Spaniards

“ How sad it seems that Spain has not sufficient energy to rehabilitate her own excellent handiwork! An Englishman who travelled in the Peninsula in 1810 wrote: “The Spaniards are brave, acute, patient, and faithful, but all their characteristics are insulated, all their exertions are individual. They have no idea of combining, either publicly or privately, in a manner to call forth their respective talents and render every one useful to the common cause. The Germans may be said to combine too much and the Spaniards not at all.” ”

“ The march of the Spaniards was now a continued triumph. No longer compelled to fight their way on, they had time to enjoy the rich and varied scenery, to scale the mountain, explore the caverns and ravines of the sierras, and the craters of the volcanoes, and show to the admiring natives, by their agility and love of adventure, that fighting and conquest had neither tamed their spirits, nor exhausted their physical powers. As they advanced, they were continually surprised and delighted with the growing evidences of civilization and high prosperity which met them on every side. ”

“ And this is the tragedy of Spain to-day—a great-hearted people in the toils of civilization. In Pérez Galdós’ “El Caballero Encantado,” the spirit of Spain thus addresses one of her sons: “The capital defect of the Spaniards of your time is that you live exclusively the life of words, and the language is so beautiful that the delight in the sweet sound of it woos you to sleep. You speak too much; you lavish without stint a wealth of phrases to conceal the poverty of your actions.” ”

“ Two Spaniards can drive fifty Indians before them, but I hear that a dozen of these Englishmen can take a ship with a hundred Spaniards on board. It is wonderful. They look something like our oppressors, but they are fairer, and their eyes are blue; and they look honest, and have not that air of pride, and arrogance, which the Spaniard never lays aside. ”

“ A scientist of repute, his voice choking with grief and wrath, declared to us that the fetters of superstition had become hopelessly riveted, during these ages of Church control, on the Spanish mind. But call it what you will, devotion or superstition, and admitting, as the tourist must, that it is a most conspicuous and impressive feature of Spanish life, there are nevertheless thousands of Spaniards, especially the younger men, over whom it has lost sway. ”

“ And thenceforth they were to be under the loving care of the priests, and the cherished children of the King of Spain; in return for which they were only called upon to give the priests and soldiers all their property, all their gold, all their handsome maidens, all their strong young men. The Spaniards had found them freemen, living happily in their primitive villages in the forest; they left them slaves, stripped of all possessions, bleeding from a thousand wounds, and lamenting a thousand deaths. ”

“ The Spaniards landed, and held their own by cruelty, oppression, and rapine, no doubt. We, with all our enlightenment, have followed their example pretty faithfully; except that, for men like the saintly Las Casas, we despatched an agent that worked a speedy conversion—fire-water. We have taken root here and grown up, and are a great nation, spreading out in all directions, wealthy, prosperous, enlightened, with civilization at our finger-ends, and Bibles willy-nilly in every one of our schools. Yes, we are a decided improvement on the Spaniards. ”

“ The land of Spain, bountifully blessed by Nature, still holds a people grovelling in the dust of ignorance and superstition. At that time it is difficult to overstate, though not to believe, the utter detestation in which the Spaniards were held by all true-hearted Englishmen, and in which the Portugals over whom they held sway had to share. ”

“ Thus the course of Spanish literature proceeded, animated and controlled by the national character, to the end of the fifteenth century.
In the sixteenth, the original genius of the Spaniards, and their proud consciousness of national greatness, contributed to the maintenance and improvement of their literature in the face of the Inquisition itself. Released by the conquest of Granada (1492) from the presence of internal foes, prosperous at home and powerful abroad, Spain naturally rose to high mental dignity ”

“ The Spaniards have had everything except knowledge. They have had immense wealth, and fertile and well-peopled territories in all parts of the globe. Their own country, washed by the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and possest of excellent harbors, is admirably situated for the purposes of trade between Europe and America, being so placed as to command the commerce of both hemispheres. ”

“ The Spaniards have been so busy keeping the East out of the West, fighting the battles of other nations, keeping those wretched Bourbons on the thrones of Italy where they were not wanted, opening up the New World and making Spanish America, that they have neglected Spain. ”

“ These pampered sons of Spain, many of whom had been petted and nourished in mansions and in palaces of luxury, had daily to fight for their lives on the invaded territory of the red man, who would engage the Spaniards at points of the greatest advantage to themselves, and who enjoyed every possible advantage because of their familiarity with the surroundings. ”

“ In Spain, however, time has effaced, or greatly weakened, the remembrance of many reverses, whilst slight and dubious successes, carefully treasured up, have swollen by the keeping into mighty victories; and at the present day, foreigners who should be so uncourteous and impolitic as to express, in the hearing of Spaniards, a doubt that Spanish valour was the main agent in driving the French from the Peninsula, might reckon, not on a stab—knifeing being less in vogue beyond the Bay of Biscay than is often imagined—but certainly on a scowl, and probably on an angry contradiction. ”

“ This then was Spain and Spanish character, as nearly as I have been able to picture them in the short space allotted, at or prior to the dawn of the sixteenth century. We have found Spaniards the noblest race on earth at that time; their men brave, their women modest. Before them opened a career more brilliant than the world has ever seen before or since. To follow them in some parts of that career is the purpose of these volumes. ”

“ In general, the Spaniards grow angry on being spoken to of cachuchas, castanets, majos, manolas, monks, smugglers, and bull-fights, though they have, in reality, a great liking for all these things, so truly national and characteristic. They ask you, with an air of apparent vexation, if you do not think that they are as far advanced in civilization as yourself? ”

“ All the Spaniards here long and yearn for Spain, and everything Spanish, which is only natural, I suppose. They hate the Archipelago, as they call it, but confess that the prospect of continuing to earn a living here ties them by the leg. ”

“ At the present time, in which there seems to have been born into the world a new assertion and exaltation of nationality, Spaniards have regained their ancient spirit, and while aspiring to absolute modernity, remain faithful to a tradition which is peculiarly their own, which makes for national individuality, and has caused them to be regarded with that interest which always accrues to the original, the characteristic, the intelligent, and consequently arouses attention and anticipation. ”

“ Then as the Spaniards, exemplifying the military superiority of the feudal over the sultanic form of social organization, proceeded steadily to recover dominion over the land, the industrious Moors, instead of migrating backward before the advance of their conquerors, remained at home and submitted to them. Thus Spanish society became compounded of two distinct castes,—the Moorish Spaniards, who were skilled labourers, and the Gothic Spaniards, by whom all labour, crude or skilful, was deemed the stigma of a conquered race, and unworthy the attention of respectable people. ”

“ The dark places of the earth are full of cruelty!” Like the natives of Ethiopia, the courteous Spaniards are “much pleased at your condescensions;” but they too have a sense of humour, and note with amusement the ignorance of nations which declare that Spain’s chief need is more education and culture. ”

“ The surprizing success of the Spaniards, in reducing so many fine islands, and such extensive, rich, and fruitful countries under their dominion in so short a time, has occasioned many authors to conceive that they must have conducted their affairs with extraordinary prudence, and with that steadiness of character for which their nation has always been remarkable. ”

“ Spaniards of culture who travelled, or who were sent abroad on missions, returned with enlarged horizons of thought, and could not but compare the backwardness of their native land with the activity, for good or for evil, of the other European nations. The more the writings of the fashionable philosophers of France were denounced, the greater became the curiosity to examine them. ”

“ The Spanish are a people of immense and abiding energy, [25] but their energy is often dormant or misdirected. Two Spaniards in the twentieth century have been seen to converse with so fierce an intensity that it seemed over and over again in the course of a protracted and loud discussion that they must come from words to blows; and the matter in dispute, conducted with a heat that would have exhausted less energetic natures, was whether it was right or wrong to expel the Moriscos from Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century. ”

“ Yet it is not certain that the Spanish can be called unpractical; they are often idle, indifferent, aloof from the events of daily life, but when a matter truly interests them, they would seem to be sufficiently shrewd and practical. King James I. of Aragon aimed an accusation at the Castilians which has often been applied to all Spaniards: “You do nothing without extravagance. [26] ” But a fundamental ingredient of Spanish{32} character is realism and clear vision; it is their birthright of transparent subtle air and unclouded skies. ”

“ The people, the first shedders of European blood in New Spain, and apparently ferocious and sanguinary, readily yielded to the Spaniards, quickly embraced the religion of the usurpers, and settled down to the cultivation of the arts of peace. ”

“ Although Spaniards have established themselves in Spanish America, even in the tropics, the evils of Spanish rule have largely arisen from the fact that Spaniards have gone to the colonies as adventurers, eager to make fortunes as quickly as possible, that they might return to Spain to enjoy them. ”

“ Besides, the Spaniards have always managed the state for themselves, and separately from the natives of the land—disdaining to give them a share in any matter of honor or profit, but remaining always foreigners and aliens, and even objects of dread, to the natives. For when some of the Spaniards die, or return to Spain, others come anew, who are always strangers to the people of the country and regard the natives as barbarians. ”

“ Owing to this, the Spaniards were greatly esteemed, and even reputed as gods, so that the people offered them no injury, and even gave them such things as they had. By these means, they passed through many countries, and many strange nations, differing from each other in language, customs, and dress, and came at length among a people that lived continually among their flocks and herds, like the Arabs. ”

“ The people of both countries exhibit a similar excitable, ardent quality in their characters; but the national temperament of the Spaniards is, perhaps, somewhat hardier, more virile, and sturdier in its passionateness. ”

“ Here half the men were left to guard their vessels and canoes. With the remainder the terrible journey across the rock-ribbed and forest-covered isthmus was begun.
No sooner had the Spaniards left the coast than troubles and perils thickened around them. The country was difficult to traverse, the people were bold and hostile. With their poisoned arrows they proved no feeble antagonists. As the adventurers left the plain and toiled up the mountains, a warlike cacique, with a large body of followers, met them in a narrow pass and boldly disputed the way. ”

“ The upper classes betray a marked Spanish origin, both in their appearance and speech, and are a little better educated; but most of the people of real Spanish descent were killed during the war, and few, if any, remain to-day who can boast a purely European origin, excepting always the small number of foreigners, English, Italians, Germans, Portuguese, and Spaniards, who have found their way into the country during the last century, and settled there, and those who continue to flow in year after year from many climes, making their new homes in this beautiful country. ”

“ The Spaniards are like other men; they are no gods as the ignorant imagine, and the creatures on which they ride are not demons but beasts of burden, such as are used for many purposes in the land where I was born. The Spaniards are men I say, and do not men hunger and thirst? Cannot men be worn out by want of sleep, and be killed in many ways? Are not these Teules already weary to the death? This then is my word of comfort to you. Cease to attack the Spaniards and invest their camp so closely that no food can reach them and their allies the Tlascalans. ”