Excerpts from selected texts Maud Howe Elliott texts

By Sara Prieto García-Cañedo

If you will look at the general map of Spain and Portugal, you will see that the outlines of the Peninsula suggest the head of a man -a broad, square head, with a high forehead and plenty of room for a large brain. The profile, lying sharply cut on the blue Atlantic, shows a crest of disordered hair, a slightly swelling forehead, a long, sensitive, aristocratic nose with a sharply cut nostril, firm lips set close together, a fine chin tapering to a small pointed beard, a slight fulness under the chin; the throat, set well back and surrounded by a blue collar -the Straits of Gibraltar- joins the head to the shoulders -the continent of Africa. The more you look at the face, the more certain you become that it is a familiar one, that it is the face of one you hold dear, till at last complete recognition flashes upon you; it is the face of Don Quixote de la Mancha! Look again; it is a face such as Velasquez painted, not once, but many times; it is the typical Spanish face, proud, high-bred, reserved (1-2).

Source: Elliott, Maud Howe, 1908, Sun and Shadow in Spain, Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, pp. 2-3.

His most famous picture, the Funeral of Count Orgaz, in the church of San Tomé, is a fine illustration both of his strength and his weakness. In the lower part of the canvas we have the dead Count, with the priests and the mourners about him. Here all is real; the dead man in his armor, the Bishop in his mitre and gorgeous robes, the long line of attendants and mourners, and the lovely head of the young boy are all portrait studies. In the upper part, where the heavenly vision is painted, Greco has left the realm of the real and entered that of the ideal. Instead of raising us to the seventh heaven, he lets us down upon the earth [...].

Don Luis was right; it is only at Toledo that one can really understand El Greco. The religious pictures at the Prado had offended us; they had seemed the work of a madman. At Toledo one gets a true understanding of his original and extraordinary personality. He neither saw nor painted as other men see and paint.

Source: Elliott, Maud Howe, 1908, Sun and Shadow in Spain, Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, p. 341.

All too soon after the fiesta came the day we had fixed to leave Madrid. Not till then did I realize the strength of the spell Spain had laid upon me. We were going to Rome -even that could not console me- for the spell of Spain, so dark, so noble, so tremendous, is not to be shaken off once you have yielded to it.

[...] I have told but a halting story of what I did see. It was enough to make me love Spain, to love the Spaniards. They are more like us Anglo-Saxons than any people I have lived among. Villegas says, In every one of us Spaniards there is a Sancho Panza, and a Don Quixote. That is as true of us as it is of them.

Source: Elliott, Maud Howe, 1908, Sun and Shadow in Spain, Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, p. 409.