to music.

“Charming place!  Thy garden is embellished with flowers which repose upon their stalks and exhale the sweetest perfumes; fresh air agitates the orange-trees and spreads abroad the sweet odour of its blossoms.  I hear voluptuous music joined to the rustling of the leaves of thy grove.  Everything around is harmonious, green, and flowering.”

Such is part of the inscription upon the arcades of the Garden of the Pond, and how perfectly the rich imagery of the words conveys the charm of the garden!  The Generalife has kept more than any place in Spain its Moorish character, combining in its palace and garden, in spite of decay and alterations, much of that full suggestion of all beautiful things that was their gift.

In Spain dancing is something more than an amusement; it is a serious art closely connected with religious ritual, which expresses, perhaps as nothing else does, if we except the bull-fight, the true spirit of the people.  The dances are Eastern in their origin; they are dramas of love, and especially those of the Gitanas, who have adopted and kept living the ancient dances of the country.

Seville, the joyous southern capital, is the city that has given its own spirit to the most beautiful of the Spanish dances.  Granada and Malaga are also centres of dancing, and sometimes good performances may be witnessed at Madrid.  But the best cafés cantantes, where the true Spanish dancers perform, are hidden in back streets where the foreigner does not readily find them.  These dances are national ceremonies and belong to the people, and are far different from the dances, often quite modern in character, that are given at the popular cafés.  The varieties are numerous, and the names are often confusing.  Many dances date back far into antiquity, while almost all owe their special character to Arabic influences.

The bolero is the most aristocratic dance.  “What majesty, what decorum, what distinction!” cried Valera, speaking of the dances of Ruiz and his daughter Conchita.  It is danced by a man and a woman, and is a kind of drama between them; both use castanets.  It is a slow dance of deliberate grace and fascination.  The jota is danced by a woman alone.  This dance, too, is a love drama of intense passion, but always decorous, always beautiful.  Both these dances are native to Andalusia, the province of Spanish dancing.  Outside of Andalusia, the most famous dance is the Aragonese jota.  This is danced by a man and a woman, and the castanets are used.  But the drama is different, the movements are quicker and less varied, and there is great vivacity.  It seems a kind of combat between the two dancers; it is more a drama of battle than a drama of love.

But the most typical of all Spanish dancing is the flamenco dance of the Gitanas, which you will see best at Seville; it is the most primitive and the most African of all.  A group of performers sit in a semicircle upon a small stage.  The spectators all take their part by a rhythmic clapping of hands and stamping feet.  One of the performers—generally a man—plays the guitar and sings an accompanying song.  A dancer rises suddenly, spontaneously, as if seized by the passion of the music.  She wears a long dress, usually of white, and a beautiful Manilla shawl is folded on her shoulders.  How can one describe the dance which is so unlike all other dances?  It is not a dance of the feet; every part of the body plays its share in the performance: the swaying figure, the beckoning hands, the glittering smiles that come and go in the dark eyes—all contribute.  The dancer is alive to her fingertips, and every expressive movement has the Spanish simplicity of emphasis.  At first the movement is slow, then faster, and now increases and rises to a passion of intensity.  And all the time the spectators are actively participating, their emotion rising with the dancer’s emotion; their rhythmic clapping and beating of feet grows louder as the drama proceeds, and cries of long-drawn-out oles stimulate the dancer.  The dance ends as unexpectedly as it began: a pause comes, and the swaying body is still, as if languor had followed on strong emotion.  There is silence; the dancer goes back to her seat.  Then the singer starts a new song, the clapping is taken up again, another dancer comes forward, and a new drama is acted.

The foreigner who would understand Spain must see these dances; then he will come to know yet another characteristic of the people—their love of strong, quite elemental sensation.  It is this that so often makes them seem cruel to us.

This delight of the Spaniard in all emotions that make sharp appeal to the senses explains the existence of the bull-fight, the national sport, which is so much a part of the life of the people that, although to-day there is a widespread movement to repress, or at least to mitigate, its cruelty, it seems unlikely that its real attraction will cease.

It is impossible not to condemn the bull-fight; its cruelty cannot be denied.  It is brutal, as the most cultivated Spaniards themselves admit.  And yet there are certain facts that the stranger must remember before he condemns.  The bull-fight, like the dance, is a solemn ritual rather than an amusement.  The combats take place on Sunday, while the most famous form part of the ceremonies of Holy Week.  Part of the proceeds are devoted to some religious object—a charity or other holy work.  Almost all the great bull-rings have a chapel where the fighters first prepare themselves in prayer and partake of the Holy Eucharist.  To the foreigner it may seem that this union of religion and bull-fighting is incongruous, but to most Spaniards it does not appear so.

The bull-fight is the Spaniard’s strongest, most characteristic intoxication.  The poor man will sell his shirt to buy a ticket for the bull-ring.  They are a profoundly serious people, but every incident connected with their national sport arouses them into vivid life.  I remember on one occasion, when travelling in Andalusia in an open third-class railway carriage, the train passed a vacada, or training-place of bulls to be used in the ring.  The effect was magical.  These quiet, sombre people sprang upon the seats, some leaned far out of the windows; they gesticulated, they waved their sombreros, they called the names of the bulls, they cheered, they shouted.  Never had I seen the decorous Spaniard so strongly moved.

The toreros are the idols of the Spanish people.  You will see them best at Seville, in their faultless tight majo costumes and frilled shirts, fastened with diamond studs, and diamond rings on the fingers of their faultless hands, and with their pigtail fastened upon the top of their heads.  There is something splendidly attractive in their perfect bodily equipoise, with every muscle trained to faultless precision.  The toreros have in the highest