THE OLD CIVILISATION OF SPAIN.

Evening Star, Issue 11608, 19 June 1902, Page 3

THE OLD CIVILISATION OF SPAIN.

When we live with the Spaniard we learn to recognise that the modern method of compressing the maximum of feverish haste into the day’s work—“and for life’s sake losing the reasons for living”—is perhaps less wholly desirable than we nave sometimes imagined (writes Havelock EUis in the ‘Nineteenth Century and After’). There is no need to haste after wealth in a land where mer. are agreed that poverty is not contemptible, and that the best things capnot be bought for money. The only worthy social end that can be reached by money is democratic equality, and that has already been attained more perfectly in Spain than in any newer civilisation is even conceivable. There is no new country where equality of social intercourse, courtesy, and sympathy are so general among all classes of the population, and where the habile of an instinctive fine breeding may bo found even among the poorest as is Spain. The sense of personal dignity and consideration for others has already bought all that the mirage of wealth only promises. Again, while the absence of education is doubtless a real loss —and certainly to those who measure the civilisation of a country by the magnitude of its newspaper Press Spain must indeed be contemptible—it is a vast mistake to suppose

that there is no education in Spain. The traditions of the old civilisation diffused throughout the country constitute aa atroosphere in which every boy or siH grows up paturally, and which cannot by any effort be produced in the most vigorous and progressive of newer and cruder civilisations. The woman who can with difficulty write her name shows an unfailing instinct where the essentials of good breeding are concerned ; the fine-fibred toreador, brutal a* his occupation may seem to us, need fear no comparison either in physical or mental qualities with the athlete of the Englishspeaking world. That hideous laugh which rings out in the night air of London sis pathetic in its reckless vacuity as any cry of sorrow —is never heard in the lowest quarter of any Spanish city, not because there is no mirth there, or any forced restraint, but because the gracious traditions of an old civiliaation are part of the lives of the commonest people. Thus it is that in Spain, unlike those centres in which civilisation ha* ripened too quickly, vulgarity and prudery are alike absent. We have indeed left behind our own civilisation and the virtues that belong to it; but we have entered another civilisation in which virtues that we vainly and ineffectively strive after are the common possession of the common people.