Basque Country

“ For it is one of the charms of the Basque land that the houses are scattered all over the face of the country, instead of being collected into crowded villages; and it is, perhaps, to this fact chiefly that we owe the preservation of so much old-world lore, and of primitive ideas, among this people. ”

“ To my mother, Biarritz was a complete restorative, and she was able there to take up her drawing again, to enjoy seeing friends, and to enter into the interests and peculiarities of the curious Basque country.
BIARRITZ. [263]
We visited many of the Basque churches, which are always encircled within by three galleries, except over the altar. These galleries are of black oak. The men sit in the galleries, and the women below, and they enter at different doors. In the churchyards the graves have all little crosses or Basque head-stones with round tops, and they are all planted with flowers. ”

“ The Basque country consists of several provinces on both sides of the Pyrenees bordering on the Bay of Biscay. Labourd, Soule, and Lower Navarre are now in the department of the Basses-Pyrenees, on the French side. The two provinces of Biscay and Guipuzcoa—a part of Alava and of Upper Navarre—belong to Spain. The whole Basque population cannot be more than 500,000. The people, as we have had a proof of, are proud of their ancient nationality ”

“ So the act of the 3rd of June 1876, which assimilated the Basque Provinces to the rest of Spain, acknowledged the true self-government which they had enjoyed for centuries.
The circumstances and methods which enabled the Basques to preserve this independence were, first, the isolation caused by their peculiar language; next, the mountainous and easily-defended nature of the country, its comparative poverty and the possession of a sea-board. Then there were the rights and the safeguards which the fueros themselves gave against encroachments. ”

“ M. Martin recoiled: "No man who ever did live, or will live, could learn a word of that infernal jargon, if he were not a born Basque. Learn Basque, indeed!—Mon Dieu, monsieur! Don't you know that the Devil once tried, and was obliged to give it up for a bad job? I don't know why he wanted to learn Basque, unless it were to talk to the fellows who went to him from that part of the country ”

“ They are very clannish, and at Madrid and elsewhere have founded “Patriotic Societies,” but in spite of these they soon become merged with the rest of the population. The few towns are principally inhabited by strangers, for the Basques prefer a country life. Their homesteads are scattered over hill-slopes and through the valleys, and beneath the oaks in front of them the inmates meet after the day’s labour to pass their time in music and dancing.
Bilbao, the largest town of the Basque provinces, has at all times proved a rival of Valencia, Santander, and Cádiz. ”

“ Basque Poetry.
[Contents] I.—Pastorales. Perhaps there is no people among whom versification is so common, and among whom really high-class poetry is so rare, as among the Basques. The faculty of rhyming and of improvisation in verse is constantly to be met with. Not unusually a traveller in one of the country diligences, especially on a market-day, will be annoyed by the persistent crooning of one of the company, like Horace of old, more or less under the inspiration of Bacchus ”

“ The Basques are a people of great interest to the ethnologist, as the last shrunken remains of that Iberian race that once occupied all Western Europe from Scotland to Portugal and Spain, and, indeed, overleaped the Straits and spread as Kabyles and Berbers in Northern Africa. Although overlapped by other races this Basque element forms the main constituent of the French race in the south-west.
Every cook knows what "stock" is. ”

“ The expression “of old” is common on the lips of both French and Spanish Basques; [69] they willingly praise the past, and are intensely conservative of all their customs, their immemorial language, their games, privileges, religion. The ox-carts, with wheels of solid wood, to be seen under the vine-trellises of Basque farms, seem as old as the withered trunk of the oak of Guernica, and similarly many ancient customs have been retained. In some parts, at funerals, the men wear long cloaks reaching to the feet, the women also wearing long, full cloaks with hoods, that completely hide the face. ”

“ What little literature there is in the Basque language is naturally of the popular cast—hero songs, dancing songs, dirges, hymns, and folk-lore.
The Basques are noted for their passionate love of liberty. The sturdy peasant is lord of his own rugged farm, and insists on tilling it in his own primitive way, breaking the soil with 366 rude mattock more often than with plough. An English engineer, laying a railroad through Alava, tried his best to make his men abandon their slow, laborious method of carrying the earth in baskets on their heads. ”

“ Character.—The most marked features in the Basque character are an intense self-respect, a pride of race and an obstinate conservatism. Much has been written in ridicule of the claim of all Basques to be noble, but it was a fact both in the laws of Spain, in the fueros and in practice. Every Basque freeholder (vecino) could prove himself noble and thus eligible to any office. They are not a town race; a Basque village consists of a few houses; the population lives in scattered habitations. They do not fear solitude, and this makes them excellent emigrants and missionaries. ”

“ While thus the Spanish Basques have, even under allegiance, held stoutly to the right of virtual self-government, their brethren north of the Pyrenees long preserved a still fuller autonomy, only coming into the national fold of France under the impetus of the Revolution.
Thus the Basques have a stiff record of independence; it keeps them in no little esteem, both with themselves and with their neighbors. Trains, travel, traffic, eat into their solidarity, and may in time disintegrate it; but a Basque has not yet lost a particle of his pride of clan ”

“ Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa are, with Barcelona and Pontevedra, the most densely populated provinces in Spain. The Basques have a genius for administration which is not to be found in other parts of the Peninsula. Their excellent roads and cleanly kept towns form a striking contrast. They have a true love of local independence, and in the eighteenth century we find two Basque frontier villages, Vera and Sare, styling themselves in a treaty the “two Republics.” ”

“ Everything presages the speedy extinction of the Escuara or Euscara, which is the name given to the Basque by those who speak it. The word, apparently, means merely “manner of speaking.” All people have, in a greater or less degree, the pretension which caused the Greeks to treat all foreigners as barbarians—that is, as not properly-speaking men.
Prince L. L. Bonaparte reckons the actual number of the Basques, not including emigrants established in Mexico, at Monte Video, and at Buenos Ayres, at 800,000, of whom 660,000 are in Spain, and 140,000 in France. ”

“ The language of the Basques bears no resemblance to any of the Indo-European, nor indeed to any known tongue. It is so difficult, so intricate in construction, that only those who learn it in infancy can ever master it. It is said that, in Basque, "you spell Solomon, and pronounce it Nebuchadnezzar." Its antiquity is so great that one legend calls it the "language of the angels," and another says that Tubal brought it to Spain before the lingual disaster at Babel! ”

“ In the first place I will remark that, supposing this proved, the Basques, or, if you will, the Iberians, would not be the less isolated; for how could the Iberian, any more than the Basque, be allied to the Keltic or to the Carthaginian? But this Iberian theory is not yet at all proved, and it will be easy to show it to be so in a few words. It reposes first of all on the following à priori—the Iberians have occupied all Spain and the south of Gaul, but the Escuara lives still at the foot of the Pyrénées; therefore the Escuara is a remnant of the language of the Iberians. ”

“ The German, for one, indulges in such with notorious yet unrebuked frequency. One is naturally startled at encountering in Basque such imbrications as Izarysaroyarenlarrearenbarena, or Ardanzesaroyareniturricoburua, which are actual names of places in Spanish Basque-land; but they are mercifully rare, and when analyzed prove to be rational and even poetic formations, laden with a full equivalent of import,—the first of the above two signifying "the centre of the field of the mountain of the star," and the second, "the summit of the fountain of the mountain of the vine." ”

“ When the old self-sufficient village industries declined, in consequence of the invention of machinery and manufacture elsewhere, the Basques entered at once upon emigration to the agricultural parts of the Americas, and the result has been that the Basque Provinces and the Pays Basque probably have never been more prosperous than they are now, and perhaps a new Eskual-herria and a new Eskuara are being built up in the distant lands to which they are such valued immigrants. ”

“ Sebastian, and Vittoria; the natives differ considerably from the rest of the Spaniards in race, language, and customs. See Basques.
Basque Roads, an anchorage between the Isle of Oléron and the mainland; famous for a naval victory gained in 1809 over a French fleet under Vice-Admiral Allemand.
Basques, a people of the Western Pyrenees, partly in France and partly in Spain; distinguished from their neighbours only by their speech, which is non-Aryan; a superstitious people, conservative, irascible, ardent, proud, serious in their religious convictions, and pure in their moral conduct. ”

“ One peculiarity of the Basque, and especially of the Tartaro legends, is that the hero of them is so often a madman, an idiot, or a fool. If we can trust our memory, the case is the same in the Slavonic representatives of Odysseus.3 But the Basques seem to dwell upon and to repeat the idea in a peculiar way; they ring the changes on all states, from the wild madman, like the Scandinavian Berserker, through the idiot and fool, to the mere blockhead and ninny. ”

“ But, like all women trained to severe manual labour, their beauty disappears with their youth.
In these provinces of mountain and valley everybody works; and, for the most part, they work their own land. Consequently, Basque farms are small. Five acres, or in other words, just so much land as a man, his wife and family can till, dictates the size of the holding. The Basques, who are the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain, and claim to be the oldest race in Europe, are grievously affected by genealogy. ”

“ Of the three Spanish-Basque provinces, Guipúzcoa (capital San Sebastián) alone is entirely Basque. At Bilbao, the capital of Vizcaya, no Basque is spoken; and long before reaching Vitoria, the capital of Alava, the language spoken is Castilian. Nor is Basque spoken at Pamplona, the capital of Navarre, though it reaches almost to its walls, and till quite recently had a wider extension in Navarre, names of places such as Mendigorria (“red mountain”) surviving. ”

“ And if it be alleged that poets like these are rare, even among people far more numerous and more cultivated, the Basques still fall short, when measured by a much lower standard. They have no poets to rival the Gascon, Jasmin, or to compare with the Provençal or the Catalan singers at the other end of the Pyrenean chain. There is no modern Basque song which can be placed by the side of “Le Demiselle” and others of the Biarritz poet, Justin Larrebat; and among the older poets neither Dechepare nor Oyhenart is equal to the Béarnais, Despourrins. ”

“ BASQUES, a people inhabiting the three Basque Provinces—Biscay, Álava and Guipúzcoa—and Navarre in Spain, and the arrondissement of Bayonne and Mauléon in France. The number of those who can be considered in any sense pure Basques is probably about 600,000 in Europe, with perhaps 100,000 emigrants in the Americas, chiefly in the region of La Plata in South America. The word Basques is historically derived from Vascones, which, written Wascones, has also given the name Gascons to a very different race. ”

“ The Basques, moreover, in this respect, present some curious points for study. “In the valley of Roncal the men speak Spanish together; with the women they speak Basque, as do the women to each other. A similar state of things is to be observed at Ochagavia in Salazar. But this custom is not observed in the Roncalese villages of Uztarroz and Isaba, where the men among themselves speak indifferently Basque or Spanish.” (Prince L. L. Bonaparte, “Etudes sur les Dialects d’Aezcoa,” &c., p. 3) . ”

“ They don’t want to be hustled by a crowd of townsfolk, whose ways are not their ways, and who speak a foreign language. Even the rich ‘Americans,’ whose splendid châteaux dot the hills, are crying out. They are Basque to the backbone, and they don’t want excursionists gaping about their grounds, and driving over them in their winding, tree-shaded roadways.
But I must not go Basque-mad, and imagine everyone is as interested in the people as I am. Let us return to modern civilization, and go to Biarritz. My coachman drives me there from Bayonne. He is a beautiful creature, my coachman. ”

“ Our translations are literal to baldness; the only liberty we have taken is in softening down the exceeding directness and grossness of some portions. Not one tale is in the least licentious—but the Basque language calls a spade a spade, and not an implement of husbandry.4 The Carlist war of the last four years has prevented our getting any legends from the Spanish Basque provinces, and has even to some extent hindered our work in the French Pays Basque, by providing an almost exclusive object of interest. ”