teristics]

It is a hazardous thing to attempt the analysis of national character,
for after all, however careful the traveller may be in his inquiries, it
is from the few individuals himself has known that his most definite
impressions are drawn. Of course he can control his observations by
asking the opinion of foreigners long resident in the country; but
curiously enough in Andalusia precisely the opposite occurs from what
elsewhere is usual. Aliens in England, France, or Italy, with increasing
comprehension, acquire also affection and esteem for the people among
whom they live; but I have seldom found in Southern Spain a
foreigner--and there are many, merchants, engineers and the like, with
intimate knowledge of the inhabitants--who had a good word to say for
the Andalusians.

But perhaps it is in the behaviour of crowds that the most accurate
picture of national character can be obtained. Like composite
photographs which give the appearance of a dozen people together, but a
recognisable portrait of none, the multitude offers as it were a
likeness in the rough, without precision of detail yet with certain
marked features more obviously indicated. The crowd is an individual
without responsibility, unoppressed by the usual ties of prudence and
decorum, who betrays himself because he lacks entirely
self-consciousness and the desire to pose. In Spain the crowd is above
all things good-humoured, fond of a joke so long as it is none too
subtle, excitable of course and prone to rodomontade, yet practical,
eager to make the best of things and especially to get its money's
worth. If below the surface there are a somewhat brutal savagery, a
cruel fickleness, these are traits common with all human beings together
assembled; they are merely evidence of man's close relationship to ape
and tiger.

From contemporary novels more or less the same picture appears, and also
from the newspapers, though in these somewhat idealised; for the Press,
bound to flatter for its living, represents its patrons, as do some
portrait-painters, not as they are but as they would like to be. In the
eyes of Andalusian journalists their compatriots are for ever making a
magnificent gesture; and the condition would be absurd if a hornet's
nest of comic papers, tempering vanity with a lively sense of the
ridiculous, did not save the situation by abundantly coarse caricatures.

It is vanity then which emerges as the most distinct of national traits,