If you are in a town and there are any pictures there of the old traditional school of Castile, go to see them--for in the great days of its expansion this race created a school of realistic painting, of a rude, vigorous, simplified realism, very limited in range of tone, which has the effect of a violent douche upon the vision. Perhaps you will come across some canvas of Ribera or Zurbaran--your eye is held by the bony form of some austere hermit, whose sinewy muscles are presented in high light against strong shadows, a canvas meagre in tones and gradations, in which every object stands out sharp-edged. Not infrequently the figures fail to form a single whole with the background, which is a mere accessory of insignificant decorative value. Velazquez, who of all Castilian painters possesses most of the racial character, was a painter of men, of whole men, men all of one piece, rude and emphatic, men who fill the whole canvas. You will find no landscape-painters, you will discover no sense of tone, of suave transition, no unifying, enveloping atmosphere, which blends everything into a single harmonious whole. The unity springs from the more or less architectonic disposition of the several parts. * * * * * In this country of climatic extremes, without any softness or mildness, of a landscape uniform in its contrasts, the spirit likewise is dry and sharp-edged, with but a meagre ambience of ideas. It generalises upon raw facts, seen in a discrete series, as in a kaleidoscope, not upon a synthesis or analysis of facts seen in a continuous series, in a living stream; it sees them sharp-edged like figures in the Castilian landscape and it takes them as they appear, in their own dress, without reconstructing them. And it has given birth to a harsh popular realism and to a dry formal idealism, marching alongside one another, in an association like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but never combining. The Castilian spirit is either ironic or tragic, sometimes both at once, but it never arrives at a fusion of the irony and the austere tragedy of the human drama. SPANISH INDIVIDUALISM In few books have I found so much food for reflection upon our Spain and us Spaniards as in Martin A. S. Hume’s “The Spanish People: Their Origin, Growth and Influence.” It is written by one who knows and esteems us. It impresses us at a first glance as an excellent compendium of the history of Spain, but on closer examination it is found to be also an excellent psychological study of the Spanish people.