12
Wallis, Severn Teackle, Glimpses of Spain; or, Notes of an Unfinished Tour in 1847 (New York, 1849), p. 365
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Of French travelers, he wrote: “France has, as yet, sent no De Tocquevilles into Spain. The better class of her travelers have generally carried with them that systematic devotion to their own ‘idées’ and national ‘prescriptions,’ which so frequently interferes with a Frenchman’s judgment, and nowhere so decidedly as in the Peninsula; for France and Spain, like
‘Oil and water, woman and a secret,
Are hostile properties.’
Joined with this usual disqualification, there is also the notion so prevalent in France, that the Peninsula is but an appandage [sic] of her, and should be judged and dealt with on that theory. Of the less graceful and philosophical French travelers, the great majority have their ideas of the Spaniards chiefly from the Barber of Seville. They find you, everywhere, ‘des Figaro, des Almavivá,’ and seem to think that they are wandering among the heroes of an opera or melo-drama, who disappoint them, hugely, when they fall below the Paris standard of stage-scenery and decorations. In cookery, too, the Gaul holds his neighbors to be merely savages. He could endure them as cut-throats and banditti, but they villainously feed on garlic and garbanzos, the moral obliquity of which he can not tolerate. With feelings and ideas such as these, of course, he travels pleasantly and usefully. The Spaniards call him a ‘gavacho,’ and he writes that they are ‘des barbares!’” (pp. 362–363).
Wallis’s opinion of British travelers in Spain was even more acidic: “The English traveler, though less abstract and artificial, and more practically sensible than his mercurial rival, is more impregnable, if possible, in his personal prejudices and social and individual habits, than the Frenchman in his theories and fanatical generalizations. He has, in a ten-fold proportion, what might be called the traveling-carriage-propensity—a sort of congenital affinity with the snail, in that turn of mind which suggests to him the necessity of carrying his own home, bodily, with him, wherever he goes. Educated and clever as he may be, his prejudices are a portion of his mind and education. Protestantism is the part of his moral wardrobe which he especially furbishes and puts on, for a jaunt to Catholic countries. To Spain, in particular, he carries a few of the notions and impressions which have come down from the days of the invincible Armada; not diminished, perhaps by the view he has had, in his childhood, of the captured instruments of torture still on exhibition at the Tower. Comfort, of all the Dei minorum gentium, is the deity whose image he specially packs up among his valuables, when he goes to see a people, whom climate and circumstances have taught to despise it. To Spain, he carries the persuasion also, that he ought to be regarded by the natives as one of their national patrons and benefactors, for his services and those of his compatriots, during the war of the Peninsula; forgetting that England selected Spain as a battleground, for her own salvation, not that of the Spaniards, and that she has endeavored, as far as she has been able, to make Spain pay the piper. More than that, too, he forgets that the last way in the world to excite the gratitude of a proud and sensitive people, is to throw their obligations always in their teeth, and to demand as tribute, what is contemptible, unless it spring from a spontaneous sentiment. That a traveler, in such a frame of mind, is hardly a fair or candid judge of what he sees, it needs no ghost to tell. That he is not likely to elicit from the people whom he visits, a display of their most excellent or pleasant qualities, seems just as obvious, on a very rational theory of human nature.” (pp. 363–364).
