The Spanish can't imagine working first and resting afterwards, They much prefer the opposite...
Spain is the true country of equality... Without the slightest condescension the big boss permits the lowliest beggar to light his roll-up on his cigar...
Les servantes et les domestiques sont traités avec une douceur familière bien différente de notre politesse affectée
On dirait que la seule affaire sérieuse des Espagnols soit le plaisir ; ils s'y livrent avec une franchise, un abandon et un entrain admirables.
Les chances diverses de l'agonie du taureau sont suivies attentivement par de pâles et charmantes créatures dont un poëte élégiaque serait tout heureux de faire une Elvire.
Les danseuses espagnoles, bien qu'elles n'aient pas le fini, la correction précise, l'élévation des danseuses françaises, leur sont, à mon avis , bien supérieures par la grâce et le charme.
Le principal mobile des pièces espagnoles est le point d'honneur
Il peut y avoir en Angleterre, en France, en Italie, des femmes d'une beauté plus parfaite, plus régulière, mais assurément il n'y en a pas de plus jolies ni de plus piquantes. Elles possèdent à un haut degré ce que les Espagnols appellent la sal.
Wherever an Englishman finds himself, he lives exactly as if he were in London. He keeps his habits wherever he goes, and carries all his belongings on his back like a snail.
cette figure rectiligne, au regard étamé, à la physionomie morte , aux gestes anguleux, avec sa tenue exacte et méthodique , son parfum de canl [BL ?] et son absence de tout naturel, me produisit un effet comiquement sinistre.
Fair play has no equivalent either in French or in Spanish.
The English translate le droit into law, which is admittedly a solution of despair; the Spaniards possess a word, derecho, which more or less represents in their legal texts the idea of droit which is handled in the Law Faculties; but the vital droit of the Frenchman who has not studied law is unknown in Spain;
As for honor, it is the more untranslatable for the existence of French and English words physically related to it. For 'honour' and 'honneur' differ profoundly from 'el honor',
Fair play implies an effacing of the individual before the team, and even of the team before the game. But this effacing does not mean annihilation.
While fair play fits itself to action at every moment in a perfect empirical way, le droit draws beforehand a scheme of rules to which it forces action to conform.
El honor consists in the setting up of a subjective law of conduct above all objective laws, whether spontaneous and natural (fair play) or calculated and intellectual (droit). This subjective law is an imperative sense which the well-born man feels pointing clearly to what he must do in each case.
for the Englishman, action; for the Frenchman, thought; for the Spaniard, passion.
for the English people, in the body-will; for the French people, in the intellect; for the Spanish people, in the soul;
for the English people, in the body-will; for the French people, in the intellect; for the Spanish people, in the soul;
... Everything in him instinctively points to action. His main preoccupation consists in being wholly at the disposal of his will at the moment when it must apply itself to the world.
We are concerned with utilitarianism, not as a philosophical doctrine, but as an instinctive and 'innocent' feature of English psychology which manifests itself in many ways
... Action being of an immediate, tangible, and material character, the tendency to demand results in terms of action may seem tainted with selfishness, with a certain materialism, with a kind of shortsightedness. And, in fact, these are the defects most frequently attributed to the Englishman.
... There is no doubt that this tendency to the solid, so closely allied to his main tendency to action, is deeply felt in all the aspects of his character.
What is meant ... By 'practical sense' is precisely this attitude of the bee that goes straight to the flower which is the attitude of the Englishman when, on his way to action, he comes up against ideas or sentiments across his path.
The English instinct of co-operation operates therefore within a well-defined group which is no other than the race.
A community endowed with the genius for spontaneous organization is like a healthy body in which each cell goes of itself to its place to fulfil its function. Such is the case with the English community.
The average level of honesty in English civil life is singularly high, as is shown in the usual disregard for detailed precautions against fraud or deceit.
A people of action such as the English, cannot tolerate that the opposition should limit itself to 'felling the Government' or merely to putting spokes in the wheel of its politics.
the English are the teachers of the world, not merely in their quickness to perceive these natural laws, but in their cordial and sincere obedience to the restrictions which they impose upon each individual for the good of the whole.
Every man is in England the aristocrat of another man.
.. Fair play is a tendency which acts within a well-defined group.
the word 'foreigner' takes on English lips a shade of contempt from which it is usually free in other languages.
We see here at work the English tendency to live under the watching eye of the self.
Shy describes the vacillation which seizes the Englishman who feels insecure on the social soil he is treading at the moment.
Snobbery might well be defined as the tendency to judge things and people by the social criteria generally accepted in higher classes.
this reputation for hypocrisy is undoubtedly due to the difficulty which other people less gifted with moral-social tendencies find in accepting at its face value the high ethical level of English collective life.
while the Englishman reflects at the very moment when he acts and in order to act, the Frenchman sees in prospective action an excellent opportunity for setting problems before his mind.
in the very moment of action, in that crest of the present in which ends the hill of the past and begins the slope of the future, the Frenchman is often seized with giddiness.
the Frenchman, more lucid than the Englishman before and after action, loses his lucidity at the moment when he feels overrun by the stream of instantaneous life.
The calm of the Englishman in action is due to lucidity, for every being is always lucid in his own element
the Frenchman tends to prepare his actions by meticulous studies in tactics and strategy. The Frenchman is a chess-player.
French order is official, imposed from above though accepted below, intellectual, artificial, regulated, preceding action by a complicated system of written laws which aim at foreseeing all possible cases.
Frankness is the quality of the Frenchman, as straightforwardness is that of the Englishman. Frankness declares its actions. Straightforwardness endeavours to keep them on the right road.
The refined hedonism of France provides a special atmosphere favourable to spontaneous organization, in the same way as the tendency to action provides a general atmosphere favourable to spontaneous organization in England.
The Spaniard is spontaneous.
The Spanish character abounds in conflicting tendencies. It is hard and human, it is resigned and rebellious, it is energetic and indolent.
The importance of personal contacts is well known wherever people of the Spanish race are concerned.
the particularly rich type of generosity which goes by the Spanish name of desprendimiento, and contains no small proportion of detachment and indifference towards the future.
The Spanish people is deeply messianistic. It has a strong tendency to place itself--perhaps it is always placed--in a state of expectation, awaiting some providential event
...the instinctive hostility to association which has often been observed in the Spaniard. It is merely a feeling of opposition towards everything that may tend to regulate his personal liberty in advance.
Such breadth of feeling rather than of views, a kind of shame which prevents him from pursuing details with excessive care, from exacting his rights to the bitter end, are amongst the features which contribute to give its nobility to the Spanish people.
the existence within the Spanish character of the most contradictory tendencies. Thus, the warmest and sincerest human sense can be found in it, side by side with an utter indifference to pain
The Englishman is not illogical, but allogical, for logic is a thing which he does not trouble about.
Ideas in English thought appear incarnated, materialized, borne by a tangible object. This tendency becomes a habit of the mind. The average Englishman thinks by means of material objects.
these English expressions often invade the domain of thought, which thus becomes hesitating and vague owing to an excessive mistrust of general laws.
English thought is never more vigorous than when it is empirical.
the mistrust of the Frenchman towards life as rebellious to thought and his effort to regulate it, to imprison it within a network of principles.
e Englishman mistrusts abstract thought, loyal to itself, rebellious to the caprices of life, and he is not happy as a thinking man unless he succeeds in catching thought at a vital moment by means of his empiricism.
In all this we see at work the instinct which leads the Englishman to connect his thought with the surrounding zones of life by links as elastic as possible.
The English race... Is gifted with a vigorous defensive instinct against all unhealthy intellectual curiosity and it rejects by strong inhibitory reactions any attempt of the spirit to bite into forbidden fruit.
English thought no doubt loses in clearness, in width, in power of generalization. It remains in continuous contact with nature, but does not soar. Its progress is slow and hesitating, like that of the blind man...
England is the country of minorities composed of one man.
The group... provides English thought with a uniformity and a cohesion which it might otherwise have lacked in view of its mistrust of generalizations and principles.
The tendency towards clearness is perhaps the most profound, the most active of the French soul. Above all the Frenchman wants to know, to know exactly.
Precision is one of the typical qualities of French thought, and the need of precision is no less typical a feature of the Frenchman.
French thought is strongly analytical. It likes to burrow into ideas in order to find out their elements, to classify them and to build up with them a complete picture which may please the mind.
the Frenchman seeks to guarantee the clearness of his intellectual vision by defining the object with the neatest possible edge.
French knowledge is cold, scientific, and external. Clear, like vision, it is, like vision, geometrical. It partakes of the abstract character of science
he is eminently gifted in qualities of method. Method is the road that the intellect must follow in order to reach its aim. The French are acknowledged masters in the art of method
By placing himself at a distance from the object, chosen in the interests of the best intellectual vision, the Frenchman purifies his observation from all vital elements. All that he gains thereby in clearness, he loses in complexity and in intimacy with nature.
the real force of this republic of letters, sciences, and arts... Is the spontaneous collaboration of the whole country in intellectual life
the Spaniard thinks by contemplation. He waits in an apparent passivity for the object to reveal itself to him.
the opinions of the Spaniard are not mere ideas carried in his head, but convictions which he breathes and which circulate in his blood.
the Spaniard works without a plan, and, his work once finished, he is incapable of correcting it.
... As the sources of intuition flow from nature herself, Spaniards prefer to contemplate nature directly, rather than to seek food for their thought in the thought of others.
This observation will enable us to understand a fair number of facts of Spanish intellectual life, in particular, artistic life: thus, the evident superiority of the arts in which genius may more easily pass for talent (literature, painting)
the life of thought in Spain evinces an uncompromising individualism and a true anarchy of ideas.
He beholds, and lets pass in him, the whole of life. This attitude creates a state of mind favourable to inactivity.
... passion in the Englishman is normally withheld and constrained. It follows that the Englishman is normally calm...
Far from being cold, the English soul lives rather at a higher temperature of passion than the average--if only as the effect of the pressure to which the constraint of self-control submits the passions of the Englishman.
The Englishman does not present himself entirely before us. Like the gear-wheel which he is, he commits himself only to the extent of the very small arc which is necessary to make the social machine turn round.
The passions of the Englishman are all relative... Take for example the passion, so English, called pride, a word which no effort of ingenuity can translate accurately into either French or Spanish.
The English language possesses an untranslatable word which expresses precisely this vital and irrational sense of the racial limitation of universal passions.
Hence it is that this people, robust and masculine, whose reputation for coldness is as universal as it is mistaken, should be one of the most sentimental peoples on earth.
... A certain coldness characteristic of the French type. Of the three peoples here studied, it is certainly the least inflammable.
There is after all in French psychology a legitimizing of passion, a kind of instinctive and tacit recognition of the right to passion...
neither self-control nor the action of the group is to be observed in the Frenchman. Licit for the individual, passions are licit for the group by virtue of that moral tolerance which we observed when discussing the Frenchman in action
...passion becomes intimately mingled with intellectual elements developed by the continuous presence of an observant self. That is why the French are masters in the art of explaining states of mind minutely.
We have observed the role played in his maîtrise by his moderation and his sense of measure.