She is the spirit of Spain. Her husband, often unruly, often rebellious, is muscle, skill, craft--he is not the spirit of Spain. Her spiritual father, Ximenez de Cisneros, whom she chose for confessor because he had no respect for a queen, and whom she exalted to be Primate of Toledo because he abhorred all greatness--he is the nude projection of her conscience upon the widening splendor of her realm. Beneath the sumptuous robes of Cisneros is a shirt of hair. Deep in his vast castle is a cell, a bare and bedless floor on which the Primate sleeps after the penitential rope each night has lashed into his flesh the words of Christ. He is a formula of her immaculate will: but he is not the spirit of Spain. His fanatical asceticism is too simple. Spain, like Isabel, is turbulent and complex. What pouring of flesh and spirit upon Spain, since the Phœnician, the Berber and the Celt first made the Iberian fecund! A subtle chaos. For Spain is a diapason of hostile forces, needing each other to survive: the embattled parts have long since found their balance, and each is in love with itself. Isabel works like an artist. She has her vision. Her instinct and experience evolve for it a form and for herself a method. She takes her material ruthlessly and transfigures it with a cold passion. But for a deeper reason, Isabel is an artist. This design which is her vision and her will and to which she conforms her world is her world’s will and vision. The creative circle is closed. For he alone is the true artist whose personal will is the will of his land and of God: only in this marriage of wills can there be true creation. Isabel makes Spain over into the image of Spain. Behold the saintly, the murderous woman! She is the face of irony, and her smile is tragic. With what tender hand she sets up the Inquisition: “Unity in Christ, enforced by the power of the modern State.” With what warm eyes, she bids her marauding mariners godspeed: “America brings recruits for Christ--and gold for the winning and holding of more recruits.” How fondly she gives her insane child, Joanna, in marriage to the heir of Hapsburg; how resolutely furthers her husband’s ambitions in the east. Spain, kingdom of God, surely cannot embrace America and neglect Europe? Infidel Africa, false France must be surrounded and crushed--“Austria, Artois, Netherland, Africa, America,” she counts the organs of her embodied Christ. And the heart of the Body, Spain herself, with Portugal long since joined by blood alliance: it must be pure and solid like the heart of the Queen. This is the kernel of her work. Isabel looks back upon her life and finds again her measure and her method. She will create a race of Spaniards whose every unit, man and woman, in intimate thought shall strike a single note: so that this note, myriad-repeated, fill the world. Spain, mother and child of chaos, shall become the archetype of unison on earth.