An altar has been decked out on the façade of a house in the great Plaza. In a bower of gilt, the priest harangues the throng in Vascuence. His theme is the curse of Modernism and Socialism, the menace to the soul of the laborer's appetite for better wages. (The Basques are the industrialists of Spain: the ore and factories of Bilbao are not far off.) On one side of the square is the summer palace of an Andalusian Duke. The balconies are hung with great mantones: gorgeous splotches of gold and green and crimson in the sun. The altar faces an esplanade which steps down to the sea. But the Basque throng in the plaza is aloof from the priest at his garish altar, from the flash of Spain on the walls of the Duke's palace, and from the ruminant sea. The throng is a packed, bright body. It is dispassionate. It is engrossed in play that remains play. Its mood is very like the mood of a sporting crowd in England. Here is none of the hot dark fervor which Spain brings even to the bull-fight.

The races are over, and the last Mass. The crowd circles the platform for the dance contest. There is a piper and a drummer. The cadences of the chistu are thin and cool: they are horizontal. The drummer weaves an interminable tattoo that becomes almost a matted background for the imponderous figures of the pipe. When the dancer and piper cease, the drum goes on in an incantation which is moving, precisely because it is so unemphatic, so sub-humanly cool, so pale. It reminds one, indeed, of the nixies of the Celt, the blond green creatures of the northern marshes. It seems as far from Spain as are the braes of Scotland. The designs of the dance are sharp and brief. Here is grace in line and point: daintiness; above all spiritual aloofness. In the pauses of dance and music, ever unceasing the weird weave of the drum. The elves and sprites of the Atlas are around the corner: but the dense, plastic passionateness of Spain is myriad miles away.

Agura, contrapas, anarxuma, zaspi, trititzka, soka, aguruku, taladera-numberless Basque dance-figures. What distinguishes them is that they are all social: and that they are made up of stylised details of the common life. The dance of Andalusia is an essence of the eternal man; it is a plastic form for the movements of the soul. These dances are scenes of human act. There stuff is not spirit, nor essence of emotion. It is a synthesis of homely

gestures taken from farm or field. Here is an apple dance, an intricate elaboration of the bestowal of apples. Here is a chair dance, a design of men and women in easy social converse. The Siete Saltos is but a stylisation of the walk-of men walking together. The music is major; the dance is comedic. Indeed, it holds the trait of social comedy which in France produced Molière. But, also, it has a purity of abstract line which recalls the classic dances of the Pueblo Indians or of the Pacific Negroes. With, again, a difference of tone and subject: the dances of the "savage" are elemental, they call rain, they invoke harvest, they enact the sexual passion. These dances of the Basque, despite their form, are fragments of social gesture.

In another part of town there is a match of pelota. This game is originally Basque; in its pure form of sport one can see it in any Vasco village: the boys playing on a dirt court against a plaster wall, or against the wall of the church if the hamlet is very modest. The Spaniards, however, have taken to pelota. It has become a game for professionals; and although all the crack players are Basque, the spirit of the sport has been transformed. It is played in the frontón: a court, three sides of which are high walls of cement. The fourth side (the long one, to the right of the players who all face one way) is for the public whose tiers of seats are placed in a sort of open building. A pair of players make a team, and two teams make a match. To the right hand of each athlete is strapped a thin short wooden bat called pala, or else, in a variant of the game, a basket, known as cesta or remonte, shaped a little like the curved beak of some imaginable bird, scooped and long and narrow. The principle of pelota is like our hand-ball which may indeed be a derivation. But the Basque game with its great distance of service and return, its complexity of movement due to the use of three walls, and its fast ball, achieves an extraordinary brilliance. Volleys last for minutes: the ball flashes back and forth from the front wall to the side and rear There is something of the delicacy of billiards, the athletic grace of tennis, and a spill of sheer physical prowess which tennis does not approach. It is a beautiful game: the game of a sane, healthily outward people. But in the hands of the Spaniard, all of this is minor.

ones.

Between the public and the court is a railing which until the game starts is empty. With the first volley, however, a large group of men in red boinas line up here, facing the public, with their backs to the players. They are the cobradores, the bookies: the true principals in what Spain has made of pelota. With the first service, they gather their first odds and cry their bets. And until the last of the game, the shifting of odds, the placing of bets, continue: the players themselves serve as a mere pretext for the gambling, like the petits chevaux of wood on a gaming table.

The bookies are middlemen between the individual bettors. Each one possesses a little rubber ball with a hole. In this hole, he places a slip of paper declaring the odds of the moment, and by tossing the ball to the man who has laid odds and to the man who has taken him on, the bet is established. The true pelota "fan" does not wager once: he wagers a dozen times as the game progresses: he concocts an intricate system of varying odds: his mind is on the betting and his balance: he is aware of the game only as the machine that automatically shifts the chances. Indeed, to go to a pelota match and observe the game, and refrain from betting, is so anomalous as to attract attention. The sport is still there: the Basque players enact it: but the Spanish public does not participate.

These are invasions of Spain upon the Basque land. There are whole towns in Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya, Alâva, where Castile or an idea from Castile has rooted and worked havoc. Such a town is San Sebastián, summer capital of the King and of the intellectuals of Madrid. There are even towns which Castile has destroyed.

The carrera, that runs along the breasting cliffs from San Sebastián to Santander beside a sea blue in summer as the summer sky, crosses the tip of a little city: it rests on a tongue of land thrust from the mountain far into the Bay. The tongue is high and steep: the streets twine and twist. And in their midst, coiled all about by alleys, stands a smothered church. It is blackened by the salt of seven hundred years. It stands low: there is a street at its door, and there are other streets at rising levels on its four façades, so that it is plunged and buried in the town. And the windows are rare, or are blanked by pavements

and by the cellars of adjoining houses. Only the squat steeple is sheer to the open sky.

It is an ignoble church, rancid and airless, like a ship's bottom after a voyage in the seven seas. Its nave is foul with shadows; its windows have a yellow blear like the eyes of the beggar at the gate.

The town is stifled and sombre: it is an apple rotted by this old church at its core. The Basque here has forgotten how to dance. He has not turned his saints' days into merrymaking. The church has conquered: the empiry of Castile. And the Basque town lies rotting.

But more significant than such invasions of the body of old Spain upon the Basque, are the invasions of the modern Basque into the life of Spain. While the Spaniard spent himself in crusade and conquest, the Basque held aloof and his energy was untapped. To resist invasion took courage. But the effort was as naught beside the heroic effort of the Spaniard to fuse Moslem, Jew, German, Roman, Celt, into one Spanish soul. The Spanish soul was achieved: but the Spanish spirit drooped from the exertion. This was the moment of the Basque. He had no culture but the most primitive; no world for the expanding of his power beside a strip of rocky soil and sea. Spain offered a profound culture, and worlds beyond the seas to act in. Now the Basque passed from his spiritual sleep-passed into Spain, through the door which Spain herself had battered open.

He has repaid the land for his long ages of resistance and aloofness. His reserve of vigorous, mobile power may yet go far in the rebirth of Spain.

WALDO FRANK.

THE IRRESPONSIBLE POWER OF REALISM

BY O. W. FIRKINS

OURS is an age that sifts the qualifications of teachers. Realistic fiction is one of its most powerful and popular teachers, yet realistic fiction is never asked to demonstrate its right to teach. It passes no test; it produces no credentials. The case has indeed some manifest peculiarities. Realistic fiction does not profess to teach; it merely teaches. The realistic reader does not register for the school; he merely learns. Obviously, however, if a professed fiction is believed to be true and is not true, the harm, though not the guilt, is as great as if the deception were intentional.

All this came about in a most innocent and guileless way. Fiction, striving mainly for amusement, found that parts of truth were amusing; insensibly, as time went on, it increased both the truth and the stress upon the truth. But there were no claims and no securities. The writer told as much truth as he could or as he chose; the reader believed as little or as much as he could or as he chose. Meanwhile, in every other field, the age showed an increasing rigor in its demands on teachers and its tests of truth; it would have seemed that in such an age the survival in one quarter of a mixed body of truth and falsehood exciting in the reader's mind a mixture of belief and doubt was impossible. The pressure of science should logically have given birth to one of two results: the expulsion of error from the books, or the eradication of belief from the reader. Fiction met neither of these demands, yet its power, particularly its power as teacher, steadily increased. It holds now, among other truth-tellers, the post of an unofficial informant, an unacknowledged counselor, a Colonel House, as it were, whose undertone, in President Wilson's ear, is as powerful as the voice of cabinets or embassies. It is a power that may err, and for its errors there is usually no remedy (confutation is only now and then effectual), and almost always no punishment. In a word, its power is irresponsible.