r life is one
vast ritual. Our religion is part of it, that is all. And so are the
bull-fights that so shock the English and Americans,--are they any more
brutal, though, than fox-hunting and prize-fights? And how full of
tradition are they, our _fiestas de toros_; their ceremony reaches
back to the hecatombs of the Homeric heroes, to the bull-worship of the
Cretans and of so many of the Mediterranean cults, to the Roman games.
Can civilization go farther than to ritualize death as we have done?
But our culture is too perfect, too stable. Life is choked by it."

We stood still a moment in the shade of a yellowed lime tree. My friend
had stopped talking and was looking with his usual bitter smile at a
group of little boys with brown, bare dusty legs who were intently
playing bull-fight with sticks for swords and a piece of newspaper for
the toreador's scarlet cape.

"It is you in America," he went on suddenly, "to whom the future
belongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured. Life has become
once more the primal fight for bread. Of course the dollar is a
complicated form of the food the cave man killed for and slunk after,
and the means of combat are different, but it is as brutal. From that
crude animal brutality comes all the vigor of life. We have none of it;
we are too tired to have any thoughts; we have lived so much so long
ago that now we are content with the very simple things,--the warmth of
the sun and the colors of the hills and the flavor of bread and wine.
All the rest is automatic, ritual."

"But what about the strike?" I asked, referring to the one-day's
general strike that had just been carried out with fair success
throughout Spain, as a protest against the government's apathy
regarding the dangerous rise in the prices of food and fuel.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"That, and more," he said, "is new Spain, a prophecy, rather than a
fact. Old Spain is still all-powerful."

Later in the day I was walking through the main street of one of the
clustered adobe villages that lie in the folds of the Castilian plain
not far from Madrid. The lamps were just being lit in the little shops
where the people lived and worked and sold their goods, and women with
beautifully shaped pottery jars on their heads were coming home with
water from the well. Suddenly I came out on an open _plaza_ with
trees from which the last leaves were falling through the greenish
sunset light. The place was filled with the