Spanish Life in Town and Country | Page 2

imperfect information and capacity for forming an opinion.
For many years, the foreign element in Spain was so small that all who
made their home in the country were known and easily counted, while
those who travelled were, for the most part, cultivated people--artists,
or lovers of art, or persons interested in some way in the commercial or

industrial progress of the nation. Even in those days, however, too
many tourists spent their time amongst the dead cities, remnants of
Spain's great past, and came back to add their quota to the sentimental
notions current about the romantic land sung by Byron. Wrapped in a
glamour for which their own enthusiasm was mainly responsible, they
beheld all things coloured with the rich glow of a resplendent sunset;
their descriptions of people and places raised expectations too often
cruelly dispelled by facts, as presented to those of less exuberant
imaginations.
[Illustration: PEASANTS]
[Illustration: PEASANTS]
On the other hand, the mere British traveller, knowing nothing of art,
almost nothing of history, and very little of anything beyond his own
provincial parish, finds all that is not the commonplace of his own
country, barbarous and utterly beneath contempt. His own manners, not
generally of the best, set all that is proud and dignified in the lowest
Spaniard in revolt; he imagines that he meets with discourtesy where,
in fact, he has gone out to seek it, and his own ignorance is chiefly to
blame for his failure to understand a people wholly unlike his own class
associates at home. He, too, returns, shaking the dust off his feet, to
draw a picture of the land he has left, as false and misleading as that of
the dreamer who has overloaded his picture with colour that does not
exist for the ordinary tourist. Thus it too often comes to pass that
visitors to Spain experience keen disappointment during their short stay
in the country. Whether they always acknowledge it or not, is another
question. To hit the happy medium, and to draw from a tour in Spain,
or from a more prolonged sojourn there, all the pleasure that may be
derived from it, and to feel with those who, knowing the country and its
people intimately, love it dearly, a remembrance of its past history and
of its strange agglomeration of nationalities is absolutely necessary; nor
can any true idea be formed of the country from a mere acquaintance
with any one of its widely differing provinces. Galicia is, even to-day,
more nearly allied to Portugal than to Spain, and it was only in 1668
that the independence of the former was acknowledged, and it became

a separate kingdom.
With all rights now equalised, the inhabitants of the remaining
provinces of Spain differ as widely from one another as they do from
the sister kingdom, while the folklore of Asturias and of the Basque
Provinces is very closely allied with that of Portugal. To judge the
Biscayan by the same standard as the Andaluz, is as sensible as it
would be to compare the Irish squatter with Cornish fisher-folk, or the
peasants of Wilts and Surrey with the Celtic races of the West
Highlands of Scotland, or even with the people of Lancashire or
Yorkshire.
Nor is it possible to speak of Spain as a whole, and of what she is likely
to make of the present impulse towards national growth and industrial
prosperity, without remembering that her population counts, among its
rapidly increasing numbers, the far-seeing and business-like, if
somewhat selfish, Catalan, with a language of his own; the dreamy,
pleasure-loving Andaluz; the vigorous Basque, whose distinctive
language is not to be learned or understood by the people of any other
part of Spain; the half-Moorish Valencian and the self-respecting
Aragonese, who have always made their mark in the history of their
country, and were looked upon as a foreign element in the days when
their kingdom and that of Leon were united, under one crown, with
Castile. It was only after Alfonso XII. had stamped out the last Carlist
war that the ancient fueros, or special rights, of the Basque Provinces
became a thing of the past, and their people liable to conscription, on a
par with all the other parts of Spain.
Every student of history knows that the era of Spain's greatness was
that of Los Reyes Católicos, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of
Aragon, when the wonderful discovery and opening up of a new world
made her people dizzy with excitement, and seemed to promise steadily
increasing power and influence. Everyone knows that these dreams
were never realised; that, so far from remaining the greatest nation of
the Western World, Spain has gradually sunk back into a condition that
leaves her to-day outside of international politics; and that, with the
loss