The music cadence is vertebral. There is a time counterpoint of two adverse factors: a rising lilt, a falling plaint. And they become the skeletal arabesque which is the backbone of the Spanish music. All the voices of Spain’s world are laced. The Jew’s sensual mysticism, conflict between his homely passions and his cosmic fate, rises in a line more Arabic than Jewish. And the tendency of the music to transcend its scale is Byzantine; it bespeaks the North African shores of Porphyry and Plotinus, of Origen and Augustine. But the stress is more barbarous than platonic. And the _form_ is forever Spain. Its elements do not suffice to make this music great. It is greatly moving, because its moving parts become articulate, not in moments, not progressively, but all at once: in restraint, in defeat--in the triumph of the artist’s will upon them. The passion does not depart; a woman’s body holds it and we are moved not by the passion but by the unmoved victory over passion. This cadence is a plaint of agony. It does not bend her. This peal is pathos. The high head, the arms crushing the breast, the torrent of heel-notes rivet a triumph over pathos. The mouth sings languorous desire; but the body is hard. Sudden the song flares like a vision from that mouth. But the body circles the stage in a crisp gayety, the eyes smile, the knees dip in courteous bestowal. At the other end of Córdoba, the night lives among the columns of the Mosque. With arched head and heel of arabesque, they dance their mystery--a forest of willful movement under the will-less stars. This woman is a column too; rigid, and stone-like and adance. But the dance of the Arab columns is horizontal; it is an easeful running with the earth. The dance of this woman which is a dance of Spain, is deep and is high. It is not horizontal. So calm, it touches hell. So still, it reaches God. _c._ _The Bowels_ The Spanish is the fusion of the warring elements of Spain into dramatic wholes. As the proportions of these elements change, the wholes change: and yet are Spanish. Granada, then, is the least Spanish of the towns of Spain; for, with all the elements there, they have remained disparate. Even physically, Granada does not resolve its discords. It is cast in confusion. Two steep spurs come down from the Sierra Nevada. They are divided by the gorge of the río Darro. Smaller, arid gorges break them, they expire in a plain. And within this broken sea of rock and ridge and wood, Granada sits uneasily. One height is Al-Hambra, palace of kings. From its towers the precipice cuts to the river; and in the west rises Al-Baicín, a populous suburb. North, beside the river straggles a gypsy village. And eastward, on another height, is the cascaded, terraced, tawdry splendor of the Generalife. Physically chaos; culturally, spiritually chaos.