[26] “Non hi ha res al mon que vosaltres non faessetz exir de mesura.”
[27] “La letra con sangre entra,” is a sad proverb of the Spanish and in the modern education of the printed page they are deficient.
[28] Cf. the sayings, _Poderoso caballero es don Dinero; Dadivas quebrantan peñas; Dineros son calidad, etc._ Sancho goes to govern the island of Barataria “with a very great desire to make money.” The tendency is still to hoard, rather than invest, as did Don Bernard de Castil Blazo in _Gil Blas_, keeping 50,000 ducats in a chest in his house.
[29] Spaniards prefer to enjoy time as a gift sent by the gods, than to waste it in trying to spend it too nicely. _El tiempo lo da Dios; Dios mejora las horas; Con el tiempo maduran las uvas._ To a peasant two o’clock on a day of March is “four more hours of sun.” Time is not parcelled out mechanically into tiny divisions by clocks. Distances are given by hours--an hour to a league. The Catalans are less lavish of the minutes; to a stranger asking the distance to a village near Tarragona, a peasant answered cannily in Catalan, “un cuart y mitj”--that is, the village was a quarter of an hour and half a quarter of an hour distant. Curiously the Catalans give the hour as in German, _e.g._ half-past eight is _dos cuarts de nou--halb Neun_.
[30] “El Caballero encantado,” 1909: “Viven en un mundo de ritualidades, de fórmulas, de trámites y recetas. El lenguaje se ha llenado de aforismos, de lemas y emblemas; las ideas salen plagadas de motes, y cuando las acciones quieren producirse andan buscando la palabra en que han de encarnarse y no acaban de elegir.” The Spaniards speak with conviction of the great gulf fixed between word and deed:--_del dicho al hecho hay gran trecho; Los dichos en nos, los hechos en Dios_.
[31] Cf. a speaker in the _Cortes_ in June, 1910: “Aquí no hay nada tan alto como las clases bajas.”
[32] Don Ramiro de Maeztu has written of the aggressive assertion of personality--_innecesária afirmación de las personas_--in Spain.
[33] _Lo que no lleva Cristo lo llera el fisco_--“What the Church leaves, the Treasury receives,” says an old proverb.
[34] An author in Pérez Galdós’ _Fortunata y Jacinta_ says that the Spaniards, that _pícara raza_, are unaware of the value of time and of the value of silence. “You cannot make them understand that to take possession of other people’s silence is like stealing a coin.” “It is a lack of civilization.” By such un-Spanish criticisms Señor Pérez Galdós betrays the fact that he was not born in Spain.