Things seen in Spain

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

The snobbery that has arisen out of modern progress is unknown to the Spanish man and woman. Business is not here the highest aim of life. The Spaniard still feels true what Ganivet made Hernan Cortes say: “The grandest enterprises are those in which money has no part, and the cost falls entirely on the brain and heart.” The hustling, besmirching spirit of commercialism is absent from the Spanish character; and for this reason, although Spain belongs to the past, the country, to those who have eyes to see, will seem to belong also to the future.

El Mitayo Cid Campeador, as the old chronicles affectionately call the Spanish hero, with his democratic manners, his rough-and-ready justice, and his acts at once ideal and yet practical in achievement, is the supreme representative of chivalry. Valour and virtue, the qualities peculiarly identified with the Spanish romantic spirit, were his. His energy in warfare, his power in love, his childlike religious faith, and his fearlessness in facing pain and also death, are characteristics that belong to all the men who have made Spain great.

Spain was the land of the sword, and the business of the true Spaniard was war. And this love of action, strange as it may seem to those accustomed to think of the lazy Spaniard, is a very real trait in the Spanish character. But the action must be connected with romance. It has nothing at all to do with the idea of working for the gain of money which belongs to the “getting on” spirit of modern civilization. The Spaniard works as the child works, for joy, and not for gain.

Living in Spain, you come to understand that this land is really the connecting link between Europe and Africa. Both in his physical traits and in his character, the Spaniard shows his relation to the North African type—“the child of a European father by an Abyssinian mother” he has been called. This is true. Lithe and vigorous, with long-shaped heads and rich pigmentation of skin—the type is clearly seen in the pictures of Murillo and Zurbaran, and with a more vivid expression in the portraits of El Greco—the Spaniard has more points of contact with the Eastern than with the Western races. Seldom indeed is he entirely a European.

But it is among the women that the resemblance stands out most clearly. There are women with dark long African faces. You will see them among the flamencas of Seville, or in the gipsy quarter of the Camino del Sacro Monte at Granada—women with slow, sinuous movements, which you notice best when you see them dance, and wonderful eyes that flash a slow fire, quite unforgettable in their strange beauty.

In dress we still find the Oriental love of bright and violent colours. The elegant Manilla shawls and the mantilla, which give such special distinction to the women of Spain, are modifications of the Eastern veil. The elaborately dressed hair, built up with combs, with the rose or carnation giving a note of colour, has also a very ancient origin. Then, the men in some districts still retain the fashion of loose, baggy trousers such as women wear in the East.

We see the Moorish influence in the Oriental seclusion of the houses, with the barred windows and high gates, often studded with bosses, seeming to forbid an entrance. The Spaniard still constructs his house as the Moors built their houses, around the inner court, or patio, those gardens of colour and rest, sometimes quite hidden from the passer-by, as at Toledo; sometimes visible through an openwork iron gateway, like the gay patios of Seville. Each house still has its buzon, and is fronted with a zaguán, or vestibule of wood.

In every department of Spanish life we meet with this persistence of the Moorish influence. This need not surprise us.

The coming of the Moors into Spain was a civilizing expedition more than a conquest. It was the Orient entering Europe. The invaders—for the most part Berbers with a few Arabs—were a race of young and vigorous culture, of such astonishing and rapid growth that, although in Africa they had hardly emerged from savagery, in Spain they manifested a truly wonderful receptivity, and absorbed and developed the best elements they found in the life of the country.