The two districts differ altogether save
in the human character of those who inhabit them: the one is pastoral,
full of deep meadows and perpetual woods, of minerals and of coal for
modern energy, of harbours and good tidal rivers for the industry of the
Middle Ages; the other is a desert land, far up in the sky, with an air
like a knife, and a complete absence of the creative sense in nature about
one. Yet in both the creation of man runs riot; in both there is a sort
of endlessness of imagination; in both every detail that man achieves
in art is carefully completed and different from its neighbour; and in
both there is an exuberance of the human soul: but with this difference,
that something in the Spanish temper has killed the grotesque. Both
districts have been mingled in history, yet it is not the Spaniard who has
invigorated the Delta of the Rhine and the high country to the south of
it, nor the Walloons and the Flemings who have taught the Spaniards; but
each of these highly separated peoples resembles the other when it comes
to the outward expression of the soul: why, I cannot tell.
Within, there is not a complete darkness, but a series of lights showing
against the silence of the blackness of the nave; and in the middle of
the nave, like a great funeral thing, was the choir which these Spanish
churches have preserved, an intact tradition, from the origins of the
Christian Faith.
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