ance, have swept over the country, changing surface customs and
modes of thought and speech, only to be metamorphosed into keeping with
the changeless Iberian mind.

And predominant in the Iberian mind is the thought _La vida es sueno_:
"Life is a dream." Only the individual, or that part of life which is
in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The supreme expression of
this lies in the two great figures that typify Spain for all time: Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the individualist who believed
in the power of man's soul over all things, whose desire included the
whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the world
was food for his belly. On the one hand we have the ecstatic figures
for whom the power of the individual soul has no limits, in whose minds
the universe is but one man standing before his reflection, God. These
are the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid ascetics like Juan de
la Cruz, the originals of the glowing tortured faces in the portraits
of El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial materialists like the
Archpriest of Hita, culminating in the frantic, mystical sensuality of
such an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through all Spanish history
and art the threads of these two complementary characters can be
traced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance the
same. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of Spanish
life been woven.

II

In trying to hammer some sort of unified impression out of the
scattered pictures of Spain in my mind, one of the first things I
realize is that there are many Spains. Indeed, every village hidden in
the folds of the great barren hills, or shadowed by its massive church
in the middle of one of the upland plains, every fertile _huerta_ of
the seacoast, is a Spain. Iberia exists, and the strong Iberian
characteristics; but Spain as a modern centralized nation is an
illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the
desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be
due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized
government on a land essentially centrifugal.

In the first place, there is the matter of language. Roughly, four
distinct languages are at present spoken in Spain: Castilian, the
language of Madrid and the central uplands, the official language,
spoken in the south in its Andalusian form; Gallego-Portuguese, spoken
on the west coast; Basq