Therefore he understands vaguely the causes of his incompetence, and struggles weakly against them. His contemporary literature is strong in plaint: it is wanting in self-knowledge and constructiveness. It is weak, also, in creative imagination: even as it is strong in fantasy. The Spanish mind has become like the mind of a child. The child’s intellect is not inferior to the man’s: it is merely too preoccupied within itself to have achieved the power of association and of objective experience which comes with maturity and which begets analysis and imagination. The child is credulous, because its belief is subjective fantasy and finds no opponent in the real world. Also, the child is cruel because it cannot imagine pain in others, it is anti-social because it has not associated its life with the life around it. The Spaniard is still the victim of the infantile beliefs of medieval Europe. He accepts the literal Heaven and Hell, having no imagination strong enough to make them real, and in consequence to reject them. He is cruel. And his separatism, his want of the adhesive impulse make him a ready victim to tyranny in government. Unable to organize a social body, he accepts the simple body of the King or the alien body of the Church of Rome. He has the virtues of his state. His personal development brings him a personal integrity, a true personal pride unknown in Europe. He has natural dignity. Whatever his rank, he is a _caballero_: a true microcosm of the Spanish nation. There is no artifice in him. He is clean, self-controlled and independent. In his veins lives the impulse of heroism; in his mind is the knowledge and the acceptance of heroism’s price. Cowardice, compromise, hypocrisy are traits more common in more social races. And cant requires no word in _castellano_. Even the Spanish thief is sincere: the tradition of the pícaro has not died. And the power of endurance, of sacrifice, of devotion is developed in the average Spaniard beyond the dream of the romantic north. The once furious and unleashed elements of the Spanish soul have been woven into this counterpoint of rest: they make a quiet music. It is natural that the Spaniard’s love of music and gift for music should be supreme. This art of vigorous abstracted balance, so subjective, so ruthlessly legal, is the symbol of the Spanish nature. And as with his classic _canto hondo_, the effect in counterpoise and control is almost that of silence. By the same token he is a great dancer: his dance is a synthesis of movements equated to rest. And he loves the drama: where the torrential forces of mankind are fused into a unitary form. * * * * * The world nurses two myths concerning Spain. The first, that she is decadent, Spain believes herself, and thereby proves, if other proof were lacking, her failure in self-knowledge. The other myth is that Spain is romantic.