The soul of Spain / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The soul of Spain / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/446 page 6
    Spain, as well as the Anarchism—a peaceful and humanitarian Anarchism for the most part— which flourishes to a greater extent in Spain than elsewhere, alike testify to this desire. The newspaper press of Spain—especially as repre- sented by the Heraldo of Madrid and the new Republican journal, La Nueva Espana— is enlightened and intelligent, in the best sense Liberal. The fermenting discontent with sacer- dotal bigotry, and especially with the extreme developments of monasticism, which has spread among all classes in the country, even leading to restriction of the freedom of public religious processions—notwithstanding the firm manner in which the Church is here rooted—is another sign of the same kind, strikingly manifested a few years ago when the Electra of the popular author Galdos was performed amid opposing demonstrations of popular feeling all over Spain; it is not necessarily a movement hostile to the Church, certainly not in so far as Galdos is its representative, but it demands a purified and humanised Catholicism which shall be in har- mony with the claims of Nature and of social progress. The bull-fight, again, the national pastime of Spain—long a mark for opprobrium among English-speaking peoples, always so keen to see the mote in other people’s eyes—no longer meets with universal acceptance, and lately, with the approval of many prominent toreadors, a
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