It is over; the ring is cleared, sand is raked over the pools of blood, a new bull is driven forward, again the drama begins. Six times the scene is re-acted, and a seventh bull, a toro de gracia, is added at the first bull-fight of the year.
In this repetition of emotions, this delight in heaping up sensations, we have a very real revelation of the Spanish temperament. And this explains the devotion of the people to the bull-fight. When we come to estimate the Spanish character, we shall find that the Spaniard has the qualities which belong to all primitive people. The sentiment of sympathy with suffering is essentially a modern one. The Spaniard is still the Moor, his ancestor. He is cruel because he is indifferent to pain, his own or another’s.
CHAPTER II—THE SPANISH PEOPLE
The Character of the People—Their Quietness and Sobriety—Their Cruelty—This the Result of their Stoicism and Indifference to Pain—These the Qualities of a Strong and Primitive People—The Feria, the Holiday of the Sevillians—Religion: its Place in the National Life—The Dance of the Seises—Holy Week in Seville—Religious Processions—The Pasos.
The character of the Spaniard, as one gradually learns to know it, not from a brief visit spent tourist fashion in hurrying from one city to another, but from living among the people, sharing their common life and entering into their spirit, is a very positive character. And this character, though at first seemingly full of contradictions, is one of an almost curious uniformity, strongly individual, and not easy to comprehend.
A significant quality of the Spaniard is his quietness—the grave enjoyment which he retains even under the influence of strong emotion, such as we have seen in the dances and in the national pastime of the bull-fight. His countenance will keep its accustomed gravity even whilst his mind is inflamed. The Spaniard has what one would like to call an active languor. On the one hand we find in his character a deeply rooted dislike, which is almost a contempt, for useful work, with, on the other hand, a reserve of untiring energy and a special aptitude for violent and emotional action.
In Spain work is not the highest aim of life. This is the reason why time is of so much less value. It explains the tendency to delay everything to a convenient to-morrow—that annoying mañana with which the Spaniard cheerfully responds to every demand.
One of the first lessons I learnt in Spain was the unimportance of time. We were staying in a country village off the beaten tracks of travel, and had to drive a long distance to meet the train which was to take us to Madrid. When we arrived at the small wayside station, we found we had three hours to wait. There was no waiting-room, no refreshments could be procured, and it was raining and very cold. I felt angered at the discomfort and waste of time; but the Spaniards who were our companions accepted the delay with true philosophy. They were genuinely distressed at my annoyance—the Spaniard is always courteous to the foreigner—but they did not at all share it. They wrapped their great cloaks around them, and walked up and down the wind-driven platform for three hours, calmly indifferent.
I understood their acceptance of life on its own terms, which is the very root of the Spanish character, at once its strength and its weakness, the cause of its beauty and of its defects.