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.