Read Spain for Free Online Page B

the reason perhaps is that Spaniards create essentially for Spaniards. Don Quixote , though it obviously has its universal meanings, is essentially a book about Spain—not a vision of the world, like Shakespeare’s plays; and the Spanish language itself, though a hundred million speak it every day, is often more a barrier than a bridge. Sometimes the Spaniard will resent your attempts to use it. Sometimes he believes it to be physically impossible for an alien to understand it. Sometimes he cannot convince himself that you are actually speaking it, and sometimes, like an Edwardian Englishman, he is of the opinion that if you don’t understand what he himself is saying in it, then you ought to, especially when he’s talking so loud.
    It is not offensive, this kind of chauvinism, only assertive—andsometimes sad. Older Spaniards are often pathetically ignorant of the world outside, and its intrusion can pitiably shake their equanimity. Even the most gaily soigné of citizens, if you plump him in a salon full of foreigners, often looks strangely self-conscious and ill-at-ease, like a man in a dress shop, and it is astonishing how few Spaniards even in Madrid, the capital, speak a single word of any language but their own. The feeblest cooking in Europe is the Spanish, when it swops its fine old stews, crabs and partridges for some dismal approximation of the French cuisine. As for the cities of Spain, they only begin to feel provincial when they abandon their ancient isolated hauteur, and try for cosmopolitanism.
    Spain is always conscious of her own symbolisms, and rightly so. ‘Spain hurts me’, cried the essayist Miguel de Unamuno fifty years ago. ‘When I speak of Spain,’ wrote the poet Antonio Machado in the thirties, ‘I speak of Man.’ Time and again Spain has been a cockpit, where the conflicts of the world have had their first round, and sometimes even their last. It was by the Treaty of Tordesillas, still a very grand little Castilian town, that the Borgia Pope Alexander VI partitioned the New World between Spain and Portugal—‘All Lands Discovered or Hereafter to Be Discovered in the West, towards the Indies or the Ocean Seas’. It was the Synod held at Elvira, near Granada, some time in the fourth century that first decreed the celibacy of the Catholic priesthood. The Reconquest, that protracted struggle of Christian against Muslim, represented for all Europe a struggle between good and evil, and knights from many countries came to fight in it: Sir James Douglas was killed in one of its campaigns, shouting ‘A Douglas! A Douglas!’ as he charged the Moors, and wearing the heart of The Bruce in a small casket around his neck. The Inquisition, as it developed in Spain under Isabel and Ferdinand, set a pattern of intolerance for the world, and is still remembered today, we may fancy, wherever there is a dank cell or a torture chamber. The War of the Spanish Succession changed the face of Europe. The Peninsular War took Wellington to Waterloo. The Spanish Civil War, when the Nazis obliterated Guernica and the Russians set up their secret police headquarters in Alcalá deHenares, not half a mile from Cervantes, birthplace—that nightmare was a preview or rehearsal of the world war that was to follow, and so bemused the impotent Powers of the West that Anthony Eden nicknamed it the War of the Spanish Obsession.
    Spain does have a microcosmic quality, and this sometimes makes her people feel a kind of chosen race. Many Spaniards have Jewish blood in them, and Spain possesses some of the doomed, self-centred, inspirational quality of Jewry—a feeling not merely of isolation, but of vocation. It is not, however, anything divine. It is only the land, the wind, the sun, and the history. The master illusion of Spain is the conviction that the Spaniards are a people different, when they are only a people separate—that alma has made them so, when it