Places and Persons

...It was a delightful and inspiring picture of the nature of the new world, and the minds it had inspired...

...This crowned the earlier period of the middle-ages...

...While Seville thus in its straight dealings with fact gave a new immediacy to painting and a new vividness to sculpture, a number of noble buildings showed that the classic acceptance of law, as expressed in arch and pediment, could be combined with eager fantasy into a mellower fullness of life, or even into wild exuberance...

...Each of the exhibitions was superbly designed, in happy collaboration with nature under mild southern skies...

...while at the same time, under the influence from Assisi, holiness found a new enlargement in accepting nature with an impulse of pure, spontaneous love...

...Though built in the style of Spanish baroque, and so continuing the majestic traditions of the renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, it yet manages to convey in its central patio the charm of the Moorish palaces, as in its great towers, it subtly echoes the Giralda...

...The mother did not begrudge her children their splendid independent homes...

...Almost all came from Seville or from Andalusia...

...It enriched great families, and was used to glorify the Church...

...It was not unnatural that the British empire's exhibition at Wembley should have suggested to Spaniards an exhibition for the Spanish-speaking world...

...The vicunas and alpacas of Peru, the tobacco of San Domingo, the emeralds of Colombia, the sombreros and the embroideries of Mexico, the nitrates of Chile, the wools, the fruits, the industries, the arts and crafts of eighteen nations, making up ioo,000,000 people, spread over an area three times that of the United States, were housed in twenty palaces, each designed with dignity, with individuality, with charm...

...Change replaces the Oriental's still absorption in timeless being...

...Every state of Spanish America raised a palace to exhibit its genius, its beauty and its opportunities...

...It became complete in its noble monuments of civic life joined to church history...

...The natural life is stated with consummate skill by Velasquez as a satisfying fact, or else, as in the case of Murillo, the life of earth is accepted with a touching literalness to be subdued to the glory of the saints which gives the world a dower of lights and fires...

...As one wanders round it, one is delighted in turn with the reflection of a tower in the water, the outline of a tower seen through an archway, the sheen of tiles on a stairway, the story of Seville, or the colonization of Spanish America, or by the sense of space and color through the courts and arches, now marble, now in colored tiles, which are the triumph of its central space...

...In return Spain opened her own treasures with a generous hand...

...In the north this led to a further break with the oriental traditions of Christianity, a break which we see completed in the dominant civilization of North America...

...Not only the work of old masters, not only the velvet, the brocades, the embroidered satin of the priest's vestments and the altar, not only the colored statue, or the chased silver of the monstrance, not only the glittering porcelain, and the splendid furniture of the great house, or the armory of days when the trappings of war were picturesque, but the arts and crafts of the modern mind were heaped together...

...Such then is the new wonder which has opened upon the world in Seville...

...In truth, they had an easier task...

...For the great years of Seville are those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...

...Yet in the very completeness of the well-being which satisfies him, he is pitied by the Oriental for his poverty in the things of the spirit, and his vagueness about mystic traditions of a more ancient wisdom...

...It weds, as no building yet has done, the East with the West in one unified and surprising mass...

...In the new world, America's United States shows an ideal of the other extreme...

...Yet it kept through all the strong savors of the East, and the sense of magic and repose...

...The savor of the East which perfumes all the Mediterranean was strong over Andalusia...

...The Redeemer, now carrying His cross, now reigning from the tree, is set before us again and again, sublime and terrible, the "Jesus of great power," with such literal vividness that the senses are persuaded almost that He is beside them in the flesh...

...The narrow streets, paved with cobblestones, the flat-roofed houses, the palms and the exotic vegetation of the gardens, the fountains trickling gently in the courts, have that air of strangeness and charm which, from Egypt to India and China, gives the Westerner the feeling that the East holds the key to a life of mystery...

...While one of her great palaces was in the Moorish or Mudejar style, another was a new expression of the style of the renaissance...

...Wembley, which represented an empire of 400,000,000 colored people and of 60,000,000 whites, was an assessment of production: it was further an invitation to unemployed to leave their country...

...Then from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth a new and splendid activity dominated at first one part of Christendom, then another, in a tumultuous growth which prepared for the new renaissance when Christianity coped with the bare element of humanism, not in philosophy but in sculpture, in architecture and in literature...

...What opportunity had done opportunity still can do over vast, rich, unreclaimed tracts, made genial by Spanish traditions and linked in language, in manners, in traditions with the soul of Spain...

...It was but a few years since the Christians had conquered Granada...

...Leaving to Barcelona the treasures of the north provinces of the country, and the display of international industrialism (that too was made in excellent taste) Seville was the monument of the Spanish-speaking world...

...It is an ideal of general good nature and of certain kinds of well-being, especially for the body...

...To this an ornate choir and a fine collection of paintings and sculptures were added in the seventeenth century...

...In the beautiful park of Maria Luisa, on the banks of the Guadalquivir, trees, shrubs and water had already made an Eden of greenness and murmuring sound, of shade and sun, before the buildings of the exhibition spread through it collections of priceless treasure...

...They learned from Wembley's errors: they did not attempt to stack together cans of pressed beef, or to fill large spaces with complicated masses of machinery...

...Each province of Spain sent its characteristic expression, and after a mile or two of walk through the premises of the modern world, these treasures of the old would blaze upon one in a new collection...

...In the south it led to the triumphs of the Counter-Reformation...

...Its dawn coincided with the epoch-making voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama...

...It more than any other was the port from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, for for centuries Spain gave it the monopoly of her trade with the Indies...

...The British empire had been disintegrating into a series of republics: the Spanishspeaking world had long recognized separate independencies and looked back with enthusiasm on the surviving fact of its unity...

...In the Mudejar palace, the works of her ancient art burst upon the visitor with the dazzle and glitter of a fire of jewels...

...It is as a centre of exchange between the East and the West, between these two sorts of wealth—and these two sorts of destitution—that Seville has become both a metropolis and a shrine...

...But the most imposing building was a triumph of the world of today...

...But Seville had no direct commercial aim...

...A new spirit marches along her ancient ways: she is the new joy of the tourist, attracted both by her wild nature and rich monuments...

...Here baroque has ceased to be commanding: it has subjected majesty to surprise, with that mysterious grace which marks the Mogul masterpieces of India, especially the Moti Masjid at Agra, and the Taj Mahal...

...Life itself seems almost secondary to the appurtenances of life...

...The religion which dominates these States is so much opposed to asceticism that in the East it could not be recognized as religion at all...

...Spain is not only a country of the past...

...Counseled by the bishop of Granada, whose portrait is in the Seville Museum, the great navigator set out on a voyage which gave Indians and Europeans alike a dower of novelties...

...almost all came in the centuries which immediately followed on the expedition of Columbus...

...From it Columbus sailed, not on a mere voyage of exploration or adventure, still less for trade, but in the words of Queen Isabella the Catholic, to give the good news of Christianity to "our friends the Indians...

...In Seville's great cathedral, the most spacious of all Gothic buildings, there is a sense not of northern wildness but of classic grandeur...

...In the Alcazar of Seville, with its glitter of scarlet and gold, the Moors had left the most brilliant of their monuments...

...Valdes-Leal pictures the saints in ecstasy while the sculptor Montanes robes them in colored vividness which makes them both immediate and splendid...

...It gives the promise of yet another renaissance, where nature is made yet more fully the ally and servant of man, and where man's joy in earth is dedicated to the expression of true religion and to the service of beauty and delight, where the picture of new worlds to conquer is balanced by the counsels and examples of the saints...

...In the thirteenth century, the adaptation of Aristotle's philosophy to the revelations of Christian light vindicated the reality of the outward world as a valid expression of the informing reality within...

...In hers they would be welcome, and enjoy the treasures of the same spirit as had made themselves...

...In Venice, the truths of faith are now associated with an obvious worldly gorgeousness...

...But it is Seville's which looks farthest into the future...

...almost all bore witness to the spiritual exultation with which Spain dedicated her wealth and her opportunities to the glory of the Church...

...Christianity has seen two great renaissances of secular inspiration...

...For two centuries wealth poured into Spain through the vessels of the navigators...

...And it concentrates in itself the pregnant significance of Seville...

...Its history goes back at least to Roman times, but its importance is that when Isabella reconquered it from the Moors, it was the port of the Indies...

...The dominion and power of Catholic Christianity stamp baroque Rome...

...For England was in difficulties, and the exhibition was jingoism's tomb...

...At the same time baroque architecture enriched the buildings of Seville...

...It had dedicated the wealth of the new world, which it knew as the Indies, to a bequest of beauty for ages to come in which the spirit of the past should glorify the life of men of today...

...Built by the Sevillan architect, Anibal Gonzales, it is without doubt the most successful and the most imposing edifice created by any architect in Europe in recent years...

...It was a call to the soul of a people...

...In Seville, which has its great day a little later than Venice, the taste for magnificence has altered...

...The American has founded great institutions of social service, and if he does not bother whether the poor have the Gospel preached to them, it is because he is determined that there shall be no poor...

...Seville is therefore, after Rome, the most splendid monument of the Counter-Reformation...