of the priestess, who ended by falling in front of the altar with foaming mouth and bloodshot eyes.  And our songs?  They are most beautiful, the products of many civilisations, but most sad, despairing, gloomy, revealing the soul of a sick and tainted people, who find their greatest pleasure in human bloodshed, or urging on dying horses in the enclosure of a circus.  Spanish joy!  Andalusian merriment!  I cannot help laughing at it.  One night in Madrid I assisted at an Andalusian fete, all that was most typical, most Spanish.  We went to enjoy ourselves immensely.  Wine and more wine!  And accordingly the bottle went round, with ever frowning brows, gloomy faces, abrupt gestures.  ‘Ole! come along 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