When I was in the French Army I met many men who had a constant tradition of the military past. These were not in the regiment, but one came across them in the garrison town where we were quartered, and among others there was an old man whose father had fought in the Peninsula and who retained a very vivid family memory of those wars. From this old man I gathered in particular what I had learned in general from reading, an impression of the Spaniard as a soldier, but that impression was false. It was false for many reasons, but chiefly for this: that Spain, like the United Kingdom, is very highly differentiated indeed, and province differs from province to an extent hardly ever grasped by those who have never visited the country.

When, many years later, I had the opportunity to visit Spain, this was the first point I noticed. It is particularly striking in the mountains. You will find yourself with one type of man talking Catalan in some small modern village; the way in which he tills his garden, the way in which his house is built, and the way in which he bargains with you, are all[Pg 230] native to his race. You set off over the hills and by evening you come to another village more different than is a Welsh village from an English one, for you have crossed from Catalonia into Aragon. Then, again, the boundary of the Basque Provinces, or at least of the Basque race, is as clean as a cut with a knife. One may argue indefinitely whether this is because the Basques have preferred the peculiar climate and soil of their inhabitance or whether it is their energy and tenacity which have changed the earth, but there it is. The Basque is much more separate from the people around him than is even (if he will pardon my saying so) the Irishman of the West from the Scotchman of the Lothians.

There is another form of differentiation in Spain which is so striking that I hesitate for adjectives to describe it lest those adjectives should seem excessive; but I will say this, it is more striking than the contrast between the oasis and the desert in Africa, and that is pretty strong. I mean the differentiation produced by the sudden change from the high plateaux to the sea-plains. The word "sea-plains" is not strictly accurate, the belt running back from the Mediterranean sometimes looks like a plain, sometimes like an enclosed valley, more often it is a system of terraces, hills upon hills, but at any rate when you are once out of the influence of the sea and on to the high plateaux which form, as it were, the body of the Spanish square, you pass from[Pg 231] luxuriance to sterility, from ease to hardship, and from the man who is always willing to smile to the stoic.

Then, again, you have the contrast between Andalusia and everything to the north of Andalusia. Andalusia was the very wealthy part of Spain under the Romans. It must always remain the very wealthy part of Spain so far as agriculture is concerned. It has easy communications and a climate like nothing on earth. Therefore, when the Moors came there they found a large, active, and instructed Christian population, and they ruined Andalusia less than any other part of Spain. Nay, in some odd (and not very pleasant) way they married the Asiatic to the European, and the European solidity, the European power over stone, the European sense of a straight line, were in Andalusia used by the vague imagination of the Asiatic to his own purpose, with marvellous results. All this has produced a quite distinct type of man; and it is remarkable that, as is to be found in so many similar cases in Europe, the people exactly limitrophous to Andalusia on the north are peculiarly sparse, impoverished and alone. There lies the wide and arid sweep of La Mancha, imperishable in European letters.

Now, having said so much as to this high differentiation of the Spanish people (and one could add much more: the Asturias, always unconquered; the Atlantic tides and rivers, the tideless Eastern harbours, the curious poverty of Estremadura; the[Pg 232] French experiments of Madrid and its neighbourhood, so utterly ill-fitted to the climate and the genius of Spain), let me say something of the Spanish unity.

No nation in Europe is so united. By which I do not mean that no other nation is so homogeneous, even in those deep things which escape superficial differentiation. The Spaniard is united to the Spaniard by the three most powerful bonds that can bind man to man—religion, historical memory, isolation. It is not to be admitted by any careful traveller that the religious emotion of the modern Spaniard is either combative or profound. Indeed, I know of nothing more remarkable than the passage from Spanish to French thought in this respect. You leave, let us say, Huesca; you notice at the morning Mass a moving and somewhat small concourse of worshippers, few communicants, but above all in the temper of the place, in the written stuff of the somewhat belated newspapers, a sort of indifference; as though the things of............