RECONQUESTS
Days in Old Spain. By Gertrude Bone. Illustrated by Muirhead Bone. (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.) The Spanish Arena. By William Foss and Cecil Gcrahty. (Gifford. 18s.)
On se trompe toujours sur l'Espagne. Napoleon's dis- couraging tip to his brother Joseph is well known and more
than almost any other sweeping statement about a national psychology which seems peculiarly apt to invite generalisation and paradox, the warning remains true, though, as countless articles and books about Spain regularly prove, it is con- sistently overlooked. Sensible and truthful accounts of things Spanish have always been rare, and now, of course, with the country itself in turmoil and textbooks on the struggle appearing hastily and by the dozen, they are fewer still. The more readable exceptions to this rule of mediocrity have usually been histories; so it is less of a surprise that the three books under review should all be admirable and worthy of publication, since each is to a large extent historical. One could in fact say that their respective merits are in proportion to their content of this kind.
The Russian author's biography of Joan the Mad deals with that period when her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, had made Spain a nation; Lady Bone's travel impressions are largely, even mainly, concerned with Spanish monuments and antiquities of a still earlier date; while the only modern book of the trio, by Mr. William Foss and the late Cecil Gerahty, is the first full-dress description by pro-Franco writers of the pangs of Spain's rebirth viewed as history in the making.
Naturally this last-named book is too controversial, too one- sided and contemporary to qualify as final truth; but if we accept Prof. Allison Peers's Spanish Tragedy as a strictly objective record of the administrative chaos that induced this war and choose, among later books, Mr. Jellinek's perhaps as the most balanced presentation of the Left Wing case, we should welcome The Spanish Arena for the fullest account of the same facts seen in a Right light. Often clumsy in argu- ment, though sincere, and by reason of its length and excess of detail, less cogent than Professor Sarolea's clear Daylight on Spain, even with part of its sting withdrawn under threat of a libel action, The Spanish Arena, as Dean Inge has said, is a " hideous story " that " must be told," for it exposes an unprecedented campaign of " organised systematic lying " that has " successfully blinded the eyes of well-meaning people " under an ill-fitting guise of impartiality. Certainly the unscrupulous and irresponsible manner in which almost the whole of our Press has treated the rights and wrongs—and the news—of this complicated war contrasts very badly with the more honest attitude of the French newspapers of all three camps—anti-Fascist, anti-Marxist, or both. The reverse would seem to apply to the dissimilar observance by the two Governments of their policy of non-intervention.
Unfortunately The Spanish Arena is sure to be read only by a small partisan public; unfortunately, too, it seems chiefly intended for them. Yet it states many facts, political, psycho- logical and military, which ought to be of general interest.
The Mad Queen of Spain also offers a convincing inter- pretation of a chapter of history that has long been read differently. Joan is one of the most tragic among famous political prisoners, a sad companion figure to Mary Queen of Scots, Ivan, and the Man in the Iron Mask. Thrust on to the throne of all the Spains by a fate that removed the four who stood between her and the succession, she was cruelly betrayed in her affections, cheated of more than a great and growing empire, shut away from the world—which was hers—by her father, her husband, and her son. The mother of two Holy Roman Emperors and of four Queens, she died at the age of seventy-five, having spent fifty years of her life in prison, forty-six of them in the gloomy fortress of Tordesillas. Though " a woman," as one of her chroniclers says of her, "fashioned to see and to endure anything in the world, whether good or evil, with a steadfast heart and unfail- ing courage," even at one time with the loyal support of her people she was no match for the contrary and combined greeds of her royal father (whom Machiavelli was later to take as model for his " Prince "), her scheming foreign consort, and her gaoler son, Charles the Fifth of Austria and First of Spain : usurpers of her kingdom. Losing love, liberty and power, she finally lost her reason. But Joan's latest chronicler is her champion; as far as possible he glosses over her madness and hints that her unjust loss to Spain was perhaps an even greater tragedy than her own.
The style of Lady Bone's written accompaniment to her husband's careful drawings is unimpeachable—to use Mr. Cyril Connolly's term, the purest Mandarinese. Looking back, from an ivory tower of interest in architecture and religious ritual, on a Spain which, her publishers tell us, has been shattered for our lifetime, she has conjured up a vision even more picturesque and placid than do the illustrations themselves. These travel-impressions date from the last days of the Dictatorship, but are mainly concerned with an ancient rather than an old Spain. A large part of her all too short space is devoted to appreciation of the beautiful Asturian churches built in the dawn and cradle of Spanish history and of surviving forms of worship that go back for centuries into Spain's past. The Visigoths are important to her, and no influence later than Herrera's wins a mention in her book. Some place-names appear—Santillana, Grazalema, Naranco- which will recall to the reader disasters of recent war, but for the most part we gratefully follow her guidance far off the beaten track, and can escape from thoughts of destruction, knowing that these glories are still preserved. Every lover of Spanish architecture should possess this small, perfect book.
JOHN MARKS.
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