12 SEPTEMBER 1946, Page 20

Triste Espana

ANOTHER book on Spain, and at such a price! What are war-weary English readers to make of it? They may be partly responsible for the present state of affairs in Spain, but need they read another book about it? The answer is, yes. It cannot compare with Mr. Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth or with Lord Templewood's Ambassador on special mission; the author has neither the profound historical sense of the one nor the experience and penetration of the other. Yet it is useful as a corrective to the superficial mysticism or deliberate misrepresentation of other recent English books on Spanish subjects, and it is a well-indexed book of reference.

The writer has tried, he says, to cut away from the history of modern Spain those platitudes and prejudices which dominate the literature of the subject, both within Spain and without. " The idea that whatever in politics or in the social order happens in Spain lacks sense or originates in the unrestrainable inclination of the race to civil war is . . false and unjust. Until the nineteenth century, England and France endured more years of civil war than Spain." A few platitudes, however, have crept in about the middle ages ; that Boo years of war against the " Moors," for instance. It is time that someone recognised in that crusade a struggle between migratory (Christian) shepherds and sedentary (Moslem) cultivators. The state of rural Andalucia to-day is the melancholy result of "reconquest" on those terms. Yet Sr: Ramos Oliveira admits that" the domination of the Moors was intellectual rather than physical." The great virtue of the book is the recognition of the fact that the persons and events of 1936-1946—the- author is good at personal sketches—are only a continuation of those of the nineteenth century. Esparterd, Narviez, O'Donnell, Prim, Martinez Campos, and other nineteenth-century generals were all of decisive, importance in their day.

We go on misrepresenting Spain and Spanish affairs ; our publicists twist Spanish ideals to fit their own particular " -isms," while we treat Don Quixote as a comic strip for children and accept complete travesties of him on the films and wireless. Yet Cervantes, Sr. Ramos points out, " saw Spaniards as they, absorbed in the cultivation of their own values, could not see themselves. He laid bare a Spain enamoured of her anachronistic ideals and on the sure road to ruin herself in saving them." Cervantes did that and more. But, alas, even Cervantes and Don Quixote can be used as political propaganda, as we may see next year, when the four hundredth birthday of the most human and tolerant -Spaniard who ever lived may be celebrated by a display of the Church militant and a parade of truculent young men in shirts. Triste Espana sin ventura! J. B. TREND.