“Hearken to me, Albar Fánez, and all my valiant knights! “With this castle we have won great spoil; “Many Moors have died; few do I see still living. “As to survivors, both the men and the women, there’s no one who will buy them “If we cut off their heads. Nary a bit would we gain. “Let’s save them for ourselves; now that we are the masters. “We’ll lodge in their houses; we’ll make them wait on us.”[11] The Cid reminds us vividly how far his Spain was yet from the ultimate, classic Spanish character, four hundred years after the battle had begun between the Moor and Christian. In the Cid are all the elements of that character--in their raw, chemically unfused state. But in the sense that Isabel was Castilian, and that the Castle is Castilian, he is not Castilian and he is not Spanish. His spirit is pagan and is European. No such light-hearted, almost comic bellicosity exists among the Semites to whom warfare was a solemn, religious matter. The Cid is the knight-errant, the medieval sportsman, stripped, however, of the mystic and amorous sentiment which Christianity later put upon the freebooters of the northern forests. The Cid is cheerful and fluid as any pagan: but he has a trait which no true Teuton knight possessed: his extreme concern with money. The Cid fights like a Goth: but he figures like a Phœnician. And, like an Arab, he keeps moving. From time to time, the Cid is minded that he is fighting for the Lord, that Christ is his captain, and that the Moor (aside passing alliances and friendships) is his spiritual foe. He gets this notion from the Moor himself: and it is well to realize how weakly the Christian has adapted it after four centuries of fighting. Meantime, the Arab who had crossed the Strait in a flame of religious passion, cooled and lost his sectarian, desert ardor. Spain was become a simmering chaos with no clear elements. Christian and Moslem were often in alliance. The Ideas of Cross and Crescent resided unalloyed only in monasteries. The process of osmosis whereby the Christian was to inherit the religious fanaticism long lost by the Moslem did not reach its climax until the Age of Isabel. The Cid--gay, ambulant, fluid, mercenary pragmatist of arms--lived under the shadow of no Castle. The Castle of Burgos had as yet no spirit for its bristling body. It was not yet Castile. But though the Castle’s body is a ruin over Burgos, and Castile is wrecked among the modern nations, their spirit lives. It created a hard kingdom to tower over Spain, to dominion the world, and stratify at last the Spanish soul. * * * * * What is a castle?