The spectators, so far from encouraging or applauding the competitors, are said to pull them back and generally hinder them from securing the prize.
when he was not a soldier.” I believe that a consideration of this pastoral character of our people would help to explain a great deal of our history and to modify accepted verdicts. At bottom the expulsion of the Moriscos, an industrious people of agriculturists and gardeners, appears to me to have been due to the traditional hatred which those whom I will call Abelites, the spiritual descendants of Abel, the keeper of flocks, bore towards the descendants of Cain, the tiller of the ground, who killed his brother. For the Hebrew legend of Cain and Abel presents one of the most profound intuitions of the beginnings of human history.
And what is the cure for this individualism? The first thing is to see whether it is an evil, and if it appears to be one, to see if it may not be converted into a good, for it is evident that vices and virtues proceed from the same stock and a single passion may be turned either to good or to evil.
The exigences of life in past ages made our remote ancestors herdsmen; being herdsmen, they acquired all the qualities that pastoral life tends to develop—they were idlers, they were wanderers, and they were disunited. The lapse of time, civilized and urban life, the necessities imposed by industrial and commercial competition—progress, in short—will modify this basal character. Can this process be accelerated, and by what means?—But that is another question.
SOME ARBITRARY REFLECTIONS UPON EUROPEANIZATION
It is a not unprofitable task to examine the national consciousness by examining ourselves and to ask ourselves as Spaniards what there is of intrinsic and permanent worth in most of these schemes for our national regeneration which almost all of us are discussing nowadays, some more insistently than others.
All those things which are being demanded and which almost all of us have demanded on behalf of our people, with a greater or less degree of comprehension of what these demands mean, may be summed up in two terms—European and modern. “We must be modern,” “we must be European,” “we must modernize ourselves,” “we must go with the century,” “we must Europeanize ourselves”—such are the watchwords of the hour.
The term European expresses a vague idea, very vague, excessively vague; but much vaguer is the idea that is expressed by the term modern. If we combine the two together it would seem that they ought to limit one another and result in something concrete, and that the expression “modern European” ought to be clearer than either of its two component terms; but perhaps it is really vaguer still.
It will be apparent that I am proceeding by way of what some would call arbitrary statement, without documentation, without verification, independent of modern European logic and disdainful of its methods. Perhaps. I seek no other method than the method of passion; and when I am moved with disgust, with repugnance, with pity or with contempt, I let the mouth speak from the fullness of the heart and the words come forth as they will.