ue, which does not even share the Latin descent
of the others; and Catalan, a form of Provencal which, with its
dialect, Valencian, is spoken on the upper Mediterranean coast and in
the Balearic Isles. Of course, under the influence of rail
communication and a conscious effort to spread Castilian, the other
languages, with the exception of Portuguese and Catalan, have lost
vitality and died out in the larger towns; but the problem remains far
different from that of the Italian dialects, since the Spanish
languages have all, except Basque, a strong literary tradition.

Added to the variety of language, there is an immense variety of
topography in the different parts of Spain. The central plateaux,
dominant in modern history (history being taken to mean the births and
breedings of kings and queens and the doings of generals in armor)
probably approximate the warmer Russian steppes in climate and
vegetation. The west coast is in most respects a warmer and more
fertile Wales. The southern _huertas_ (arable river valleys) have
rather the aspect of Egypt. The east coast from Valencia up is a
continuation of the Mediterranean coast of France. It follows that, in
this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian
snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected.

Here is probably the root of the tendency in Spanish art and thought to
emphasize the differences between things. In painting, where the mind
of a people is often more tangibly represented than anywhere else, we
find one supreme example. El Greco, almost the caricature in his art of
the Don Quixote type of mind, who, though a Greek by birth and a
Venetian by training, became more Spanish than the Spaniards during his
long life at Toledo, strove constantly to express the difference
between the world of flesh and the world of spirit, between the body
and the soul of man. More recently, the extreme characterization of
Goya's sketches and portraits, the intensifying of national types found
in Zuloaga and the other painters who have been exploiting with such
success the peculiarities--the picturesqueness--of Spanish faces and
landscapes, seem to spring from this powerful sense of the separateness
of things.

In another way you can express this constant attempt to differentiate
one individual from another as caricature. Spanish art is constantly
on the edge of caricature. Given the ebullient fertility of the
Spanish mind and its inte