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that hallucinatory masterpiece. Here Sancho himselfwas deluded. He soon saw through the specious allure of power (though he ‘ordained so many good things that to this day they are preserved in that place and called the Constitution of the Great Sancho Panza’); but he really did suppose that the territory assigned to him was an island—down the foothills of the Pyrenees, beside the Saragossa railway line.
    Nowhere in western Europe could be much more dismal than the Isle Barataria today, reverted once again into a hamlet called Alcalá del Ebro, and slumped upon a bend of the river in an attitude of awful dejection. Its houses are mostly mean, its narrow streets are sloshed with winter mud or choked with dust, its river is brown and sluggish, and all day long there clank and clatter past the village, slung in containers from an overhead conveyor, loads of salt-rock destined for a factory beside the level-crossing. It was called Barataria, Cervantes says, either because that was its name anyway, or because of its exceedingly low real-estate value— baratura means cheapness. I incline to the latter interpretation, for it seems to me a dominion with no asset but its Spanishness. It lives by casticismo —its courtesy, its arid landscape all about, the mud in its streets, the solemn faces at its saloon door. There is nothing special about the place, except its famous fable and its poverty; but in such a village, with such an association, you can appreciate how insular is the pride of Spain, and how delusory.
    There is no country in Europe more introspective than Spain, and few admire themselves more. It is true that the Spaniard is subject to fits of wild self-criticism—‘We are a backward nation, we lack culture, we are not formal enough, we can never catch up, never trust a Spaniard.’ More often, though, he still seems convinced, for all the ignominious evidence of the centuries, that his nation is not only best, but also altogether unique. Even in Strabo’s time the Spaniards used to boast that they had been a literary and law-abiding nation for more than six thousand years (though since the Spanish year then lasted four months, the brag was less majestic than it sounds). On every Spanish passport, the historian Angel Ganivet once said, there were written the invisible words: ‘This Spaniard is authorized to do whatever he wants.’ In Spain foreigners have generally been regarded as inferiors, andthe Fleming courtiers who came to Spain with the Hapsburgs were so generally despised that their very name, some people think, entered the language in derogation— flamenco , which now means a kind of song and dance, apparently used to mean an oafish vagabond. If you ask a Spaniard who fought the Battle of Trafalgar, he will tell you the Spanish and the British, quite forgetting the French; if you ask him who fought the Peninsular War, he will say the Spanish and the French, quite forgetting the British. Spaniards prefer not to be laughed at, and do not much like losing: they tend to remember only what is flattering to Spain, and they readily believe the State schoolmaster, when he says there is no nation on earth so famous, so successful, so rich, or so powerful as theirs.
    Thus the genius of Spain is of an exceptionally private kind. Considering the age, activity, and ability of this nation, it is surprising how few Spaniards are generally known to the world today: among monarchs, only Isabel, Ferdinand, Philip II; among fighting men only Cortés and Pizarro; among writers, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Galdós, Federico Garcia Lorca; among thinkers, St. Ignatius, St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, Miguel de Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset; among composers, Vitoria and Falla; among painters, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, Dali, Miró; among scientists, the inventor of the autogyro; among statesmen, General Franco. It is not many, for such a nation, and