The pillars of Hercules

by David Urquhart

It is acknowledged, that the facility of intercourse in France, as contrasted with England, and the ease with which people may congregate and visit each other at the time of day when such meetings are most appropriate—the evening—arises from the absence of formal invitation; in other words, restriction on intercourse is the result of our fashion of hospitality.

A word is even misused with impunity, and here the mistake of a Latin term covers the perversion of a Christian maxim. The hospitality of the Romans was that of Judæa. The manners of Judæa are the matrix of Christianity. When Christ sent forth the seventy, he told them to carry no scrip, and to make no provision. Wherever they first entered (were received) there should they abide. They were to eat what was set before them (given them). Hospitality was the condition of the reception of the Gospel: shall it be needless for, or incompatible with, its maintenance? Those who, in Jewish Canaan or Judæa, had no place where to lay their head, shook off the dust from their feet, in testimony against those who received them not. In Christian England, the Apostles of the Saviour would be sent to the workhouse or put upon the treadmill.

I was here interrupted by a visit from a French merchant. The conversation turned upon the Spanish mercantile character. He said, there is no public credit in our sense, but there is real credit, for man trusts man. A great traffic had been carried on through the Basque provinces, during the Continental blockade: no books were kept; the recovery of debts by legal process was impossible; yet was it distinguished by the most perfect confidence, and entire absence of failures or embezzlement.

The statement was subsequently confirmed by Mr. George Jones, of Manchester, who managed the largest English concern in the Basque provinces during the war. He had no clerks. The goods were disembarked and put in warehouses. He could keep no regular accounts. The muleteers came themselves to get the bales, and all he could do was, to tell them what the bales contained, and to receive their own note of what they had taken in an amount of 300,000l., and there was but one parcel missing. Several years afterwards, a priest brought him fifty dollars, which was the value of the missing bale of goods, saying, “Take that and ask no questions.”

My visitor related to me the following anecdote:—A French merchant from Bordeaux, who had a house at Barcelona, where he resided, received, in the course of business, a large sum of money from a Spaniard at a time when he was much embarrassed in his affairs; he was therefore unwilling to receive the money, and yet fearful to refuse it, lest his credit should be shaken. Shortly afterwards, he failed and absconded. His creditor traced him to Gibraltar and thence to Cadiz. There he found him lying sick, without attendants, in a garret. On entering the room, the Spaniard sternly demanded his debtor’s books. Receiving them, he sat himself down and spent several hours examining them, referring to the Frenchman merely upon points where he wanted information. When he had completed his investigation he returned the books without comment, and departed. Shortly afterwards he returned, accompanied by a physician, and had his debtor removed to a comfortable apartment, and then addressed him thus: “I am satisfied that you have not been guilty of fraud; but you have done me a great wrong: had you been frank, I should have enabled you to hold your ground. Now that we are in the same boat, let me know how much will enable you to re-commence business.” The sum being specified, he said, “Well, you shall have it upon the condition that you pledge me your word of honour that you will not leave Spain without my permission.” The debtor was about to pour forth expressions of gratitude, when his creditor stopped him: “It is you,” said he, “who have rendered me a service;” and, unbuttoning his coat, showed him a brace of pistols, adding, “One of these was for myself.” My informant concluded: “I am the man, and it happened under this roof.”

Those who come to Spain to see something that belongs to her, would not wish her peculiarities to be diminished; those who wish to find in Spain what they can have in Paris or in London, had better stay away. In travel, profit and enjoyment always coincide, for none can profitably travel who do not go to seek out for things different from what they are accustomed to, and none can agreeably travel but those for whom it is an enjoyment to be and to feel like the people of the country in which they are. For my part, I should be as careful to possess completely the thought or the habit of a people as to master a problem of Euclid; and as careful to keep distinct in my mind the thoughts and customs of one people from those of another, as if they were medicines or chemical substances ranged upon a shelf. There is no difficulty in learning half-a-dozen different languages; but you could not learn one if you jumbled in every sentence the words of your own tongue, or converted the foreign one into your own syntax. If you did so, the knowledge of words would extinguish the faculty of speech, and this is what we do when we reason, in our own country’s fashion, on the thoughts of another;—keep these distinct and you can multiply existence as you can multiply languages. Then you can put yourself in the place of a Frenchman or Italian, and will know what, under any given circumstances, he will think or do; this you do not reason upon, and therefore are sure of.

This character of interest scarcely, indeed, presents itself amongst the people of Europe, on the one hand from their close resemblance, and on the other from the extinction of habits and traditional thoughts; but when you get into Spain, there it does present itself to whoever will discriminate it; the word of every peasant is not a reverberation of a proposition, but a record of centuries. To one who feels this, Spain will present the most interesting field of travel in Europe; to one who does not, the most gratifying. An English resident at Gibraltar told me that, by following a certain rule, he found travelling in Spain very agreeable, and recommended it to my adoption. He said, “I always address a Spanish peasant as if he were my equal.” “I do not require,” I replied, “your rule, for I feel myself honoured whenever a Spanish peasant condescends to speak to me.”

There is, however, a rule not only by which to make travelling pleasant, but to make life itself so, and that is, to seek for and see in others only what is good and profitable, in order to correct, or, at least, comprehend, that in ourselves which is useless or faulty; but this is not a rule.

Another weakness is the idea of being able to rate enjoyments or estimate hardships. It is not merely that the hardships and enjoyments are not equal in degree when similar in character, but very often they are reversed. A German coming to England will complain of the misery of hard beds. The English, but twenty years ago, would have made the same complaint: their habit is changed, their enjoyments are changed with them, or their fancied enjoyments are changed.

The climax in the picture which a writer draws of the sufferings of the Spanish nuns, is their having to go about bare-foot. Tell this in Scotland. To myself there cannot be a greater source of annoyance and vexation—there is nothing in which I have a greater sense of astonishment and surprise—than at nations wearing shoes and boots. The whole economy of the feet in Europe is something as disgusting as it is marvellous. We see the poorer orders clogging themselves with heavy shoes out of doors,[106] and the wealthier classes confining their feet and soiling their apartments in doors. Those who have lived in Scotland will understand the first, those who have lived in the East will apprehend the second.