are simple and wholly natural, but what of an utter obtuseness of
understanding which dresses itself up and becomes rhetorical? Can
anything be more disagreeable?

When a fly devours the pollen greedily from the pyrethrum, which, as we
know, will prove fatal to him, it becomes clear at once that flies have
no more innate sagacity than men. When we listen to a conservative
orator defending the past with salvos of rhetorical fireworks, we are
overwhelmed by a realization of the complete odiousness of ornamental
stupidity.

With cruelty it is much the same. The habits of the sphex surprise while
bull fights disgust us. The more cruelty and stupidity are dressed up,
the more hateful they become.




THE ANTERIOR IMAGE


I wrote an article once called, "The Spaniard Fails to Understand."
While I do not say it was good, the idea had some truth in it. It is a
fact that failure to understand is not exclusively a Spanish trait, but
the failing is a human one which is more accentuated among peoples of
backward culture, whose vitality is great.

Like a child the Spaniard carries an anterior image in his mind, to
which he submits his perceptions. A child is able to recognize a man or
a horse more easily in a toy than in a painting by Raphael or by