moreover, God is always, in essence, the
proudest sublimation of man's soul. The same spirit runs through the
preachers of the early church and the works of Santa Teresa, a disguise
of the frantic desire to express the self, the self, changeless and
eternal, at all costs. From this comes the hard cruelty that flares
forth luridly at times. A recent book by Miguel de Unamuno, _Del
Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida_, expresses this fierce clinging to
separateness from the universe by the phrase _el hambre de
inmortalidad_, the hunger of immortality. This is the core of the
individualism that lurks in all Spanish ideas, the conviction that only
the individual soul is real.

III

In the Spain of to-day these things are seen as through a glass,
darkly. Since the famous and much gloated-over entrance of Ferdinand
and Isabella into Granada, the history of Spain has been that of an
attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. In the great flare of the
golden age, the age of ingots of Peru and of men of even greater worth,
the disease worked beneath the surface. Since then the conflict has
corroded into futility all the buoyant energies of the country. I mean
the persistent attempt to centralize in thought, in art, in government,
in religion, a nation whose every energy lies in the other direction.
The result has been a deadlock, and the ensuing rust and numbing of all
life and thought, so that a century of revolution seems to have brought
Spain no nearer a solution of its problems. At the present day, when
all is ripe for a new attempt to throw off the atrophy, a sort of
despairing inaction causes the Spaniards to remain under a government
of unbelievably corrupt and inefficient politicians. There seems no
solution to the problem of a nation in which the centralized power and
the separate communities work only to nullify each other.

Spaniards in face of their traditions are rather in the position of the
archaeologists before the problem of Iberian sculpture. For near the
Cerro de los Santos, bare hill where from the ruins of a sanctuary has
been dug an endless series of native sculptures of men and women,
goddesses and gods, there lived a little watchmaker. The first statues
to be dug up were thought by the pious country people to be saints, and
saints they were, according to an earlier dispensation than that of
Rome; with the result that much Kudos accompanied the discovery of
those draped women with high head-dresses and f