[89] George Eliot, “The Spanish Gypsy.” The purple shadows are the effect of dark patches of rock seen through the transparent blue water.
[90] “Papel y tinta y poca justicia, paper, ink, and little justice,” say the people, in one of their proverbs. They feel that, in Spain, if revenge is a kind of wild justice, so too frequently is justice.
[91] Barretti’s Dictionary (edition of 1778) quaintly renders socarrón as “a crafty, subtle fellow; an arch wag.”
[92] On the road from Tortosa to Valencia there is a stone cross with the pathetic, ill-spelt inscription: “Aqui murió instantáneamente al tirarse del carro por habersele desembocado el mulo Dominco Cugat Jardi el 30 agosto de 1894. R.I.P. Carrateros ya veis lo que paso este infelis.” “Carters, you see what happened to this unhappy man.” But the carters throughout Spain continue to sleep away the long hours of the road.
[93] The latest statistics available show that, while 90 and 80 per cent. of the electors in some northern provinces of Spain can read and write, in Andalucía the highest averages are 51 and 50 (provinces of Cadiz and Seville), that of the province of Córdoba being but 41, of Almería 38, of Granada and Jaen 35, of Málaga 34.
[94] “Chapters on Spanish Literature.” 1908.
[95] “N’uma mão a penna e n’outra a lança.”
[96] M. Boris de Tannenberg, speaking of “Sotileza,” has said excellently: “C’est que plus une œuvre a un caractère local marqué, plus elle a de chance de devenir universelle, à condition que l’écrivain, sous la particularité des mœurs et du langage, ait pénétre jusqu’au fond commun d’humanité.” And Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, who represented King Alfonso on January 23, 1911, in the ceremony of unveiling at Santander the statue of Pereda by Señor Collaut Valera (nephew of the novelist, Juan Valera), said in his speech: “His books, so local that even the inhabitants of the mountain require a glossary, and as Spanish as the most Spanish writings since Cervantes and Quevedo, are profoundly human owing to the intensity of life which they contain, and the quiet majesty with which it is developed.”
[97] We are apt to forget that men in the Middle Ages, if they dwelt insistently on the sinister “Dance of Death,” also felt to the full the joys of living. The “Poema del Cid” sings no variations on the theme “How good is man’s life, the mere living,” but the feeling itself appears in every line.
[98] The King had sent “letters to León and Sanctiague, to Portuguese and Galicians, to those of Carrión and the Men of Castille,” to announce a Cort dentro en Tolledo, in order to judge between the Cid and the Counts of Carrión. “Since I was King,” he says, “I have held but two Cortes, one in Burgos, the other in Carrión, this third in Tolledo have I come to hold to-day.”