They Are,
On The Whole, The Best-Dressed People On The Continent.
The hate of
ablutions descends from those centuries of warfare with the Moors.
The
heathens washed themselves daily; therefore a Christian should not. The
monks, who were too lazy to bathe, taught their followers to be filthy
by precept and example. Water was never to be applied externally except
in baptism. It was a treacherous element, and dallying with it had
gotten Bathsheba and Susanna into no end of trouble. So when the cleanly
infidels were driven out of Granada, the pious and hydrophobic Cardinal
Ximenez persuaded the Catholic sovereigns to destroy the abomination of
baths they left behind. Until very recently the Spanish mind has been
unable to separate a certain idea of immorality from bathing. When
Madame Daunoy, one of the sprightliest of observers, visited the court
of Philip IV., she found it was considered shocking among the ladies of
the best society to wash the face and hands. Once or twice a week they
would glaze their pretty visages with the white of an egg. Of late years
this prejudice has given way somewhat; but it has lasted longer than any
monument in Spain.
These, however, are but trivial manifestations of that power of
tradition which holds the Spanish intellect imprisoned as in a vice of
iron. The whole life of the nation is fatally influenced by this blind
reverence for things that have been. It may be said that by force of
tradition Christian morality has been driven from individual life by
religion, and honesty has been supplanted as a rule of public conduct by
honor, - a wretched substitute in either case, and irreconcilably at war
with the spirit of the age.
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