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THE

SOUL OF SPAIN

BY

HAVELOCK ELLIS

FOURTH IMPRESSION

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

LONDON: CONSTABLE & COMPANY, Ltd.

1914

f V.

PREFACE

Many years ago, as a child of six, I was taken by my father from Callao to spend the day in Lima, the capital of Peru. It was the first great foreign city I had seen, and the unfamiliar features of its streets, such as elsewhere have since become so familiar to me — the huge gate- ways, the pleasant courtyards one looked into beyond — made an ineffaceable impression on my mind. It has since seemed to me a fact not without significance that this first glimpse of the non- Anglo -Saxon world should have been of a foreign city founded on those Spanish traditions which have since been so attractive to me, so potent to thrill or to charm.

My acquaintance with Spain itself has been confined to the past twenty years or less. During this period I have visited the land five times, traversing it in all directions, entering and leaving it by all its chief portals, at Port-

vi THE SOUL OF SPAIN

Bou, at Algeciras, at Irun. I am convinced that it is only by a succession of visits at intervals that an unfamiliar country, of such marked and strong character as Spain possesses, can be comprehended ; it is necessary to meditate over one's impressions at leisure, to start afresh, again and again, with some old prejudice re- moved, and a clearer vision of the essential facts ; during a single visit, however lengthy, this is difficult to effect.

Although I have in this way tried to approach, as well as I can and from many different sides, a few of the manifold aspects of the Spanish spirit, I am well aware how inadequate and superficial my attempt must appear to those among us who have devoted their lives to the study of Spain. My own life-work is in other fields ; I cannot therefore complain if more profound students should feel that I have made but a feeble attempt to in- terpret the Spanish spirit.

Let me say also, once and for all, that this book is not put forward as an indiscriminate recommendation to visit Spain. Spain is not an easy land to comprehend, even for intelligent visitors, and, taken as a whole, it is by no means a land for those who attach primary importance

PREFACE vii

to comfort and facile enjoyment. The common notion that Spain is another Italy is false and misleading. An acquaintance with Italy is, in- deed, the worst preparation for entering Spain : all we have learnt in Italy must be forgotten when we cross the Pyrenees. Spain is not even the equivalent of Italy. For all who inherit European civilisation, Italy must always be the chief and richest museum of antiquities, a sacred land of pilgrimage. Spain is interesting and instructive, in the highest degree fascinating for those who can learn to comprehend her, but these must always, I think, be comparatively few. For these few, however, the fascination is permanent and irresistible. It is a fascination not hard to justify.

The political, industrial, and commercial aspects of Spain, it will be seen, have little or no place in these pages. Those are aspects of Spain often dealt with by writers far more competent to deal with them than I am, and I recognise that they are aspects which are gaining a larger importance to-day than they have had for a long time past. But unless we look very far back, it is not in those fields that the genius of Spain has been conspicuously shown. Spain represents, above all, the supreme

Vlll

THE SOUL OF SPAIN

manifestation of a certain primitive and eternal attitude of the human spirit, an attitude of heroic energy, of spiritual exaltation, directed not chiefly towards comfort or towards gain, but towards the more fundamental facts of human existence. It is this essential Spain that I have sought to explore.

HAVELOCK ELLIS.

'CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Spanish People . 3. The Women op Spain

4. The Art of Spain

5. Velazquez

6. Spanish Dancing

7. Ramon Lull at Palma ^ 8. ' Don Quixote ' .

9. Juan Valera

10. Santa Maria del Mar

11. The Gardens of Granada

12. Segovia

13. Seville in Spring

14. Seville Cathedral .

15. Monserrat

16. Spanish Ideals op To-day INDEX .

PAGE

1

29 61 106 134 170 191 223 244 273 306 321 338 355 369 386

415

IX

2 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

achievement. Journeying in a little -visited country, with few modern means of locomotion, and no Baedeker in his hand (it is scarcely ten years indeed since Baedeker recognised the existence of Spain), Gautier in a few weeks grasped all the more salient characteristics of the people and the land, and set them down in the clearest and firmest fashion. His book will never cease to have its value, for it represents a state of things which has largely vanished. No one nowadays need make his Spanish tour in a diligence, and no tourist now is likely to be permitted, as Gautier was, to spread out his mattress at night in the courts of the Alhambra. The virginal romanticism of a splendid and tattered Spain such as Gautier found has gone, almost as completely as the splendidly ruinous Eome that Goethe entered in his carriage has to-day been swallowed up in the shoddy capital of modern Italy. Spain, indeed, has not yet attained the depressing exuberance of renovated Italy, — and the peoples of the two peninsulas are far too unlike to make any such resemblance probable, — but the contrast between Gautier's Spain of less than a century ago and the state of Spain to-day is sufficiently striking to dispel for ever the notion that we are here concerned with a country which has been hope- lessly left behind in the march of civilisation. I have been able to realise the change in

INTRODUCTION 3

Spain in the course of my own acquaintance with the country during the past twenty years, never more vividly than now as I return from my fifth visit to a land which to me has long seemed perhaps the most fascinating I know in the Old World or the New. And when I com- pare the Spain I have just left with the Spain I first entered at Port-Bou nearly twenty years ago, the magnitude of the changes which have been effected in so brief a space seems to me very remarkable. As soon as we leave the railway track, indeed, we enter at once what may be called the eternal Spain — the Spain sub species ceternitdtis — which Cervantes immortalised. It is in the cities and towns that the change has chiefly been manifested. Spaniards are now experiencing (though not for the first time, for the same tendency was noted over a century ago) the modern European tendency to crowd into towns. All the recent consular reports, from north and from south alike — from Barcelona and Bilbao, from Malaga and Granada — con- tain the same monotonous refrain that the towns are becoming crowded, and that the expenses of town life are increasing. Yet the population of Spain, as the censuses show, is not expanding at any inordinate rate and the movement of emigration is active. What is happening is that urban life is developing, and as it develops its attractive power increases and it draws the

4 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

country dwellers more and more within its circle. The brothers Quintero, who rank high among the Spanish dramatists of to-day, in one of the best of their comedies, El Amor que Pasa, have presented a delightful picture of an old- world Andalusian village from which the tide of life has receded, where men are scarce and where strangers rarely come, and all the vivacity and intelligence of the place are concentrated in a few girls whom there is no one to woo. It was not part of the dramatists' object to elucidate this question of urban development, but it is easy to see from their picture how the city has impoverished the village, and how those who are left only feel with the greater force the fascina- tion of the city.

The more flourishing Spanish cities are nowa- days full of life and animation. Not only are the large and handsome caf^s crowded — that is no novelty — but factories are springing up, the signs of industrial and commercial activity abound, and the streets swarm with electric cars. In the use of electricity, indeed, Spain is before, rather than behind most European countries. Electric lighting is becoming universal, even the smallest and most old-world cities are now covered with networks of wires, and as the massive old churches offer a tempting basis of attachment, the most beautiful and picturesque spots and buildings are everywhere being

INTRODUCTION 5

desecrated and disfigured, to the disgust of the travelling lover of the picturesque. The brill- iance, vivacity, and modern activity of a large Spanish city, a certain touch of almost Oriental colour in it, suggest that the Spanish are taking as their models the Hungarians of Buda-Pesth, a city which, in the opinion of some, represents the highest point of city development Europe has yet attained.

The conservatism and traditionalism of the Spaniard, we have to realise, are compatible not only with an aptitude for change, but even with an eager delight in novelty and a certain dis- content with the past. An excessive admiration for everything foreign is, indeed, by no means a new Spanish characteristic ; more than a century ago it was said that every educated Spaniard speaks ill of his own country ; and to-day an Anarchist writes from Barcelona that "in no country have the workers shaken off prejudice and tradition so completely as in Spain." It would be surprising indeed if that spirit of restless adventure which enabled Spaniards to add America to the world, while the Portuguese of the same Iberian race were unveiling India and the farther East, had com- pletely died out with the days of great adventure. The Spaniard, even the Spaniard of the people, is eager for reform. The more or less philo- sophical Republicanism, so frequently found in

6 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

Spain, as well as the Anarchism — a peaceful and humanitarian Anarchism for the most part — which flourishes to a greater extent in Spain than elsewhere, alike testify to this desire. The newspaper press of Spain — especially as repre- sented by the Heraldo of Madrid and the new ^Republican journal, La Nueva Espana — is enlightened and intelligent, in the best sense Liberal. The fermenting discontent with sacer- dotal bigotry, and especially with the extreme developments of monasticism, which has spread among all classes in the country, even leading to restriction of the freedom of public religious processions — notwithstanding the firm manner in which the Church is here rooted — is another sign of the same kind, strikingly manifested a few years ago when the Electro, of the popular author Galdos was performed amid opposing demonstrations of popular feeling all over Spain; it is not necessarily a movement hostile to the Church, certainly not in so far as Galdos is its"1 representative, but it demands a purified and humanised Catholicism which shall be in har- mony with the claims of Nature and of social progress. J The bull-fight, again, the national pastime of Spain — long a mark for opprobrium among English-speaking peoples, always so keen to see the mote in other people's eyes — no longer meets with universal acceptance, and lately, with the approval of many prominent toreadors, a

INTRODUCTION 7

movement has begun for the mitigation of its more offensive features.

In all the practical appliances of domestic and working life, although it is the Spaniard's instinct to cultivate an austere simplicity, he is yet adopting the devices and appliances of more advanced nations, while in cleanliness and convenience a Spanish city usually com- pares favourably with a Provencal city.1 The Spaniard is honest ; he is sometimes a little slow of comprehension ; he is proverbially proud of his country's ancient glory, but is at the same time deeply convinced that Spain has fallen behind in the race of civilisation, and he is eager to see her again to the front. I find the typical Spaniard of to-day in an Aragonese peasant, elderly but lithe, whom I lately saw jump from the train at a little country station to examine a very com- plicated French agricultural machine drawn up in a siding ; he looked at it above and below with wrinkled brows and intent eyes ; he ran all round it ; he clearly could not quite make it out, but there was no flippancy or indifference in his attitude towards this new strange thing ; he would never rest, one felt, until he reached the meaning of it. And many of us will regret that in this eager thirst for novelties the Spaniard

1 Peyron in 1777 drew a very unattractive picture of the posadas which nearly everywhere were the only available kind of hostelry ; they were expensive, having to pay high rents ; they were forbidden by law to supply any kind of food, and bedsteads were usually absent.

8 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

will cast aside not a few of the things which now draw us to Spain.

There can be no doubt that this attitude of the Spaniard of to-day, inevitable in any case, has been greatly increased by the war. Thought- ful observers of great movements have often felt that the old cry " Vse victis ! " requires very serious and even radical modification. This feel- ing was indeed loDg ago expressed by Calderon in his Magico Prodigioso : —

More The battle's loss may profit those who lose Than victory advantage those who win.

In many a war it has been the vanquished, not the victor, who has carried off the finest spoils. Cuba and the Philippines have been like a tumour in the side of Spain and dragged her down in the race of civilisation. They have drained her life-blood and disturbed all her national activities. Only a serious surgical operation could remove this exhausting excres- cence, and Spaniards themselves have been the first to recognise that the operation, though painful, was in the highest degree beneficial. Not even the most patriotic of Spaniards dreams of regaining these lost possessions. There was indeed a passing moment of exasperation against Columbus for having discovered the New World, — on one occasion the mob stoned the Columbus statue at Barcelona, — but the war was scarcely

INTRODUCTION 9

over before Unamuno referred to it as that famous encounter between Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote over an island. The war has been beneficial in at least two different ways. It has had a healthy economical influence because, besides directing the manhood of Spain into sober industrial channels, it has led to the removal of artificial restrictions in the path of commercial activity. It has been advantageous morally because it has forced even the most narrow and ignorant Spaniard to face the actual facts of the modern world.

It can scarcely be expected that the lover of Spain should view this new movement of progress and reform with unmitigated satisfaction. No traveller will complain that Spanish hotel-keepers are beginning to obtain their sanitary fittings from England, or that clerical and secular authori- ties alike are putting down the national vice of spitting. But the stranger can feel no enthusi- asm when he finds that similar zeal is exercised in suppressing, on the slightest pretext, the national dances, unique in Europe for their grace and charm and ancient descent, or in discarding the beautiful and becoming national costumes. It is a little depressing to find a cinematographic show set up in the market-place of even the remotest cities, to hear the squeak of the gramophone where one has once heard the haunting wail of the malaguena, or to have

10 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

to admit that the barrel-organ is taking the place of the guitar. Civilisation is good, and progress is necessary for any people. But " civilisation " and " progress " mean much more than a feverish thirst for new things or a mad race for wealth, and some of us think that, however salutary the lessons that Spain may learn from the more prosperous nations of to-day, there are still more salutary lessons in the art of living which these nations may learn from Spain. One would grieve to see that in the attempt to purify her national currency Spain should cast away her gold with her dross.

A nation that is alive must needs borrow from other nations. The process is vital and altogether beneficial so long as the borrowed elements are duly subordinated to the develop- ment of the national genius. A nation that in its anxiety to reach the level of other more prosperous peoples moulds itself servilely on their ways and lets go the hold of its own traditions, condemns itself to hopeless mediocrity. To be a great and fruitful power in the world a nation must be true to its own instincts, and in Spain, it is well to remember, we have a people of very tenacious and independent fibre, crushed but not destroyed by centuries of misrule and the enfeeblement of the autonomous political apti- tude it once possessed.

The Spaniard indeed, we may admit, always

INTRODUCTION 11

is — and except to some extent in Catalonia perhaps always will be — essentially unbusiness- like, as we Anglo-Saxons reckon business. If we enter a Spanish shop, as likely as not no one will be forthcoming to attend to our wants ; on going into a cafe" it may be difficult to attract the attention of the two waiters who are too deeply absorbed in their game of chess to be conscious of any external distraction. Business has never seemed in Spain to be the highest end of man. "The grandest enterprises," Ganivet makes Hernan Cortes say, in justification of the old Spanish adventurers, "are those in which money has no part, and the cost falls entirely on the brain and heart." The Spaniard is constitution- ally incapable of accepting the delusion that the best things in the world may be bought by money, or that a man's wealth consists in the abundance of his possessions.1 That is why, in a passing phase of civilisation, the Spaniard seems to belong to the past ; and that is why, to some observers, he seems to belong also to the future.

When I first entered Spain I said to myself that here was a land where the manners and

1 "I will say for the Spaniards," Borrow wrote in The Bible in Spain, " that in their social intercourse no people in the world exhibit a juster feeling of what is due to the dignity of human nature, or better understand the behaviour which it behoves a man to adopt towards his fellow-beings. It is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt, and, I may add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolised."

12 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

customs of mediaeval Europe still survived.1 Spain seemed in many respects to be about three hundred years behind the age. Now, when all things are in flux, it is pleasant to find that that early impression need not be absolutely effaced. Spain is still the most democratic of countries. The familiar and intimate relationship which we know in the old comedies of Europe as subsisting between master and servant, between gentleman and peasant, is still universal. The waiter, even in your modern hotel a few paces from the Puerta del Sol, pats you on the back with friendly intimacy as you step out of the lift on the day after your arrival, and every low-class Spaniard expects, as a matter of course, to be treated as an equal.2 We are not unfamiliar

1 Stendhal made the same remark nearly a century ago. "I regard the Spanish people," he says {Be V 'Amour, ch. xlvii.), "as the living representatives of the Middle Ages. They are ignorant of many small truths of which their neighbours are childishly vain, but they know deeply the great truths, and they have the character and intelligence to follow them out to their most remote conclusions.

. Spanish character forms a fine opposition to French intelligence ; hard, brusque, scarcely elegant, full of savage pride, not concerned with the opinions of others, it is exactly the contrast of the fifteenth century with the eighteenth."

2 In 1821 Pecchio wrote in his interesting letters from Spain : " When the Spaniard presents himself before a powerful personage he does not bend like a reed or stammer and become embarrassed ; he salutes him and behaves as a man should before a fellow-man. When I travelled through Spain with the Minister, Bardaxi, the post- masters and alcaldes of the smallest villages, after saluting him with natural frankness, sat beside him, asked him questions, lighted their cigars at the Minister's, and in the warmth of conversation frequently

■s slapped him on the shoulders."

INTRODUCTION 13

with that attitude in more progressive countries, but the Spaniard shows that he is entitled to courtesy by knowing how to return it, and that is a phenomenon we are less familiar with. There is among Spanish people a friendly trust- fulness towards all, even towards strangers and foreigners, which belongs to an age when no fear was necessary ; the man of progressive civilisa- tion is always prepared to be suspicious ; he scrutinises a stranger carefully and feels his way slowly. That outcome of modern progress seems unknown to the Spanish man or woman ; it is always assumed that your attitude is friendly, and on the strength of this trustfulness even the instinct of modesty or the not less instinctive fear of ridicule seems in Spain to become slightly modified.

We realise how far we are from the present when we enter a Spanish church. The ecstatic attitude of devotion which the worshippers sometimes fall into without thought of any observer is equally unlike the elegant grace of the French worshipper^or the rigid decorum of the English, while perhaps, if it is a great 'festival, groups of women cluster on the ground with their fans at the base of the piers, and children quietly play about in corners with unchecked and innocent freedom. Nor are the dogs and cats less free than the children ; at Tudela I have even seen a dog curled up in the

14 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

most comfortable chair by the high altar, probably left in charge of the church, for he raised his head in a watchful manner when the stranger entered ; and in Gerona Cathedral there was a cat who would stroll about in front of the capilla mayor during the progress of mass, receiving the caresses of the passers - by. It would be a serious mistake to see here any indifference to religion; on the contrary, this easy familiarity with sacred things is simply the attitude of those who in Wordsworth's phrase " he in Abraham's bosom all the year," and do not, as often among ourselves, enter a church once a week to prove how severely respectable, for the example of others, they can on occasion show themselves to be. It was thus that our own ancestors, whose faith was assuredly less questioning than ours, made themselves at home in the aisles of Old St. Paul's.

It would be easy to enumerate many details of life in Spain which remind us of a past we have long left behind. Pepys in seventeenth- century London days went out to a tavern for his " morning draught," which was sometimes chocolate, and in the smaller hotels of Andalusia one is still expected to do the same. Our fore- fathers in Shakespeare's day were familiar with the fact that " good wine needs no bush," and we are reminded of that fact when, as in Tarra- gona, we everywhere see great clumps of green

INTRODUCTION 15

bushes, usually fir branches with their cones, suspended over the doors of low-class wine shops. The England of Chaucer and the ballads was familiar with the wandering figure of the palmer with his cockle-shells. Once on arriving at Zamora I found myself walking behind a dark, quiet, bearded man, evidently just arrived from Compostela, who had several large scollop shells fastened to the back of his cloak, and two or three little twisted shells hanging from the top of the traditional palmer's staff he bore, an ancient figure one supposed had passed from the earth five centuries ago, walking through the streets of a modern city, and not even attracting the atten- tion of the bold and familiar children of Zamora. It is pleasant to feel that such evidences of the community of Old Spain with a world — in many respects an excellent world — from which we have ourselves emerged have not yet ceased to exist. When we pass out of the beaten tracks we still come in touch with it almost everywhere in Spain. The stranger cannot perhaps more easily catch a glimpse of the true and ancient Spain than by acquiring the habit of travelling third-class. The seats, indeed, are hard, but the company usually is excellent, charming in its manners, and not offensive to any sense. Here a constant series of novel pictures is presented to the traveller, who may quietly study them at leisure. Perhaps it is a dozen merry girls on

16 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

their way to a festival, packed tightly together and laden with packages ; some, the more sedate among them, wear mantillas, some bright hand- kerchiefs on their heads or with hair uncovered, but however they are dressed, to whatever class they belong, they are all clean and sweet. They carefully tie to the racks the little bunches of carnations they bear — Spanish women always treat carnations tenderly — and give themselves up to unrestrained chatter and laughter; their voices are apt to be somewhat piercingly vibrant and metallic, but their delight is good to see ; the younger girls, at the climax of their glee, will perhaps stand up and flutter their arms like wings, and the elder women, if any there be, join in with only more restrained enjoyment. Or perhaps it is a less crowded carriage one enters ; there are two middle-class Spaniards and a peasant group of three : a fat, jolly, middle-aged man in a peasant's costume, but clean and new, almost stylish ; a woman of like age, one of those free, robust, kindly women whom Spain produces so often ; and a pretty bare-headed girl, evidently her daughter, though the man seems a friend or relation who is escorting them on their journey. By and by, when we have been some hours on our journey, he lifts from the seat in front of him the^ large, heavy, embroidered wallet,— that al- forja which Sancho Panzawas always so anxious to keep well filled,— unwinds it, draws out one

INTRODUCTION 17

of the great flat delicious Spanish loaves and throws it in the woman's lap. Then a dish of stewed meat appears, and the bread is cut into slices which serve as plates for the meat. But before the meal is begun the peasant turns round with a hearty " Gusta ? " It is the invita- tion to share in the feast which every polite Spaniard must make even to strangers who happen to be present, and it is as a matter of course politely refused: "Muchas gracias."1 Before long the black leather wine -bottle is produced from the wallet, and the meal pro- ceeds. At its final stage some kind of sweet- meat appears, and small fragments are offered to the two middle-class Spaniards, and then — with a slight half-movement, expressing a fine courtesy restrained by the fear of offering any offensive attention — to the foreign caballero also. It is not improper to accept this time ; and now the leather bottle is handed round, and the middle- class Spaniards avail themselves of it, though with awkward unfamiliarity, for it requires some skill to drink from this vessel with grace.2 You

1 The origin of this invitation, which has survived in Spain alone of European civilised countries, is magical. "In Morocco," Wester- marck observes ( The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. i. p. 561), " nobody would like to eat in the presence of other people without sharing his meal with them ; otherwise they might poison his food by looking at it with an evil eye." Similar ideas are found among primitive peoples elsewhere.

2 One of the best passages in Ford's Gatherings from Spain (chap, ix.) deals with the leather bottle or boia, the true and original bottle.

18 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

carefully fold over the belly of the vessel to the angle demanded by the state of its repletion, and as you apply the mouthpiece to your lips you slowly elevate your eyes towards the zenith. The two Spaniards quietly remark to each other that the wine is of first-class quality, and even without such an assurance one would know that that peasant never drank anything that was not of superior quality. Once more one enters a carriage, this time second-class, where sits a charming and beautiful Spanish lady with her child, opposite to a man who, with little success, is paying attention to the child with the object of opening up conversation with the mother. Two black-robed monks enter. They do not look at the pretty lady, they seem unconscious of her presence, and the elder of the two, a man of gentle refined face, alone greets us with the customary " Good-day." The other brother, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, is a larger man of more stolid and impassive type, evidently of lower grade in the order. The two exchange very few words in the course of their three hours' journey, and it is always the elder and more intelligent man who takes the initiative. He sits with folded hands, quietly but alertly interested in every smallest incident, while the younger man having placed his spectacles on the seat beside him, leans back, calmly vegetative, with arms folded within his sleeves. After a

INTRODUCTION 19

while the other, with gentle feminine fingers, touches him softly on the arm without a word. He understands, and produces a bundle fastened in a knotted blue check handkerchief. I imagine for a moment that the holy men are about to partake of a frugal repast ; but the bundle contains a large book of devotions, which the elder monk reads for a short time and then fastens again in the bundle and pushes towards his companion as its recognised guardian. A little girl enters the carriage with her small basket ; the elder monk looks at her with affec- tionate interest, and when she passes him to get out at the next station he smiles sweetly at her, speaking a few words, to which she responds with an "Adios." I seem to see here typified the two varieties into which the discipline of the cloister moulds men — the sensitively feminine and the listlessly vegetative. The whole of the lives of these men has marked itself upon them. I realise how true are the words of the wise physician, that " from him who has eyes to see" and ears to hear no mortal can hide his secret ; he whose lips are silent chatters with his finger- tips and betrays himself through all his poresJ/^_j If I were asked to sum up the dominant impression that the survival in Spain of old- world medisevalism makes, I should say that Spain is, in the precise and specific sense of the word, the home of romance. The special

20 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

character of the Spanish temperament and of Spanish developments in literature and in art are marked not by classic feeling — though Spain owed so much to ancient Rome and Rome to Spain — but by a quality, rising and sinking with the rise and fall of Gothic, which we call the romantic spirit — a mixture, that is, of the /mysterious and grandiose with the grotesquely | bizarre, of the soaringly ideal with the crudely | real, a mixture which to us to-day has the I cunning fascination of art, but was really on | both sides the natural outcome of the experi- ! ences and feelings of the men who created it. This romantic spirit was once the common possession of all Christendom, but the Spanish temperament peculiarly lent itself to the romantic attitude, and it is in Spain to-day that we may catch its final vanishing echoes. It was certainly no accident that Victor Hugo, the great repre- sentative of the romantic renaissance in France, went to Spain for his inspiration. It is some- times said, and with truth, that Hugo had but a slight knowledge of Spain : he went there as a child of ten, that was all. But this child of precocious genius was able even at that age to receive impressions strong enough to germinate in the fulness of time. The whole of the earlier and more fruitful period of his work may be said to have been touched by the stimulus which came to Victor Hugo from Spain.

INTRODUCTION 21

To-day it is the Church, always the most powerful stronghold of tradition among any people, where the stranger may most vividly realise how well the romantic spirit has been preserved in Spain. Notwithstanding invasions from without and revolutions from within, especially during the early years of the last century, Spain is still the country where the mediaeval spirit of romantic devotion is most splendidly embodied and preserved. To the English visitor, in whose churches nearly every beautiful thing that royal despoilers had left was battered and broken by still more energetic Puritans, it is a perpetual miracle to find so, much delicate work from remote ages which has/ never been ravaged by revolutionists or restorers; Moreover, there is no style of architecture which so admirably embodies the romantic- spirit as Spanish Gothic. Such a statement implies no heresy against the supremacy of French Gothic, i But the very qualities of harmony and balance, of finely tempered reason, which make French Gothic so exquisitely satisfying, softened the combination of mysteriously grandiose splendour with detailed realism in which lies the essence of Gothic as the manifestation of the romantic spirit. Spanish Gothic, at once by its massive- ness and extravagance and by its realistic naturalness, far more potently embodies the spirit of mediaeval life. It is less aesthetically

22 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

beautiful, but it is more romantic. -In Leon Cathedral Spain possesses one of the very noblest and purest examples of French Gothic, a church which may almost be said to be the supreme type of the Gothic ideal of a delicate house of glass finely poised between buttresses, but there is nothing Spanish about it. For the typical Gothic of Spain we must go to Toledo and Burgos, to Tarragona and Barcelona. Here we find the elements of stupendous size, of mys- terious gloom, of grotesque and yet realistic energy which are the dominant characters alike of Spanish architecture and of mediaeval romance. We find the same characters in every object which subserves the Church service and ritual. The Spaniard has no fine instinct for the aesthetic, but in the sphere of devotion his romantic instinct is always right. The gloom which pervades Spanish churches — so unlike French churches, which are a blaze of light — has its source in the need for tempering the glare of the southern sun. But this gloom is finely subdued to the purposes of devotion, and exquisitely tempered not only by windows which are always painted, but by the use of candles as the only source of artificial illumina- tion. Though here and there, as in Toledo Cathedral, we find the hideous French device of the electric light that pretends to be a candle, Spaniards still understand not only that the

INTRODUCTION 23

candle is the illuminant which symbolically best lends itself to Christian worship, but that the full and equable illumination necessary to reveal the symmetry of classic buildings is worse than useless in this more mysterious Gothic art which demands the emphasis of its perspective, the broken play of light and shade.1

The affinity of the Spaniard for the romantic spirit is far from being — in the common sense of the word " romantic " — the expression of a superficial sentimentality. The chivalry peculiarly identified with Spain — the chivalry embodied in the conception of the Cid, which finally drove the Moor out of Spain — however fantastic and extravagant it sometimes became, was stern in its ideals and very practical in its achievements. And alike in its practical and its fantastic shapes, it was always peculiarly congenial to the temper of the Spaniard. When Loyola, the knight of a new chivalry, watched over the weapons of his spiritual armour in his long vigil at Monserrat, he was not artificially aping the knight of old-world chivalry, but

1 The candle, as has been said by a writer on " Christmas as the Feast of Candles" (Gentleman's Magazine, December 1906), is the true symbol of the link between the soul of man and the Unseen. Spain has always been noted for its devotion to candles, and is "not only the land of sunshine but the land of candle-light." Nowhere has the use of tapers in worship been so highly developed. More than fifteen centuries ago the Synod of Elvira condemned the Spanish custom of burning candles in cemeteries, apparently regarding it as a relic of witchcraft, but the custom has none the less persisted even till now on All Saints' Day.

24 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

naturally satisfying the spiritual instinct of a true Spaniard.

Interwoven with the manifestations of the romantic spirit of Spain, indeed a part of its texture, there is a perpetual insistence on suffer- ing and death. A certain indifference to pain, even a positive delight in it, was long ago observed by Strabo to mark the Iberian. And the deliberate insistence on the thought of death, so congenial to the ethical temper of this people that, it has been said, the Spaniard has a natural passion for suicide, has always been a note of the romantic mood. But while the favourite medi- aeval conception of the dance of death, peculiarly at home in Spain,1 has elsewhere passed out of the living traditions of European peoples, in Spain the naked lugubrious fact of death is still made part of the lesson of daily life. "Hie jacet pulvis, cinis, nihil " : that inscription in huge letters which alone serves to mark the grave of. a great Archbishop on the pavement of Toledo Cathedral, well expresses the Spaniard's haughty humility. The Escorial, again, the Eoyal Spanish Temple to Death, is unique in its elaborate and

1 The anonymous Spanish Danza de la Muerte of the fourteenth century is said to be the oldest known Macabre Dance legend. Smile Male, however, who has written an interesting study on the Dance of Death, and the fascination exerted by the idea of Death in mediaeval Europe after the thirteenth century (Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1906), regards the Dance of Death as an entirely French concep- tion, though he thinks its origin may probably be traced to Franciscan or Dominican influence.

INTRODUCTION 25

impressive circumstances ; the ruling Spanish monarch may here descend the dark marble staircase to the little vault below the high altar, to view in its own small niche the sarcophagus which was prepared for him centuries before he was born. Even in Spain there is nothing more impressive than this huge Escorial, the grey and sombre Palace of Death, which Philip built on this carefully chosen site, in the lonely village amid the grey and sombre mountains. And in the loftily magnificent pile there is nothing so impressive, and nothing so essentially Spanish, as the little suite of dark rooms with its plain furniture which the greatest and richest of kings built for himself, so that he might lie on his, dying bed with its outlook on the high altar, fingering the same crucifix as his father, the still mightier monarch, Charles V., also held when he too lay dying, in the same Spanish way, gazing at the altar in the Convent of Yuste. Nowadays a disconcerting little stream of cosmopolitan tourists is for ever passing through the huge temple — gaily dressed ladies from every clime, the patient Yankee globe - trotter, the smug English curate, the irrepressibly cheerful kttle Frenchman who stands in the middle of the solemn vault of the dead kings and quietly sums up his impressions : " C'est joli, ga ! " — • but it cannot wash away the deathly solemnity of this ferocious Escorial.

26 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

The Spaniard broods over and emphasises the naked majesty of death. Very far from him is the sunny and serene saying of the Spanish Jew, Spinoza, that "There is nothing the wise man thinks of less than of death." In Barcelona Cathedral, the most solemnly impressive model of Catalan architecture, the broad and stately entrance to the crypt, the gloomy house of death, is placed in the centre of the church, between the capilla mayor and the choir. Every Spanish sacristan seems to possess a well-polished skull and a couple of thigh-bones, with which to crown the catafalque it is his duty to erect — a task in which we may sometimes find him engaged in the silent church at twilight, pre- paring for the funeral ceremony of the morrow. In a church in the heart of the city of Zamora I have found, prominently placed on a pedestal, a skeleton of fine proportions holding an hour- glass in one hand and a scythe in the other, while high on the interior wall of Salamanca Cathedral one discerns a skeleton of lesser pro- portions with what seems to be the skin still clingiug to the bones.1

1 Since the above passage was written, I have read the Espa«a Negra of the distinguished Belgian poet, Emile Verhaeren (translated into Spanish, annotated, and illustrated by Dario de Regoyos, who accompanied the poet on his journey). No tourist in Spain has seen so vividly as Verhaeren the sombre violenco of the Spanish tempera- ment, the insistent fascination of death, showing itself in the unlikeliest places, even in Andalusian love -songs. Few tourists in Spain seem to note these things. Even Ford, whose Gatherings from

INTRODUCTION 27

The age of chivalry, as we know, is over, and the romantic spirit is rooted in conceptions of life and death which are not able to nourish vitally in the soil of our time. It is inevitable that, however firmly the mediaeval idea may have persisted in Spain, its tendency must be if not to die out, at all events to become attenuated, overlaid, at the least transformed in its manifest- ations. But a nation that at one moment led the world and has always shown an aptitude for bringing forth great personalities, cannot be hastily dismissed as decadent, unable to exert any influence on human affairs. The people of Spain — still sound at the core, and with a vigour of spirit which has enabled them to win strength even out of defeat — showed at one period at least in their history, from the conquest of Toledo to the conquest of Seville, an incomparable strength, freedom, and vitality ; even later, Spain still had the energy to find and to colonise the other hemisphere of the globe ; and later still, to bring spiritual achievements of immortal value to the treasure-house of humanity; while the forceful and plastic genius of Spain has moulded one of the strongest and most beautiful forms of human

Spain is so delightful and intimate, for the most part so accurate and well-documented a picture of Spanish manners and customs, shows no sign of any perception of the tragically intense and sombre aspect of Spain. Verhaeren's special temperament makes him peculiarly sensitive to this side of the Spanish soul, though Espaila Negra can hardly be accepted as a completely adequate picture of Spanish life.

2S THE SOUL OF SPAIX

speech and one of the most widely diffused. The soul of Spain has i:s persistent and inde- structible fibre inextricably woven into human affairs. It has, moreover, its own special seal. the mark of a lofty and unique personality. which we cannot too patiently and reverently study in all its various manifestations. For we are but now growing ready to receive the inspira- tions that it may yield us..

II

THE SPANISH PEOPLE

It has been said that a Spaniard resembles the child of a European father by an Abyssinian mother. Whether or not the statement is literally true, the simile may be accepted as a convenient symbol of the most fundamental fact about Spain and her people. Just as Russia and her people are the connecting link between Europe and Asia, so Spain is the connecting link between Europe and the African continent it was once attached to and still so nearly adjoins. That is the cause of the almost savage primitive- ness and violence which we find in all the burnt-brown soil of Spain, wherever it is most characteristic, and of the independence, equally savage in its aboriginal primitiveness, which we may detect in the temper of its people. Spain is a great detached fragment of Africa, and the Spaniard is the first-born child of the ancient

29

30 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

white North African, now widely regarded as the parent of the chief and largest element in the population of Europe. That is why the people of Spain are nearer to the aboriginal European racial type, as Ripley has truly said, than are the people of any other civilised land in the European continent.

The Berbers and Kabyles, hidden among the hills of Morocco and Algeria, may well seem, to one who has lived in North Africa, to have a better claim than any other people to represent the primitive European stock. In appearance they are not seldom entirely European ; while often as dark as men of Cadiz can be, they might sometimes also pass as men of Aberdeen. Physic- ally they are lithe and vigorous, with the dignity that comes of lithe vigour. In character they are serious yet cheerful, warlike yet according a high place to women, extremely independent, and preferring to live in small, clannish, closely knit communities, jealous or hostile toward other social units. They constitute an admirable human material, though one that is peculiarly difficult to tame to the ends of civilisation. In nearly every respect the Spaniard seems to show traces of relationship to this North African stock, which he, of all European men, most closely resembles.

It is now generally believed that the Basques with their mysterious language represent the

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 31

primitive Iberians of Berber stock. Once, as place-names still show, this language was spoken over the greater part of Spain, but now, in a modified shape, it is confined to the people who inhabit the north-east corner of Spain and the adjoining region in France. The Basques them- selves, as Telesforo de Aranzadi has shown in a detailed anthropological study, correspond to the primitive Iberians of Berber affinity, though modified, he believes, by some admixture with people, on the one hand, of Lapp and Finn type, on the other hand, of Cymric or Germanic type. Their isolation on the flanks of the Pyrenees has enabled the Basques to retain their ancient language and some of their primitive institutions, — as, in some districts, precedence of the eldest daughter over all the sons in inheritance, — but the Iberians still, it is probable, form the funda- mental material in the population all over Spain. Moreover, it is a remarkable and significant fact that nearly all the successful historical invasions of Spain have been carried out by peoples who were of North African or allied stock, and often very largely of actual Berber race. The. Car- thaginians, who played so large a part in the early history of Spain, were mainly, it is prob- able, of race allied to the Berbers. The Moslems, who represent by far the most important invasion, reached Spain from Morocco, and though their leaders often came from farther east, the bulk of

32 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

the Moorish invaders was usually made up, as the name indicates, of Berbers from Morocco; so that, notwithstanding the age-long warfare between Spanish Christianity and Moorish Islamism, Spaniards and Moors were yet in blood closely related.1

To this general rule there were two notable exceptions. The Visigoths — a Germanic people of Byzantine civilisation who were not alto- gether typically Teutonic — dominated Spain for several centuries and then more or less melted away into the underlying mixed Iberian stock. Of much earlier occurrence — before the fifth century B.C., according to Jubainville — was the invasion of the Asiatic and mid-European Celts, who are still easy to trace in the Iberian penin- sula, though much mixed with Iberian elements, by their shorter heads. They probably entered from France — where they are still firmly en- trenched among the mountains of Auvergne — and being unable to dislodge the tenacious inhabitants of the Pyrenean heights, were com-

1 The readiness with which so obstinate and pugnacious a race as the Spaniards received the Moslem invaders and made terms with them, in large numbers even embracing Mohammedanism (being then termed Muladies), shows that they regarded them as less alien than their Gothic masters. Even when their Christian subjects retained their religion (and were then termed Mozarabes) the Moors frequently admitted them to high posts, even to the command of Moslem armies. The fanatical spirit only began to appear at the beginning of the twelfth century, and the intimate alliance and mingling of Christian and Moor continued even to the last. (See, e.g., Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain, vol. i. pp. 52 et seq. )

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 33

pelled to proceed farther and found a congenial home among the hills of Asturias and Galicia, for everywhere these reserved and dreamy people are attracted to the seclusion of hilly country ; their descendants extend along the Portuguese coast, and it may be said that the Celts have had less to do with the making of Spain than of Portugal, to which indeed Galicia really belongs, by soil and climate, as well as by race and language. Along the northern Spanish heights Celts and Iberians seem to have mingled at a very early period to form the vigorous and obstinate Celtiberian stock. The Celts brought, however, no very positive contribution to the Spanish character; they doubtless heightened the Spanish tenacity and domesticity, and prob- ably diminished Spanish pugnacity, for crimes of blood are comparatively infrequent in the Celtic regions of Spain ; 1 they were certainly more apt for menial labour ; even to-day the Gallegos in Spain, like the Auvergnats in France, are known all over the country as labourers and servants.

Partly owing to the predominance of the primitive Iberian elements, partly to the racial affinity of most of the elements of later introduc- tion, the population of Spain reveals to-day a singular anthropological uniformity.2 It is quite

1 Bernaldo de Quiros, Criminologia, p. 52.

1 A similar uniformity seems to have prevailed even at the outset. In a fragment of the old Greek historian, Herodorus of Heraclaea, it is said that the Iberians are everywhere the same people, though they

D

34 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

true that the inhabitants of many of the pro- vinces of Spain are even now distinguished from each other by various marked and obvious peculiarities of appearance, costume, and dis- position. If, for instance, we compare Spain with France in this respect, we might be inclined to say that the Spanish provinces are more un- like each other to-day than the French provinces probably were even a century ago. Yet the in- habitants of many of the French provinces are anthropologically of radically unlike race, while the people of Spain are as uniform, anthropologically, as those of Great Britain now are. This apparent diversity, there seems to me little doubt, is due to that tendency to clannishness, to local patriot- ism, which the Spaniard has inherited from his Berber ancestors.

The greater part of Spain is thus occupied by a race which Deniker terms Ibero-insular, and is sometimes called Homo Mediterraneus.1 The same race occupies the large islands of the western Mediterranean, the south of Italy, and some regions in central France, especially Limousin and Perigord. The chief racial char- acteristics of this people, as compared with

bear different names because they are divided into different tribes ; and Pierre Paris, in his valuable study of primitive art and industry in Spain, finds that among all the ancient works of art which have been discovered throughout the great peninsula there is a certain undeniable uniformity.

1 Deniker, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, July and December, 1904,

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 35

Europeans generally, are shortness, darkness, and long-headedness. In stature they vary within the same limits as Italians, but while in Italy the short population is mainly in the south, in Spain it is more to the north and in the centre. In colour Spaniards are on the average somewhat darker than Italians, and though fair hair and light eyes are common in many if not all parts of Spain, there appears to be no large region of the country in which, as illustrated by Deniker's chart of pigmentation, the people of brown type fall below 30 per cent of the population. Tacitus referred to the curly hair and coloured complexion of the Spaniards. The rich pigmentation of the skin seems to be a marked characteristic of the Iberian race (even in the branch that extends to the south-western peninsula of England), for Silius Italicus compared the Spaniard's skin to the gold of his mines, and in its most delicate modification it constitutes that " golden pallor " which Grautier so greatly admired in the women of Malaga. As regards head-shape, Spaniards, as we should expect, though on the whole long- headed, are distinctly less so than the Berbers. The fairly uniform manner in which mixture has taken place is decisively shown by the very narrow limits within which the cephalic index varies. The more long-headed people are in the east and southrwest, the more broad-headed

36 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

people in the north-west. The men and women we see in the pictures of Murillo, and to some extent those of Zurbaran, admirably illustrate the chief anthropological types of Spain.

II

The land of Spain and the physical traits of Spaniards lead us back to Africa. If we take a more penetrating survey we shall find that there is much in the character of the Spaniard which we may also fairly count as African. Indeed, the Spanish character is fundamentally, it seems to me, not only African, but primitive, and — in the best and not in any depreciative sense of the word — savage. It is usual to say that every nation passes successively "through the three stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, and no doubt that is true. But it has often seemed to me that certain peoples have so natural an affinity for one or other of these stages that something of its character always clings to their national temper. Thus France is not only the land of civilisation to-day, but we clearly detect the same instinct of civilisation in the Gauls described by Strabo two thousand years ago; that premature instinct of civilisation seems indeed the main reason why they fell so easy a prey to the Eomans. Again, the Eussian is and always has been a barbarian,

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 37

not necessarily for evil, but also for good. And the • Spaniard is, and remains to-day, in the best sense of the word, a savage. His childlike simplicity and intensity of feeling, his hardness and austerity combined with disdain for the superfluous, his love of idleness tempered by the aptitude for violent action, his indifference to persons and interests outside the circle of his own life — these characteristics and the like, which have always marked the Spaniard, mark also the savage. The love of idleness, for instance, as a background for the manifestation of violent energy, everywhere noted among savages, has always been pronounced in the Spaniard ; he has little natural aptitude for . sustained and detailed labour ; even the highest efforts of Spanish genius have often had little about them of "an infinite capacity for taking pains," and none of the world's great literary masterpieces show so many careless flaws in matters of detail as Don Quixote, even though high authorities maintain that Don Quixote is written with great care. Except in Catalonia and Galicia, work is a necessity, it may be, but never a heart-felt impulse ; the shopkeeper and the manual labourer are traditionally regarded with contempt; even the poor Valencian boat-^ man, in a novel of Blasco Ibanez's, could feel nothing but contempt for men who cultivated the ground : " they were labourers, and to

38 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

Jrim that word sounded like an insult." The Spaniard of an earlier age entrusted labour to slaves, or to free Moors living under Christian rule, and called Mudejares, who were frequently men of much more skill and education than their employers. So that the Castilian, whose business was war, having left trade and com- merce and craftsmanship to slaves, came to regard them as slavish occupations. Hence it is that in Spain a beggar can afford to feel proud — indeed nowadays the beggar alone retains that air of pride once attributed to the Spaniards generally — and social parasitism, which gave rise to the old picaresque literature,1 under new forms still remains a national institution.

It is true that in this matter a too absolute statement may easily produce a false impression. Spaniards themselves are reasonably annoyed with the tourists who seem to see the population of Spain symbolised in gipsies who dance or tell fortunes and beggar boys who lie in the sun eating oranges. Spain, Emilia Pardo Bazan declares, is not merely the land of the gipsy

1 It ia noteworthy that the masterpieces of Spanish picaresque literature were probably all written by men who had lived on the verge of the nomadic life they described, and perhaps themselves felt the impulses it tended to engender. The authorship of the first and best, Lazarillo de Tormes, is unknown, but " it may have been written," as Butler Clarke remarks, "in a camp, a pot-house, a lax student's garret, or even in a prison." Mateo Aleman was a poor soldier ; Espinel was a vagabond, a soldier, a sailor, and perhaps, like Cervantes, a prisoner in Algiers ; Quevedo had mixed with all strata of society.

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 3J

with his guitar, for there is "a youthful anc muscular Spain, covered with sweat, wearing ; blue blouse, and with face blackened by th< smoke of the forge." This is undoubtedly thi fact, and yet it remains true that the tempera ment, the independence, the traditions of th Spaniard, even his climate, all combine to rende uncongenial the gospel of work for the love o it which has commended itself to the nation who are for ever inventing new wants in orde to excuse to themselves their appetite for wort To the Spaniard work is not so much a goo< in itself as an evil to which he is inured, an< he prefers to limit his wants rather than t increase his labour. According to a Libyai or Berber tradition, preserved by a Pindari fragment, the first ancestor, Iarbas, of the rac to which the Spaniard belongs, sprang directl; from the sun-heated African soil. It was natural belief. 'The plains of Castile, also, ar hard to cultivate, and baked by the sun whe: they are not frozen; the natural selectio: exercised by ice, fire, and hunger has tendei to produce a tough and dry race, extreme! sober, temperate in all their physical demands and too familiar with work to care to idealis it. The poverty of the Spanish soil has mad the Spaniard, as Unamuno puts it, the son c Abel rather than of Cain, the agriculturalist, wh slew him ; he prefers to breed cattle in the pasture

40 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

and among the hillsj from such districts, rather than from the rich and cultivated lowlands, came conquistadores like Cortes or Pizarro, with many others of the most vigorous children of Spain. By environment as well as by temperament the Spaniard is a nomad, a born adventurer.1 f So that if we may say that there is in the Spaniard a distaste for organised and constant labour, there is also a great reserve of energy, and also the heroic endurance of hardship when the laborious acquisition of comfort is counted a greater hardship. On the one hand, there is the love of doing nothing, a contempt for ordinary useful work, and a tendency among the weaker social elements to parasitism ; on the other hand, there is at times, and especially in some elect individuals, a fury, almost an ecstasy, of extravagant and untiring energy^ It is this fascination of energy which leads in Calderon, as Norman Maccoll has remarked, to a special predilection for all daemonic types of character, the natures full of restless energy and eagerness for action, urged forward by an impulse they are themselves unable to account for, and regard as external. Even the poet

1 It has often seemed to me a curious proof of the persistence of hereditary influences that Casanova should have been ultimately of Spanish race ; it is scarcely fanciful, indeed, to find in him a special affinity with the Mallorcans, among whom the name Oasanova has long been common and indeed famous, since it is that of their chief woman saint. Casanova is the Spanish picaro in excehis. (I may refer to my study of £asanova in Affirmations.)

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 41

of to-day, Ruben Dario, though penetrated alike by the cosmopolitanism of the new world and the old-world fragrance of Baudelaire and Verlaine, remains a true child of Spain in his admiration for energy, and sings —

" Yo soy el caballero de la humana energia."

In his^estas, also, as Salillas well remarks, the Spaniard loves to expend an immense amount of work, which may not indeed be useful work, though it is capable of being transformed into use- ful work, — and is to-day to some extent undergo- ing this transformation, — for it has all the virility of work ; and the chief national form of the jiesta, the bull- fight, demands in the highest degree y courage, strength, agility, intelligence, and grace.1

This attitude of the Spaniard, his hardness,5 the indifference to pain which is so often looked upon as a love of cruelty, again allies the Spaniard to the savage. From first to last the emotional attitude underlying such manifestations is alien to | the tenderness, fully as much egoistic as alrtsuistic, which marks civilisation, but it is perfectly intelligible to the savage mind. EveryJ form of asceticism has been triumphantly ex- hibited by Spaniards, and asceticism, sometimes tempered by orgy, is always easy and often necessary in the conditions of savage life. It is only in this way that we can understand a

1 Salillas, ffampa, pp. 86 et seq., 114 et seq.

42 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

characteristic so alien to the softness of civilisa- tion. Spaniards have often indignantly repelled the common charge of cruelty, and the accusation that the existence of the Inquisition testified to a special delight in religious persecution; the town of Salem alone, Valera somewhere remarks, was responsible for more torture in the name of religion than can be put to the account of the Holy Office from California to the Straits of Magellan. Moreover, in an age when torture was a recognised part of judicial procedure nearly everywhere,1 its use by the Inquisition in Spain can only call for special comment if it can be shown that the Spanish Inquisitors went beyond their judicial contemporaries in its application. This is the reverse of the fact. In Aragon, though it admitted the Inquisition, torture was even illegal, and it was only by positive command of Clement V. that it was applied in 1311 to the Templars. Later, when torture was in daily use in Castile in the secular courts, it was also used by the Inquisition, as it then was in Aragon, though still not there permitted in secular jurisprudence. The In- quisition in Spain used the almost universally accepted methods of torture for extracting confession, but its use was jealously guarded, and as a rule only a few of the simplest of the

1 Even in seventeenth -century England, Bacon, a man of the highest genius, humanity, and temperamental moderation, accepted torture as a matter-of-course element in English judicial proceedings.

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 43

generally recognised mediaeval methods of torture were applied, and not generally to any great extent. The belief that the methods of torture used by the Spanish Inquisition were exception- ally cruel in their character or their degree is due, remarks Lea in his very detailed study of the Spanish Inquisition, to sensational writers who have played on the credulity of their readers. "The system was evil in conception and in execution," he states, " but the Spanish Inquisition, at least, was not responsible for its introduction, and, as a rule, was less cruel than the secular courts in its application, and con- fined itself more strictly to a few well-known methods. The comparison between the Spanish and the Koman Inquisition is also eminently in favour of the former." J Yet when we reflect on the history of Spain, and the temperament of the Spaniard, it is difficult not to realise a certain indifference to pain, almost a love of it. Thej early Iberians, even when nailed to the cross, still chanted their national songs, unvanquished in spirit, to the astonishment of their Eoman conquerors, and Iberian mothers dashed their children to death rather than that they should live to be slaves. It is scarcely more than a century since Spanish churches in Lent were habitually bespattered with the blood of peni-

1 H. C. Lea, Eistory of the Inquisition Ml Spain, vol. iii. oh. i.? " Torture."

44 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

tent worshippers, — just as across the Straits of Gibraltar to-day the more fanatical sectarians of Islam dance through the market-places during the great Moorish festival in June, hacking themselves till the blood flows down. Even yet, it appears, a similar custom still lingers here and there in Spain. Eegoyos has seen at San Vicente de la Sonsierra, near Haro in Bioja, a brotherhood who still flagellate them- selves and each other till the blood flows, a mediaeval survival amid electric lights and railway trains. Just as bulls are pricked in the bull-ring, so these men use a special instrument armed with sharp pieces of broken glass. Not every one feels called upon to be a picao in this game, but those who have the courage to take part in it are greatly admired by the girls and much sought in marriage. Those who once adopt this practice, which is an observance of Good Friday, feel that they need it every spring to cool the blood, and the authorities have not been able to stop it, for even when prohibited it still took place in private.1 Two centuries ago it was a common custom for lovers during Holy Week to scourge themselves to a like extremity in the streets, to win the pity and admiration of their mistresses.3

1 Emile Verhaeren and Dario de Regoyos, Espafla Negra, 1899, p. 72.

a In 1692 the Countess d'Aulnoy, in her Relation du Voyage d'Espagne (vol. ii. pp. 158-164), gave a detailed account of such flagellatory scenes and the admiration they aroused in the feminine

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 45

"I suspect the Spaniards," Barres remarks, "of finding pleasure in the sight of the sufferings of Christ." It is certain that Spanish artists have ever sought to achieve the most poignant and agonised images of the suffering Christ, and that Spanish worshippers have shown a peculiar complacency in surrounding such images with elegance and luxury. I recall, for instance, a most sorrowful Christ which I came across not long since over an altar in an aisle of Palencia Cathedral. It was a large wooden image on a crucifix, carved in the Spanish realistic muscular style, and around the waist there was a charming little embroidered skirt, very short, and below it peeped out a delicate lace petticoat, a coquettish disguise made to suggest and not to conceal, for there was nothing to conceal. Such is the piquant figure that Spanish religion devises for the adoration of Spanish women, and the bent dolorous face looks more dolorous than ever with eyes turned to this ballet-girl's costume.

The Spanish interest in blood, and the satis- faction in the shedding of it, has even intruded itself not only into art, but also, as Ganivet well points out, into medicine. Servetus's part in the discovery of the circulation of the blood is one of the most notable contributions of Spain

heart. When such a flagellant met a good-looking woman in the street he would strike himself in such a way that she was sprinkled by his blood ; it w,as a great honour, and the grateful lady would thank him.

46 THE SOUL OF SPAIN

to medical science, while Spain has surpassed all other nations put together in the number and excellence of its blood-letters. The supreme Spanish doctor is Doctor Sangrado.

Stoicism, the instinctive philosophy of the savage everywhere, is the fundamental philo- sophy and almost the religion of Spain. Seneca, the typical Spanish Stoic, it has been said, has in Spain the air of a Father of the Church ; the Spaniard, Marcus Aurelius, bears the imprint of his native country ; and Lucan of Cordova was the first of a long line of Spaniards. They have taken so important a share in moulding the later developments of Stoicism because that philosophy answered to an instinct they already felt in their veins. Even when most a Christian the Spaniard has been a Stoic, one may say, almost more than an ascetic. Torquemada lived in palaces, surrounded by princely retinues of armed horsemen, but he would not accept the archbishopric of Seville, he wore his humble Dominican habit, never wearing linen nor using it on his bed, he ate no flesh, and he refused to give a marriage portion to his indigent sister. One recalls also the characteristic anecdote of Fray Luis de Leon, who, after five years' suffer- ing in prison at the hands of the Inquisition, returned to his professorial chair at Sala- manca— in the dark little lecture -theatre we may still see there — and began, according to

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 47

his usual custom : "As I said in my last lecture."

This attitude of mind is associated with the Spanish emphasis on character, on morals, on practice. Pure intellectual curiosity has never flourished in Spain. Spaniards have played no prominent part in mathematics or geometry, in astronomy or physics, though they have dis- tinguished themselves in many departments of applied science as well as in biology, and to-day Kamon y Cajal, the neurologist, has a world- wide reputation. They have also been greatly occupied with metaphysics, but in Spain meta- physics has been one with theology, a subject of intensely practical concern.1

It would be a mistake to suppose that the hardness of the Spaniard and his instinctive Stoicism in any degree exclude an aptitude for real tenderness or the display of any of the gentler human emotions. This result is not reached even in the savage, and in the Spaniard there is a very high degree of such human feel- ing. Cervantes, the most typical of Spaniards, is as sweetly humane as Chaucer.2 What seems to mark the gentler emotions of the Spaniard

1 Menendez y Pelayo, who brings out this point in his Ciencia Espanola (3rd ed., 1887, vol. i. p. 94), refers to "the sad fact that our Faculties of science are deserted. "

2 It is the humanity of the Spaniard which makes the plague of beggars so difficult to suppress in Spain ; a considerable section of the Spanish population of all classes feels that it is inhuman to refuse to give alms.

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is simply a less effusive facility in their more serious manifestations and a tendency to expend them on those immediately around him rather than on the world at large. 'For their friends, said Strabo, the Iberians were ready to sacrifice their lives. There is thus, as has sometimes been pointed out, a certain apparent antagonism in the attitude of the Spaniard towards the world. On the one hand, he delights in a hard and rigid formalism, an austere and abstract uniformity in morals and religion, to which his own spirit and that of others must be relentlessly broken. But, on the other hand, to the individual sinner, as to his friend and neighbour in all the rela- tionships of life, the Spaniard is always indulgent,1 a quality which was conspicuously displayed, in the strictly theological field, by many Spanish casuists.2 The Spanish Qhurch, however stern to the alien heretic outside, was always tender to its own child within. Spain produced the pitiless Torquemada, but also produced the piti- ful Valencian monk who, six centuries ago, built the first hospital for the insane. " We have an

1 It is noteworthy that the practice of allowing counsel to prisoners in criminal cases, though comparatively recent in England, has in Spain been customary for many centuries, defendants too poor to retain counsel being supplied at the public expense (Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain, vol. iii. p. 43).

2 Caramuel, who, on account of the tendency of his teaching to moral indulgence, has been termed the enfant terrible of theology, was a Castilian. He was a man of great learning, very influential, and full of practical energy.

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anomalous state of things," an acute Spanish thinker has said, " in harmony with our character. We punish with solemnity and rigour to satisfy our desire for justice ; and then, without noise or outcry, we pardon the condemned criminal to satisfy our desire for mercy."1 This attitude of mind has been regarded as a Spanish outcome of Christian sentiment and Senecan philosophy at a point where they both concord. But the tendency is probably more radical and instinctive than such a suggestion would indicate. We may find a similar mingling of strong notions of abstract justice combined with merciful indul-

1 In the Spanish religious spirit there is an extreme tolerance as well as an extreme intolerance. The austere spirit of intolerance gained the upper hand during the late Middle Ages, just as the austere spirit of Puritanism, a little later, gained the upper hand in England, but it is not necessarily the most genuine and native impulse of the race. The Visigoths were very tolerant. ' ' Never was there a nation who so little deserved the reproach of bigotry as the Visigoths of Spain " (H. Bradley, The Goths, p. 329). It was a Spanish Goth who s"hocked Gregory of Tours by saying that it is a Christian's duty to treat with respect whatever is reverenced by others, even by idolaters. At a later period Castile, alone among Latin nations, refused to admit the methods of persecution, notwithstanding all the prescriptions of the Church. Aragon was more subservient to the Popes of Rome, although its secular laws were enlightened and just, and Jaime the Conqueror burnt obstinate heretics (Lea, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol. ii. pp. 180 et seq.). Early in the fourteenth century the movement of religious intolerance spread among the Castilian bishops after they returned from the Council of Vienne, and at the Council of Zamora in 1313 they went beyond the French in the ferocity of their movement against Jews and infidels, although the people were far from sharing their feelings. The Inquisition, which was the chief instrument of the impulse of intolerance, was political even more than religious, and was mainly fostered by the political genius of Ferdinand in his effort to attain unity and strong government.

E

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gence to offenders among the peasantry of Ire- land, a land where, according to very ancient tradition, which modern research tends to con- firm, a primitive Iberian element is well marked. As regards the Spanish peasant's attitude towards his fellow-men, I found an instructive story, as recorded by a Spanish magistrate, in an Ara- gonese newspaper a few years ago, at a time when there was much distress in Aragon. A labourer out of work came on to the highroad determined to rob the first person he met. This was a man with a waggon. The labourer bade him halt and demanded his money. " Here are thirty dollars, all that I have," the detained man replied. "There is nothing left for me but robbery, my family are dying of hunger," the aggressor said apologetically, and proceeded to put the money in his pocket. But as he did so his mind changed. "Take this, chico," he said, handing back twenty-nine dollars, " one is enough for me." "Would you like anything I have in the cart ? " asked the waggoner, im- pressed by this generosity. "Yes," said the man ; " take this dollar back too, I had better have some rice and some beans." The waggoner handed over a bag of eatables, and then held out five dollars, which, however, the labourer refused. " Take them for luck-money," said the waggoner, " I owe you that." And only so was the would-be robber persuaded to accept. This

THE SPANISH PEOPLE 51

authentic story is characteristic of the mixture of impulses in the Spanish temperament. We are \ not unaccustomed to find a veneer of humanity and courtesy over an underlying violence and hardness, but in this temperament it is the violence and hardness which lie nearer to the surface, and they fall away at once as soon as i human relationships are established.

This tendency of the Spanish peasant, to- gether with his HkiDg for abstract laws which can be modified in concrete cases, his in- dividualism, his love of independence, and his clannish preference for small social groups, may help to explain why it is that Spaniards, peasants and workmen alike, are attracted to the ideals of Anarchism. There is no country in which Collectivist Socialism of the Marxian school has made so little progress as in Spain, and Anarchism so much progress. This has been the case for at least forty years.1 In 1868 Fanelli, an Italian member of the Bakunist Alliance (the Anarchist section of the Inter- national), went over to Spain, and two years later, when an Anarchist Congress was held in Barcelona, the movement was already beginning to assume a convinced and determined character. Since then Anarchism has steadily progressed in Spain. It flourishes in Catalonia, where it

1 A brief sketch of the history of Spanish Anarchism, by Stoddard I Dewey, was published in the Contemporary Review for May 1902.

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actively foments and supports the frequent strikes in Barcelona; it finds a stronghold in Andalusia, where the contrasts of wealth and poverty are very marked ; while all the inter- vening Mediterranean coasts, especially Valencia, an important industrial region, are affected by its influence. The more northern parts of the country also show similar developments, but in a less degree, and the Atlantic coast is not so favourable to Anarchism as the Mediterranean ; in Bilbao, the second great industrial centre of Spain, the Labour Party has frequently been hostile to Anarchism, but in most parts of Spain the ideals of labour are largely the ideals of Anarchism.1

There is another Spanish characteristic which is also characteristic of the savage attitude towards life : the love of formalism aud ritual and ceremony. No doubt in every stage of human culture this ceremonial and ritualistic element exists and must exist, but in savagery,

1 The ideals of Anarchism are by no means confined to the Spanish peasant and labourer. In his DoOa Luz, Valera has a passage which, although he ascribes it to "my famous friend Don Juan Fresco" (who reappears in the background of so many of his novels), we may fairly accept as embodying his own opinions : " I confess that I have an ideal which, at the rate we are moving, will not be realised, if it is realised at all, within ten or twelve centuries ; but it is necessary to make our way towards it, even though at the tortoise's pace. My ideal is the least government possible, almost the negation of govern- ment, a mild anarchy compatible with order, an order born harmoniously from the bosom of society and not by authority." This is a genuinely Spanish creed.

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as well as in an ancient civilisation like that of China, ilj is the external embodiment of all philosophy and religion and social organisation. Far from being free, a savage is" always bound by a ceremonialism which is by no means a mere convention, and may even be tragic in its reality. For the Spaniard, also, ceremonialism is a real and serious thing, extending over the whole of life, not less formal and serious in the bull-ring than it is in the Church. In ancient days this conception of ceremony, as the supreme expres- sion of the highest religious privileges, reached its climax in the gorgeous spectacle of the auto- de-fe, or "act of faith," the great festival of joy in a glorious service to God, at which the In- quisition publicly enacted the final scene in the condemnation or reconciliation of the heretic, before he was " relaxed," that is, abandoned to the secular arm, to be burned at the quemadero outside the city, the execution of heretics being a matter entirely of secular law, and not pre- scribed by the Church. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that the auto-de-fe fell into disrepute.1

The Spanish dance, again, in its ancient and noble forms, is a solemn ritual. " What majesty, what decorum, what distinction ! " exclaims Valera, in old age, recalling the dances of Ruiz and his daughter Conchita, "and what grace

1 Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain, vol. Hi. bk. vii. oh. v.

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when both together danced the bolero ! There is no more aristocratic dance. They seemed to be princes or great personages."

To the man of Anglo-Saxon stock ceremonial functions are for the most part an unreal and uncongenial convention, which he carries through to the best of his ability with awkward and portentous solemnity. To the Spaniard cere- monialism is so real that in his hands it becomes gracious, simple, natural, almost homely. " All my life I have carried myself gracefully," said the Marquis de Siete Iglesias on the scaffold, summing up the final apology of a Spanish gentleman. This ritual tendency involves indeed a faith in exteriority which is almost fetichism ; it seems to have been a Spaniard, Eamon de Penafort, who first mentions the pardon of venial sin by aspersion with holy water, and in one of Calderon's plays, the Devocion de la Cruz, a man commits every crime yet retains his respect for the cross, the symbol of redemp- tion, and by that at the end he is saved ; he has not violated his tabu.

Ill

When we thus survey the various aspects of the Spanish temperament as revealed in daily life, in history, in religion, in literature, and in politics, we find that they coalesce into a more

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harmonious picture than is sometimes repre- sented. They are all the manifestations of an aboriginally primitive race which, under the stress of a peculiarly stimulating and yet hardening environment, has retained through every stage of development an unusual degree of the endowment of fresh youth, of elemental savagery, with which it started. The brilliant author of the Idearium Espanol, I may add, puts the same point in a rather different manner when he remarks that there is a profound reason why Spain has always proclaimed and defended the dogma of the Immaculate Conception : she has herself been forced to undergo all the pangs of maternity and has yet reached old age with the virginal spirit still young within her.

With this history and this outlook we see how inevitable and how deep-rooted are alike the fine qualities of Spain and her defects, especially the combination of splendid initiative with lack of sustained ability to follow it up which Menendez y Pelayo regards as marking the Spanish genius. We see how it is that the point of honour always played so important a part in Spanish ideas, even in the most brilliant and fruitful period of Spain's history; we see why the Cid, as popularly conceived, with his thoroughly democratic air, his rough-and-ready justice, almost as of a glorified Robin Hood,

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came to be the great hero of Spain.1 "We realise also how the prime virtue of the Spaniard has ever been the primitive virtue of valour. " Our most striking quality," Pascual Santacruz truly says of his people, " is valour," though he admits that it is a valour which has in it much of the savagery and rashness which belong to the infancy of civilisation. Whatever can be achieved by the inspirations of sheer valour, even carried to the pitch of heroism, has been achieved by Spaniards. It is interesting to observe that Brantdme — the Frenchman, Morel- Fatio believes, who has best understood Spain — was chiefly impressed by the warlike qualities of the Spaniards. He saw them marching through France to Flanders in the days when Spain was still a great power in the world. " You would have called them princes," he says, " they were so set up, they marched so arrogantly, with so fine a grace." 2 They were mostly indifferent to any

1 For a study of the character of the Cid, see H. Butler Clarke's The Cid Campeador in Heroes of the Nations Series.

a It seems to have been as a caricature of the Spaniard as soldier that the old conception of the Spaniard as braggart — which ran, and indeed still runs, through so much of the adventurous literature of France and England — originally arose. Shakespeare's Pistol has been supposed to reflect this caricature. The conception is mistaken, for the Spaniard's undoubted pride, which is by no means vanity, is apt to be associated with discretion, a quality on which Cervantes much insisted. "The extravagant, boastful posturer," Mr. Martin Hume remarks in his interesting study of Spanish influences on English literature, "which the French adopted as the Spanish type, was never true to nature, except perhaps in the case of the Spanish soldier of fortune in the sixteenth century."

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other virtue but valour. " They send books to the devil," he adds, " save a few among them •who, when they give themselves to study, are rare and excellent therein, very admir- able, profound, and subtle, as I have known several."

Even, however, when he has directed his energies into other channels, it is interesting to observe how often the Spaniard has preserved the same spirit of chivalrous valour, even the very forms of warfare. This is so even in the sphere of religion. Ramon Lull is happily termed by Menendez y Pelayo " the knight-errant of philosophy." St. Theresa began her career by writing a romance of chivalry. The militant friars of the Dominican order were organised by a Spaniard, while the peaceable and scholarly Benedictines, with a few notable exceptions, soon ceased to flourish on Spanish soil. It was to the military genius of another Spaniard, Loyola, that the Church owed, as the Protestant Macaulay pointed out, the reorganisation of the forces of the Counter-Reformation, and the effectual rampart that Catholicism was enabled to erect against the further advance of the movement started by Luther. Loyola had been a soldier and he organised his order in the spirit of a soldier ; everything was based on implicit obedience and military dis- cipline ; regulations and nomenclature were alike

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military;1 the order constituted a compania; they had a standard— a bleeding heart crowned with thorns— and they were commanded by a general. The soldier of Christ, elsewhere a symbol, in Spain became, in the Company of Jesus, an embodied reality.

Literature, again, an avocation which seems far outside the soldier's profession, has in Spain been almost monopolised by soldiers.2 Cervantes, the supreme literary figure of Spain, Camoens, the supreme literary figure of Portugal, were both men who spent a large part of their lives in fighting and adventure. Sir Philip Sidney, a unique figure in England, corresponds to the general type in Spanish literary annals. The poets of Spain, as well as the dramatists and novelists, have frequently been fighting men who have written in the intervals of their more active life in courts and camps and affairs. The Castilian Alvaro de Luna — rthe best knight, horseman, dancer, troubadour,, and diplomat in the Spain of his day — represents the old Spanish

1 Here, again, we have evidence, if more were needed, of the per- sistence of primitive tendencies among Spaniards, for the early Church was profoundly impressed by military metaphors ; the sacrament was the solemn promise of allegiance to his great Captain made by Christ's faithful soldier and servant, and the early Christian's symbol or pass- word, as he called his Creed, was a name taken from the military vocabulary.

a This is clearly brought out in Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly's admirable and delightful History of Spanish Literature, a work in which spirited narrative and sympathetic enthusiasm are balanced by exact erudition. It has been found worthy of translation into Spanish.

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ideal. In later days, the novelist Alarcon was adventurer, journalist, free-lance, soldier, and man of the world. Until recently the literary man of the study, the writer who is nothing else than a writer, was almost unknown in Spain. Even yesterday the most conspicuous Spanish man of letters, Valera, was a diplomatist and cosmopolitan man of the world, while Blasco Ibanez, the most remarkable novelist of the younger generation to-day, is a politician and revolutionist whose life has been full of daring adventure.

The special qualities of the Spanish genius, we cannot fail to recognise, found their most splendid opportunities in a stage of the world's history which, on the physical side at all events, is now for ever gone. Spain has fallen on to an age which is content to demand and to reward the industrial and commercial tasks which require a less brilliant initiative. Great, however, as is the natural wealth of the country, we can scarcely desire to see Spain occupying her fine energies in no higher task than that of com- peting, on a second-rate basis, with England and Germany, accepting the petty bargains which the greater industrial powers, first in the field, may have disdained to touch. Spain is at last facing the task before her of setting straight her economic position and her domestic political position. But beyond and beside that task

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there are problems in the future of human progress in which we have a right to expect that Spain should take as independent and as valorous a pioneering part as she once took in the problems of the physical world. It is by- retaining and applying afresh her own primitive and essential ideals, we may be sure, that Spain will impart her finest spiritual gifts to the world.

Ill

THE WOMEN OF SPAIN

There are some countries, one is inclined to assert, peculiarly apt to produce fine men, others peculiarly apt to produce fine women. That this is so on the physical side all who are familiar with several countries have had occasion to observe. It is so also on the mental side. I have elsewhere pointed out, when investigating the genius of Great Britain, that while the men of Scotland have contributed more than their share to the sum of British intellectual achieve- ment, and the men of Ireland less, as regards women the case is reversed, and the women of Ireland have contributed more than the women of Scotland.1

The Spaniards, if we take their history as a whole, have been a peculiarly virile people, yet at the present day one is tempted to think that the women of Spain are on the average superior to the men. In the past, the men of Spain

1 Havelook Ellis, A Study of British Genius, p. 28. 61

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have been distinguished by the most brilliant personal qualities. In the Spanish men of to-day, however, it is sometimes difficult to recognise the splendid and restless activities of their forefathers. There is often a certain air of lassitude about them which is reflected in the comparative absence of brilliant adventurers or highly endowed personalities among the men of modern Spain when compared with the men of the great ages. It cannot be said that this must be set down to " degeneration," for then it would affect the feminine half of the race ; but the women are full of energy and vigour even to advanced age; the Spaniards also are certainly a healthy people, and centenarians are by no means rare.1

While the problem is somewhat complicated, we may perhaps appeal to selection for its explanation. Everything has happened that could happen to kill out the virile, militant, independent elements of Spanish manhood. War alone, if sufficiently prolonged and severe, suffices

1 Oloriz, who has made a special study of the distribution and causes of longevity in Spain (summarised in British Medical Journal, December 24, 1898, p. 1898), states that for the Peninsula and adjacent islands generally the proportion of centenarians is twenty -five per million, and that on the whole it rose during the past century. The Andalusian provinces (especially Malaga) stand at the head of the list, the second place being occupied by the Galician provinces, while the more or less Basque provinces of the no>th-east stand lowest ; the central regions also stand low ; on the whole, extreme and ordinary longevity coincide, but not in Andalusia, where the conditions seem to use up rapidly the energy of average members of the race, but to be very favourable to those who reach old age. Longevity is more oommon among Spanish women than men.

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to deplete a people of its most vigorous stocks. " The warlike nation of to-day," says President Jordan, " is the decadent nation of to-morrow." * The martial ardour and success of the Spaniards lasted for more than a thousand years ; it was only at very great cost that the Eomans subdued the Iberians, and down to the sixteenth century the Spaniards were great soldiers ; but the struggle in the Netherlands against the Dutch finally wasted their energies, and when at Rocroy, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Spanish infantry that had been counted the finest in Europe went down before the French, the military splendour of Spain finally vanished.2

1 This writer has stated in a powerful manner the arguments which t»nd to show that war permanently deprives a nation of warlike men, that it is a people bred through long ages of peace which attains heroism and success in war, and that the warlike spirit tends to kill out itself ("The Blood of the Nation," Popular Science Monthly, May and June 1901).

3 Among the Spanish women also, in ancient days, notwithstanding their customs of almost Moorish seclusion, courage and warlike qualities were common. A typical fifteenth century figure is that of Dona Maria de Monroy, a widow of noble family with two sons. One of these youths was slain in a quarrel over dice by two close friends, who then slew the other brother to avoid his vengeance, thereupon fleeing to Portugal. But the mother, in male attire and accompanied by a band of twenty cavaliers, promptly took horse and tracked them to a house where they lay concealed, entered with two of her men, and was soon on horseback again with both heads suspended from her left hand, never stopping until she had reached Salamanca and placed the heads on her sons' tomb. She was a type, Lea states, of the mugeres varoniles of the time, " who would take the field or maintain their place in factious intrigue with as much ferocity as the men" (H. C. Lea, History of the Inquisition im Spain, vol. i. p. 57).

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It is not war alone, however, that has tended to crush Spain's manhood: the Inquisition, an institution apparently alien to the spirit of the race and only established — by Spaniards indeed — with great difficulty, killed, banished, and drove out all the varied, vigorous, and independ- ent stocks on the intellectual side, just as war had on the militant side. And a third great cause of the depletion of manhood was the vast colonial empire " on which the sun never set." All the ardent adventurers, in search of gold or fame or eager to convert the heathen, rushed to the new world and made the old world poorer. When Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, almost at the same moment that they succeeded in firmly establishing the Inquisition and that Columbus returned from his great expedition, Spain seemed about to reach the summit of her worldly glory, but at the same time she was preparing to plunge into an abyss.

So it is that, as some one has said, the history of Spain may be summed up in a single ancient sentence : " This is Castile, she makes men and wastes them." But the women of Spain have not thus been wasted ; war, persecution, and emigration have never borne heavily on them ; there has been no powerful weeding out of the best here. And it seems to me that we might explain the fine qualities of Spanish women to-day by supposing that, while the stocks that specially

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tend to produce fine men have been largely killed out, the stocks that tend to produce fine women have not been subjected to this process.

Whether or no this is so, — for both facts and theory are still doubtful, — the distinguished qualities of Spanish women can scarcely be questioned. Their beauty and grace are a theme for rhapsody to every tourist. And if we dis- regard the tourist, we find that a scientific anthropologist like the Italian Mantegazza — who has lived in many lands, and regards the study of beauty as one of the anthropologist's most serious duties — reaches the conclusion that the most beautiful women, whether in the old world or the new, are those of Spanish and of British race, and that the finest Spanish women and the finest English women are the most perfectly beautiful types the world can show;1 it is certainly a conclusion that an English lover of Spain need not feel called upon to question.

"If any one can be found to question the beauty of Spanish women, he should go to the Feria at Seville. This is especially a woman's festival, and the beautiful women of Andalusia, and, indeed, of Spain generally, crowd to Seville for the three days during which it is held. If

1 ' ' When an Andalusian woman attains the stately height of an Englishwoman, and when an Englishwoman has small hands and feet, they are both divine, the two highest forms of life, the most splendid creatures in the human world " (Mantegazza, Fisiologia della Donna, cap. iv.).

F

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the foreign visitor to the Prado de San Sebastian at this time has ever before in his life anywhere seen so many beautiful women beautifully dressed he may count himself happy. The national costumes of Spain may be dying out, but on such an occasion as this the shawl and the mantilla are universal, and in Seville, at all events, the Andalusian woman betrays little desire to seek for new fashions from Paris. It is fortunate, for a Spanish woman in a Parisian costume is nearly always badly dressed, while in her native costume her distinction is perfect. In the Sevillian temperament the aristocratic and the democratic are united ; this is reflected in the costume. Its simplicity, the universal love it reveals for black — a colour so admirably fitted to emphasise beauty and grace — introduce a note of distinction which is equally within reach ol poor and rich, so that it is often difficult for an uninitiated stranger at a first glance to guess the social class of the woman he meets.1

The typical young Sevillian woman of the people builds her hair up into a little fortress with combs at the top of her head — in a way that is substantially the same as that practised by the women in this part of Spain more than two thousand years ago * — and she adorns it with

1 It has doubtless always been so ; in 1623 Howell wrote from Spain that "one can hardly distinguish a countess from a cobbler's wife."

2 Even in the sixth century before Christ Artemidorus described the extravagant head-dresses of Iberian women. The manola's long

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a carnation or a rose. She wears a shawl, as, indeed, all Spanish women do, but the Sevillian woman is distinguished by the manner of wearing it ; she folds it in oblong, not triangular, shape, so that it lies straight across the back and hangs over each arm ; this method requires a little more skill than the triangular method, but, so worn, the shawl becomes a more expressive garment and adds a distinction to the wearer. The Feria is a marvellous display of beautiful and various shawls — which are often, even when belonging to the poor, very costly — and they are nearly always worn in this way. There are, indeed, exceptions to this rule ; some of the small and more elaborate Manila shawls cannot thus be worn, and the old women also wear the shawl cross-wise with a point hanging down, and at the same time do their hair at the back and not at the top of the head. The peculiar erection of the hair at the top of the head, the flowers that adorn it, and the method of wearing the shawl are a kind of coquettish war-paint, the appanage of youth and vigour; and there is a certain pathos in the resignation of the return to the cross-wise method with its inelegant tail lying motionlessly down the back.

comb covered by the black mantilla is a survival of those elevated coiffures which we may still see in prehistoric statues, such as those of the Cerro de los Santos. They are figured, for instance, by Engel in the account of his archasological mission to Spain (Nouvelles Archives dcs Missions Stientifiques, 1892, vol. iii. p. 180).

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This method, however, becomes more frequent as we leave Seville in any direction, even at Cordova, and still more so at Granada. When we reach Aragon a totally different type of costume prevails, a severely prim type — well suited to the graver, more austere type of feminine beauty prevailing here — with little or no bright colour, one white flower alone perhaps being worn in the hair, which is done at the back and brought close down over the temples, while an abundance of white petticoats are worn, simulating a crinoline. The plain dark shawl is worn cross-wise down the back, and instead of being loudly striped the stockings are more usually black ; altogether in this extreme sobriety of visage and costume the Aragonese women are absolutely unlike the brilliant stately Andalusians, and, to English eyes at all events, present a quaint old-fashioned air singularly recalling the women of the early Victorian era.

Charming as is the costume of the most typical Spanish woman— the Sevillana — that charm is merely the expression of the physical personality it clothes. It is certainly true that the element of solemn ritual which runs through everything Spanish has its part in the women's dress also, and that the contrast, especially among the middle class, between the Spanish woman in the almost oriental seclusion of her own house and the same woman when abroad in

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the streets is often considerable. But there is a proud, almost self-conscious, absence of artifice in a Spanish woman's dress ; in Seville, at all events, it is strictly expressive of the woman it covers. The mantilla is in this respect truly char- acteristic ; it is the type of the garment — more common in the East than in the West — which is itself meaningless and expressionless, gaining all its meaning and expression through its en- hancement of the special qualities of the wearer. The Spanish woman is commonly spoken of as a small brunette of sallow or " olive " complexion. Such are indeed frequently found in Spain, as also in Italy and France, and this description is far from defining precisely the woman of Spain. From an English point of view Spanish women are, on the average, below medium height, with small but well-shaped and vigorous hands and feet. They are sometimes slender when young, but bust and hips are generally well developed. As they approach middle age they frequently become very stout ; this tendency seems to me specially marked in Catalonia, but is fairly evident everywhere ; a type is thus produced to which Spaniards themselves apply the term jamona ; but this tendency by no means always involves any considerable loss of agility. In old age, when this excessive stoutness is no longer so pronounced, the women are often singularly vigorous and active.

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Beyond these main physical traits of the Spanish woman, she possesses certain interesting peculiarities. One of these lies in the shape of the chest. Unlike the French and the Northern woman, the Spanish woman's chest is found to be shorter and broadest at the base — at the level, that is, of the lower end of the breast-bone — so that she requires, according to Carmandel, a differently-shaped corset, while at the same time there is greater amplitude and accentuation of the hips in relation to the figure generally. These characteristics of the Spanish woman are well illustrated, it has been said, by a comparison between the statue which Falguiere modelled after Cl^o de Merode and the distinctively national Spanish type represented in Goya's Maja Desnuda now in the Prado.1

The typical Spanish woman (as Duchenne first pointed out in 1866) presents another puzzling but well- authenticated peculiarity in the heightened curves of her spine. The Spanish woman's spine looks as if its curvature had been increased by pressure applied to the two ends. This indeed has by some been supposed to be the actual cause of the peculiarity, and

1 It may be further noted that the Spanish woman's breasts (as is shown and illustrated by Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, vol. i. ch. viii.) tend to have the peculiarity that the areola around the nipple is raised and clearly separated from the surrounding skin ; the same peculiarity is noted in Sicilian women, who are of allied race ; it is a characteristic which recalls the breasts of black African women.

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Spalikowski — who has found the ensellure or saddle-back, as it is termed, well marked among some of the most beautiful and vigorous of the labouring women and fisher-folk near Boulogne and Dieppe — states that it only occurs in women who are accustomed to bear heavy burdens ; he also remarks that it is frequently associated with small feet and hands, well-modelled neck, grace- ful bust, and lithe figures, usually in brown-eyed women. This association of characters suggests that the peculiarity is not an individual acquire- ment, but a racial trait, and there is no difficulty in believing that the Iberian element, which is still strong in the south-west of France and recognisable in the south-west of England, may also have passed up the French coast. Lagneau and others are distinctly of opinion that the saddle-back is a racial Iberian trait.1 This con- clusion seems inevitable, and in any case there can be no doubt that the special grace and distinction of profile of the Spanish woman's figure is associated with the saddle-back ; it is ' this that gives the characteristic mark to her bearing and carriage, while it emphasises much that is most significant in Spanish dancing. In

1 Sr. Bernaldo de Quiros remarks (in a private letter) that the saddle-back is not marked in the women of the northern coast, who are accustomed to bear burdens on the head, but in those of the centre and south, where weights are more usually supported on the hips. He also refers to the curious fact that the horse of Andalusian race possesses a very pronounced saddle-back.

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extreme cases it may sometimes involve a slight simulation, in a more beautiful manner, of the development typical of the Hottentot Venus, and then the Spanish girl of the people may, if she so pleases, adopt, like the Ogowe woman of tropical Africa, that swaying movement from side to side which was familiar to the author of the old sixteenth century novel, La Lozana Andaluza, as culeando. For it is a curious and significant fact that the Iberian saddle-back has not only been traced in a slight degree by Hartmann among the Kabyle women of North Africa, but has been found by accurate measure- ments to mark many of the Negro tribes.1

It is probably in some degree to her ana- tomical peculiarities that we must attribute something of the special character of the Spanish woman's way of walking. This gait, which is also seen wherever women are accustomed to bear burdens on the head — as in the women in Rome from the Alban hills and in some parts of Ireland2 — is the erect dignified carriage, with

1 6. Fritseh has carefully studied the natural lordosis of the African's body (Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 1891, part iv. p. 470).

2 I well remember the surprise of a graceful Irishwoman, who had lived long in Australia, when I told her that she must once have been used to carrying heavy things on her head. Among the very ingenious and elaborate gymnastic systems which have been invented for the benefit or the torment of civilised women this method has no place, ! probably because it is too simple to afford a living to its professors. But it is an excellent method not only of ensuring a beautiful distinction of carriage, but of imparting tonicity and control to a large number of muscles throughout the body.

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restrained movement, of a priestess who is bearing the sacred vessels. At the same time, the walk of Spanish women, while not lacking in proud human dignity, has in it something of the gracious quality of a feline animal, whose whole body is alive and in restrained movement, yet without any restless or meaningless excess of movement. A beautiful walk seems to mark all the races which have produced a fine type of womanly beauty, and the fact that it is so rare in England and America arouses some misgivings as to the claim of our women to stand in quite the first rank of beauty ; the Spanish woman, like the Virgilian goddess, is known by her walk.

Perhaps an even rarer accomplishment than that of walking well is that of sitting well. A typical Sevillian woman of the people — sitting squarely in an attitude of calm and easy, yet not languid repose, her knees slightly separated, her hands resting on her thighs — seems to assume instinctively, as a friend once remarked to me, the hieratic pose of a Byzantine Madonna.

The special features of the Spanish woman's face that have always aroused admiration are her eyes and her complexion ; in these respects she is universally considered to excel the women of other countries. The face varies greatly in outline ; not seldom it is straight in the classic manner, with beautiful brows ; the lower part of the face, though often as beautiful as could be

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desired, is the part most liable to be unsatis- factory ; it may become somewhat coarse and thick. The nose also is sometimes defective; there seems, indeed, to be a peculiar tendency to arrested or irregular development in the Spanish nose ; and Spanish women at times have what we commonly call the Wellington nose. The hair, again, though sometimes con- sidered a special beauty of the Spanish woman, does not, to me at least, stand in the first rank of her charms ; it is not comparable, for in- stance, to the beautiful and abundant hair which one sees so often among Polish women in the streets of Warsaw. The Spanish woman's hair, in the south (it is not so in the north- west), is frequently lacking in any tawny or auburn tints, and it is too tightly dressed (often with the aid of oil of sweet almonds) to be quite charming ; but, with its prevailing tones of dull brown to deep black — with blue reflections rather than red — it supplies, at all events, a perfect background to the white or preferably red flower, the jasmine or carnation, which is often the chief note of colour in the Spanish woman's attire.

It is usual to say that the Spanish woman's eyes are large and black, sometimes, it is added, and bold. This is the first and most obvious impression of the northerner, who realises that he has come among a people of a higher degree of

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pigmentation than he is accustomed to, who use their eyes with a calm steadiness not unusual in peoples with a dash of the East in their blood and their habits — it is still more pronounced in Hungary — but disconcerting to the foreigner from England or France or Germany. The impression, however, which the Spaniard himself receives of the beautiful eyes of his own women, as well as the impression of the foreigner who has really lived in Spain, is not the same as that of the casual tourist. In Spain, as Mateo Aleman wrote four centuries ago, the mere glance of a woman's eye is regarded as a high favour, and the Spaniard is more affected by the quality of the gaze than by the precise colour of the eyes. Undoubtedly the brown or pigmented eye seems more expressive than the blue or unpigmented eye — a fact of which physiologists have sought to give a precise >■ explanation — but it is by no means the " black " eye which is in chief honour. The black eye is plebeian, and it is usually associated with a plebeian style of beauty. The Spaniard, whatever region of the country he belongs to, has nearly always admired the "mixed" eye, that of medium pigmentation, which — like the men of Old France, who felt the same admiration for it — he terms green. Calderon, it is true, associated black eyes with beauty, but in the Celestina green eyes with long lashes are one of

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the chief marks of supreme beauty. "lam per- suaded," said Don Quixote also, " that Dulcinea's eyes must be green emeralds, full and soft, with two rainbows for eyebrows." Even to his charming little gipsy, Preeiosa, Cervantes gives locks of gold and eyes which are, as usual, like emeralds. The same admiration exists to-day, and is easily traceable in the chief and most characteristic Spanish novelists. In Morsamor, Valera, describing the beautiful and seductive Olimpia, refers to "the magnetic force of her green or glaucous eyes, like those of Minerva, Medea, and Circe, and which might be compared to two emeralds in burning flame." Blasco Ibafiez also, in Cartas y Barro, says of Neleta, the beautiful Valencian girl of the Albufera, that she had " clear green eyes that shone like two drops of Valencian absinthe."

The complexion can scarcely be passed over, for it is a character of the first importance in the Spanish beauty. The Spanish complexion has sometimes been called "sallow," or, as Gautier more happily and more correctly described it, "a golden pallor." But whether the golden element is present or not, there can be little doubt that the Spanish skin is the most perfect in Europe, and there is no need to hide it, as was once the Spanish custom, by rouge, and now by the unpleasant use of powder. The finest English complexion is incomparable, but it is a

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very delicate and transitory possession ; take it into a hot, dry climate, like that of Australia, and it is swiftly destroyed. But Spain is a very hot and very dry country, and yet, even among the peasantry, who are constantly exposed to the weather without any sort of protection, one can nowhere see better complexions, sometimes even very fair; this skin seems to be not only of finer, but also of firmer and more vital texture ; it will not easily discolour ; it seldom congests ; it never freckles. There is a quality about the skin of a beautiful Spanish woman which always instinctively suggests, alike to the foreigner and to the Spaniard himself, the quality of the finest and most exquisitely wrought metals. This had not escaped Cervantes. " Sefior Don Quixote," asked the duenna, "have you observed the comeliness of my lady the Duchess, that smooth complexion of hers like a burnished polished sword ? " Blasco Ibaflez refers to the " metallic reflections " of Neleta's skin, and Valera says of Bosita, in Las Ulusiones del Doctor Faustino, that at twenty-eight she was so full of health and purity that " she seemed a statue of burnished bronze; the weather had tarnished neither her hands nor her face, which had; something of the patina which the Anda-1 lusian sun gives to columns and other objects, of art." Nothing could more accurately de- j scribe the impression constantly given by j

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the Spanish, and especially the Andalusian, woman.

Discussion has sometimes taken place as to the proportion of fair-complexioned women in Spain; it is certainly large, not only in the seaport towns (there is always a ' tendency to blondness by the sea), but in Madrid and other inland centres. The proportion of notably fair- complexioned women in Spain is decidedly larger than in the south of France, in Toulouse, for instance, or at Aries. The northerner, arriving in Spain for the first time and noting the presence of a very dark type, much darker than can be found in France, is apt to overlook the more familiar fair type and so to receive a false impression. Over sixty years ago Gautier noted that blondes were common in Madrid ; half a century later they seemed to Mr. Finck to be rare, and he contended that they are being dis- placed by brunettes. Dona Emilia Pardo Bazan, the distinguished Spanish novelist, writing at about the same time as Mr. Finck, expressed an entirely contrary opinion, remarking that what she considers the national type of beauty — the woman of middle height, slight yet rounded form, undulating movements, swift and graceful, black eyes, black hair, and olive complexion — is slowly giving place to a fleshy blonde of the Rubens type. If one may venture to express an opinion in a matter concerning which such

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learned authorities differ, I should be inclined to say — in the absence of exact statistics — that there has really been no change. My own impressions to-day in Madrid correspond with tolerable exactness to those of Gautier in the early part of the nineteenth century. Eeally blue eyes and very light hair are indeed, in most regions, rare ; but light mixed eyes and medium brown hair are by no means rare, while quite fair complexions are common. The prevalence of the very fair type, in the past as well as in the present, is clearly reflected in Spanish literature. It is sufficient to refer to Cervantes ; throughout Don Quixote and The Exemplary Novels a beautiful woman has golden hair just as she has emerald eyes ; Luscinda, by way of variety, has auburn (rubios) tresses. The fair woman plays, indeed, in Spanish literature, a much larger part than she is entitled to, for fairness in Spain was not only part of the ideal of beauty, but also the mark of aristocratic birth,1

Eyes and complexion are recognised traits of

1 The term "blue blood," or sangre assul, as indicating nobility, is believed to be of Spanish origin. In Spain, as in most other countries, the nobility are somewhat fairer than the ordinary population, and, as Sir Lauder Brunton has pointed out {British Medical Journal, March 21, 1896), while in dark people the blood-vessels do not easily show through the skin, in the fair the veins are distinctly seen and appear of a blue colour, so that to have "blue blood" means to be fair. I have discussed the European ideal of beauty in its history and national modifications in my Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. iv. , " Sexual Selection in Man."

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Spanish beauty, alike to native and foreigner. There is another characteristic of the Spanish woman which I have never seen mentioned, but which seems to me very fundamental, very significant of a special quality of nervous texture. I refer to the comparative immobility of the face, the absence of unnecessary movement. The contrast in this respect with the face of the average Englishwoman is considerable. If one walks through a crowded English city and looks at the women's faces, one notes that, in many if not in most cases, the face is in constant meaningless movement, the forehead wrinkling, the eyes tremulous, the mouth twitching, the ex^ pression suggesting obscure physiological distress; in the better-bred people the restless movement is less conspicuous, being replaced by an equally painful sense of artificial tension. But the Spanish woman exhibits the minimum of this confused fluctuation of muscular movement. Whether or not she is observed, she is serene, motionless, self-possessed. Her face withstands your gaze, graciously indeed, but coolly and firmly as a marble statue. I have heard it said that the English face with its fleshy pink- ness looks positively indecent beside the finely toned skin of the Spaniard, and one is almost tempted to think that this complexion acts as a shield, of which the northerner is deprived. It is doubtless because of this muscular control

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that to gaze on a woman in Spain is by no means an offensive act ; it causes no embarrass- ment ; it is a form of flattery well suited to a dignified, silent, and intense race, and in Spanish poems and novels the mirada, this long gaze, plays an important part.

The adequate adjustment of nervous force to muscular movement is, in the best sense, an animal quality ; it is the quality which gives animals, living in nature, their perfect grace. In Northern France, in England, in America, the influences of civilisation lead to an excess of irritable nervous energy, which is always overflowing, meaninglessly and there- fore ungracefully and awkwardly, into all the muscular channels of the body. In this excess of restless nervous energy the qualities of our modern civilised temperament largely lie, and it is this probably, more than anything else, which removes us so far from the Spaniard. ' The existence of a general dis- tinction is clearly as present to the Spanish as to the foreign mind. It is often a little sur- prising to the Englishman to find that he is nearly always, in the first place, supposed to be a Frenchman, or, as I heard myself described by a more precise Spaniard, " that French or English gentleman." To the average Spaniard the difference is clearly small or none, and a party of Catalan ladies, with whom I once found

G

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myself travelling, though they knew me to be English, brought out their small stock of French words in my honour, and sought to please me by saying what a fine place Paris must be. When, however, a few days later, I found myself once more in Paris, I realised that this con- fusion is not so absurd as at first it seems to us. I felt at once that I belonged to these people as I could not possibly belong to the Spaniards. The differences between Englishmen and northern Frenchmen are indeed very im- portant, but they are slight differences, and to the untravelled Spaniard, whose civilisation and whose character — though not without its marked affinities for the English character — has traits and traditions which are Moorish, mediaeval, and still more primitive, they may seem to have scarcely any existence at all.

In connection with this special nervous quality of the Spanish woman which seems to me so significant, I may refer to her general attitude towards men. In England, especially in any urban centre, if one observes a young woman — any ordinary young woman of the people — talk- ing casually with a man in the street, one may usually note that, though they are probably speaking of the most indifferent subjects, her face is full of the consciousness of her sex ; her whole nervous system is instinctively affected by the fact that she is a woman before a man-

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In France, though more restrained and less naively expressed, the same tendency is still emphatically present. But it is seldom obvious in the Spanish woman, whose manner towards a man, gracious as it may be, is always cool and self-possessed ; she sees the man but is not embarrassingly conscious of the possible lover. Dona Pardo Bazan remarks that it is a mistake to suppose that the Spanish woman possesses in a high degree what the French call " tem- perament." Probably she is right. No doubt, there are great possibilities of passion in the Spanish woman — the Spanish qualities of mysti- cism, ardour, and tenacity would alone indicate this — and those possibilities not seldom lead to tragic results ; but the very intensity of this disposition is opposed to emotional facility. All the old Spanish traditions show that the women of this race required much wooing; a certain chastity corresponding to their extreme sobriety seems to lie in the temperament of the people.1

«- This proud reticence, the absence of any easy erethic response to masculine advances, is the probable source of that erotic superiority of women, the sexual subjection of men, which has

-j 1 They also demanded much discretion in their lovers. "The

! Spaniard," said Howell, " is a great servant of ladies, yet he never

: brags of, nor blazes abroad, his doings in that way, but is exceedingly

' ' careful of the repute of any woman, a civility that we much want in

I England. " The same point is reported in Spanish countries to-day.

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often been noted as characteristic of Spain, and is indeed symbolised in the profound Spanish adoration for the Virgin Mary. It is probably very primitive. Strabo, perhaps a little exces- sively, even speaks of " gynecocracy " or rule of women among the ancient Iberians, and Bloch considers that a persistent relic of the early matriarchal period was transformed into chival- rous romance and supremely illustrated in the great Spanish romance of Amadis of Gaul.1 In the Celestina, when Calisto is asked if he is a Christian, he replies : " I am a Meliboean : I worship Meliboea, I believe in Melibcea, and I love Melibcea." At the end of the eighteenth century, a thoughtful German observer in Spain, after referring to the seeming lack of modesty in the speech and the eyes of Spanish women, and their " masculine boldness," adds that it is a great mistake to imagine that they yield easily to love, and any liberty on the part of a man is not well taken, for they are proud. "They wish to choose and not to be chosen, they play the man's part, and it is for him to yield and sacrifice himself. That is why a reticent, shy, and cold man has more success with them than an ardent and passionate lover."2 This state- ment may be put somewhat extravagantly, but

1 I wan Bloch, Be.itra.ge zur Aetiologie der Psychopathic/, Sescualis, vol. ii. p. 150.

2 0. A. Fischer, Beise von Amsterdam ueber Madrid, 1799, pp. 195 et seq.

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it doubtless corresponds to a real psychological fact which in some degree still persists.

We may associate this position of women in Old Spain with the recognition that was accorded under many circumstances to unmarried mothers and the relative absence of the social stigma else- where generally attached to illegitimate children. This was doubtless a survival of primitive matri- archal conditions, but it was adhered to with great tenacity by Spaniards, and even the not uncommon practice of a legitimate son preferring to use the name of his mother rather than that of his father shows the absence of any ostenta- tious preference for paternal descent. This is a remarkable feature in the domestic life of medi- aeval Spain, which has left ae impress on the laws even to-day, and it is interesting to observe how the women of what is commonly regarded as the most bigoted Catholic country succeeded in preserving a freedom and privilege which even in the free Protestant countries has never yet been established and only of late claimed.1

Nowadays, Dona Pardo Bazan states, chivalry towards women is in Spain nothing more than a code of antiquated and empty formalities, and she considers that the social position of the

1 See Burke, History of Spain, vol. i. Appendix II. : "On customary concubinage or barraganeria," the recognised concubine being called a barragana. In 1679 Innocent XI. felt called upon to condemn formally the proposition of the Spanish theologian, Sanchez, that concubines should not under all circumstances be cast forth.

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Spanish woman generally has been lowered by the introduction of constitutionalism and the accompanying modern institutions. [In the old days the Spanish woman was more on a level with the Spanish man ; what interested him interested her ; she could engage in any activity and occupy the highest place in the State, while in the sphere of religious ardour men and women could rival each other in saintliness. This state of things has given place to a political system, devoid of either religious or patriotic enthusiasm, in which all the rights belong to men, and women have nothing but duties. The social position of women, their intellectual interests, and their personal initiative have consequently been depressed.1 ■

If this is the case, it is a transitory phase which will pass with the inevitable expansion of our modern political methods. There is indeed no enthusiastic movement in Spain for conferring the suffrage on women. " The suffrage in Spain," as Posada remarks, " can scarcely be called such ; it exists in law, but in practice it is an indecorous and unworthy farce. How is it possible for men to feel the necessity of giving it to women, or for women to be anxious to

1 Emilia Pardo Bazan, "La Femme Eapagnole," Revue des Rewm, February 1, 1896. Concepcion Arenal, one of the most eminent of modern Spanish women, who had been appointed Inspector of Prisons by Queen Isabella, was deprived of that post by the Revolu- tionary Government, merely on the ground that she was a woman.

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become, like the great majority of Spanish men, merely honorary voters ? " 1 Spain has adopted the English parliamentary system, which was not "the outcome of her own history and which she has not been able to assimilate. As her political and social development enters a more vital stage, no doubt the women of Spain will naturally and inevitably take the part in the national life which they are so well fitted to take.

Salillas, the Spanish sociologist, who has so often discussed in an illuminative way the psychology of his own people, somewhere remarks that the Spanish woman is a tame savage. Such a generalisation contains as much truth as most attempts to reduce complex phenomena to simplicity. It may be said that the typical Spanish woman, as Spaniards see her, is specially marked by sweetness and strength. Just as the typical Italian woman seems to suggest tenderness and maternity, the typical Teutonic woman purity and reserve, so the ideal Spanish woman is at once strong, inde- pendent, self-contained, and at the same time wholesomely gracious and gentle. She is, as Valera says, angelic but robust.

In foreign representations the Spanish woman is usually a brilliant and reckless creature, passionate but cruel, peculiarly adapted to occupy a place in novels and pictures, but on

1 Posada, Feminismo, p. 222.

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the reverse side ignorant, bigoted, lazy, and dirty. MenmeVs and Bizet's Carmen — the cigarrera who slashes the face of another cigarrera, and who possesses over men a maddening influence which she exerts to their ruin — crystallises into a wk^Jg^^e more pic- turesque elements of this* conception, and is doubtless largely responsible for its' wide dis- semination. It is true that Merimde rtfepresented his Carmen as more or less of a gipsy, j But, as he was himself well aware, in many respects his Carmen was not and could not be a. gipsy. Louys, again, in La Femme et le Prpntin, presents the conventional picture of the bold and bad Sevillian cigarrera, and represents the tobacco factory itself in a somewhat appalling light, while Baedeker speaks of it as an unpleasant and malodorous spot, which no one should visit for pleasure. Bearing this in mind, my own visit to the Fabrica, together with a small party, was planned not without some misgiving. So far, however, from being unpleasant, the Fabrica seemed to me one of the most delightful spots in this delightful city, and one of the most picturesque. The workrooms are vast chambers, supported by great piers and resembling cathedral crypts, airy, scarcely redolent even of tobacco, and occupied by girls and women, who have changed their out-door dresses, which hang all round the walls, but remain fully dressed in

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various costumes, and are so absorbed in their work, except when they turn to the babies some have brought with them, that even the hum of conversation is scarcely heard and but few workers look up as the strangers pass. Every workroom has its duly decorated altar, and here and there one notes a beautiful carnation placed in water while its owner is at work. It is not necessary to deny, and there is ample evidence to show, that life in this Fabrica, as in the factories elsewhere in which women are con- fined together under undomestic conditions, leads to the development in predisposed indi- viduals of various evil passions and to quarrels that , are sometimes even fatal. Yet a more restful and charming scene of labour, and one more typically Spanish, it could not be possible to find. A few days after my visit to the Fabrica the anhtjjal festival of the Sevillian cigarreras, the Kerrrtksse, took place in the Eslava Gardens. Imaginnagthat if I saw the cigarrera at play I might find that the conventional traditions were more exact than appeared from the contemplation of the cigarrera at work, I duly visited the Eslava Gardens. Nothing could be more remote from the Flemish conception of a Kermesse. It was really a kind of bazaar, for the benefit of the workers, but quite free from the vulgarities of an English bazaar. Every stall was presided over by a group of shy, gracious, beautiful cigarreras

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— evidently the finest flowers of the factory — all dressed in their very best Andalusian attire. The Spaniard has none of the instincts of the commercial traveller, and I could not see that one of the girls ever offered her wares for sale, or even addressed a stranger at all, though the final results of the sale seem to have been con- siderable. On a stage a number of the women were sitting in a semicircle, and dancing from time to time the characteristic sevillanas and other dances, in a simple, unaffected, often, it must be said, very amateurish way. So again I went away confirmed in my first impression. Clearly one was indeed far away here from the typical English factory-girl, but one was scarcely less remote from the insolent cigarrera of legend.

If one distrusts one's own impressions, it is interesting to see how the Spaniards themselves depict their women. Dona Pardo Bazan has chosen a cigarrera as the heroine of one of her best as well as most realistic novels, La Tribuna.1 Amparo is not only a cigarrera but the daughter of a cigarrera, and having become a partisan of republican opinions through reading the news- papers, she takes a prominent local part in the movements of 1868, as a sort of tribune of the

1 Dona Pardo Bazan has since stated that before writing this book she spent two months, morning and afternoon, in the tobacco factory of her own city of Corunna.

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people, a woman " whose heart was softer than silk, who could not hurt a fly, and yet was capable of demanding the one hundred thousand heads of those who live by sucking the blood of the people."1 At the same time, however, she falls in love with a man of higher class than herself, who seduces her under promise of marriage, and finally, as the revolutionary movement dies out, Amparo is left to become a mother, abandoned but not crushed.

Amparo, notwithstanding her southern ardour and impetuosity, belongs to Corunna, to Northern Spain, Dona Bazan's own country. If, however, we turn to the novels of Valera, who has devoted himself to the delineation of the women of his own Andalusian land, we find the„ same qualities of energy, independence, and courage — the firm resolve to lead one's own life and possess one's own soul — that seem to me to mark Spanish women in an unusually high degree. In a book which he describes as less a novel than " a mirror or photographic reproduc- tion of the people and things of the province in which I was born,!' Juanita la Larga, Valera's most detailed portrait of a girl of the people, the heroine reveals the same fundamental vigour and

1 I may remark that the cigarreras have strong political convic- tions. The marriage of the Infanta, the Princess of Asturias, a few years ago, was extremely unpopular in Spain, and when, in celehration of this event, the authorities sent theatre tickets to the cigarreras they were returned. j

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independence as Amparo, though in this case united with the most solid common sense, and exerted exclusively within the sphere of her own personal everyday life. She is an illegitimate child, but by force of her personal qualities she wins the esteem and regard of all, and finally marries one of the chief persons in the village, a man much older than herself, whom she has slowly learnt to love and respect. Juanita's vigour and solidity are as marked on the physical as on the mental side. At seventeen she could run like a deer, throw stones with such precision that she could kill sparrows, and leap on the back of the wildest colt or mule, to ride not astride but sideways ; while, a little later, when the advances of a wealthy admirer became too aggressive, she was able to lay him dexterously on the floor and to render him henceforth her humble servant.1 In the same way Blasco Ibanez,

1 Elsewhere, in the course of a detailed and interesting essay on the women of his own province of Cordova (" La Cordobesa"), Valerahas some remarks on this aspect of the Spanish woman. After observing that the poorest girl will talk of her honour like a heroine of Oalderon, be adds : " When that is not sufficient, she neither screams nor makes any disturbance or scandal, but defends herself like a Penthesilea ; she wrestles as the angel wrestled with Jacob in the darkness of the night, and, robust though angelic, she is able to trip and throw him and even to give him a pummelling, and all this with an eloquence that remains marvellously silent ; nor is this singular, for among poor girls, even those of well-to-do families of the labouring class, there is a notable robustness. They are harder than marble, not only in their hearts, not only at the centre but all over the surface." After narrating incidents in point from his own observation, Valera adds : " I do not imply anything that would diminish or disfigure in

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who has an incomparable knowledge of the psychology of the Spanish people of to-day as well as of their ways of life, describes in his Flor de Mayo a young woman who could meet " audacious proposals with gestures of contempt, a pinch with a blow, and a stolen embrace with a superb kick which had more than once felled to the ground a big youth as strong and firm as the mast of his boat."

While to-day we naturally find this attitude described as more especially pertaining to women of the people, it is essentially that of the ideal Spanish woman throughout Spanish literature. It is this type of woman which Cervantes delights in throughout Don Quixote, as well as in The Exemplary Novels. The " Illustre Fregona," for instance, who is described as very beautiful, with cheeks made of roses and jessamine, is yet, like Valera's women, " as hard as marble." Sancho's daughter was " as tall as a lance, and as fresh as an April morning, and as strong as a porter." " I know her well," said Sancho of the peasant girl whom Don Quixote identified with Dulcinea, "and let me tell you she can fling a crowbar as well as the lustiest lad in all the town. She is a brave lass and a right and stout one, and fit to

the least the beauty and charm of my fellow-countrywomen. Density and firmness is one thing, unwieldy size another. The girl who works from childhood, walks much, goes to the fountain to return with her full pitcher resting on her hip or with the clothes she has washed in the stream, is not fat, but she is strong. "

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be helpmate to any knight-errant that is or is to be, who may make her his lady. What pith she has, and what a voice ! And the best of her is that she is not a bit prudish, for she has plenty of affability, and jokes with everybody, and has a grin and jest for everything." This ability to " fling a crowbar" seems to have descended in a but little changed form to the Spanish damsel of to-day. Not long since I spent a Sunday in the old Castilian city of Palencia and watched how the women — stout and matronly as well as young women — amused themselves with playing at a game between bowls and ninepins, casting the large heavy balls along the grass with un- wearying satisfaction during the whole of a long afternoon in the most business-like and yet gleeful manner, while a few children stood looking on at their elders. I have never seen English women of the people, or indeed the women of any other land, playing at anything so vigorously healthy and innocent for the sheer joy of muscular exertion, and a race whose mothers have so much wholesome energy to spare can scarcely be very exhausted or decadent. It is of interest to note this aspect of the Spanish ideal of women, in life and in literature, for it is widely unlike that which has until lately prevailed in England. Shakespeare often found it convenient to put his heroines into men's clothes, but it never occurs to him to

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sum up their feminine charms in the epitaph — which Cervantes has written over " Las Dos Doncellas," who girded on swords and went out into the world in search of their lovers — that they were " as daring as they were virtuous," although, rightly considered, with regard to the special circumstances of women's lives, daring is as much a feminine as a masculine virtue. However much his women may seem to vary, Shakespeare nearly always selects ultra-feminine types, and clearly delights to dwell on their gentleness, dependence, and weakness. It is the same, though usually in a less pronounced degree, with the other Elizabethan and Jacobean drama- tists ; and for the original of their " Eoaring Girl," who is a little in the Spanish manner, Middleton and Dekker had to seek rather low in London life. The heroines of the robust literature of the eighteenth century were much more concerned to achieve daintiness than vigour ; while Dickens and Thackeray, the most popular and admired novelists of the nineteenth century, were eager to idealise the lowest stages of feminine feeble- ness and inanity. Meredith, with his ideals of robust and independent womanhood, Hardy, with his spontaneous and autonomous heroines, are the representatives of a more modern spirit. It is of interest to find that the more vigorous ideal, in harmony with our de- veloping conception of the place of women,

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has always been held in honour in Spanish literature.1

In this matter Spanish literature corresponds to the facts of Spanish life. There can be no doubt that the vigour and independence of character notable in the finest Spanish women of to-day, and so often reflected in Spanish literature, is a characteristic which stretches very far back in the history of the Spanish race, and is by no means entirely due, as the considerations I brought forward at the outset might suggest, to any modern effeminisa- tion of the men. Even in the fourth century Spanish women insisted on retaining their own names after marriage, for we find the Synod of Elvira trying to limit this freedom ; 2 while for long afterwards it still remained possible for a man to assume his mother's name. The greatest of Spanish painters is only known to most of us by the name of his mother, a Velazquez, and even to-day it is not unusual for a Spaniard to use the united names of both his parents.

I have emphasised the physical qualities of

1 Tirso de Molina, the great dramatist, has been said to represent Spanish life and Spanish character more veraciously and more realistic- ally than any other Spanish author. Dona Blanca de los Rios de Lamperez, who has specially devoted herself to the study of Tirso's life and works, after emphasising this point, remarks, that though it is not true, as some have said, that " all his vigour is in his women and all his weakness in his men," yet he seems to regard virility as a quality apart from sex, and bestows it on women as well as on men.

2 A. W. W. Dale, The Synod of Elvira, p. 172.

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the Spanish woman, but it must always be remembered that they are the expression of corresponding qualities of intelligence and will. The Spanish woman may be reticent and reserved, as regards her most real self, but in her most characteristic manifestations she is prompt and witty and alert, like Altisidora in Don Quixote, the ancestress of the girls whom we meet again to-day in the plays of Serafin and Joaquin Quintero, frank, independent, outspoken, self-possessed, always charming. Even in the most dubious avocations of life, the qualities of Spanish women have been triumphantly vindi- cated. In one of the earliest and most genuinely Spanish of Spanish novels, La Lozana Andaluza, which Francisco Delicado, a Spanish priest from Cordova, wrote in Eome in the year 1524 for the solace of his own sufferings, we have the whole detailed and instructive history of a Cordovan woman who was, as the author is careful to tell us, the fellow-countrywoman of Seneca, not only by birth but by intelligence and experience and knowledge, while she was lozana, as he also points out, in the full meaning of that term, which implies beauty and elegance and vivacity and frankness. Yet she was a courtesan. At Carmona, near Seville, where she learnt the occupation of a weaver, she was noted for her beauty and her grace ; she was athletic also, for we incidentally learn that she was in the habit

H

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of jumping over walls; and she had wit. Aldonza was still young when she fell in love with a handsome young Genoese merchant and ran away with him, travelling much in the Levant and elsewhere, and having several children. He meant to marry her, but his father interfered, separated them, and sent her off, meaning her to be drowned, but she escaped in her shift and holding a valuable ring in her mouth, and came to Rome in the days of Pope Leo X., when all the most pagan forms of gallantry were held in honour. Aldonza here falls in with a young valet, Rampin, who becomes her lover as well as her servant, but who is never jealous, and her career as a courtesan begins. Delicado always insists on the grace of his heroine, on her bold courage, on her clever speech. She can be all things to all men, " a Christian with Christians, a Jewess with Jews, Turkish with the Turks, a hidalgo with hidalgos, Genoese with the Genoese, and French with the French." At the same time she is by no means without the domestic virtues, and is an excellent cook. Aldonza always remains very Spanish even at Rome. " Spanish women are the best and the most perfect," some one remarks in this novel, even among courtesans. Aldonza eays she believes it, for there are no such women anywhere. Finally, she leaves Rome with her old valet Rampin for the Island of Lipari ; here

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she changes her name to Vellida, and finishes her life in holy fashion — muy santamente — according to the Spanish tradition, having, the clerical author points out in a final defence of his heroine, taken care always to earn her own living, and never to offend God or injure her neighbour. Thus nearly four centuries ago we find clearly set forth in rough outline that type of which Valera has given the finest and the latest picture in Eafaela la Generosa.

La Lozana Andaluza, whether or not it was founded on life, was quite true to life in representing the success of Spanish women as courtesans in the splendid Eome of the Eenaissance. Tullia d' Aragona, the most dis- tinguished among the Eoman courtesans of that age, an almost austere figure indeed, commanding the respect of the best men and women of her time, is believed to have been Spanish, the daughter of Cardinal d' Aragona, an illegitimate scion of the Spanish royal family.1 Isabella de Luna, again, another famous Eoman courtesan of the Eenaissance, was also Spanish. She had, like Aldonza, travelled much, even in North Africa, also following the Imperial Court to Flanders, and she appears to have been a charming and intelligent woman, much esteemed in Eome and highly spoken of by Bandello.2

1 G. Biagi, "Un Etera Romana," Nuova Antologia, 1886, pp. 655- 711. a A. Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento, p. 234.

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It is so usual for writers on Spanish women to dwell on the eminence they have attained as queens and as saints, that it seemed as well to point out that the great personal qualities of the women of this race have been very far from confining them to success in merely the more honoured avocations of the throne and the con- vent, or the more modern platform, but have also enabled them to inspire respect and admira- tion even in those walks of life which are counted least honourable ; although it is perhaps a significant fact that, as Emilia Pardo Bazan remarks, the famous Spanish courtesans in the sixteenth century, as well as to-day, have attained fame and success in foreign lands, and been little known in their own land.

Spanish women have likewise been pioneers on the stage. According to Devrient, it was in Spain that women first assumed women's parts, although actresses appeared in Venice not much later. Spanish actresses are mentioned in 1534, in an ordinance of Charles V.1 Shakespeare was compelled to entrust his women's parts to boys, but his Spanish contemporary, Lope de Vega, could give his women's parts to women, to the " divine " Antonia Granada and others.

Spanish women have often willingly sought the convent and gained the highest fame there ; St. Theresa, though sometimes counted the

1 Devrient, OescKichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst, 1848, vol. i.

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victim of hysteria,1 is deservedly considered the greatest woman who ever lived in a cloister. But if Spanish women have often willingly entered the convent, they have sometimes will- ingly left it, temporarily or for ever, for other less spiritual occupations, even a military career or the bull-ring, acquiring therein also both success and fame.2 Calderon was not violating probability when, in the Devocion de la Cruz, he represented a nun as escaping from the cloister to become a captain of bandits, while the ex- ploits of Emilia Pardo Bazan's heroine, Amparo,

1 The serious disorders which began to afflict St. Theresa at the age of sixteen, and never entirely left her during the remaining fifty years of her life, being doubtless also intimately connected with all her activities and ways of feeling and thinking, are vaguely termed "hysterical," but there is no exact agreement among even the most competent medical authorities who have studied her history. Thus while Georges Dunjas regards her as strictly hysterical, Pierre Janet considers that she was a psychastheniac who, as it were, aspires to hysteria, that is to say, seeks an automatism of action which she never succeeds in attaining. (Discussion at the Soci^te de Psychologie, Revue Scientifique, May 12, 1906.) But when morbid nervous and psychic manifestations are combined with genius the results defy even the most subtle analysis. An interesting picture of St. Theresa's practical activities, it may be added, is presented in Mrs. Cunninghame Graham's biography, Santa Teresa.

3 Thus Dona Maria de Gaucin, according to Mme. Dieulafoy (Aragon et Valencia, 1901, p. 21), left the convent to become a torero, in which career she was distinguished not only for her courage, but also her beauty and virtue, and after a few years, during which she attained renown throughout Spain, she peacefully returned to the practice of religion in her convent, without, it appears, any reproaches from the sisters, who enjoyed the reflected fame of her exploits in the bull-ring. One of Goya's etchings in the Arte de Lidiar los Toros, I may add, represents the " valor varonil " of " la celebre Pajuelera " in the Plaza de Toros of Saragossa.

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in leading popular movements are strictly true to life. When I was in Barcelona a few years ago, during a great strike, when martial law was proclaimed and sanguinary collisions took place between the people and the military, it was remarked that an unknown work-girl appeared as an organiser and leader of the men on strike, encouraging the waverers and bringing in new recruits, finally disappearing, still unknown, into the obscurity from which she had mysteriously emerged.

It is not alone in movements of revolt that Spanish women have been leaders. Concepcion Arenal, one of the most distinguished women of the nineteenth century, at first a poet and novelist, then a collaborator with her husband, a distinguished jurist, became a leader in various social and moral reforms, more especially as they affected Spain, and was marked by her sagacity and good sense. Emilia Pardo Bazan — of aristo- cratic origin, and belonging, like Concepcion Arenal, to Galicia — is to-day the foremost woman in Spain, and perhaps indeed the most notable woman of letters in Europe. Above all a novelist, she has in that field followed the realistic traditions of Spain with some influences from France, but with the versatility so usual among the writers of her land, she has con- cerned herself with criticism, sociology, and many other subjects, always with brilliance,

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insight, and sound knowledge. Like Conception Arenal, she is vividly interested in the destinies of her own country, and in all the questions that affect its progress.1

Spanish women are not highly educated, as education is usually counted ; a large proportion cannot even read or write. But there is perhaps no European country where one realises so clearly how little this really means. A Spanish woman of the people, who finds it a laborious task to write her own name, may yet show the finest tact and knowledge in all the essential matters of living. More than a century ago Casanova remarked on the superiority of Spanish women in intelligence. To-day Dona Pardo Bazan similarly remarks that the women are superior in intelligence to the men. She is referring more especially to the upper classes, but the same is perhaps true of the working classes. Among these, as Posada observes,2 whether in town or country, a woman receives a preparation for life not inferior to a man's ; she co-operates with men, and her work is often identical with theirs and as capably accom- plished, while among the middle classes the women lead a life of marked inferiority, in which it is extremely difficult for them to

1 Dona Pardo Bazan has written a long and interesting autobio- graphical introduction to her novel Los Pazos de Ulloa.

2 Posada, Feminismo, p. 212.

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reveal their real qualities. It is probably among the middle class that women appear to • least advantage; lacking both the privileges of the better classes and the freedom of the lower classes, they are without opportunities for work in the world, and are often reduced to a life of cloistered vacuity. This is by no means a survival of Moorish Spain, for the Moors not only bestowed high honour on their women, but a very thorough education. It is true that educa- tion is open to women in Spain ; the universities are not closed to them ; they may practise medi- cine, although few have yet availed themselves of this privilege. But opportunities for work are few, and the ancient semi-oriental traditions in favour of the secluded life of women still prevail among the middle class. It requires great courage and resolution for a Spanish woman to strike out a path of her own. It is there- fore all the more remarkable that women have played a prominent part in Spain, and have had the courage to face difficulties which are greater than elsewhere, like Concepcion Arenal, who adopted men's garments in order to gain a university education, at that time not yet open to women.1

1 The adoption of male costume by women certainly occurs every- where, but seems to be specially favoured in Spain by the difficulties placed in the way of feminine careers. Not long ago, it is stated (in 1906), the authorities of Seville were surprised to discover that their oldest and most respected police officer was really a woman. Nearly

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It is noteworthy that, in spite of the efforts of the Church, women have taken an enthusiastic share in the progressive religious movements which were symbolised a few years ago in Perez G-aldos's play Electro, ; while in politics they have always been ready to take the advanced side.1 As the social atmosphere be- comes more favourable, we can scarcely doubt that Spanish women will play their part in directing the civilising influences of the twen- tieth century. The very contrasts which they present in character to the women of Anglo- Saxon race, who have played so large a part in the world, can only render their activities the more valuable. The reckless self-abandonment sometimes shown by the advanced woman in pursuit of impersonal ends, her tendency to unsex herself by imitating masculine methods, are profoundly antagonistic to the temperament of the Spanish woman, whose energy and good sense are too solidly personal to be easily turned aside into artificially masculine lines.

three centuries before, Dona Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, a remark- able lady of Seville, who wrote a dramatic poem and was an ardent advocate of the most rigid school of classic poetry, pursued a course of study, varied by love and adventure, in male costume at the Univer- sity of Salamanca ; her life furnished suggestions for some old Spanish plays, and was ultimately the origin of an episode in Gil Bias.

1 Thus in 1821 Pecchio wrote that all the pretty girls were Liberals and in favour of the new Constitution, and he gives a delightful picture of one, "a Spanish Corinne," who is engaged to a young officer and loves Liberty as she loves her lover.

IV

THE AKT OP SPAIN

Spain is not a land of great painters. That is a fact we sometimes fail to realise at first. If we come from Italy to the land of Velazquez we perhaps expect to enter another paradise of painting, strengthened in this by the knowledge that even to-day Spain is producing brilliant artists who rank high among European painters. But it is not so. Spain has never been a painter's paradise. Velazquez, one of the greatest initiators in art, belonged to a race that showed little artistic initiative, and the vigorous and characteristic Spanish painters of to-day all come from enterprising commercial communities whose energies have chanced to overflow into art. There has never been a time when Spanish painting was really comparable to what, at one time or another, Flemish, Tuscan, Venetian, Dutch, and French painting have been. The dominant note of the Spanish temperament, even when Spain was a great world - power,

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was always character. ^Esthetic sensibility — Velazquez always excepted — meets us nowhere in Spanish art. The inspirations of art usually came to Spain from outside. Keenly alive as he was to the subtlest mysteries of religion, the Spaniard disdained the refinements of artistic delicacy ; he instinctively preferred a vigorous, masculine, realistic grasp of things, even of spiritual things. Spain is not the land of great art but of great personalities, and Velazquez towers as much above his fellow -painters as Cervantes above his fellow-novelists.1

Within the sphere of the plastic arts the real predilection of the Spaniard is less for painting than for architecture and sculpture. The Spanish character has impressed itself on Spanish archi- tecture with more complete and overwhelming force than it has manifested in any other art, although the essential ideas of this architecture

1 The great vogue which the Spanish school has always enjoyed both in England and France is due to a succession of circumstances. In the eighteenth century it was identified, not altogether unreason- ably, with the late Italian schools and received the same high regard as was accorded to them. When the romantic movement burst forth, in literature with Victor Hugo and in painting with Delacroix, it was instinctively attracted, and to some extent indeed inspired, by Spain, the last home of romance, and Spanish painting was looked at with fresh interest from another point of view. And when, later on, new technical methods of painting appeared with Manet — who also in- stinctively turned to Spanish painters and Spanish subjects long before he paid his one brief visit to Spain — these new ways of approach- ing the problems of light and colour led to the triumph of Velazquez, who was found to have been the leader, three centuries ago, in the most modern movement of the conquest of painting over Nature.

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have all been borrowed. In most countries architecture, however national it may seem, has expressed the ideals of a few choice spirits. We must go back to ancient Rome, almost to Egypt, to find a people who have affirmed themselves in building so emphatically as the Spaniards. For sculpture, also, the native taste is deep- rooted. The Visigoths were atttracted to sculp- ture. Even the prehistoric Iberians had a vigorous school of sculpture, based on Greek and Asiatic sources and attaining an individu- ality of its own, though sculpture starting from a similar combination is found in Etruria and in Cyprus.1 The best of these Iberian sculptures are absolutely distinctive and original, though founded on combined elements. The men, says Professor Pierre Paris of Bordeaux, who has more especially studied this field of prehistoric art, are simple and virile, the women are dis- tinguished by dignity of attitude and nobility of face, expressive of deep religious gravity. In the folds of their royally luxurious garments and in their hieratic head-dresses, in their priestess -like chastity, they betray Chaldsean ideas transmitted through Egyptian channels and with Greek influences in the general style. The Lady of Elche, the bust in the Louvre which Pierre Paris, in agreement with Eeinach, dates

1 Engel, Nouvelles Archives des Missions Scientifiques, 1892, tome iii. p. 180.

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about 440 B.C., is the supreme type of primitive Iberian sculpture, a work that is very attractive in its curious originality and seems to have come from the hand of a sculptor who was the fellow-countryman of the captivating Spanish woman whom he has immortalised.1 How genuinely Spanish the Lady of Elche is we may realise by the resemblance she bears to Velazquez's " Woman with the Fan," who, how- ever, has grown older and more tired and is no longer beautiful.

In more modern times none of the world's famous sculptors have been Spaniards, but the amount of beautiful or imposing sculpture to be found throughout Spain in churches and cloisters is extraordinary. Like the painting, it is seldom exquisite — Spain has produced no Donatello — but it is various, vigorous, romantic, in the

1 " In her enigmatic face," Pierre Paris writes, " ideal and yet real, in her living eyes, on her voluptuous lips, on her passive and severe forehead, are summed up all the nobility and austerity, the promises and the reticences, the charm and the mystery of woman. She is Oriental by her luxurious jewels and by a vague technical tradition which the sculptor has preserved in the modelling ; she is Greek, even Attic, by an inexpressible flower of genius which gives to her the same perfume as to her sisters on the Acropolis ; she is above all Spanish, not only by the mitre and the great wheels that frame her delicate head, but by the disturbing strangeness of her beauty. She is indeed more than Spanish : she is Spain itself, Iberia arising still radiant with youth from the tomb in which she has been buried for more than twenty centuries " (Pierre Paris, Essai sur VArt et V Industrie de VEspagne Primitive, 1903-4, vol. ii. p. 308). By virtue of the symbolic character which Professor Paris thus eloquently ascribes to her, the Lady of Elche appears at the front of the present volume.

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highest degree. The wonderfully preserved tombs in such cathedrals as those of Toledo, Zamora, and Leon can hardly be matched else- where for fine conception and interesting detail. Spanish wood-carving is not less fascinating and is even more distinctively Spanish, though its first inspirations are believed to have come from Flanders or Holland.1 This medium lent itself happily to the finely expressive and realistic manner of the Spaniard,2 and in this art he found not only scope for his fantastic extrava- gance and his naturalism, but he attained also a delicacy and loveliness which we usually miss in Spanish art. Nearly every great Spanish church has carved walnut-wood stalls which are treasuries of delight, each with its own special character. It seems to have been the freedom and facility of wood which enabled the Spaniard, whose aim was ever expressiveness, to attain such success in this medium. For a different reason he was equally successful in the use of iron ; here ex- travagance as well as grotesque realism is

1 Valladolid is specially rich in these sculptured wooden figures. "There is," as Emilia Pardo Bazan truly says in describing this aspect of that city, " a mingling of classicism in the modelling of the flesh and draperies, of romanticism in the expression, of realism in the colouring and details, which make of this sculpture in wood the seal and symbol of our national genius and our religious ideal. "

2 The naturalistic tendencies of Spanish sculpture and wood-carving have always been recognised. In an interesting pamphlet (summarised in Nature, Nov. 2, 1899, p. 15) Dr. E. S. Fatigati shows, as is indeed fairly obvious, that from the sixth century onwards a close study of plant life and animal life is clearly reflected in Spanish sculpture,

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inevitably checked, and for the combination of restrained boldness with harmony the ironwork screens of Spanish churches, notably at Seville, Toledo, and Granada, cannot be surpassed.

Spanish people, with their predominantly serious character and their impulse for strong expression, are innately dramatic. They have produced a long succession of fine playwrights and good actors, continued up to the present day. They are instinctively dramatic even in their gestures and speech. Nowhere, it seems to me, is this more marked than in Aragon, and Aragon is probably the chief focus of Spanish sculpture. There can, I think, be little doubt that the Spanish predilection for sculpture — for the moulding of wood and stone and iron — and the high level of accomplishment here reached, are founded on impulses which are also expressed in Spanish life and literature. They are the natural artistic outcome of the predominance of character in the Spanish temperament.

The seriously realistic and dramatic tendencies of Spanish art may perhaps seem strange to those who couple Spain vaguely with Italy as "the South." Italy we are accustomed to regard — not quite accurately, for among its greatest poets Italy produced the sombre figures of Lucretius and Dante — as a land of sunny idle- ness and facile enjoyment, where lazy and picturesque peasants bask in the sun by the

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blue sea, ready to be transferred to the drop- scenes of theatres. That is a vision we must not usually expect to see in Spain, either in the actual Spanish landscape or in Spanish pictures. It has indeed often seemed to me that the meteorological effects of the climate of Central Spain have had not merely an indirect but even a direct influence on the most typical Spanish painters. The hard and violent effects, the sharp contrasts, the strong colours, the stained and dusky clouds, looking as if soaked in pig- ment, may well have affected the imaginations of the artist, and a Castilian sunset often seems to have a real affinity with many a canvas of the most typical Spanish painters. However this may be, we find in Spain a more extreme south united to a more extreme north than Italy ever shows us. And just as Norway and Africa meet in the Spanish climate, and Visigoths and Moors in the Spanish people, so Flanders and Naples meet in Spanish painting.

The basis of Spanish painting is northern and Flemish ; even Italian influences, it has been pointed out, first reached Spain through Flemish channels ; the spirit of Flemish art, its realism, its dramatic veracity, its deep and serious feeling, were altogether congenial to the Spanish tempera- ment. We hear of Jan van Eyck travelling in the peninsula ; Roger van der Weyden's pictures were evidently greatly admired, for we find some

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of the finest in Spain to-day, and his dramatic force and intense religious feeling could not fail to make a strong appeal to the Spanish temperament; Gherart David, who also has strong Spanish affinities, may likewise be seen in many parts of the country.

On this Flemish basis arose a long school of painters whose names are little if at all known ; they have been treated with undeserved neglect by their fellow-countrymen, for while Flemish in inspiration, they represent a really Spanish development which, if it had not been largely overwhelmed by other influences, might have led to fine results in the line of the national genius. The two chief representatives of this movement are Luis de Dalmau of Barcelona and Alejo Fernandez of Cordova. Dalmau's chief work, the altar-piece now in the Museo Municipal of Barcelona, was painted soon after the great masterpiece of the van Eycks at Ghent, which in some respects it recalls, and it has a generally Flemish character, representing yellow - haired and yellow-eyed women, and black-haired men, as we often see them in Flemish paintings ; but it remains a little stiff in its forcefulness, although quite a beautiful, harmonious, decorative picture. Fernandez, who painted somewhat later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, is a much more charming and more individual artist. His Madonna with Angels at Triana is the most

i

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delightful picture the early Spanish painters have given us ; in its general aspect as well as in much of its detail it is Flemish, without the Flemish stiffness and indifference to beauty, for there is an almost Italian grace and ease about it, and the Angels recall Filippo Lippi.

But this orderly development on a Flemish basis towards a Spanish ideal was roughly de- stroyed by the eruption over Europe of that new kind of art which had grown up in Italy. Early Spanish art melted at the touch of this powerful solvent as swiftly as the early Flemish art from which it sprang. The Italians in their fine climate, where any wall would do to paint on, had had a long training, and their aesthetic sensibility, their instinct for design, enabled them to use with complete mastery the methods of self-expression they had evolved. But their slowly acquired freedom acted as a swift poison on the artists trained in the sober and realistic traditions of the Flemish school. Freed from their bonds to tradition, and at the same time losing their loving and reverent devotion to Nature, they could not, like the Tuscans, trust to their own happy inspiration ; they became licentious in technique, shallow in feeling, insipid and extravagant in design. It is rare indeed to find any fine artistic personality behind the wildly flowing draperies of the facile, superficial canvases of these painters ; their art

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interests us scarcely more than that of Vasari. Great as was the fascination exerted by the new and free art of Italy, it seldom so far inspired the Spaniards as to enable them to work truly in its spirit. Here and there in sculpture we catch a glimpse of that spirit, and the great sixteenth century retablo of the church of San Jeronimo at Granada is a beautiful and harmonious work in the Italian manner, though without any obvi- ous imitation. In painting, Eoelas of Seville has a sweet and gracious charm which is also Italian rather than Spanish. As we see his work in some of the Seville churches, he combined something of the Venetian spirit of Titian with the Anda- lusian spirit which reached its climax in Murillo, while yet retaining an attractive personality of his own.

Another artist who was not only a Venetian in artistic origin but a foreigner by birth and race, Theotocopuli, commonly called El Greco, ranks among the chief pioneers of Spanish painting, and has even been regarded as the first in time of the characteristically Spanish masters. He came from Venice, and his early affinities were mainly with Tintoret. He was already an accomplished Venetian painter, but after he had settled in Toledo, to spend a long life there, he slowly acquired a new manner of his own, highly individual, even morbidly eccentric, yet at the same time in many respects

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genuinely Spanish. From being almost com- pletely neglected, of recent years a reaction has set in towards the opposite extreme, and by some Spaniards Greco is now placed on nearly as high a pinnacle as Velazquez.1 His extreme individuality, the sincerity with which he followed his own mannerisms to the utmost, so that one is inclined to say that even the smallest fragment of a Greco canvas could be immediately recognised as the work of the master, scarcely suffices, however, to make a painter of the first order.

1 In 1906, when it was reported that Greco's most famous picture, the "Burial of Count Orgaz," was to be sold and taken out of the country, there was a great outcry in Spain at this " sacrilege and profanation." The demand was made on this occasion that all tin works of art in churches and monasteries should be declared national property, or a law passed, on the lines of the Italian law, though less extreme, to keep them in the country. Zorilla, when Minister of Public Works in the Revolutionary Government of 1868, issued a decree empowering the State to take possession of collections of art and science belonging to religious bodies, to prevent them from being diverted from public use or sold ; but the clergy were greatly agitated, and threatened to assassinate the officials charged with the execution of the decree, which was never carried out. A serious and difficult problem is, indeed, presented by the immense amount of priceless and unique artistic treasures whioh are stored in the churches throughout Spain. Now that their value is becoming recognised, it is difficult for their present possessors to guard them adequately even against ordinary thieves, and many daring robberies have taken place (as lately from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela), while the slowly growing antagonism between the Church and the people will introduce more risks of devastation, such as occurred in England in the seventeenth century and in France in the eighteenth. On the other hand, the Church will certainly maintain its rights jealously in this as in other respects, and it must be admitted that the artistic loss would be great if the treasures of Spanish churches were to be stacked in museums after the manner now followed in most other countries.

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The reckless and frantic effort of his inspiration lacks the genius which could alone justify it. " His pictures might at times," as Mr. Eicketts says, " have been painted by torchlight in a cell of the Inquisition." He is lashed and tormented by his vision, but is seldom able to embody it. Even his generally acknowledged masterpiece, the " Burial of Conde Orgaz," at Toledo, — although comparatively restrained, full of fine passages and ideas, and at the time of its production as great a picture as had ever been painted in Spain,1 — can scarcely be said to be among the great pictures of the world. The general design of it — the group of bending figures around- the supine form, and the super- natural circle of figures in the clouds behind — had been a familiar composition among Byzantine artists centuries before,2 as it remained after- wards, well illustrated by Zurbaran's "Funeral of a Bishop" in the Louvre. Powerful and impressive as the work undoubtedly is, the individual portraiture of the bystanders, and the realistic detail of their costumes, clash with the larger religious significance which the painter has sought to give to his work ; the religious

1 Justi, usually temperate in his judgments, declares that this picture is "in his worst style," surely a difficult opinion to maintain.

2 See, e.g., the " Dormition of the Mother of God," a fourteenth century Byzantine fresco in the church of Santa Maria di Cerrati near Lecce in Otranto, illustrated in Bertaux's great work, L'Art dans Vltalie Miridionale, vol. i., and compare a pen-drawing by an eleventh century Benedictine monk on p. 201 of the same volume.

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significance is unachieved, and, on the other hand, the episode depicted and its supernatural accompaniments are not felt to aid the singularly fine row of portrait heads resting on their white ruffs which chiefly draw our attention. In his more purely religious and supernatural scenes, Greco was sometimes imaginative but more often bizarre in design and disconcerting in his colouring, with its insistence on chalky white, his violet shadows on pale faces, his love of green.1 Yet his colouring was his greatest and best discovery. His distorted fever of move- ment— the lean twisted bodies, the frenzied, gesticulating arms, the mannerism of large calves that taper down to pointed toes — usually fails to convince us. But in the audacities of his colouring he revealed the possibility of new harmonies, of higher, brighter, and cooler keys of colour than had before been achieved, and along these lines he was destined to inspire a more consummate artist than himself. Greco was usually at his best in portraiture ; 2 here he

1 The predilection for green is interesting, and one of the numerous points in which Greco anticipated the characteristics of the Spanish school, for green has usually been prominent on the Spaniard's palette, and has remained so — sometimes, as in Fortuny's pictures, becoming very insistent.

2 In an interesting study of Greco ("A Study of Toledo," Monthly Review, March 1901) Mr. Arthur Symonshas finely characterised these portraits, in which " there is a certain subdued ecstasy, purely ascetic, and purely temperamental in its asceticism, as of a fine Toledo blade, wearing out its scabbard through the mere sharpness of inaction . . . . Their faces are all nerves, distinguished nerves, quieted by an effort, the

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reached a high degree of distinction, refining on the methods of Tintoret, bringing out the charm of his women sitters and the aristocratic qualities of his men, imparting to them something of that consuming febrile and neurotic energy which is the special characteristic of his own art and doubtless his own personality — possibly the source of the legend of his madness — while it sorts so well with the city of his adoption. This haughty and aristocratic quality in Greco — a Spanish quality again, though most Spanish painters revealed in their art their often plebeian origin — led him to follow out his own aims in disdain of the art around him, and together with certain qualities in his colouring it may have been an inspiration to Velazquez, who seems to have learnt from Greco, although his sane and solid genius instinctively rejected the bizarre elements in his predecessor's work. Carrying his own individuality to the utmost limits, Greco was a real liberating force in Spanish art.

For the most part, as we have seen, the hard, deep -feeling, individualistic, sometimes rather violent temper of the Spaniard could not be conciliated with the spirit of Italy. But at last a really fertile seed from Italy was scattered on Spanish soil. It was altogether of novel

faces of dreamers in action ; they have all the brooding Spanish soul with its proud self-repression." The general characters of Greco's art are discriminatingly set forth by Mr. Ricketts in his book on The Prado (pp. 23-31).

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character, and it came from the south of the Italian peninsula, a region allied to Spain, for Naples and Sicily, unlike Northern Italy, are African in their affinities ; they were, moreover, for a long time under Moorish influence, and they had subsequently become part of the great domain of Spain.1

The rough, stern, realistic art of Naples, veracious and dramatic, but revealing little delicacy of aesthetic sensibility — mainly em- bodied for us in the work of Caravaggio and Salvator Rosa — was a vigorous revolt against the shallow and feeble forms of later North Italian art, and the insipidities and inanities into which that had at length fallen.2 But it is necessary to remember that the Neapolitan school was only in a very slight degree made up of South Italians ; nearly all its leaders reached Naples from elsewhere. It must also be re- marked that the Valencian school of Spain was developing out of the Bolognese school along the same lines as the Neapolitan school, and the Valencian Bibalta — with his strong lighting and vigorous modelling — was the master of Ribera.

1 "And truly in my opinion," wrote Howell from Naples in 1621, "the King of Spain's greatness appears here more eminently than in Spain itself."

2 This tendency was not, however, of late appearance. The mosaics of Southern Italy (as illustrated in the first volume of Bertaux's L'Art dans Vltalie M&ridionale), unlike those of Byzantine art generally, are often singularly vigorous and dramatic, with figures in high relief on a dark background. ■<

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The decisive factor, moreover, in concentrating the realistic revolt of late Italian art in Naples seems to have been the fact that Naples had then long been under Spanish rule, and that to the Spaniards this kind of art was as congenial as it was alien to Italians generally. The Neapolitan painters were thus in a double sense a branch of the Spanish school. In this way it came about that Eibera the Valencian — Lo Spagnoletto, as he was called in Italy — a leader of Neapolitan art, was not only born in Spain,1 but is rightly counted as in every sense one of the glories of Spanish art.

Eibera's best works are scattered, — though a special room is now devoted to him in the Prado, — but any one who has been able to obtain a comprehensive vision of them as a whole can scarcely fail to come to the conclusion that after Velazquez there is no greater figure in Spanish art. It may be admitted that Eibera is very unequal, and that in facile and obvious charm he is not usually conspicuous. It is possible to turn away from many of his pictures with the

1 As Salazar has finally proved ("La Patria e la Famiglia dello Spagnoletto," Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche, 1903, vol. vii. sezione iv.), Ribera was born at Jativa in Valencia, of Spanish parents, although the family shortly afterwards migrated to Naples, where the painter married an Italian wife and eventually died, probably at Posilippo, in 1652. Jativa, a fortress amid a paradise of flowers and fruit, was also the home of the Borgias, and at one time a stronghold of Valeneian revolt ; it is still a centre of Anarchism.

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feeling that they are sombre, harsh, violent, if not indeed sometimes brutal. We have to re- member that he came first, and that Velazquez followed him, while Murillo began by being frankly his imitator. The profound originality of Eibera is shown by the complete manner in which, though seemingly inspired by foreign influences, he expresses and works out the genius of his own people. The qualities of Spain, as we know, are the qualities of char- acter. The art of Eibera is the manifestation of this temper, earnest, profoundly emotional, almost exclusively religious, yet nearly always realistic, and invariably dramatic. So dramatic is he, and so anxious to expend all the resources of his art in bringing his figures into the strongest relief, that we might regard him as really, by instinct, a sculptor. He was born on the confines of Aragon, a centre of sculpture, the most national of the plastic arts of Spain, and no other Spanish painter has so persistently conceived the scene before him from the sculp- tor's point of view, that is to say, as sculpture has been understood by the dramatic and realistic Spaniard, like Montanes, who designed some of those noble and poignantly life-like images which are still borne in procession at Seville in Holy Week. The robust vigour of Eibera's art is compensated and completed by his essential tenderness. In the power of

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rendering loving devotion, of tender abandon- ment, associated with religious emotion, Ribera not only surpasses all his countrymen, but is scarcely excelled outside Spain. His Magdalene in the Prado caressing a skull succeeds in imparting the simple sincerity of true feeling to a stereotyped scene which the painter has usually found it very difficult to realise con- vincingly. In the National Gallery " Entomb- ment " the attitude of the stooping St. John at the Saviour's feet, with bowed head covered by a waving wealth of golden hair, is singularly char- acteristic of Ribera ; and not less so, in a well- known picture in the Louvre, the dead Christ, whose mass of brown-black hair mingles with shadows of the same tint. In such pictures we see those sombre and deep tones of emotional colour, the rich dusky harmonies which have so often haunted Spanish artists down to Gandara and Zuloaga, but have never been so strongly and splendidly achieved as by Ribera. He remains the most superb and original colourist of Spain, a strayed Venetian whose emotional tone is yet entirely Spanish. The crowning proof of Ribera's artistic strength and his power of rendering ecstatic emotion is furnished by the great " Conception " which hangs over the high altar in the Church of the Augustinas Recoletas in Salamanca. The fine blending of modesty and pride in the Virgin's face and erect figure

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is here triumphantly attained ; in one effort Eibera has not merely succeeded where Murillo after him so often lavished his labour in vain, but he challenges comparison with Titian.1

It was not merely in painting ecstatic Virgins in the clouds that Murillo sought to follow Eibera. In much of his early work he moulded himself on Eibera at every point. Before an "Adoration of the Shepherds " in the Murillo room at the Prado it is difficult to realise that we are not in the presence of a characteristic work of the earlier master ; there is the same colouring, the same realism, the same type of Virgin's face ; even the angel who seems so characteristic of Murillo we find fully developed in the white- winged angel, robed in golden brown and purple, of the "San Pedro in vinculis" of the Eibera room. Murillo, it is true, left out the occasional brutal crudity of Eibera, but he also left out his force and sincerity and dramatic veracity.

The supremacy of Velazquez — whose early work also exhibits, though in a less definite degree, the influence of Eibera — among the painters of Spain is to-day unquestioned, nor is there much question that among the artists of the world he stands in the first rank, in certain

1 Eibera was often singularly happy, far beyond any other Spanish painter, in the difficult task of combining nobility with fresh human sweetness in his Virgins. This is, for instance, well illustrated in the delightful " Holy Family " which is the most interesting picture in the little visited Museo Provincial at Toledo.

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respects, indeed, unsurpassed and unsurpassable. But Murillo, once counted as more than the peer of Velazquez, has fallen from his high estate in critical estimation, though his popularity among the masses, in and out of Spain, remains unaffected by the discussions of critics. His real position, we shall probably not err in concluding, is neither so high nor so low as opposing factions have placed it, and we may agree with those who would rank him not far from Andrea del Sarto. He has suffered from his popularity and from the critical reaction aroused by that popularity. But as in the case of his in many respects greater contemporary Vandyke, we must allow due weight to real charm and genuine accomplish- ment, however much we may be affected by the absence of those qualities which are essential to the making of the greatest art. Murillo was lacking in original force : the methods, the aims, even the favourite designs, of the first period of his art were, as we see, largely impressed on him by the puissant genius of Kibera ; and the modi- fications which his style underwent later in life, while doubtless more peculiarly personal, were of no great artistic significance. He was an artist of feminine and receptive temperament, a realist indeed, but with no virile force, inapt to express the vigorous dramatic qualities which most natively find expression in Spanish art. But his hand was highly accomplished and his taste

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showed a finer sensibility than is common in Spain ; he was sensitive to beauty, especially to the idyllic beauty of homely landscape scenes (though he was here largely a follower of Bassano), and to the plebeian charm of the Spanish peasant. His quick eye and ready hand were forced to adapt themselves to the needs of a city in which beauty was dedicated almost altogether to the service of religion. That circumstance, though it led to the production of pictures which made Murillo's fame, has yet been unfortunate for his reputation in the highest sense. Of all Spanish painters, Murillo alone, the genuine child of Andalusia, may be said to represent the spirit of what we term the " South." For that very reason, perhaps, he was not so typically and essentially Spanish as Eibera was. He was without the Spanish dramatic aptitude, without the sincerity of intense religious feeling. Murillo's famous Virgins in the clouds, after the manner of Ribera's great Salamanca " Conception," however delicious the glowing haze in which they live, are nearly always pretty peasant girls, posing in beautiful robes that do not belong to them, and simulating ecstatic emotions they have never felt. His other religious pictures are similarly gracious and charming, similarly unconvincing. When we can forget that we are looking at a religious picture, or when the painter was free to devote himself to frankly secular subjects, we can better

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enjoy the qualities of his art. It is true that his beggar-boys are just as deliberately and self- consciously picturesque as his saints are de- liberately and self-consciously holy. Still, no other Spanish painter has so agreeably seized the peasant life of Spain, or rather of Andalusia, at the points where it fell in harmoniously with his own pretty mannerisms ; in this field, indeed, he sometimes seems both sensitive and sincere, able to present life for what it is worth. Even the absence of dramatic instinct helped him here. His love of beauty and refinement, especially when manifested in a plebeian shape, his idyllic feeling for the beauty of pastoral repose in a patriarchal age, — illustrated by many of the pictures at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, — his softly bright and luminous colouring, his facile skill in realistic detail — all these things must make Murillo a fascinating and peculiar figure in Spanish painting, though they cannot enable us to place him beside Velazquez and Eibera.

His proper rank is more nearly with Zurbaran, unlike as in many respects the two artists are — Murillo, who came somewhat later, the more skilled and versatile master of his art ; Zurbaran, a more natively dramatic realist, and with a far more sincere and profound religious instinct, the finest type of the realist as religious visionary.1

1 The significance and importance of Zurbaran have only been realised during recent years. The comprehensive exhibition of his

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But they were alike in their refinement of nature, the delicacy of their realism, their genuine love of plebeian human nature, Zurbaran always remaining more direct in his vision, more unaffected in his execution, a man of very humble soul, perhaps too humble for a great artist, con- tent to be on the earth, and by preference in a cloister, never eager to climb, as Murillo was, on to a cloud.

Zurbaran was a native of Estremadura, the province that lies between Castile on the north and Andalusia on the south, and this position seems accurately to account for his spiritual attitude. He had much of the Andalusian sweetness and cheerful contentment, but at the same time in his dramatic vigour, his intense fervour, his genuine preoccupation with religion, he was intimately related to Castile. Technically, his pictures are often uninteresting because he

works in Madrid during 1905 (which I was unfortunately unable to see, although in Spain at the time) has largely contributed to this recognition. Lord Leighton, however, a very well-informed and often judicious critic of Spanish painting, wrote with enthusiasm nearly twenty years ago of Zurbaran, as "a man of whom we have in this country but little knowledge, a painter of conspicuously powerful personality, in whom more than in any of his contemporaries the various essential characteristics of his race were gathered up — its defiant temper, its domestic bent, its indifference to beauty, its love of fact, its imaginative force, its gloomy fervour, its poetry, in fact, and its prose. Murillo was truly Spanish, no doubt, but had neither the imagination nor the sustained virility of style of the son of the peasant from Estremadura, the completest representative in art, I think, of the genius of his race." There is, however, much in this eloquent estimate which seems more accurately applicable to Eibera.

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is nearly always dominated by the instinct to convey his religious feelings and ideas as simply and sincerely as he can. Murillo was a religious painter, because the age would not allow him to be anything else. But Zurbaran was entirely in harmony with the religious spirit of his age. He is a Spanish Fra Angelico, that is to say, a very realistic Angelico, whose knees rest always firmly on the earth.

The great period of Spanish painting was comprised within the first half of the seven- teenth century. It died even more completely and suddenly than the contemporaneous efflor- escence of Spanish drama, and almost at the same time. The life of Velazquez ended iu 1660, and that of Calderon, who outlived most of his fellow - dramatists, in 1681. The ancient and vigorous school of Venice, with which the Spaniards had so often come in touch, con- tinued within narrowed channels alive and alert, retaining its aptitude for new developments, and in Guardi at all events stretching forwards towards modern art, but Spanish art had lost all vitality. Not one notable figure emerges until we reach Goya towards the end of the eighteenth century. In this man of Aragon, the son of poor labourers, and showing in his portrait the very type of the shrewd and keen Aragonese peasant, we have a genuine and ener- getic renascence of the Spanish spirit in art.

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He shows, indeed, some suggestions of French influence ; for, with fundamental differences, it is not difficult to feel now and again in his work the hardness and pseudo-classicality of David, while we miss also the substantial solidity of the old masters and their aristocratic instinct. But, on the whole, with his versatile aptitudes and wide-reaching interests, Goya represents the Spanish temper and Spanish interests more com- prehensively than any other Spanish painter. He has finally escaped from the control of the Inquisition, which fettered his predecessors, and is a little intoxicated with his freedom. Eeligion, the prime interest of Old Spain, is a negligible element in his art. It is, indeed, a fact of some significance in estimating the spiritual outlook of Spain, that since Zurbaran there has been no great Spanish religious painter. Goya touched Spanish life vividly and alertly on every other side ; he has all the fantastic energy of Spain, some of his pictures are like pungent political pamphlets, he illustrated fully all the aspects of Spanish popular and festive life, technically in a versatile and experimental way which is always interesting, though, except in a few occasional sketches and etchings, it seldom reaches consummate achievement. Some of his drawings, in their superb dash and felicity, are almost comparable to Eubens's sketches, though again, in the Caprichos and other etchings, their

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beauty and spirit, their vigour of line and ex- pression, tend often to fall into caricature. And in his personal life he exhibited just the same versatile and audacious temper, ready with his sword, competent to play his part in the bull- ring, at one time abducting a nun from her convent, at another time carrying on a public liaison with a duchess of the Court, and painting her (according to an unproved tradition) in his "Maja Desnuda," as Manet afterwards painted the less distinguished "Olympia" of the Louvre. And while he was at heart and in life a typical Spaniard, Goya was also a nervous and restless modern, indeed with some claim to be accounted the earliest of modern painters.

Goya marked, however, a real revival in Spanish painting, which has continued to the present time, although, with the possible ex- ception of Zuloaga, it has not produced any figure of the first rank. For the most part the Spanish painters have allied themselves with those of France and have sought training and fame in Paris. Such an approximation was natural and inevitable, even apart from the unique reputation which Paris has long enjoyed as an art centre. France has been the last of the great European countries to attain serious and deliberate self-consciousness in painting, and ever since that development has taken place the French painters of the south-west have frequently

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shown characteristics of colouring and design which recall the Spaniards. The influence of France has not, however, destroyed the specifi- cally national qualities of Spanish painters, not even when they chanced to be born on French soil. Thus Diaz, who played a prominent part in the French romantic movement, remained Spanish in the large and masculine effects of his best work, and in the peculiar suppressed richness of passionate colour which we may sometimes note in the painters of Spain.

At the present day nearly all the Spanish painters of repute, unlike their ancient pre- decessors, are either Basques or, more especially, Catalans ; belonging, that is to say, to the Spanish populations which in other fields also are most energetic and successful. The chief representa- tive of the Basques is Zuloaga, to-day the most distinguished of Spanish painters, the most brilliant exponent of the finest Spanish tra- ditions ; while first among the Catalans conies Anglada-Camarasa, a great master of luxuriant and yet refined colour, the Spanish violence tempered harmoniously by Spanish sobriety. Sorolla, another artist of European reputation, belonging to Valencia, is also truly Spanish, a master of broad and energetic effects. The Luxembourg possesses a choice collection of modern Spanish paintings, and in the Paris Salons there is always much Spanish work,

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clearly characteristic, and mostly with that bold and ostentatious brush-work, once the method of Velazquez and after of Hals, which has since become a fashionable acquirement rather than the inevitable outcome of any psychological necessity. In its origin, however, it seems the expression in painting of a combative and war- like temperament, the transformation into art of valour, that fundamental quality of the Spaniard, so that before it one may feel as Brantdme felt when he saw the Spaniards riding to the wars in Flanders, like princes in their arrogant and insolent grace.

V

VELAZQUEZ

In a little room of the Prado Museum, specially constructed for this end, stands the large picture of Velazquez's last period which has long been known as "The Maids of Honour," Las Meninas. It is a simple scene in the artist's studio, viewed as the King and Queen, who stood at the same point as the spectator now stands — we see them reflected in the mirror in the background — once viewed it during a moment of rest in the course of a royal sitting. There in the centre is the little princess about to accept the refreshment offered by one of the charming maids of honour ; there are the two court dwarfs with the big dog who is stolidly reposing ; and there, on the left, is the painter himself, erect, with his large canvas, facing us and the royal couple. A typically Spanish picture, indeed the most instructive representation we possess of the life led by

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Philip IV., it is a natural, unstudied scene, painted in a natural, unstudied way, with large, light, seemingly careless strokes, yet with no parade of assertive brush-work, so that at a little dis- tance the picture presents a smooth surface. Gently, calmly, neither as master nor as slave, but courteously in the Spanish manner, as an equal, the painter seems to stand face to face with Nature. We feel that this is less a picture that has been painted by a brilliant and deliberate expenditure of pigments than a vision that has been mysteriously evoked and that floats before us in its own atmosphere. If by a " miracle " we mean an event in which the effect is beyond measure out of proportion with the seeming simplicity of the cause, then we may say that of all the great pictures of the world this may most precisely be called miraculous.

Whether the men of Velazquez's day realised that a miracle had here been performed there is no evidence to tell ; more likely they considered that the excellent Court painter had properly done his duty, as every Court functionary, whether painter, barber, or buffoon — they were officially classed together — ought to. The earliest known utterance concerning the picture is indeed one that finely reveals a sense of its greatness, but it was made thirty years after Velazquez's death, and by a foreigner. When Luca Giordano came to Madrid — an accomplished

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painter, but a man of a sensitive and receptive temperament which was a fatal endowment in an age of artistic decay — it is recorded that he said to Charles II. : " Sire, this is the theology of painting ! " But it is an utterance that stands alone. At that time, and for long after- wards, Velazquez had no real and deep influence on art and artists. Frans Hals, indeed, in the land that politically had shaken itself free of Spain, while always possessing something of the Spaniard's fiercely independent spirit, had illus- trated the technical tendency of the painter's craft along certain lines to follow spontaneously the evolution revealed in Velazquez's work while still almost his contemporary. There we see something of the same qualities of brush-work without the greater qualities of Velazquez, and in the wonderful pictures of the Stadthuis in Haarlem, painted at the age of ninety, the final development of his art, Hals at last reaches up towards Velazquez. The painter, we feel, is physically aged and frail, his colouring is often decomposed, here and there we are only conscious of strange masses of pigment, but his intellect is still sturdy and clear ; the old man's hand trembles, but his vision has become, at last, as the vision of Velazquez. Hals stands alone as Velazquez stands alone.

To-day, when we see that every modern movement in painting has been to some extent

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forestalled by Velazquez, when such great and diverse initiators as Corot and Manet, whose originality cannot be contested, may alike be said to have conscious or unconscious points of departure here, it is difficult to realise that in the eighteenth century, when Raphael Meugs revealed him to Europe, a hundred years after his death, as " the first of naturalists," Velazquez still seemed without significance. Reynolds, it is true, admired a picture of Velazquez's ; it is said that he pronounced the portrait of Inno- cent X. " the finest picture in Rome " ; he copied it; he also copied one other picture in Rome, Guido's " St. Michael." I do not think there is a single reference to Velazquez either in his Discourses or his Notes of Travel ; he probably regarded the Spaniard as a brilliant outside member of the Venetian school, not worth any special separate characterisation. Wilkie, in 1828, rediscovered Velazquez (but only appre- ciated his earlier work), and twenty years later Sir William Stirling - Maxwell wrote the first notable biography of the artist.1 Half a century later, in 1899, the third centenary of Velazquez's birth, henceforth become alike a national and an international festival, was celebrated by the construction of a new hall in the Prado for the

1 In later years R. A. M. Stevenson's fresh, charming, and finely appreciative little study of Velazquez (1895) has probably done much to make the painter popular and intelligible in England.

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reception of his chief pictures, and within it, this special shrine for " Las Meninas," now for the first time clearly to be seen.

Here, as of old to the shrine of Spain's patron saint at Compostela, a ceaseless stream of pilgrims nowadays arrives from all parts of the world. The artists in every field come here, with the mob which blindly follows their lead. Here, on the one hand, might once be seen the great actress, Eleanora Duse, spending hours, day after day, during the time she was playing in Madrid, before " Las Meninas," and on her last visit, the longest of all, suddenly walking up to a bewildered attendant to exclaim, before she almost ran out of the long gallery, " Eso es un teatro real ! " And here also, on the other hand, may