[30] “El Caballero encantado,” 1909: “Viven en un mundo de ritualidades, de fórmulas, de trámites y recetas. El lenguaje se ha llenado de aforismos, de lemas y emblemas; las ideas salen plagadas de motes, y cuando las acciones quieren producirse andan buscando la palabra en que han de encarnarse y no acaban de elegir.” The Spaniards speak with conviction of the great gulf fixed between word and deed:—del dicho al hecho hay gran trecho; Los dichos en nos, los hechos en Dios.
[31] Cf. a speaker in the Cortes in June, 1910: “Aquí no hay nada tan alto como las clases bajas.”
[32] Don Ramiro de Maeztu has written of the aggressive assertion of personality—innecesária afirmación de las personas—in Spain.
[33] Lo que no lleva Cristo lo llera el fisco—“What the Church leaves, the Treasury receives,” says an old proverb.
[34] An author in Pérez Galdós’ Fortunata y Jacinta says that the Spaniards, that pícara raza, are unaware of the value of time and of the value of silence. “You cannot make them understand that to take possession of other people’s silence is like stealing a coin.” “It is a lack of civilization.” By such un-Spanish criticisms Señor Pérez Galdós betrays the fact that he was not born in Spain.
[35] The historian, Mariana, displayed more patriotism than accuracy when he wrote that Spain “is not like Africa, which is burnt by the violence of the sun nor is it assailed, as is France, by winds and frosts and humidity of air and earth.”
[36] So Fr. Alonso de Espina wrote that, were an Inquisition established, “serían innumerables los entregados al fuego, los cuales si no fuesen aquí ... cruelmente castigados ... habrán de ser quemados en el fuego eterno.” La Fortaleza de la Fe. 1459.
[37] “This spectacle,” says an admiring Englishman in 1760, “is certainly one of the finest in the world, whether it is considered merely as a coup-d’œil or as an exertion of the bravery and infinite agility of the performer.”
[38] Yet certainly no Englishman should attend a bull-fight while the modern custom prevails of leading out a cruelly gored horse, sewing it up, and bringing it in again for fresh sufferings. This is done to save the contractors of the plaza a few shillings and is a disgrace to Spain. Those who have not seen a bull-fight and can scarcely believe that so sordid and outrageous a practice is possible may, if they have the courage, read all the details in Señor Blasco Ibáñez’ novel Sangre y Arena (1908).
[39] The Inquisition was a tyranny universally feared, though in principle supported by the people. In Pepys we read of “the English and Dutch who have been sent for to work (in the manufacture of certain stuffs) being taken with a Psalm-book or Testament and so clapped up and the house pulled down; and the greatest Lord in Spayne dare not say a word against it if the word Inquisition be mentioned.” Cf. the groundless terror of the old woman in Quevedo’s El Buscón, or the story of the man who, when asked for a few pears by an Inquisitor, pulled up and presented him with the whole tree. Attacks on and ridicule of priests in Spain are not exclusively modern; the following verse of Juan Ruiz (14th century) is but one of countless instances throughout Spanish literature: