What is it about the Yugoslays which has changed iconoclast
into a worshipper of jeans? Miss West does n attribute to them ethical qualities which they do not posse She admits their "eagerness not to be more sinned against th sinning," even as she recognises that Mr. Gladstone might a have retained his enthusiasm for the Balkan Christians had known them really well. Yet whereas she does not insist up( their moral habits she does insist upon their moral significan She sees in them the inheritors of the Byzantine tradition, s bemoans their lost glory, .and she reveals their history as supreme denial of defeatism. Yet, above all, she finds amo the Yugoslays a return to fundamentals, a Blake-like simplifi tion of the values which we ourselves have • complicated a obscured by intellectualism. "This have I learned," she sat "of Yugoslavia, which writes obscure things plain, which fur nishes, symbols for what the intellect has not yet formulated. Her book is not, as she half-humorously suggests, an invent° of a foreign country ; it is an allegory of something intense. desired which she cannot define to herself. She loves "the austere Byzantine splendour, which make their men gaunt minatory, their women still and patient, like the ancient kin and holy personages in the frescoes." She so loathes lethar, that she welcomes the violence of Yugoslav history, "the gin of Grachanitsa and the self-slaughter of Kossove—even defenestration of Queen Draga from the clothes-closet. Aga this background of deep admiration she can smile affectionate at the inconsequence of the Yugoslays, their persistent prejud their lack of calm, their xenophobia, their self-preoccupat Here you have the portrait of the ideal Yugoslav in heroic cr. portions as if by Mestrovic. Yet Miss West, I stispe would regard Mestrovic as vulgar in having proclaimed loudly a discovery which she wanted (in two volumes) to ke to herself.
, *
Previous page
