Plaza de Toros, is regarded with uncomprehending and empty disdain. The aristocracy reads even less than the bourgeoisie. Indeed, there is nothing a Spanish woman abhors more than a book. The futility of literature was never more apparent to the wisdom of Solomon. Her hatred takes an aggressive form, for a book in the hands of another is resented as a personal affront, and serious and ingenious are her efforts to cure misguided persons of this unhappy passion. She mysteriously connects a book with the loss of your im mortal soul, and supposes heaven to be the Elysium of the illiterate. Seeing a volume of mine once, the least intelligent but kindest and most charming of women cried, with the delightful play of Castilian eyes and hands, "Oh, how big it is what a dreadful quantity of pages! It must be terribly wicked!" I laughed, and begged her to pray for my conversion; and she was kind enough to suggest that perhaps, after all, notwithstanding the monstrous offence of mere authorship against public morals and breeding, I might not be damned. Whenever she referred to my profession, it was in a tone of sad and pitying resignation, and I interpreted her unexpressed feeling: "What a pity and yet, in spite of so serious a disqualification, I can't help liking and forgiving you."

The resources of pleasure and distraction being so few, naturally love-making absorbs two-thirds, if not more, of youth. Fashionable young men, in the best of tailoring, with their hearts upon their sleeves, lounge in club or café window, or upon the animated pavement, in wait for beauty. Every woman that takes their fancy is addressed by them in extravagant compliments. Those armed with notes they call flowers," hymning the praises of blonde or brunette, distribute them with impassioned speech. Nothing could be less delicate or less subtle than Spanish love-making. It follows its obvious course, like the moon or the tide. Youth and maid have their duties cut out for them by tradition and custom, and the whole town is aware of their tender relations twentyfour hours after the explosion of passion. The lover takes up his post of

honor outside the beloved's window, not by moonlight, but in the full glare of day, and the silly creatures hold dumb converse for hours at a stretch. They have time, you perceive, to waste, and, my faith! they waste it with a vengeance. There are other loves less official, but not a whit more discreet; and a land that thrives upon gossip is well supplied by each young man of fashion and fortune. Austerity is not a predominant feature of modern Spanish life.

After love, the amusements of youth are gambling and the graceful and brilliant game of pelota. Cricket and football seem clumsy and inscrutable recreations beside such a finished and charming exercise as pelota. These slim, deft Spaniards, with their grace of gesture, their inherited charm of movement, an indescribable animal nobility of expression and attitude, make almost a classical picture of a modern game. Pity it is that more time is not given to pelota and less to the theatre (which chiefly means the ballet and its attendant influences), the café, and club, where the national vice, gambling, is practised with lamentable assiduity. The Spaniards do not drink, and profess loathing and horror of the English because of their devotion to the glass. To listen to them one would think there was but one vice, and that is drunkenness, and that the people who do not drink enjoy immunity from censure on every other score. Such is the ferocity of their contempt for this failing, that I have heard a Spanish nobleman gravely assert that a man should be hanged for getting drunk once. suggested humanely that imprisonment might suffice on the first occasion. Whereupon he angrily protested: "No, decapitation at once. It should be regarded as a capital crime." That indolence may be a vice far more disastrous in its consequences to a nation than even the abuse of alcohol you could never convince any Spaniard. Meditating on the exposure of national imbecility the present war reveals, I am minded of the daily existence of one of the most important of Spanish military officials I once was privileged to study in profound astonishment. This man received a large, a very large, salary

I

quence lures the naïve foreigner. Is it possible to be taken in by such candid and courteous advances? Unfortunately Spanish courtesy must be accepted at an enormous discount. As a rule it means nothing but empty words. A Spaniard would regard his own brother as a loafer if he came to dinner often. A friend could not do this, for the door would be politely shut in his face on the second occasion. No northern race could conceive anything to match Spanish inhospitality. I will give an example. A Spanish writer, with whom I have had a correspondence for several years, of as pleasant an intimacy as if we had been friends for life, begged me when next I went to Spain to visit him. I went to Toledo last year, and not once but repeatedly he urged me before leaving the Peninsula to come up to the north to see him. At last I consented. Instead of taking from Madrid the mail-train for Paris, I took the slow train up to the coast town where he lived, which meant a journey of seventeen hours, and added two days and three nights in all to my return voyage to France. I telegraphed to the man I naturally regarded as my host to announce the hour of my arrival. Sure enough, when I reached this remote. town, the great man was on the platform, not with a member of his family (he was married, he had a wife, a daughter of twenty-two, a son over twenty), but with two strangers, men of letters, he introduced to me on the spot. I expected him to give my luggage in charge of a porter and show me to a cab, and then drive me to his house. No. He left me to settle everything, and told me to have my things sent to the Fonda Europa, that we would walk there, as it was close to the station. At the hotel he told me to settle about my room, and waited for me. Then he sat down, assured me he was enchanted to see me, and proposed to return when I had rested and lunched. He and his friends came back in the afternoon, and I was carried off in a steam-tram to make the acquaintance of a fellow-Academician along the coast. The illustrious mau received us standing, showed us all his treasures, without offering us a chair, or tea, or even a glass of water, though

it was hot enough, heaven knows, and bade us good-bye with the most ardent regrets. My friend, who assured me repeatedly of his affection, his admiration, and sympathy, escorted me back to my hotel, and blandly wished me a good appetite for dinner and a good night's rest, hoping to see me again. I left next day without seeing him, and, having gone to the far north at his invitation, I neither entered his house nor drank a draught of water at his expense. He was amazed at my dissatisfaction at this extraordinary reception, and in several long and eloquent letters afterward protested that he had done all that it behoved a gentleman to do to show me honor and friendship. He had come twice to my hotel in one day, and he regarded it as the height of exigence to expect more. It never occurred to him that a five-pound note, two broken nights, and several unnecessary hours in a railway-carriage, constituted a big price to pay for two hours of his society, without even the compensation of a good dinner. An American, to whom I repeated the story, said it reminded him of the hospitality of a certain man of Kentucky, who said: "If ever you find yourself near my house, stay there." But here is revealed the superiority of American candor. At least the Kentucky man warned you of what to expect, whereas my illustrious Spaniard always called his house my house, and instead of advising me to vising me to stay there" repeatedly urged me to come here." The explanation is that he never for an instant thought I would go, and believed that he would have all the benefit of his fine protestations and mock hospitality for nothing. My telegram was probably a thunderclap, and he had not the cour age to reveal his indiscretion to his wife. For poverty was no explanation, as the man belongs to what is called the haute bourgeoisie, owns estates, has a luxurious town residence, into which I penetrated several years previously, is rich and highly civilized; but, like nearly all Spaniards, understands hospitality as the freedom of the streets.

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This your house," says the Castilian, and marches you along the public place. In his esteem the plaza was instituted for the hidalgo's reception of hig

friends. I, in my early visits to Spain, spoiled by my experience of a Spanish woman as sincerely and cordially hospitable as a princess of Eastern fable, accepted hospitality on all sides with a lamentable lightness. I was charmingly received always, but, I have no doubt, left a reputation behind me of gross indelicacy in construing this Iberian compliment by the common rules of AngloSaxon speech.

I know not why the opinion prevails that the Spaniards are dirty. Their habit of spitting is, of course, appalling; but in every other respect, the middle classes are cleaner than the English or the French. Middle-class houses are scrupulously tidy and clean, and in Barcelona domestic luxury is so general that for £24 a year you may have a magnificent flat, with every latest sanitary improvement, lofty chambers, marble stairs, electric bells, and electric light. In the suburbs the £12 flats are large and charming, with gallery and terrace. I noticed in Valladolid also that the middle-class houses are quite modern and luxurious. As for the standard of bedroom cleanliness and personal linen, it is unsurpassable. Well-to-do people in England are content with coarse and common sheets, while a Spanish peasant offers you embroidered and lace-trimmed linen. The upper classes have the standard of our own-the daily bath, the daily change of linen. Nobody dresses for dinner, which robs the table of its decorative aspect; but the curious habit of dining with gloves is gaining ground in Madrid. In some houses dinner-gloves are placed beside the napkins, and the lady takes off her drawing-room gloves and puts on her table gloves as a matter of course. One seeks in vain the special attraction of this fashion, for surely the ungloved hand is more lovely far than a gloved hand any day.

Religion plays an inevitable but facile part in every phase of Spanish life. Morning mass is as regular as breakfast; but I doubt if the result be in the least spiritual. The virtues of the land are racial, the religion an impossible mixture of materialism and contented ignorance, with a remote and naïve strain of paganism, which keeps the modern traveller of tolerant views on

the edge of a smile, so quaint and hideous and sensual are all these forms of worship,-gorgeously dressed dolls, crucifixes decked out with the skirts of

a

ballet dancer, and gold-fringed scarves, beads, medals, and processions. With their splendid capacity for devotion, their indomitable courage which in suffering turns the least intelligent and sympathetic Spaniard into a hero or Roman heroine, their innate dignity, one asks one's self if something of imperishable value might not be made of this decaying race by an austere wave of puritanism and religious intellectuality, the exercise of the untrained conscience, the blighted will. When you see a nobleman and his wife sit up to watch by the bedside of a sick house or nurse maid; a selfish woman of fashion prolong her stay in the country because of a sick servant, and lavish the same expensive care on that servant as she would on a member of her own family; and see them elsewhere give proof of an inhuman indifference to the interests of their fellows, one has an instinct that this inconsistency might easily be rectified by education. For Spain cannot by the kindliest observer be regarded as civilized or modern.

In her development, as well as in tradition and in national character, Spain has practically stood still since the death of the sixteenth century. This fact has ever been the triumphant delight of the mere artist, of the modern dreamer, of the lover of picturesque and romantic legend. But nations in those progressive and complex times cannot, with propriety or justice, be regarded from this exclusive standpoint, and can hardly be admired for living so resolutely up to a national character formed by times that have barely a connection with our vivid, vital, and moving present. Spain stands forlorn on the edge of history, draped in the cloak of futile regret, with glance unintelligently retrospective, blighted and empty, mind a blank, attitude a complete conquest of natural activity, the assertion of stupefied indifference. Hence the labored and exhaustive complaints of the modern traveller.

It is in the abstract no doubt a charming reflection that down there, beyond the imposing Pyrenean range,