In prose, the thought of death is of course one of the mainsprings of Spanish religious literature, and in modern times it inspires almost to the point of obsession the powerful genius of Don Miguel de Unamuno.

But the influence of the thought of death is not limited to religious works and lyrical poetry. It creates a mood which, though in different degrees, affects the whole of the arts and letters of Spain, and it accounts perhaps for that curious sense of detachment which most of her artists and writers convey.

Yet, though imbued with the negative spirit of Ecclesiastes, the Spanish mind does not surrender itself to Death. Far from it. There are in the depths of the Spanish soul treasures of energy sufficient to conquer spiritual pain and to triumph over the most human of infirmities. It is from this deep source of life that mysticism flows.

In her mystic or triumphant mood, Spain is no

less faithful to her homocentric nature than when she dwells on the evil of life or on death. What is typical of the Spanish mystics is precisely the vital

and human character of their beliefs, as opposed to the philosophical or theoretical doctrines of the mystics of other nations. Our Mystics seek the survival of the individual in their union with God. St. John of the Cross, in his most celebrated poem, expresses it in clear words :

Mira que la dolencia

De amor, que no se cura

Sino con la presencia y la figura.1

Here is love in the concrete. None of those abstractions which subtilize the most individual of all passions

1 Lope de Vega is even more forcible in the following lines :

No venga angel ni legado. Cristo en carne evangelice Descienda Dios humanado.

Auto Sacramental de los Cantares.

into a kind of metaphysical category, but a concrete relation between two living beings, the creature and the Creator, the temporal and the Eternal.

It is this vital and human character which the spirit of love retains in Spanish literature even when shorn of its mystical attributes. A certain dryness and indifference to pain, a certain tendency to stiffen against tenderness, may have contributed to obscure the real love that animates it. With all its hardness, however, Spanish literature is most deeply imbued with the spirit of fraternity. Without that all-pervading feeling which unites all men in the common category of sons of God, the penetration revealed by such works as La Celestina and Don Quixote would have been unthinkable. Without the warmth which that feeling rouses in our soul, the sympathetic presentation of the types and characters which live in the Spanish novel would not have been even attempted. Love is the key to the understanding of such dissimilar artists as Fray Luis de Leon and GalclOs. Of the three Muses of Spanish literature it is Death which limits the scope of subjects ; it is Evil, or if you prefer, Life, which dictates the form ; but it is Love which provides the main inspiration.

I have thus tried to explain the three phases of the spirit of Spain—its strophe, its antistrophe, and its catastrophe. Experience ending in disillusionment, disillusionment overcome by love. Three phases which may be summed up in one : Man complete and concrete. In the European family, therefore, Spain represents a spirit which in the face of abstractions asserts the wholeness of man ; to the ought-to-be ' and to the `seems-to-be' it opposes a plain is. In its concreteness and all-round individualism it finds its safest guide. Abstract thought may go astray and fly too high in the clouds of pride or welter too low in the mud of cynicism. But to Spain we can always