Poor Folk in Spain

We had tasted of Spain before ever we had crossed her frontiers. Indeed, perhaps Spain is the easiest country to obtain samples from without the fatigue of travelling. The Spaniard carries his atmosphere with him: wherever he goes he re-creates in his immediate surroundings more than a hint of his national existence. The Englishman abroad may be English—more brutally and uncompromisingly English than the Spaniard is Spanish—yet he does not carry England with him. He does not, that is, re-create England to the extent of making her seem quite real abroad; there she appears alien, remote, somewhat out of place. So, too, neither the Russian, the German, the Dane, the Portuguese, the Italian, nor the American can carry with him the flavour of his homeland in an essence sufficiently concentrated to withstand the insidious infiltration of a foreign atmosphere. To some extent the Scandinavian countries, Norway and Sweden, have this power; but Spain is thus gifted in the greatest measure. These three countries seem to possess a national unconsciousness which fends them off from too close a contact with lands which are foreign to them; perhaps one might almost accuse them of a lack of sensitiveness in certain aspects....
However, be the reason what it may, we had gathered some experience of Spain in Paris before, and in London during the war. What we had tasted we had liked, and so when in our low-ceilinged attic refuge in London we gazed out upon a sky covered with flat cloud, as though with a dirty blanket, and wondered how we might escape in order to seek for our original selves—if they were not irretrievably lost—we thought of Spain. I think that we went to Spain to look for something that the war had taken from us. It was as though the low ceiling of our room, and the low-lying sky, shut us in with something which was not altogether true; indeed, we feel that many years must pass before the dissipation of this curious sensation of unreality which the war had stamped on to every one, except the most callous.