ong here! This is the joy of the world!' but the joy did
not appear in any part. The men looked at one another with scowling
brows, the women stamped their feet and clapped their hands with a
stupid vacuity in their looks, as though the music had emptied their
brains. The dancers swayed like erect serpents, with their mouths
open, their looks hard, grave, proud, unapproachable, like dancers who
were performing a sacred rite. Now and then above the monotonous and
sleepy rhythm, a song, harsh and strident like a roar, like the scream
of one who falls with his body run through. And the poetry? As dreary
as a dungeon, sometimes very beautiful, but beautiful as might be the
song of a prisoner behind his bars, dagger thrusts to the faithless
wife, offences against the mother washed out in blood, complaints
against the judge who sends to prison the caballeros[1] of the
broad-brimmed sombreros and sashes. The adieus of the culprit who
watches in the chapel the light of his last morning dawn. A poetry
of death and the scaffold that wrings the heart and robs it of all
happiness; even the songs to the beauty of women contain blood and
threats. And this is the music that delights the people in their hours
of relaxation and that will go on 'enlivening' them probably for
centuries. We are a gloomy people, Gabriel, we have it in our very
marrow, we do not know how to sing unless we are threatening or
weeping, and that song is the most beautiful which contains most
sighs, most painful groans and gasps of agony."

[Footnote 1: Highwaymen.]

"It is true, the Spanish people must necessarily be so. It believes
with its eyes shut in its kings and priests as the representatives of
God, and it moulds itself in their image and likeness. Its merriment
is that of the friars--a coarse merriment of dirty jests, of greasy
words and hoarse laughs. Our spicy novels are stories of the refectory
composed in the hours of digestion, with the garments loosened, the
hands crossed on the paunch, and the triple chin resting on
the scapulary. Their laughter arises always from the same
sources--grotesque poverty, the troublesome hangers on, the tricks
of hunger to rob a companion of his provision of begged scraps. The
tricks to filch purses from the gaily-dressed ladies who flaunt in the
churches, who serve as models to our poets of the golden age to depict
a lying world devoid of honour. The woman enslaved behind iron bars
and shutters, more dishonest and v