ixed solemn eyes and
those fragmentary bull-necked men hewn roughly out of grey stone; they
were freed from the caked clay of two thousand years and reverently set
up in the churches. So probably the motives that started the watchmaker
on his career of sculpturing and falsifying were pious and reverential.

However it began, when it was discovered that the saints were mere
horrid heathen he-gods and she-gods and that the foreign gentlemen with
spectacles who appeared from all the ends of Europe to investigate,
would pay money for them, the watchmaker began to thrive as a mighty
man in his village and generation. He began to study archaeology and
the style of his cumbersome forged divinities improved. For a number of
years the statues from the Cerro de los Santos were swallowed whole by
all learned Europe. But the watchmaker's imagination began to get the
better of him; forms became more and more fantastic, Egyptian,
Assyrian, _art-nouveau_ influences began to be noted by the discerning,
until at last someone whispered forgery and all the scientists scuttled
to cover shouting that there had never been any native Iberian
sculpture after all.

The little watchmaker succumbed before his imagining of heathen gods
and died in a madhouse. To this day when you stand in the middle of the
room devoted to the Cerro de los Santos in the Madrid, and see the
statues of Iberian goddesses clustered about you in their high
head-dresses like those of dancers, you cannot tell which were made by
the watchmaker in 1880, and which by the image-maker of the
hill-sanctuary at a time when the first red-eyed ships of the
Phoenician traders were founding trading posts among the barbarians of
the coast of Valencia. And there they stand on their shelves, the real
and the false inextricably muddled, and stare at the enigma with stone
eyes.

So with the traditions: the tradition of Catholic Spain, the tradition
of military grandeur, the tradition of fighting the Moors, of
suspecting the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of sobriety,
of chivalry, of Don Quixote and Tenorio.

The Spanish-American war, to the United States merely an opportunity
for a patriotic-capitalist demonstration of sanitary engineering,
heroism and canned-meat scandals, was to Spain the first whispered word
that many among the traditions were false. The young men of that time
called themselves the generation of ninety-eight. According to
temperament they rejected all