One incidental circumstance of rural Spain, the fatal effects of which are all-penetrating (though it will never be altered), is absenteeism on the part of landowners. Not even a tenant-farmer will live on his holding. No, he must have his town-house, and employ an administrator or agent to superintend the farm, only visiting it himself at rare intervals. Oh! that hideous nightmare, the hireling, how his dead-weight of apathy and dishonesty at secondhand crushes out every spark of interest and enterprise, and breeds in their stead a rampant crop of all the petty vices and frauds that prey on industry. But that evil can hardly be eradicated.
What we British understand by the expression "country life" totally fails to commend itself to the more gregarious peoples of the south. Rich and poor alike, from grandee to day-labourer, the Spanish ignore and disdain the joys of the country. They call it the _campo_ and the _campo_ they detest. Each nightfall must see every man of them, irrespective of class, assembled within the walls of their beloved town or city, irresistibly attracted to street-girt abode--be it humblest cot or sumptuous palace (and one stands next door to the other). Even suburban existence is eschewed. There are no outer fringes to a Spanish town. No straggling "villa residences," no Laburnum Lodge or River-View "ornament" the extramural solitude. Back at dusk all hie, crowding to the _paséo_, to club or casino, to social gathering and games of chance or (more rarely) of skill. That ubiquitous term "_animacion_," which may be translated gossip, chatter, light-hearted intercourse, fulfils the ideals of life. Its more serious side--reading, study, scientific pursuit--have little place; seldom does one see a library in any Spanish home, urban or rural.
None can accuse the authors of desiring to use a comparison (proverbially odious) to the detriment of our Spanish friends. The above is merely a record of patent facts that must quickly become obvious to the least observant. It is but a definition of divergent idiosyncrasies as between different human genera. And remember that we in England have recently been told that our rural system is fraught with unseen and unsuspected evil. Into those wider questions we have no intention of entering. But at least our impressions are based upon personal experience of both lines of life, while much of the vituperation recently poured upon rural England is derived from a view of but one, and not a very clear view at that.