BOOKS OF THE DAY
Costa- Brava I AM sure Miss Rose Macaulay would be the last person in the world to wish to turn her favourite haunts in Spain into tourist-ridden resorts ; in fact she says so herself :'
" If it (the Costa Brava) should ever become, as it would long since have become in Britain were such a coast conceivable in Britain, a continuous chain of luxury hotels and villas, I should not revisit it." I am sure she would not. But then she should not write such alluring books about her own preserves. She should keep their secrets to herself, going off quite alone in the hottest months of the year (for she agrees with Theophile Gautier that all countries should be visited when their climate touches its extreme, Spain in summer, Russia in winter) with her not-too-reliable car, prepared to spend the night under an umbrella pine failing other accommoda- tion, plunging up and down precipitous roads, jolting over impossible tracks if she suspects that there is something nice at the end of them, spending as much time in the sea as out of it, driving herself four thousand miles in a country where the sight of a woman at the wheel creates a sensation, right round the coast of Spain from the French frontier at Port Bou to the tip of Portugal at Cape St. Vincent. Let her do this every year if it pleases her, but let her not be surprised if she tempts her readers to come trailing along where she has decoyed them.
Miss Macaulay, as a decoy, is doubly dangerous : she is an ideal traveller and she is an ideal writer of travel books. (It is remarkable, when you come to think of it, how often this combination has occurred.) As a traveller she is zestful, interested, inquisitive, indomitable, apparently indefatigable, and always amused. As a writer, she commands a pen which . . . well, it is perhaps simpler just to say that it is the pen of Rose Macaulay. Descriptive passages, so apt to go dead and tedious, under its management become truly descriptive in that we see with her eyes and feel with her sense ; the little walled town rises at the end of our street, the white farm gleams, our limbs slip gratefully into the jade-green water, we lie drying ourselves on the hot sand of the cove in the scent of the pines. Perhaps it is not necessary to go to Spain after all, since for fifteen shillings we can instantly be there, and with Miss Macaulay for company.
It is a fine journey that she takes us. Down the Catalonian coast, that Costa Brava which, in its beauty and seclusion, has won her heart more than any other—making a couple of tantalising pecks inland, to Figueras and Gerona ; then rejoining the coast road, to run down through Barcelona to Tarragona, "possibly the most grandly poised city in Europe "; then out,of Catalonia southwards into Valencia, through " the lovely sequence of small Valencian towns, so different from the small mediaeval Catalan towns, and from those, so white and African, further south." The model of these she found in Elche, with its forest of date-palms and its " low, white, flat-roofed Arab houses crowded together like a box of bricks, topped
by blue-tiled domes, cleft by deep shadowed trenches of streets," and then on towards Orihuela and into Murcia, and on into Anda- lucia which one does not enter " without a leaping of the blood." Here she went inland 0' Granada, and then again down to the sea, through Malaga to Gibraltar and Tarifa, where the two continents of Europe and Africa look only a stone's throw apart, and on to the white city of Cadiz, and so into Portugal towards her journey's end. Fittingly, she found no inn at the Sacred Cape, so made her bed on the last night in the roofless apse of a ruined chapel.
This may seem little more than a geographical catalogue of names, with perhaps a slight suggestion of the wonderful variety of Spain, but to these bare bones must be added the fabulous and historical background which has enriched these coasts from the time of Homer onwards. Mythological figures, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths and Moors ; adventurers, traders, pirates, settlers, conquerors—this is the population, vanished indeed, but still to be discerned in many traces, which haunts the ancient Mediterranean kingdoms of Spain and which Miss Macaulay so sensitively resurrects. She wears her learning as gracefully as she wears her humour ; there is no dust upon it, it is as fresh and lively as everything else in this
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