I
INTRODUCTION
The common belief that Spain is a rigidly conservative country, unchanging and unchangeable, is not without an element of truth. There is a certain tenacity of fibre in the people of this land, tempered during untold generations by the mingled fire and ice of their keen Castilian climate, which makes it easy to recognise in the Spaniard of to-day the Iberian described by Strabo two thousand years ago.
But the Spaniard's tenacity of fibre is like that of his famed old Toledo blades; it admits a high degree of flexibility. Of all the larger countries of Europe with a great past behind them, Spain has most fallen to the rear. Yet it is a mistake to imagine that Spain has at any time been standing still. It is highly instructive to-day to read Gautier's Voyage en Espagne. This book is much more than a fine piece of literary impressionism, it is a massive intellectual achievement. Journeying in a little-visited country, with few modern means of locomotion, and no Baedeker in his hand (it is scarcely ten years indeed since Baedeker recognised the existence of Spain), Gautier in a few weeks grasped all the more salient characteristics of the people and the and, and set them down in the clearest and firmest fashion. His book will never cease to have its value, for it represents a state of things which has largely vanished. No one nowadays need make his Spanish tour in a diligence, and no tourist now is likely to be permitted, as Gautier was, to spread out his mattress at night in the courts of the Alhambra. The virginal romanticism of a splendid and tattered Spain such as Gautier found has gone, almost as completely as the splendidly ruinous Rome that Goethe entered in his carriage has to-day been swallowed up in the shoddy capital of modern Italy. Spain, indeed, has not yet attained the depressing exuberance of renovated Italy,—and the peoples of the two peninsulas are far too unlike to make any such resemblance probable,—but the contrast between Gautier’s Spain of less than a century ago and the state of Spain to-day is sufficiently striking to dispel for ever the notion that we are here concerned with a country which has been hope- lessly left behind in the march of civilisation.
T have been able to realise the change in
