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.

    37/446 page 19
    while the other, with gentle feminine fingers, touches him softly on the arm without a word. He understands, and produces a bundle fastened in a knotted blue check handkerchief. I imagine for a moment that the holy men are about to partake of a frugal repast; but the bundle contains a large book of devotions, which the elder monk reads for a short time and then fastens again in the bundle and pushes towards his companion as its recognised guardian. A little girl enters the carriage with her small basket; the elder monk looks at her with affec- tionate interest, and when she passes him to get out at the next station he smiles sweetly at her, speaking a few words, to which she responds with an “ Adios.” I seem to see here typified the two varieties into which the discipline of the cloister moulds men—the sensitively feminine and the listlessly vegetative. The whole of the lives of these men has marked itself upon them. I realise how true are the words of the wise physician, that “ from him who has eyes to see and ears to hear no mortal can hide his secret; he whose lips are silent chatters with his finger- tips and betrays himself through all his pores.” If I were asked to sum up the dominant impression that the survival in Spain of old- world mediaevalism makes, I should say that Spain is, in the precise and specific sense of the word, the home of romance. The special
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