/*bootstrap*/ My Maugham Collection Concordance Library: Don Fernando – IX

Don Fernando – IX

Non-Fiction > Don Fernando >


Though the sun might never set on the Spanish King's dominions and his fleets brought from the Indies year after year precious metals that to the imagination of the time appeared of fantastic value, his chosen people suffered from hunger. To get not enough to eat, but enough to prevent them from dying of starvation, was their constant preoccupation. Half the dull rogueries that the picaroons committed were to get food to put in their bellies. The monasteries daily provided all corners with a dish of soup and to get this thieves and students, beggars, soldiers and artisans waited patiently at their gates. The famished scholar and the starveling gentleman were stock figures of fun. When a gallant wanted to show his appreciation of his lady's charm he sent her food, not chocolates like the lover of to-day, but sausages and a ham, a pasty and a brace of capons. Far from offending her delicacy such a present was accepted with eagerness.

But this did not impair their cheerfulness. They were perfectly ready to make a joke of an empty belly and they could have a good time on dry bread, an onion and a drink of water: a gay and laughter-loving people, passionately addicted to amusement. I have told already how fond they were of the theatre. Beside this they had bull-fights, public shows and religious processions. A festival of the church was a public holiday. Then the house-fronts were decorated with bright hangings, women, young and old, thronged the balconies and the chattering, vivacious crowd surged in the streets. They never tired of going on little excursions to the Prado Madrid or to the Alameda de Hércules in Seville. Men of quality went on horseback and the women, in all their bravery, their faces white with powder and their cheeks vermilion with cinnabar, on foot or by carriage. Then if no gallant accompanied them they were ready enough to enter upon a flirtatious contest of wits with a stranger. They did not hesitate to ask him to buy them oranges, sweets and other kickshaws from the wandering vendors. At sunset they ate the supper they had brought with them. All classes frequented these cool and pleasant places; the artisan with his wife and children picnicked happily in the immediate neighbourhood of the fine lady with her duenna and attendant swains. They relished back-chat and a gift for repartee made a man famous. Wherever people assembled, they amused themselves with the thrust and parry of persiflage. A woman was admired if she had a sharp reply to a wanton jest and you were sure of the applause of the crowd if you managed to make an inoffensive stranger look a fool.

It was the same spirit that made them take so much delight in practical jokes. This lamentable form of humour was of course practised at that time throughout Europe, but I think it was nowhere more prevalent than in Spain. The soil was favourable. The jokes played were coarse and brutal. Their aim was to subject the victim to an intolerable humiliation and since the Spaniard's honour meant so much to him he was more than others susceptible to the shame that was put upon him. People who read Don Quixote are outraged at the cruel game that is made of the gentle, crazy knight and indeed but for the enchanting conversations between master and man it would be hard to read the book now without distress. But to the readers of Cervantes' day these pranks were matter for uproarious mirth. They are at all events less foul than many you find in the masterpieces of picaresque literature. In Quevedo's El Buscon (a repository of practical jokes) an incident is related that is significant of the manners of the day. When the hero (a proper rascal certainly) went to study at Alcalá de Henares and, as was not unusual, to keep himself, acted as servant to a richer undergraduate, on going for the first time to the university he was surrounded by the students who with jeers and mocking laughter spat on him from head to foot till face and clothes were white as snow with spittle. In all the books I have read I do not remember more than one such jest that has brought a smile to my lips. For its rarity I will narrate it.

A serving-man, waiting for his master at the city gate of Guadalajara, saw a funeral procession approach. Half a dozen priests, solemnly chanting, four friars and a number of mourners. He called to them with a loud voice to stop. More surprised by the novelty of the occasion than impressed by his appearance they did so, and one of the priests asked him what he wanted.

'Who is the deceased?' he asked.

'If it matters to you could you not have asked while we were going rather than stop us?'

He insisted that it was important for them to stay and tell him what he wished to know. They answered him:

'The deceased is a weaver called Juan de Paracuellos. He died in four days from kidney trouble. He leaves a wife, young and poor, called Maria de la O, and three children of whom the eldest is not six. Now of what importance is it that you should have this tiresome information?'

One of the dead man's two brothers who were following the bier told them to go on.

'Stop, I repeat,' cried the joker. 'And you, defunct weaver, by the power and virtue of my charmed words, I order you to rise hale and hearty and return to the tangled making of your stuffs.'

They all marvelled to hear this mysterious exorcism and put the bier down on the ground. Attracted by the noise the neighbours, men, women and children, crowded round.

'For the second time,' he went on, 'I command you, obstinate corpse, to rise hale and hearty and return to finish the cloth that you had begun.'

None of those present could make up his mind whether this was a madman or a wizard who in the sight of all dared to make so strange a charge. Neither his face nor his habit suggested the saint. They paused. They stared, without so much as batting an eyelash, at the dead man, and the joker raising his voice still more cried out once again:

'For the third and last time of asking, I order you, dead weaver, to rise good and proper and return to wield the shuttle which is the means of livelihood of your family.'

The disobedient corpse did not stir; whereupon the rogue said:

'Pass on, gentlemen, and proceed with the funeral, for I give you my word that the same thing has happened to me twice with two dead men at Toledo and Ocana, and neither of them would be resuscitated. And pardon me for having detained you.'

Having said this he took to his heels followed by the enraged populace. He took refuge in a monastery and having told the monks what had happened they were so much amused that they helped him to get safely away.

This story is told by Tirso de Molina in a tedious book called Las Cigarrales de Toledo.

But for all this brutality the Spaniards in their mutual intercourse preserved the forms of scrupulous politeness. Ceremonial phrases were part and parcel of ordinary conversation. It was no more than civil to say 'I kiss your mercy's hands,' or 'I put myself at your mercy's feet.' The Habsburg dynasty had brought with it a passion for titles and their possessors addressed one another by them with great punctiliousness. Common and gentle alike set great store on purity of descent and well they might since a trace of Jewish or Moorish blood brought with it all manner of disabilities. They were enraptured with their own nobility and both men and women seldom told you the story of their lives (an inveterate habit of theirs) without stating from what eminent families they issued. In one play, Lope's El Premio del Bien Hablar, the heroine, knowing that her suitor wants something to read, sends him her family tree to show him that her extraction is no less aristocratic than his. Lope, whose father was an embroiderer, claimed descent from a noble family of Asturias, and even the wise Cervantes, the son of a surgeon-barber who wandered from town to town cupping and blistering his patients, laid claim without justification to the distinguished name of Saavedra. In passing I may mention an incident that I came across in a life of Solorzano, a voluminous writer of picaresque stories. He was for some time secretary to the Conde de Benavente, a famous Viceroy of Naples, and the king desiring to reward his services at no expense to himself granted him a title with the right to sell it. He disposed of it, doubtless at a good price, to a certain Vicencio Antoniani, a native of Gaeta. It has occurred to me that this is a practice that might very well be followed at the present day: the needy servant of the state might thus be spared financial anxiety in his old age at no cost to the tax-payer and many a prosperous merchant or lucky broker might honourably join the ranks of the aristocracy.

Van Aarssens, the Dutch traveller, says that the streets of Madrid were large, but foul and stinking. 'They which calculate all the ordures cast into them say they are daily perfumed by above a hundred thousand close-stools.' Everyone threw his slops out of window, though if he were law-abiding only from ten at night till day-break, and this custom also gave occasion for practical jokes that were much appreciated. This inconvenience, however, would hardly have struck the young man whose adventures in Spain were occupying my fancy, for whether he came from Edinburgh or London he would have been familiar with it. The streets were lit at night only by the lamps that burned before the various images. They were far from safe. You ran the danger of being set upon by a band of ruffians who might leave you dead and stripped of everything that you had on you. If a gentleman had a grudge against another he did not hesitate to have him waylaid by hired assassins and stabbed to death. For the point of honour did not make the unreasonable demand that you should risk your own skin to dispose of an enemy when you could pay others to do the job for you. Nor did the path of courtship run without hazard. Women in theory lived in a seclusion almost as great as in Moorish times, the windows on the street were few and protected by the reja, the grille, typical of Spain, on which the ironworkers of the period lavished such charming invention; and from behind them they exchanged at night pleasant conceits with their admirers. But the gallant was so jealous, and so arrogant, that often he would not even suffer another in the same street and swords were drawn to decide which should remain. Sometimes a stern parent or a punctilious brother would issue from the house and at the rapier's point drive away the unwelcome suitor.

I have already mentioned the fact that love was an affection that seized upon its victims at first sight. In men and women equally (at least in plays and novels) a glance, a comely shape seen in passing, could excite a paroxysm of passion. So ardent was it that even early in the morning, and the dawn was the signal for them to rise, its power engrossed them. I think I am not wrong in saying that in our day, on the other hand, the passion misnamed tender has a very small hold on the lover till the first cocktail has brought its solace and its violence can be held within the bounds of common sense till after business hours. In Spain they loved twenty-four hours a day. They were a race who spoke naturally in an exaggerated fashion, and when we would say, 'What a bore,' they would cry, 'Is there in the whole world a more unhappy man than I?' I have already related in what terms the rude soldier Miguel de Castro referred to his beloved. The Spanish lover snatched down the moon from heaven to lay at his lady's feet; the sun was dragged in by his flaming hair; he ransacked classical mythology to prove the extravagance of his desire and the animal and vegetable kingdoms only just sufficed to provide him with metaphors. It was a love the aim of which was marriage, especially when the lady's birth and fortune were of a satisfactory nature, but whether this was due to the censorship of the Inquisition or the Spaniard's innate desire for domesticity I do not know.

But the love that enflamed these hot-blooded people, notwithstanding their romantic professions, was very honestly, without pretences on one side or the other, rooted in sexual desire. Marriage was but the necessary prelude to the nuptial couch. But men being what they were and women healthily eager to share their pleasure, the marriage ceremony was often anticipated and then it was difficult to induce the gallant to fulfil his promises. On the Spanish stage there is a long procession of high-born ladies mourning their lost honour and through three acts pursuing the faithless lover with entreaties or threats of vengeance. The stage rings with their appeals for justice. They do not attempt to conceal their shame, but lament it vociferously in every kind of metrical form. It must be admitted that when the unwilling swain is obliged, willy-nilly, to redeem his pledge he does so with a good grace and the spectator is left with the consoling assurance that the couple will live happily ever after.

Considering their obstinate persuasion that in their virginity they possess a pearl of great price, the female characters of the Spanish drama are astonishingly careless about it. The dangers that attend its loss are constantly before their eyes. Not only may the ravisher leave them in the lurch, but their fathers and brothers may think that only their death can cleanse the blot on their escutcheon. In El Alcalde de Zalamea, when Isabel has been abducted by soldiers and ravished by their captain, her brother, though but a peasant's son, is only prevented from plunging his dagger in her heart by the opportune appearance of their father. She, poor thing, though in no way to blame, looks upon death as no more than her due. When she finds her father tied to a tree she will not unloose him, convinced that he will kill her before she has said her say, till in melodious numbers she has given him a circumstantial account of the outrage that has been inflicted on her. Her father however decides that it will do if she enters a convent. As the bride of Jesus Christ, he remarks with brutal common sense, she chooses a husband who is not fussy over quality. But notwithstanding these hazards the feckless creatures continue to exhibit an extreme want of prudence. They are more negligent of that article of virtue, their maidenhead, than ever an actress of our day of a heavily insured string of pearls.

In this connection it is instructive to examine a play called El Burlador de Sevilla which has made some stir in the world. It is by Gabriel Tellez, a Mercenarian monk who wrote under the name of Tirso de Molina; and I may remark in passing that he managed the affairs of his order and performed his religious duties in an exemplary manner. It must be one of the worst plays that was ever written. The Spanish dramatists, perhaps rightly, never bothered themselves much with rules, but few plays can ever have run their course in so happy-go-lucky a fashion as does this one. It is monstrously incoherent. Scenes follow one another with no sequence. Probability is flouted. Peasants indulge in conceits that would have surprised even the cultured Euphues. None of the persons behaves with elementary common sense. The characters are perfectly conventional. Nowadays when a play is badly constructed, when its people act without rhyme or reason, and loose ends are left lying about all over the place, we sit up and say it has atmosphere. I suppose one might say of El Burlador de Sevilla that it had the same vague quality. It has certainly a strange, sinister life. One cannot, however, read it without being astonished that such a clumsy piece of work should have had such a remarkable destiny. Innumerable versions have been made of it. It has inspired poets and painters, sculptors and composers. For it is in this play that Don Juan first made his bow before a world that has never since been tired of gazing at him. It proves, I suppose, that you may write as badly as you like, and do your job as ill as it can be done, if you chance to create a type he will go marching down the ages to the end of time. You gave him life and he holds you for ever in the remembrance of men. It is the best fortune that can ever happen to an author.

Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Don Juan Tenorio are all three immortal.

It is curious to compare the Don Juan of this play with the Don Juan that posterity has little by little constructed. But first of all let it be noted that the episode of the statue coming to supper has been a great stumbling-block. Authors in fact have found him (or it) the very devil to deal with. After his entrance, which cannot fail to be dramatic, they have none of them quite known what to do with him. Tirso de Molina made a greater hash of it than any of his successors. The statue comes to supper with Don Juan and then Don Juan goes to supper with him. By making two scenes when only one was necessary the dramatist has lamentably weakened his effect. But it was this incident that gave him the idea for his play and through its course he was bound to work up to it. He invented the character of Don Juan to fit it. Tirso de Molina is not the only playwright whose imagination has been excited by a dramatic incident and when he came to write his play found that the character he had devised to act it made the incident nonsensical. Don Juan lives in despite of the paltry intrigue and the grotesque catastrophe. Later generations have represented him as a great lover, passionate but inconstant, and it was inevitable that some should have seen in his unsatisfied desire an allegory of life. Others have looked upon his fickleness as a symbol of man's restless seeking for the ideal. Some have thought that he passed from one earthly love to another in desperate pursuit of that heavenly love of which Plato wrote. But Tirso called his play El Burlador de Sevilla, The Joker of Seville. His Don Juan is not a great lover, he is a great fornicator. But his pleasure lies not only in the gratification of his lust, but in the joke of it; half the fun consists in the deceit he has practised. He gets women by stratagem, by promises he has no intention of fulfilling, by making much of his position, and when he has had his way with them is tickled to death because he has made fools of them. It is a jest of the same nature as pulling away a chair when somebody is just going to sit on it. Prudence and courage are strangely mingled in him. He will hazard his life to save his servant from drowning, but he prepares his get-away at the same time as he makes arrangements to seduce his victim. He can afford to be bold since he takes no risks; his father is chief justice and the king's favourite. He is a good Catholic, and though he turns a sarcastic ear to such as threaten him with the vengeance of heaven, he fully intends to make his peace with God in good time. He is incapable of gratitude and insensitive to others' pain. He is gallant, witty and courteous. The type lives on; Don Juan is the ancestor of the raffish young nobleman of our own day, with the manners of a gentleman and the instincts of a Borstal boy, who makes his friends of prize-fighters, jockeys and bar-loungers. Good-natured and unscrupulous, he is described by the people who like him as his own worst enemy. A frightful bounder. Women, though he treats them like kitchen-maids, adore him. They fall for him with such indecent alacrity that he himself is often embarrassed. Strange creatures! Gangsters and crooks will tell you that what makes their trade so hard is neither the vigilance of the police nor the untrustworthiness of their confederates but the importunity of the sex.

And indeed the behaviour of the women in El Burlador de Sevilla is so imprudent, their folly so inane, that it almost serves to disculpate the ruffian. The Duchess Isabella, a maiden, admits into her room at night a man who knocks at the door and hops into bed with her under the impression that it is her suitor. She is very much surprised when a light is brought to discover that she has lost her virginity to a total stranger. Tisbea is a fisher-girl, and when Don Juan has just escaped drowning she gives him shelter in her hut. He has but to promise her marriage for her immediately to succumb to his advances. Doña Ana loves and is beloved of the Marques de la Mota, Don Juan's dearest friend. She has made an appointment with him, whereupon Don Juan, getting rid of him by a trick, takes his place and ravishes her. Aminta, a pretty peasant, is being married to Batricio when Don Juan casts his eye on her. He tells Batricio that he has already slept with her, whereupon the bridegroom's honour forces him to leave her. Don Juan makes his way into the wedding-chamber and after telling her what a grand fellow he is (and of course promising marriage) seduces her. It may be that the maidenhead of these women, duchess or peasant, is their most priceless possession; they are all in a confounded hurry to be rid of it. Not thus behaved the heroine of the novel La Picara Justina. She knew very well the worth of her virtue and with wiles and her quick wit foiled the attempts of the men, students, barbers, pious hermits and sanctimonious sacristans, who sought to debauch her; she plundered them all and gave nothing in return, so that when at last she married she was able to say with pride that her virginity would honourably prove itself by enamelling with ruby floods the silvery white of the nuptial sheets. Messy, but convincing!

But there are people so perverse as to declare that novels and plays do not always give a trustworthy picture of the manners and customs of the day. They point to our London stage, with its murders and burglaries, its crooks and gangsters, and claim that an intelligent foreigner making a tour of it would get a very false impression of the average life of the English. I will quote then, in this connection, from A Journey into Spain by the eminently respectable van Aarssens, Heer van Sommerledijk. 'Besides the great numbers of loose women that are to be found up and down Madrid,' he writes, 'there are others in certain fixed quarters, countenanced by Publick Authority, for accommodation of any that will go to them. . . . They have a salary from the Town, for which cause so infamous an employment is sought after, and when one of the Jades dies or is disabled by the Pox, the Magistrates are sollicited for the vacancy. . . . Sinning thus with impunity and toleration of Publick Authority, they seldom forsake the vice they so openly profess, though one day in the year is devoted to exhort them to repentance: On a Friday in Lent, they are by an alguazil or two conducted to the Church of Penitents, and there seated near the Pulpit, where the Preacher does his best to touch their hearts, but seldom with success; after many vain exhortations to amend their lives, descending from his Pulpit, he presents them the Crucifix, saying Behold the Lord, embrace him; which if any does, she is immediately taken away, and shut up in the Cloister of Penitents; but usually they only hang down their heads and shed a few tears, without laying hold on what is offered, and after their grimaces continue their deboshed life; neither can the story of St. Mary Magdalene so often inculcated to them, move them to imitation of her.'

There is no reason to suppose that the family of the divine Cervantes was very different from any other family in the middle class to which he belonged. There is much in its recorded behaviour that must give pain to the moral sense of our enlightened age. His Aunt Maria became the mistress of an archdeacon, and her father, a stern and upright judge, did not hesitate to invoke the majesty of the law when the reverend gentleman fought shy of paying the stipulated sum to compensate her for the loss of her virtue. The author had two sisters, Magdalena and Andrea, and both supplemented their meagre earnings as sempstresses by the pleasant and more lucrative exercise of prostitution. He would have been released from captivity in Algiers much sooner than he was if Don Alfonso Pacheco de Portocarrera, notwithstanding his illustrious name, had not bilked Magdalena of five hundred ducats. Don Alfonso seems to have been a bad payer. He agreed to pay Andrea five hundred ducats ('for the great obligation to you that I am under'), but the most assiduous research has failed to show that he did so. It looks as though the whole family were like that, for Andrea was obliged to bring an action against his brother for money and jewels that he had promised her. Fortunately for all parties she had other admirers who were more generous. An Italian, Juan Francisco Locadelo, had on one occasion given her a certain sum in cash, wearing apparel and a lot of household furniture. Part of this, five rolls of taffeta, when money was short Cervantes afterwards pawned for thirty ducats.

Shortly before his marriage to Catalina de Salazar, Cervantes had a daughter by an actress called Ana Franca. She was known as Isabel de Saavedra. Her mother dying when she was fourteen or fifteen, her Aunt Magdalena engaged her as a maid-servant. She does not appear to have remained a maid very long and so naturally ceased to be a servant; she then assumed her rightful station as a daughter of the house. This was only proper since, her aunts being long past their prime, it seems to have devolved on her (with Cervantes earning so little by his pen) to keep the home fires burning. For soon after the triumphant publication of Don Quixote a very unfortunate accident befell its author. A rake named Gaspar de Espileta was mortally wounded at the door of his house. He was brought in to die. The Alcalde who undertook the investigation learned that the behaviour of the ladies of the house had given rise to scandal and, thinking that they knew more of the murder than they chose to say, arrested Cervantes, his sister Andrea and her bastard daughter Constanza, his own daughter Isabel and certain other women who lived there. He arrested also a wealthy Portuguese, Simon Mendez by name, who was commonly supposed to be Isabel's lover. There was no evidence to show that any of them were connected with the crime, but the four alcaldes sitting in judgement forbade Simon Mendez to have any further communication with Isabel de Saavedra, and the women, though released from gaol, were placed under arrest in their house. Some time afterwards Isabel de Saavedra was living by herself (dans ses meubles) under the protection of a married man of mature age called Juan de Urbina, and it was he who paid her dowry when (with a baby of eight months old) she settled down to married life with a certain Luis de Molina.

Such were the domestic relations of a very distinguished man of letters in the Golden Age of Spanish literature.

All this has caused the biographers of Cervantes much uneasiness and they have exercised a great deal of ingenuity to conceal the fact that he was poor and saw no disgrace in profiting, when occasion called, by the frailty of his sisters first and then of his daughter. It is unreasonable to judge a man of one age by the standards of another. A popular author nowadays would think it discreditable to live on the prostitution of his female relations (he would not need to) but he would not hesitate to praise a critic's book in order to get a favourable criticism of his own. Morally there is nothing to choose between one action and the other. Perhaps no one that we know of was more tolerant than Cervantes; but tolerance is not an umbrella that you take when you think it will rain and leave at home when it looks fine; tolerance is a staff that you carry with you always as a support in all the circumstances of life. There is no reason why Cervantes should not have looked upon his own conduct with the same indulgence as upon other people's. We may do the same. From the behaviour of most people you would judge that tolerance is called for only in matters that you care nothing about: on the contrary it is called for in matters about which you care a great deal. It is not the least of the victories that man may win over his ruthless egoism. The biographers of Cervantes have tried to make a saint of him. Folly! An artist needs no whitewashing. You must take him as he is and it is impertinent to deny his failings: without them he would not be the man, and so the artist, that he is. A writer constructs characters by observation, but he only gives them life if they are himself. The more persons he is the more characters he creates. Cervantes was not only the noble Don Quixote, he was the astute and faithful Sancho, the rascally Ginés de Pasamonte, the barber, the Curate, the joking Sansón Carrasco as well. The artist, like the mystic who tries to attain God, is detached in spirit from the world. He has by his nature the freedom which the mystic seeks in the repression of desires. He stands aloof. The artist's right and wrong are not the right and wrong of plain men. Plain men may condemn him if they choose; he shrugs his shoulders and gravely goes his own way. But the plain man were wise to hesitate. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in our judgement of others. We make an ideal picture of ourselves and measure our fellows by it. But when we read the Diary of Pepys or the Confessions of Rousseau, in which a little of the truth is told, when we study the life of Wagner, we are horrified: we forget; we will not look at our private selves. I do not believe that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity; and also I believe that there are very few who have not at the same time virtue, goodness and beauty. Cervantes did not hesitate to profit by the looseness of his sisters. He got into so much trouble in the business affairs in which he was from time to time engaged that it is hard to be quite certain of his honesty. He was courageous. He was long suffering. He was gallant. He was magnanimous.

This is a digression. I apologise for it.

I do not know whether 'in this antick of remarques which I have daubed with so many colours,' to quote again my good Dutchman, the reader will have been as much surprised as I have been at the picture of the Spaniards of the Golden Age that presents itself. For my part I must admit that it does not in the least fit in with my preconceptions. These are not the dignified, taciturn and punctilious creatures that most of us imagine those hidalgos to have been. So great is the difference between them and the gay, loose and sportive folk who display themselves in the literature of the day that one can hardly believe one's eyes. Certainly when one looks at the long series of El Greco's portraits in the Prado it is hard to believe that his sitters were the same people as those who took their part in Tirso de Molina's Cigarrales de Toledo from which I took the little story of the practical joker and the dead weaver. One cannot see those wan and melancholy gentlemen dressing up in fantastic garb and playing the fool. Van Aarssens, who went to Spain when Philip IV was king, says that in public Spaniards seemed very grave, serious and reserved, 'but in private, and to those that are familiarly acquainted with them, they act in a manner so different, you would not take them for the same persons.' That is interesting. It looks as though it were a mask they assumed. Why should they have done so? The House of Austria looked upon gravity as an essential part of majesty, and the same traveller tells us that one day the queen, laughing at dinner at the quips and antics of a buffoon, was put in mind that to do so ill became a queen of Spain. The king, as we know, was trained to show his feelings neither by his manner nor by his expression. His lips and tongue moved when he spoke, but no gesture was permitted him and his countenance suffered no change. It is possible that this impressive solemnity was imitated by such as were in contact with the court and so grew to be a mark of gentility. Then, in Italy and the Low Countries the Spanish lived among a hostile population quicker-witted than themselves: stupid people in authority very naturally assume a dignified manner as a defence against a cleverness they do not understand. It may have been very useful to them in their relations with these subject races. But even in their own country they have always been suspicious of foreigners. They have kept them at a distance by haughtiness and ceremony. It is natural enough that these characteristics should have impressed foreigners, and when writers came to portray the Spanish in plays and novels it was only to be expected that they should seize upon them as typical. And a type once determined dies hard. Who on the English stage to-day would believe in a Frenchman who did not gesticulate or a mathematician who was not absent-minded? The Spaniard whom the writers, starting with Corneille, depicted, unsmiling, proud, jealous and passionate, obsessed with his honour, had an obvious dramatic value; and it is not strange that the authors of the romantic era should have accepted him without demur, for he precisely fitted their demand for the melodramatic picturesque.

But these are merely guesses and the reader can take them or leave them.

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