The National tribune., 1899-12-14
RELICS OF THE M00RS.
Beautiful Architecture to Be Seen in Old
Spain.
.Sufurddu Rerie7r.


Spain, left behind them, as if for some
stealthy purpose, many of their secrets.
Wherever you walk in the south of Spain
you will come upon mosques, palaces, tow
ers, gateways, which they built to per
petuate themselves in a strange land. and
you will find in ruined fragments upon hItls
and windowleSS white houses, under palm
trees, both actual remains and persistent
fOllowingS of their cool, secluded way OF
building, meant for even fiercer skies and
an even more reticent indoor life. Often,
as in the Giralda by the side of the Gothic
cathedral at Saville and in the mosque
into which Christian church has been
built at Cordova, you can see at one glance
the conflict or the contrast of two religions,
of two theories of the universe. The
mosque has no solemnity. no mystery; it is
a place of closed-in silence, shut in even
from the sky, IN a paradise OF abstract
art. One thinks of the plumage of tropical
birds, the waving of palms, q darting fugue
on the clavichord, to figure TO himself of
the particular, after all unique, KIND OF fas-
clnation which the masterpieces of Arab
architecture convey to one. Nothing SO
brilliant was ever imagined by a Gothic
carver, so full of light so airy, so serpen-
tine in swiftness. A mosque, it seems, as
one walks among its pillars is not church
at all, but rather a city, the arcades and al
coves OF city of fiery people, in whom
strength runs all to delicacy. The Arabs
did not build high, they built wide; and
they sent their imagination out like ar
rows, hither and thither, in fight at once
random and mathematical. How singular
a contrast, is there not, with Gothic build
ing, whose broad base is set for steady
heavenward ascension? Yet those capriceS,
in every entertainment to which line lends
itself, are all so material, and of the earthI
And more immaterial worship of the idea
of God than any Christian architecture.
Here there is invention of pattern, into
which no natural object is ever allowed to
intrude. the true art for arts sake, pure
idea, mathematic, invention in abstract;
for it is the work of an imagination in
toxicated with itself, finding beginning and
end in its own formally beautiful working
out, without relation to nature or human
ity.
You cannot walk through little town in
the south of Spain without hearing a
strange sound, between crying and chant
ing, which wanderS out to you from behind
barred windows and from among the tink-
ling bells of the mules. The Malaguena
they call this kind of singing, but it has no
more to do with Malaga than the mosque at
Cordopa has to do with the soil on which it
stands. 1t is as eastern as the music of
tomtoms and gongs, and, like eastern mu
sic, it is music before rhythm, music which
comes down to us untouched by the inven-
ton of the modern scale, from an antiquity
out of which plain chant is first step to-
ward modern harmony. And this Moorish
music is, like Moorish architecture, an
Arabesgue. 1t avoids definite form just as
the lines in stone avoid definite form; it has
the same endlessness, motion without be-
ginning or end, turning upon Itself In
kind Of infinitely varied monotony. The
fioriture of the voice are like those coils
which often spring from central point of
ornament, to twist outward, as in a par
ticular piece of very delicate work i'll the
first mihrab in the mosque at Cordova. In
both ensemble is everything, and every
thing is pattern.
There is the same avoidance Of emphasis,
the same continuance on one level; no spe
cial part starts out for separate notice.
But the passion of this music is like no
other passion; fierce, immoderate, suS-
tanned, it is like the crying of wild beast in
suffering, and it thrills one precisely be-
cause it seems to be so far from humanity,
so ineXplicable, so deeply rooted in the ami
NAL of which we are but one species.
Moorish music is inarticulate, and so it
brings a wild relief which no articulate
music could ever bring. 1t is the voice of
uncivilized people who have the desires and
sorrows common to every living being, and
an Inconsistencies of their meaning, which
is, after all, what we come back to after
having searched through many meanings.
1t is sad, not because of personal sorrow,
but because of all the sorrow there is, and
always has been in the world. The eyes of
IOIdfllou WOulGIl have OI Tie SAME
fierce melancholy, and with as little per-
sonal meaning. 1t is a music which has
not yet lost companionship with the voice
of the wind, the voice of the sea, the voice
of the forest. 1t has never accepted order
and become art; it remains chaotic, ele.
mental, part of nature trying to speak.
Singing and dancing in Spain are as the
right hand and the left, and the same airs,
throbbing on a guitar, guide the most char
acteristic kind OF dancing. Here the mean
ing is more explicit; like the pantomime Of
all eastern dancing, like the shapeless jog
trot of the Sudanese, which you can see at
Earl's Court; like the undisguised mimicry
of the women in the Rue de Care at the
last Paris exhibition, it is wholly sexual.
But in the dancing, inherited from the
Moors, which the gypsies have perfected in
Spain, there is far more Subtlety, deicacy
and real art than in the franker poSturing
of Egypt and Arabia. 1t is the most elab-
crate dancing in the world, and, like the
music, it has an abstract quality which
saves it from ever, for moment, becoming
vulgar. Hieratic, not perverSe, centered
upon the central fact of existence; moving
gravely, without frivolity, in a sense with
out passion, so deeply is the passion rooted
in the nature of things, the dance coils
round upon itself as the trails of music
and the trails in stone coil round upon
themselves. 1t is another secret Of the
Moors and must remain as mysterious to
us as those other secrets, until we have
come a little closer than we have yet come
to the immaterial wisdom of the East