or part of the museum of traditions they
had been taught to believe was the real Spain; each took up a separate
road in search of a Spain which should suit his yearnings for beauty,
gentleness, humaneness, or else vigor, force, modernity.

The problem of our day is whether Spaniards evolving locally,
anarchically, without centralization in anything but repression, will
work out new ways of life for themselves, or whether they will be drawn
into the festering tumult of a Europe where the system that is dying is
only strong enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth in which
there was hope for the future. The Pyrenees are high.

IV

It was after a lecture at an exhibition of Basque painters in Madrid,
where we had heard Valle-Melan, with eyes that burned out from under
shaggy grizzled eyebrows, denounce in bitter stinging irony what he
called the Europeanization of Spain. What they called progress, he had
said, was merely an aping of the stupid commercialism of modern Europe.
Better no education for the masses than education that would turn
healthy peasants into crafty putty-skinned merchants; better a Spain
swooning in her age-old apathy than a Spain awakened to the brutal
soulless trade-war of modern life.... I was walking with a young
student of philosophy I had met by chance across the noisy board of a
Spanish _pension_, discussing the exhibition we had just seen as a
strangely meek setting for the fiery reactionary speech. I had remarked
on the very "primitive" look much of the work of these young Basque
painters had, shown by some in the almost affectionate technique, in
the dainty caressing brush-work, in others by that inadequacy of the
means at the painter's disposal to express his idea, which made of so
many of the pictures rather gloriously impressive failures. My friend
was insisting, however, that the primitiveness, rather than the
birth-pangs of a new view of the world, was nothing but "the last
affectation of an over-civilized tradition."

"Spain," he said, "is the most civilized country in Europe. The growth
of our civilization has never been interrupted by outside influence.
The Phoenicians, the Romans--Spain's influence on Rome was, I imagine,
fully as great as Rome's on Spain; think of the five Spanish
emperors;--the Goths, the Moors;--all incidents, absorbed by the
changeless Iberian spirit.... Even Spanish Christianity," he continued,
smiling, "is far more Spanish than it is Christian. Ou