“DOÑA ELENA.”
MY SPANISH YEAR
BY
Mrs. BERNHARD WHISHAW
AUTHOR (WITH BERNHARD WHISHAW) OF
“ARABIC SPAIN”
WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.
Published 1914
INTRODUCTORY
To the foreigner visiting Spain for the first time somany things seem topsy-turvy that, unless a philosophicalspirit be cultivated, one’s temper might sufferserious damage. But there is one way not only toendure, but actually to enjoy the minor discomforts,absence of consistency, and utter lack of commonsense forced upon one at every turn in this mostoriginal country; and that is to regard them allfrom the standpoint of comic opera. So manypeople expect to find Spain merely an enlargededition of Bizet’s Carmen that it ought not to bedifficult for them to smile when comic-operaticincidents are enacted before them in daily life; andyet one often sees the impatient traveller exhaustinghimself in furious denunciations of tough beef, badbutter, unpunctual trains, faulty postal services,retrograde hotels, and so on ad infinitum, insteadof thanking his lucky stars that there is still onecountry in Europe which remains much as God madeit, instead of being recast in the mould preferred bythe tourist agencies.
No doubt when we get express trains flying fromIrun to Madrid and from Granada to Seville at sixty[vi]miles an hour, with a chain of cosmopolitan hotelsall along the road, those tourist agencies will be ableto do far better business. But their clients will notthen travel in Spain but in Cosmopolitania, and thelast stronghold of romance left in Western Europewill have gone the way of Switzerland and Italy,where in some towns it is almost the exception tohear the language of the native spoken in the streets.Thank Heaven, Spain has not yet awakened to thecommercial advantages of moulding her nationalcharacteristics into the groove of the common-place,and her soul has not yet been cut out and thrownaway in the pursuit of filthy lucre.
Meanwhile, the traveller who follows the beatentrack has really very little to complain of, for duringthe last ten years great progress has been made bothin the train service and the hotel accommodation;and when you have grumbled and slept and scoldedthrough the eight or ten or twelve or twenty hours’railway journey from one provincial capital toanother, and take your place at the table d’hôtein one of the big new hotels, you might almostimagine yourself in London or Paris or New York.One thing, however, reminds you that you are inSpain: the anxious solicitude of the waiters, whowatch your every mouthful as if it were a matter ofpersonal consequence to them that you should bepleased with your dinner, and press fresh dishesupon you if you do not eat as much as they thinkyou ought, assuring you that they are very excellentand that you must keep up your strength in order toenjoy the beautiful monuments that you are g