A Great Spaniard
The Spaniards in their History. An analysis of Spain's national characteristics. By Ramon Menendez Pidal. (Hollis and Carter. 16s.) IT is a pity that this very great scholar should be presented in just this way to a British public which has hardly heard of him. The first hundred pages are given up to a most sympathetic survey by Professor Walter Starkie of Menendez Pidal's tremendous field of research ; he has altered the Spaniard's view of his own literature. But the essay chosen for translation is one of those painstaking rummages through history's haystack in search of the missing needle of a first cause—in this case the cause of Spain's decline—that leaves a reader breathless and a little dubious whether the needle would be worth threading, even if found. Menendez Pidal is a great liberal and a humanist ; and it was natural that after the disastrous years of the civil war he should look for a reason to explain the repeated and sullen head-on collisions between radical secularism and clericalism that seemed to be the abiding pattern of his country's recent history.
Every Spanish intellectual since the war of 1898 has gone over this ground, weighing up the relative importance of such factors as the African strain in the Spanish blood, the expulsion of Jews and Moors, the barrenness of the soil and exhaustion from two centuries of wars. The question has been debated therefore for half a century, with a vehemence that has effectually concealed the un- reality of its terms of reference. For it is clear enough, surely, to any dispassionate observer that no impulse continues unchanged and in its original direction over several centuries. Britain's vigour lies in our having subjected ourselves to fresh influences decade after decade since the beginning of our national greatness. Spain underwent the awakening experience of national unity within the mediaeval framework under Ferdinand and Isabella, of world CP• ploration and conquest,' and of leadership in the Counter Reforma- tion. Then she closed down and lived on her past. No revivifying experience is possible to a nation that has given itself over to dead systems of thought.
But after many centuries a new inspiration did come to Spain, and Professor Menendez Pidal, who is now in his eighty-second year, was one of the first to be awakened by it. It took scholars out of their studies to explore the stream of Spanish literature where it flowed in the open, to catch the ballads from the lips of peasants who were still singing them, in Spain or among the Sephardic Jews of the Near East ; it sent them over bridle-tracks exploring the sites of the Cid's battles, or roaming after Don Quixote over the highlands of La Mancha. Menendez Pidal's edition of the Poema del Cid, his book upon it, and his equally delightful book on the Jongleurs are fresh with all the morning of original scholarship. Anyone, by the way, with the minimum of Spanish wherewith to read it should have his collection of the ballads, obtainable in the cheap and handy Austral editiona there is a magic in them that only our own ballads can rival. It is the Menendez Pidal wliff4-4:vas- an inspiration to the short- lived humanism of the last Republic, the scholar who deeply in- fluenced Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and other poets and writers of the 'thirties, that should be honoured in this country. To this purpose a reissue of the Cid. which has already been translated, or a translation of his book on the Jongleurs would be more fitting than this sterile little essay. Professor Starkie's introduction is all that it could be ; it gives an admirable picture of the man and his work. But even more admirable as a tribute would be an English version of his Poesia Juglaresca y Juglares (The Jongleurs and Their
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