BELMONTE THE. MATADOR
By Henry Baerlein
In 1914-1918, while Europe was engaged in international slaughter, bayonetting and blowing itself up, Spain was busier than ever with its national sport of butchering " bulls instead : 1913-1920 was the Golden Age of bull- fighting. There had appeared in Spanish rings an ugly little man, Juan Belmonte, who fought as no one else ; as it was known to be " impossible " to fight. An idol and a multi-millionaire, in 1921 he went to Lima for the winter season and failed to return until 1924. Three years later he retired for good--until his reappearance tinder a month ago, at the ripe age of 42 in Nimes. This " come-back " was announced last winter, vet in his recently-published book on Belmonte (Thornton Butterworth, 10s. 6d.) Mr. Bierlein makes no mention of it. With this exception all the facts of Belmonte's romantic career are here, engagingly recounted by Mr. Baerlein ; he fails, however, to give us any valuable critical assessment of Belmonte's work in the ring—an omission odd enough in the biography of a bullfighter, extraordinary when the subject of the biography happens to be the greatest torero of all time, and deplorable in the introduction to English readers of a man who is first and foremost an artist. That he should have expressed his personality in the form of the bullfight is almost by the way ; he revolutionized and embellished that form, but as a bullfighter made and an artist born. In this case critical notices quoted from the Spanish Press hardly take the place of a first-hand valuation. Only the assumption that Mr. Hemingway may have created a small Anglo-Saxon public eager to learn more of bullfighting could justify a merely popular biography of Belmonte in English ; for surely most readers of Death in the Afternoon were interested in its authorship, not its subject ; and to others already familiar with the business and beauties of the arena the many anecdotes of Belmonte's life are an old story. But for those recently introduced to the attraction of Spain and the mysteries of the bullring this book will make welcome reading; though surely even they will notice, amid much that is pleasant, much that is missing. It would be 'difficult for any author, however gifted, to write a Life of Nijinsky without having seen him dance and knowing little of ballet in general.
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