IBERIAN IMPRESSIONS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3827, 30 October 1936, Page 3

IBERIAN IMPRESSIONS

THE SPANIARD AS I KNEW HIM.

(By

A.W.T.

in Melbourne Age.)

It is not surprising that strongly contradictory opinions about Spain should be published every day, because Spain is, for the first time since the Peninsular war, cable page news for the public, which knows that Borrow and Ford are out of date, but is not asking for modern books on postrevolution Spain, such as ‘‘Tramp Royal in Spain,” ‘‘Quiet Days in Spain,” “Spanish Adventure,” or “Misadventures with a Donkey.” These modern books would have prepared us for the effect of vast spaces, extreme domestic discomfort and plausible propaganda on a mainly uneducated people, with a wide variety cf local tradition that renders sympathy or understanding impossible between Barcelona, with its commerce and demand for independence, and Seville, soaked with Moorish influence and recalling imperial greatness, and Madrid, which has acquired an authority which hundreds of ancient cities begrudge her. It was my duty in 4929-30 to travel over the south east 'from Valencia to Granada every month as a chaplain in the diocese of Gibraltar, and on my way home I saw most cities that lie in a roughly direct line between Cordova and San Sebastian during the last days of the rule of Alfonso XIII, and the dictatorship of Primo Rivera. The first thing I noticed was the falsity of French views about Spain, and one has to remember that French information is the main thing that prevents tourists from crossing the frontier, as they despise a lazy people, dislike dirty people, and shudder at the prospect of bad roads. The average visitor does not realise that a Spaniard starts work at 5, and so can afford to "take the sun” in the middle of the day; that, though he uses a basket for excavations and a child’s pick for road making, he does get a grave dug and a road made to time; that his barbers’ shops, bathrooms and markets are cleaner than those in most parts of our Empire; that his slums smell sweeter than those of London or Edinburgh because though he does not wash his person often he washes his linen daily, while we often neglect both. His main roads are probably the best in all Europe. You can go from Toledo to Madrid in one hour, and near Barcelona you can average fifty miles per hour in safety. In these days, when much of our pacifism is not international sympathy, but sheer dread of discipline and pain; it is quite easy to get excited ever “Spanish atrocities.” We should ignore them if there were a war on anywhere else; if we recalled the Thirty Years War and many other past campaigns, and if we understood Spanish history. Spaniards have always endured and inflicted pain. They died in Sagunto to a man to keep Hannibal out, as they died to a man at Numantia in defiance of Rome. At enormous cost they drove the Moors out and defeated them at Lepanto. The inquisitors did not burn heretics out of devilry, but out of love to save souls from their burden of unorthodox flesh. They suffered more than their victims in establishing their South American Empire, and they endured untold hardship when they offered the first national resistance that Napoleon met. s

Contempt for blood and death and agony is the main lesson of their religious pictures and sculpture and is the inner secret of their national pastimes. We, as spectators, watch a man risk his reputation or exhibit his skill in games. They, at a bull fight, watch a man and an animal match their lives and dexterity, I have seen a football umpire stoned at a cup tie, but it was to all present what being

bombed was to the king, “an incident inseparable from the profession he had adopted.” A Spanish audience will encore a whole act of a play or order a new play if it does not like the one on the bill. They don’t mind pain, and they expect anyone to keep smiling and endure it, too. I have formed no opinion as to which of the rival forces is in the right, but I feel sure that both sides will be as ready to endure and inflict pain as were the two great Spanish characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose gigantic memorial was new when- I was in Madrid in the spring of 1930, in pursuit of their ideals. It is often forgotten that the dreaming hero did an immense amount of personal damage to others before they turned on him, and that his henchman was«Joyal to his leader though he “died daily” like St. Paul. They will fight to a finish. What finish is possible? The Spaniard has neglected politics and so has made politicians corrupt, and now that ill-digested education in a flood and foreign propaganda has made him enter politics he will secure in the long run a fairly clean government that will leave him alone. He was drastically governed under the dictatorship, but he prospered in many ways and he may try the experiment again. He neither hated nor loved the king, but the king without his wife, who was not popular, might very well be the president of a Spanish republic, for tie knows his business and none has ever seen him afraid of anything. When Spain has settled down to education and ceased to connect wealth and church she will stand by her old religion, which is a strange mixture of manifold growths. In the long run the Spaniard will do what the ablest observers predict. He will be the model of Europe. He can do all the things others call "progress,” but he has been their master and not their slave. He has not any respect for wealth nor any contempt for poverty. He is a natural gentleman who has been defined as "one who has too much self-respect to be lacking in respect for anyone else.” He is oriental in his complete disregard for time. If you try to hustle him in order to catch a train he will courteously correct the grammer of your last sentence and ask you which sweet you will prefer. He has a keen sense of honour because he has a great history behind him, for he has been the first European coloniser, the sole champion of human freedom, the finest soldier, the greatest of missionaries, the defender of Christendom. “To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends,” and when these drums and tramplings are stilled he will come into his own again. If he is to do so it is the British race that will help him most, for we, like him, are uneducated, too fond of national pastimes, essentially simple, over indulgent to our children and men of our word.