A View of Spain
The Spanish Temper. By V. S. Pritchett. (Chatto and Windt's. 15s.) TT is not so much Africa that starts at the Pyrenees, for Mr. Pritchett, as Europe that abruptly stops there. And Europe means the world —or at any rate the West, the half-world we know and as Europeans have fathered—against which Spain stands in dogged, impotent, but 'lever pathetic protest, advancing, as an alternative to the last three hundred years or so ... what? Here is Mr. Pritchett's problem, And his statement of what Spain is, what Spain advances against the 'European soul,' is concerned more with negation than definition, using an oblique, metaphorical method that, brilliantly though it points out what Spain denies ("Spain hated and rejected the Refor- mation, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution"—sweeping rejections enough—"Hogarrh's industrious apprentice or the trite figure of the ingenious Robinson Crusoe knocking up a bungalow on a desert island are unknown to the Spanish imagination," "The Spaniards do not really want Gibraltar ; they want its nuisance value," "The hatred of European modern civilisation is true of the Spanish upper stratum as well," "The Spaniard cares very little and leaves us to discover him . .` Nada—nothing,' he says restfully before every subject that is broached"), when it comes to the centre of his argument must fall back for description on more comparison, and finally on such phrases as "the 'eternal Spain,' indefinable because so various."
But, skirting the central and indefinable as perhaps any foreigner must, Mr. Pritchett makes magnificent use of his method of far-flung comparison. "Like the Russian bureaucracy in Gogol's time, the Spanish is a huge collection of poor men," "The life of Spanish cities runs much closer to what life was like in England in the seventeenth century, indeed, if one wants to imagine the habits of London life in the time of Defoe, one cannot do better than study Madrid or Seville": comparisons like these, trailing clouds of literary assoc.a" tion as they do, enlarge the whole scale of one's observation, even though that high-coloured and (Mr. Pritchett would deny the Word in the spurious sense I use it) picturesque quality of his eyesight makes him, not over-write, but over-observe--or at least observe 10° dramatically, too one-sidedly. But then, as he says himself, he is "in the country of todo o nada,' " whew the sweeping statement and the half-truth are infectious and inescapable. ' It is, all of it, a dramatic book; for all its twenty or thirty years long summing-up of Mr. Pritchett's views on Spain written, you feet at a good spanking and enthusiastic pace that can slap down far" fetched generalisations like "Shyness is incomprehensible to anyone born in Spain" beside judgements, well balanced and provoking at once, on Spanish thought, history, art, religion, morals, manners, literature, regional distinctions (the framework of the book is $ journey round Spain), politics,—past, present, Civil War—dancira bull-fights, dress, speech, peasants, gipsies, cave-dwellers, the middle, classes ... the list could go on, for the book, for all its unhurried and almost conversational air, is astonishingly compressed. Best is when Mr. Pritchett takes some subject that pleases him—the Spanish obsession with death, say—and looks at it from all angles!, in this case from Goya and El Greco to Viva la Muerte I—slogan 01 the Falange in the Civil War—and the pictures of Manolete's death in the bars round the Puerta del Sol; from Philip IL's terrible gen' grenous death ("1 wish you to see how the monarchies of the earth end") to Unamuno's agonised preoccupation with immortality; and finally to Menendez Pidal's dictum that: " The thought of death, which is the thirst for immortality, is the profoUnd concern of the Spanish people." A fine if often a biased guide book to thespirit of Spain as well as the lie of the land—and every guide has surely a right to his bias-- it is illustrated with some excellently chosen photographs: the great walls of Avila, the girl with the "fine appearance," Don Quixote's country, the pedlar against the sunny wall. But even the sunshine is no excuse for gaiety, for as Mr. Pritchett stresses, "Sombreness is so much the dominant aspect of these people that one is puzzled to know how the notion of a romantic and coloured Spain has corn°
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