industrial channels, it has led to the removal of artificial restrictions in the path of commercial activity. It has been advantageous morally, because it has forced even the most narrow and ignorant Spaniard to face the actual facts of the modern world.

The war has had a further result in leading to a movement for a closer sympathy between Spain and the Spanish states of South America. The attitude of these states towards the mother country has hitherto been somewhat unsympathetic; they have regarded her as hopelessly opposed to all reform; the hostility of Spain to the aspirations of Cuba and their own earlier struggles for freedom amply accounted for such an attitude. Now there is nothing to stand in the way of a movement towards approximation which has already begun to manifest itself, and may ultimately possess a serious significance.

It can scarcely be expected that the lover of Spain should view this new movement of progress and reform with unmitigated satisfaction. No traveler will complain that Spanish hotel-keepers are beginning to obtain their sanitary fittings from England, or that clerical and secular authorities alike are putting down the national vice of spitting. But the stranger can feel no enthusiasm when he finds that similar zeal is exercised in suppressing, on the slightest pretexts, the national dances, unique in Europe for their grace and charm and ancient descent, or in discarding the beautiful and becoming national costumes. It is a little depressing to find a cinematographic show set up in the market-place of even the remotest cities, to hear the squeak of the gramophone where one has once heard the haunting wail of the malagueña, or to have to admit that the barrel-organ is taking the place of the guitar. Civilization is good, and progress is necessary for any people. But "civilization " and "progress mean much more than a feverish thirst for new things or a mad race for wealth; and some of us think that, however salu

tary the lessons that Spain may learn from the more prosperous nations of to-day, there are still more salutary lessons in the art of living which those nations may learn from Spain. One would grieve to see that in the attempt to purify her national currency Spain should cast away her gold with her dross.

When I entered Spain twenty years ago I said to myself that here was a land where the manners and customs of mediæval Europe still survived. Spain seemed in many respects to be about three hundred years behind the age. Now, when all things are in flux, it is pleasant to find that that early impression need not be absolutely effaced. Spain is still the most democratic of countries. The familiar and intimate relationship which we know in the old comedies of Europe and other sources as subsisting between master and servant. between gentleman and peasant, is still universal. The waiter, even in your modern hotel a few paces from the Puerta del Sol, pats you on the back with friendly intimacy as you step out of the lift even on the day after your arrival; and every low-class Spaniard expects, as a matter of course, to be treated as an equal. We are not unfamiliar with that attitude in more progressive countries; but the Spaniard shows that he is entitled to such courtesy by knowing how to return it; and that is a phenomenon we are less familiar with.

There is among Spanish people a friendly trustfulness towards all, even towards strangers and foreigners, which belongs to an age when in a well-knit community no fear was necessary. The man of shifting and progressive civilization is always prepared to be suspicious; he scrutinizes a stranger carefully and feels his way slowly. That outcome of modern progress seems unknown to the Spanish man or woman; it is always assumed that your attitude is friendly; and on the strength of this trustfulness even the instinct of modesty, or the not less instinctive fear of ridicule, seems in Spain to become slightly modified.

We realize how far we are from the present when we enter a Spanish Church. The ecstatic attitude of devotion which the worshiper sometimes falls into, without thought of any observer, is altogether unlike the consciously elegant grace of the French worshiper or the rigid decorum of the English; while perhaps, if there is music, groups of women cluster with their fans at the foot of the piers, and children quietly play about in corners with unchecked and innocent freedom. Nor are the dogs and cats less free than the children; at Tudela I have even seen a dog curled up in the most comfortable chair by the high altar, probably left in charge of the church, for he raised his head in a watchful and suspicious manner when the stranger entered; and in Gerona Cathedral there was a cat who would stroll about in front of the capilla mayor during the progress of mass, receiving the caresses of the passers-by. It would be a serious mistake to see here any indifference to religion; on the contrary, this easy familiarity with sacred things is simply the attitude of those who in Wordsworth's phrase "lie in Abraham's bosom all the year," and do not, as often among ourselves, enter a church once a week to show how severely respectable, for the example of others, they can on occasion show themselves to be. It was thus that our own ancestors, whose faith was assuredly less questioning than ours, made themselves at home in the aisles of Old Saint Paul's. It would be easy to enumerate many details of life in Spain which remind us of a past which we have ourselves long left behind.

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indeed, are hard, but the company ally excellent, charming in its manners and not offensive to any sense. Here a constant series of novel pictures is presented to the traveler who may quietly study them at leisure. Perhaps it is a dozen merry girls on their way to a festival, packed tightly together and laden with packages; some, the more sedate among them, wear mantillas, some bright handkerchiefs on their heads, or go with hair uncovered; but, however they are dressed, to whatever class they belong, they are all clean and sweet. They carefully tie to the racks the little bunches of deep-toned carnations they bear, Spanish women always treat carnations tenderly, and give themselves up to unrestrained chatter and laughter; their voices are apt to be somewhat piercingly vibrant and metallic, but their delight is good to see; the younger girls at the climax of their glee will perhaps stand up and flutter their arms like wings, and the elder women, if any there be, join in with only more restrained enjoyinent.

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Or, perhaps, it is a less crowded carriage one enters; there are two middleclass Spaniards and a peasant group of three: a fat, jolly, middle-aged man in a peasant's costume, but clean and new, almost stylish; a woman of like age, one of those free, robust, kindly women whom Spain produces so often; and a pretty bare-headed girl, evidently her daughter, though the man seems a friend or relative who is escorting them on their journey. By and by, when we have been some hours on our journey, he lifts from the seat in front of him the large, heavy, embroidered wallet,—that alforja which Sancho Panza was always so anxious to keep well filled, unwinds it and draws out one of the great flat delicious Spanish loaves and throws it on the woman's lap. Then a dish of stewed meat appears, and the bread is cut into slices which serve as plates for the meat. But before the meal is begun the peasant turns round with a hearty "Gusta?" It is the invitation to share in the feast which every polite

Spaniard must make even to strangers who happen to be present, and it is as a matter of course politely refused: "Muchas gracias." Before long, the black leather wine-bottle is produced from the wallet, and the meal proceeds. At its final stage some kind of sweetmeat appears and small fragments are offered to the two middle-class Spaniards, and then - with a slight half-movement, expressing a fine courtesy restrained by the fear of offering any offensive attention to the foreign caballero also. It is not improper to accept this time, and now the leather bottle is handed round and the middle-class Spaniards avail themselves of it, though with awkward unfamiliarity, for it requires some skill to drink from this vessel with grace: you fold over the belly of the vessel to the angle demanded by the state of its repletion, and as you apply the mouthpiece to your lips you slowly elevate your eyes towards the zenith. The two Spaniards quietly remark to each other that the wine is of first-class quality, and even without such an assurance one would know that that peasant never drank anything that was not of first-class quality.

Once more one enters a carriage, this time second-class, where sits a charming and beautiful Spanish lady with her child, opposite to a man who, with little success, is paying attentions to the child with the object of opening up conversation with the mother. Two black-robed monks enter. They do not look at the pretty lady, they seem unconscious of her presence, and the elder of the two, a man of gentle, refined face, alone greets us with the customary "Good day." The other brother, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, is a larger man, of more stolid and impassive type. evidently of lower grade in the order. The two exchange very few words in the course of their three hours' journey, and it is always the elder and more intelligent man who takes the initiative. He sits with folded hands, quietly but alertly interested in every smallest incident, while the younger man, having

placed his spectacles on the seat beside him, leans back. calmly vegetative, with arms folded within his sleeves. After a while the other, with gentle feminine fingers, touches him softly on the arm without a word. He understands, and produces a bundle fastened in a knotted blue check handkerchief. I imagine for a moment that the holy men are about to partake of a frugal repast; but the bundle contains a large book of devotions, in which the elder monk reads for a short time, then fastens it again in the bundle and pushes it toward his companion as its recognized guardian. A little girl enters the carriage with her small basket; the elder monk looks at her with affectionate interest; and when she passes him to get out at the next station he smiles sweetly at her, speaking a few words to which she responds with an "Adios." I seem to see here typified the two varieties into which the discipline of the cloister moulds men -the sensitively feminine and the listlessly vegetative. All the life of these men has marked itself upon them. I realize how true are the words of the wise physician, that "from him who has eyes to see and ears to hear no mortal can hide his secret; he whose lips are silent chatters with his finger-tips and betrays himself through all his pores."

If I were asked to sum up the dominant impression that the survival in Spain of old-world mediævalism makes, I should say that Spain is, in the precise and specific sense of the word, the home of romance. The special character of the Spanish temperament and of Spanish developments in literature and in art is marked, not by classic feeling, though Spain owed so much to ancient Rome and Rome to Spain, but by a quality, rising and sinking with the rise and fall of Gothic, which we call the romantic spirit: a mixture, that is, of the mysterious and grandiose with the grotesquely bizarre, of the soaringly ideal with the crudely real,-a mixture which to us to-day has the cunning fascination of art, but was really on both sides the natural outcome of the

experiences and feelings of the men who created it. This romantic spirit was once the common possession of all Christendom; but the Spanish temperament peculiarly lent itself to the romantic attitude, and it is in Spain to-day that we may catch its final vanishing echoes. It was certainly no accident that Victor Hugo, who created the renaissance of romantic drama in France, went to Spain for his inspiration. It is sometimes said that Hugo had but slight knowledge of Spain; he went there as a child of ten, that was all. But this child of precocious genius was able even at that age to receive impressions strong enough to germinate in the fullness of time. The whole of the earlier and more fruitful period of Hugo's work may be said to have been due to the stimulus which came to him from Spain.

To-day it is the Church, always the most powerful stronghold of tradition among any people, which enables the stranger most vividly to realize how well the romantic spirit has been preserved in Spain. Notwithstanding invasions from without and revolutions from within, especially during the early years of the last century, Spain is still the country where the medieval spirit of romantic devotion is most splendidly embodied and preserved. To the English visitor, in whose churches nearly every beautiful thing that royal despoilers had left was battered and broken by still more energetic Puritans, it is a perpetual miracle to find so much delicate work from remote ages which has never been ravaged by revolutionists or restorers.

Moreover, there is no type of architecture which so admirably embodies the romantic spirit as Spanish Gothic. Such a statement implies no heresy against the supremacy of French Gothic. But the very qualities of harmony and balance, of finely tempered reason, which make French Gothic so exquisitely satisfying, softened the combination of mysteriously grandiose splendor with detailed realism in which lies the essence of Gothic as

the manifestation of the romantic spirit. Spanish Gothic, at once by its massiveness and extravagance and by its realistic naturalness, far more potently embodies the spirit of medieval life. It is less æsthetically beautiful, but it is more romantic. In Leon Cathedral Spain possesses one of the very noblest and purest examples of French Gothic,- - a church which may almost be said to be the supreme type of the Gothic ideal of a delicate house of glass finely poised between but tresses; but there is nothing Spanish about it. For the typical Gothic of Spain we must go to Toledo and Burgos, to Tarragona and Barcelona. Here we find the elements of stupendous size, of mysterious gloom, of grotesque and yet realistic energy, which are the dominant characters alike of Spanish architecture and of mediæval romance.

We find the same character in every object which subserves the Church service and ritual. The Spaniard has no fine instinct for the æsthetic; but in the sphere of devotion his romantic instinct is always right. The gloom which pervades Spanish churches so unlike French churches, which are a blaze of lighthas its source in the need for tempering the glare of the southern sun. But this gloom is finely subdued to the purposes. of devotion, exquisitely tempered not only by windows which are always painted, but by the use of candles as the only source of artificial illumination. Though here and there, as in Toledo Cathedral, we find the hideous French device of the electric light that pretends to be a candle, Spaniards still understand not only that the candle is the illuminant which symbolically best lends itself to Christian worship, but that the full and equable illumination necessary to reveal the symmetry of classic buildings is worse than useless in this more mysterious Gothic art, which demands the emphasis of its perspective, the broken play of light and shade.

The affinity of the Spaniard for the romantic spirit is far from being, in the com

mon sense of the word "romantic," the expression of a superficial sentimentality. The chivalry peculiarly identified with Spain, the chivalry, embodied in the conception of the Cid, which finally drove the Moor out of Spain, - however fantastic and extravagant it sometimes became, was stern in its ideals and very practical in its achievements. Interwoven with the manifestations of the romantic spirit in Spain, indeed a part of its texture, there is a perpetual insistence on suffering and death. A certain indifference to pain, even a positive delight in it, was long ago observed by Strabo to mark the Iberian. And the deliberate emphasis of the thought of death, so congenial to the ethical temper of this people, has always been a note of the romantic mood. But while the favorite medieval conception of the Dance of Death has elsewhere passed out of the living traditions of European peoples, for the new interest in the poignant old English morality, Everyman, is but an artificial revival, - in Spain the naked lugubrious fact of death is still made part of the lesson of daily life. "Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, nihil:" that inscription in huge letters, marking the grave of a great Archbishop on the floor of Toledo Cathedral, well expresses the Spaniard's haughty humility. The Escorial, the royal Spanish temple to Death, is unique in its elaborate and impressive circumstances; every ruling Spanish monarch may here descend the dark marble staircase to the little vault below the high altar and view the sarcophagus which was prepared for him centuries before he was born.

The Spaniard broods over and emphasizes the naked Majesty of Death. Very far from him is the sunny and serene say ing of Spinoza that "there is nothing the wise man thinks of less than of death" In Barcelona Cathedral, the most solemnly impressive model of Catalan architecture, the broad and stately entrance to the crypt, the gloomy house of Death, is placed in the centre of the church between the capilla mayor and the choir. Every

Spanish sacristan seems to possess a wellpolished skull and a couple of thigh-bones with which to crown the catafalque it is his duty to erect, a task in which we may sometimes find him engaged in the silent church at twilight, preparing for the funeral ceremony of the morrow. In a church in the heart of the city of Zamora I have found, prominently placed on a pedestal, a skeleton of fine proportions holding an hour-glass in one hand and a scythe in the other, while high on the interior wall of Salamanca Cathedral one discerns a skeleton of lesser proportions with what seems to be the skin still clinging to its bones.

The age of chivalry, as we know, is over; and the romantic spirit is rooted in conceptions of life and of death which are not able to flourish vitally in the soil of our time. It is inevitable that, however firmly the medieval conception may have persisted in Spain, its tendency must be, if not to die out, at all events to become attenuated, overlaid,—at the least, transformed in its manifestations. But a nation that at one moment led the world. and has always shown an aptitude for bringing forth great personalities, must not be too hastily dismissed as no longer able to exert an influence in human affairs. The people of Spain are sound at the core; they have suffered as much from their virtues as from their vices — from their idealism, their indifference to worldly advantage, their cheerful good nature, their stoical resignation. In the women of Spain, also, one may discern an element of promise. However hampered by lack of education and a habit of Oriental seclusion, Spanish women have always possessed a singular native vigor and fibre. It is not alone their beauty and charm which distinguish them, but intelligence and character. As queens and as heroines and as saints, in literature and in philanthropy, Spanish women have in all ages asserted themselves.

Spain has suffered from incompetent and treacherous rulers, from her own lack of political instinct, even from a too ready