These are splendid gifts; it is for the historian to tell how they have been used. Certainly, the people who possess them have never been deficient in natural endowments. They have had their full share of great statesmen, great kings, great magistrates, and great legislators. They have had many able and vigorous rulers; and their history is ennobled by the frequent appearance of courageous and disinterested patriots, who have sacrificed their all that they might help their country. The bravery of the people has never been disputed; while, as to the upper classes, the punctilious honor of a Spanish gentleman has passed into a byword, and circulated through the world. Of the nation generally, the best observers pronounce them to be high-minded, generous, truthful, full of integrity, warm and zealous friends, affectionate in all private relations of life, frank, charitable, and humane. Their sincerity in religious matters is unquestionable; they are, moreover, eminently temperate and frugal. Yet, all these great qualities have availed them nothing, and will avail them nothing so long as they remain ignorant....
In Spain there never has been a revolution,[55] properly so called; there never has even been one grand national rebellion. The people, tho often lawless, are never free. Among them we find still preserved that peculiar taint of barbarism which makes men prefer occasional disobedience to systematic liberty. Certain feelings there are of our common nature, which even their slavish loyalty can not eradicate, and which, from time to time, urge them to resist injustice. Such instincts are happily the inalienable lot of humanity, which we can not forfeit, if we would, and which are too often the last resource against the extravagances of tyranny. And this is all that Spain now possesses. The Spaniards, however, resist, not because they are Spaniards, but because they are men. Still, even while they resist, they revere. While they will rise up against a vexatious impost, they crouch before a system of which the impost is the smallest evil. They smite the tax-gatherer, but fall prostrate at the feet of the contemptible prince for whom the tax-gatherer plies his craft; they will even revile the troublesome and importunate monk, or sometimes they will scoff at the sleek and arrogant priest, while such is their infatuation that they would risk their lives in defense of that cruel Church which has inflicted on them hideous calamities, but to which they still cling, as it it were the dearest object of their affections.
Connected with these habits of mind, and in sooth forming part of them, we find a reverence for antiquity, and an inordinate tenacity of old opinion, old beliefs, and old habits, which remind us of those tropical civilizations which formerly flourished. Such prejudices were once universal, even in Europe; but they began to die out in the sixteenth century, and are now, comparatively speaking, extinct, except in Spain, where they have always been welcomed. In that country, they retain their original force, and produce their natural results. By encouraging the notion that all the truths most important to know are already known, they repress those aspirations, and dull that generous confidence in the future, without which nothing really great can be achieved. A people who regard the past with too wistful an eye will never bestir themselves to help the onward progress. They will hardly believe that progress is possible. To them antiquity is synonymous with wisdom, and every improvement is a dangerous innovation.
In this state Europe lingered for many centuries; in this state Spain still lingers. Hence the Spaniards are remarkable for an inertness, a want of buoyancy, and an absence of hope, which, in our busy and enterprising age, isolate them from the rest of the civilized world. Believing that little can be done, they are in no hurry to do it. Believing that the knowledge they have inherited is far greater than any they can obtain, they wish to preserve their intellectual possessions whole and unimpaired; inasmuch as the least alteration in them might lessen their value. Content with what has been already bequeathed, they are excluded from that great European movement, which, first clearly perceptible in the sixteenth century, has ever since been steadily advancing, unsettling old opinion, destroying old follies, reforming and improving on every side, influencing even such barbarous countries as Russia and Turkey, but leaving Spain unscathed.
While the human intellect has been making most prodigious and unheard-of strides, while discoveries in every quarter are simultaneously pressing upon us and coming in such rapid and bewildering succession that the strongest sight, dazzled by the glare of their splendor, is unable to contemplate them as a whole; while other discoveries still more important, and still more remote from ordinary experience, are manifestly approaching, and may be seen looming in the distance whence they are now obscurely working on the advanced thinkers who are nearest to them, filling their minds with those ill-defined, restless, and almost uneasy feelings, which are the invariable harbingers of future triumph; while the veil is being rudely torn and nature, violated at all points, is forced to disclose her secrets, and reveal her structure, her economy, and her laws to the indomitable energy of man; while Europe is ringing with the noise of intellectual achievements, with which even despotic governments affect to sympathize, in order that they may divert them from their natural course, and use them as new instruments whereby to oppress yet more the liberties of the people; while, amidst this general din and excitement, the public mind, swayed to and fro, is tossed and agitated—Spain sleeps on, untroubled, unheeding, impassive, receiving no impressions from the rest of the world, and making no impressions upon it. There she lies at the further extremity of the Continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole representative now remaining of the feelings and the knowledge of the middle ages, and, what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied with her own condition. Tho she is the most backward country in Europe, she believes herself to be the foremost. She is proud of everything of which she should be ashamed. She is proud of the antiquity of her opinion; proud of her orthodoxy; proud of the strength of her faith; proud of her immeasurable and childish credulity; proud of her unwillingness to amend either her creed or her customs; proud of her hatred of heretics, and proud of the undying vigilance with which she has baffled their efforts to obtain a full and legal establishment on her soil.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] From Volume II, Chapter VIII, of the "History of Civilization in England."
[55] It is here to be borne in mind that Buckle wrote long before the revolutionary successes achieved by Castelar, Prim and Serrano, and the overthrow and exile of Queen Isabella in 1868.