At her spiritual climax, under Isabel, Carlos and Philip II, Spain was squalid. By contrast with the state of England, of France, of the German towns and of the cities of Morocco, she was an economic laggard. Her nobles with their retinues cut swathes of gold through the landsides. She was full of heroes and of saints. But the land was arid with neglect. War had razed her forests. Seven centuries of Reconquest, making labor despicable beside the guerdons of battle, had sapped her burghers. What the long wars began, the Inquisition and Expulsions carried on. Jews--a solid class of craftsmen and middlemen--were expelled. The Granadan Moors--ablest of Spain’s cultivators--were making homesick songs about their Andalusian farms, in Fez and Marrakech. There were more vagabonds in Spain than farmers, more soldiers than laborers. There were more hidalgos and caballeros than artisans and merchants. There were seven million Spaniards--and nine thousand convents! Some men are poor because they are weak and dull: some are poor because they are men of genius. Amsterdam and London grow rich, because such is their will. Avila and Toledo remain dingy, because their will is elsewhere. Spain is virile, brilliantly equipped. But Spain has resolved to be a hero and a saint. Spain has no time to pave streets, who paves the way for Christ beyond the sea. Spain has no time for natural science, for agriculture and for the tricks of trade, who is so expert in theology.[22] In the extremes of her life, none is wider than this between the Spirit of Spain’s enterprise and the fact of her condition. The crass and earthly elements of Spain are not destroyed nor repressed by her religious will: they are engaged. They must serve in her armies, even though the fight be a crusade. They must man her ships, even though the mariner’s compass be divinely pointed. They are intensified indeed, like all the parts of Spain. And like the other elements of her world, brutality and lust assume in a particular form the wholeness of Spain’s will. Spain is adventuring. Now the sheer impulse of adventure is embodied. The pícaro is born. He has in him the aboriginal Spaniard: that unruly, lusty, atomic man whom Rome encountered, whom the Cid personified. He is an anarch, brutal as the Iberian of the north, shrewd and subtle as the Phœnician of the south. He is this aboriginal, complex man of Spain shaped by the Spanish will. The pícaro is not lawless: he is an outlaw. He reacts from Spain’s social purpose, from Spain’s social structure, from the mysticism and heroism of this later Spain. Like all reactive bodies, he resembles his opponent. And it is this union in him--the direct issue from the source of Spain and the direct response to Spanish culture--which makes him so true an element in that culture.