In La Seo, Aragon works its transformation upon elements chiefly of France and the east. In the _jota_, the basic material is Spanish. What is known as the first jota is a birth of the defense of Zaragoza in 1808 against the forces of Napoleon. It swears to the Virgen del Pilar that the men and women of Zaragoza never will be French. Jota songs and variants of its dance are legion throughout Spain, and its musical elements hark back to Arab days. The formation of the jota is the couplet; the music is an adaptation, in three-quarter time, of Andalusian _cante hondo_. The classic southern song becomes romantic. Its abstract lines, devoted to the elemental passions, become vehicles for commentary verse in which religion, politics, wit and satire are barbarously mingled. The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric. Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the north. The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. It has abandoned the dynamism of the soul whose infinite motions conform into an almost motionless figure. The classic dance of Spain, drenched with a facile nervousness from Europe--this is the jota of Aragon. * * * * * So the prehistoric atom begets this baroque romanticism of Aragon. There is nobility here. These are the people who fought the establishment of the Inquisition: the heroic defenders of their land against Roman, Visigoth, Arab, Frenchman. But the toughness of Aragon is vulnerable, if not to its invaders, to its own conquests. Valencia and Barcelona become conduits through which a motley of elements pour in. The alliance with Castile brings another bewilderment of forces. The primitive stuff of Aragon has no _organic_ response for these racy cultures. They overwhelm it: they form an amalgam _about_ the rigid core. And the harmony of Aragon is indeed one of flashing dissonances: brilliant, appealing, evanescent. It is a surface fusion, and its charm is flight from an impenetrable center. Triumphant Aragon disappears in the living peoples it absorbs, in the great neighbor with which it is allied. As cultural beings, its vassals all survive it. Its own primal core survives it....