ed to hear him refer to this as Edinburgh folk refer to
a wrestle with the east wind. It's an attitude that was bound to
persist, long after the rest of Europe had got going with more modern
history, in Spain; where villages were subject on winter's nights to the
visitations of wolves and bears, and where the Goths and the Arabs and
the Christians and the Berbers proved so extravagantly the wrangling
lack of solidarity in the human herd. There had from earliest times
existed all round the Mediterranean basin a ceremony by which primitive
man gave a concrete ritual expression to this fear: the killing of the
bull. They took the bull as the representative of the brutes which were
the enemies of man and slew him by a priest's knife and with much
decorative circumstances to show that this was no mere butchering of
meat. Well, there in Spain it survived.... He had spoken confidently and
dogmatically, but his eyes asked them appealingly whether they didn't
see, as if in his course through the world he had been disappointed by
the number of people who never saw.

"That's all very fine," said Mr. Philip, "but they've had time to get
over their little fancies. We're in the twentieth century now."

Ah, the conception might never emerge into their consciousness, and
perhaps they would laugh at it if it did; but for all that it lies sunk
in their minds and shapes their mental contour. When a dead city is
buried by earth and no new city is built on its site the peasants tread
out their paths on the terraces which show where the old streets ran.
Something like that happened to a nation. Modern Spaniards hadn't,
thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for
themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they
repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had
responded to their quite real psychological imperatives. You couldn't
perhaps find in the whole of the Peninsula a man or woman who felt this
fear of the beast, but that didn't affect his case. It was enough that
all men and women in the Peninsula had once felt it and had formed a
national habit of attending bullfights, and as silly subalterns
sometimes lay the toe of their boots to a Hindu for the glory of the
British Empire--keeping the animal creation in its place by kicks and
blows to mules and dogs.

It was incredible, he exclaimed, the interweaving of the old and the new
that made up the fabric of life in Spain. He