I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is
unlike any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are
bound to respect him.
There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate
because part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was
brought from Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of
a Spanish grandee who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina
Celi, its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew.
The mansion is filled with the fruits of many a foray. There are
plunder from Naples, where one ancestor was Viceroy, and treasures from
the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, where two other ancestors
ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost some mariner of the Tarifa
Straits a pot of money.
Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To
such base uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and
smiles on the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits
serene upon the green hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing
had ever happened; neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron;
the past but a phantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems.
There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich
and prosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the
political fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always
“devil take the hindmost,” community of interests nowhere. “The good
old vices of Spain,” that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the
greater in regulated gradations all the way from the King to the
beggar, are as prevalent and as vital as ever they were. Curiously
enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic blood and Moorish blood still trickles
through the Spanish coast towns. It may be traced through the
nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurations and appendices,
which would account for some of the enterprise and activity that show
themselves, albeit only by fits and starts.