The Spanish Way of Living
Life in Spain To-day. By Charles Wicksteed Armstrong. (Blackwood. 10s. 6d.)
Ninga sabado sin so! (No Saturday without sunshine). So runs a Spanish saying, and the superstition acquires much more than literal significance for us poor unfortunates doomed to suffer a seemingly endless succession of dismal Saturdays. Mr. Armstrong is quite right in emphasizing what a premium is placed on enjoyment of life and the art of living by the fact that Spain enjoys cloudless skies for over three hundred days in the year. If we would try to assess the importance of Spain to-daywe cannot but think of it as the supreme example of a country and people that has exchanged the glory of an empire where the sun never set for the spiritual treasure of a national being in which the sun still shines. I recently committed myself to the statement that Spain has more to contribute to the progress of civilization of the present century than any other nation, and each of these three books in its own way reinforces that bold assertion.
Mr. Armstrong, by profession a schoolmaster with thirty years' experience in South America and the father of six, gives us a delightfully personal sketch of everyday life in Spain and particularly the keen and kind atmosphere of Barcelona "under a benign dictatorship." With his eye on the general reader whose image of Spain is probably compact of legend and prejudice, he has performed the same kind of service as that rendered by Mr. Alexander Wicksteed in his little book on Soviet Russia. The climate, of course, is the chief reason why that " struggle " which is the leitmotif of the Englishman's life, in work or play, is replaced by an atmo- sphere of" talk and dreams and love." But we must also give the Spaniards credit for their innate sense of human dignity, and no less their precious possession of social discipline— witness the general strike only the other day—in a word, their high standard of civilization ; and this civilization in the spiritual sense of the term is precisely what we men and women of this age most feel the need of.
This quality is distilled from Mr. Armstrong's trivial enough description of the externals of Spanish life which is set off by u wealth of amusing comparisons between his" earthly para- dise" and this England which, in his opinion, is well on the way to perdition as a pauper State. In the introduction the author disarms criticism by representing his views as those of "one long accustomed to focus British ways and social policy from a distance," but I had better warn readers that Mr. Armstrong is a superb individualist (and therefore in his element in Spain), impatient with all humbug and conventionality, scornful of democracy, hating lawyers and doctors (in the mass) and all who batten upon the innocent "John Citizen," and, of course, with his own transparent prejudices, which, because they are different from the usual, I suppose, are rather delightful. I must leave him to tell his own stories, but I may perhaps join With him in protest against the snobbery of English Parents who reject the idea of sending their children to an Anglo-Spanish school in Barcelona because they do not wish them "to mix with the natives " ; against the general Phari- saical attitude of so many English people abroad which is revealed in all its nakedness in a country of naturalness, truth and candour like Spain, and finally against the casual, insular self-satisfaction which is illustrated, for instance, by British business methods, particularly the pathetic showing at the Barcelona International Exhibition, where, being without any encouragement or help, the British building in every way ranked as that of a fifth-rate nation.
The contrast between the pomp and nmjesty of the Empire and the spiritual qualities of civilization for which we prize Spain to-day is pointed, too, by our reading of Azorin, perhap4 the highest representative of Spanish culture of our time. With exquisite sensitiveness and the " touch " of the suprane artist Azorin has made of his reception address to the Spanish Academy in 1924 a series of meditations on the quality and destiny of his country. In this dream-picture of the sixteenth century he gives us the whole gamut of Spanish notes, first the tone of Ecclesiastes, " Vanity of vanities ...," everything moving towards annihilation (nida), then the turning away from the" bitter" material world to man's treasure of spiritual detachment, his" requital in the inner dream," in the secret world which he makes purer and more beautiful day by day in his individual communion with the other world ; most persistent of all, perhaps, the cry that virtue comes before intelligence, that Mere intellectualism is stale, fiat and unprofitable. Azorin seems to see in the will to be up and doing, not thinking, the essence of Spain, and there is a good deal to be said for the view that Spanish " decadence," within Spain at least, was the creation of men whose native hue of resolution was sickbed o'er by the pale cast of thought.
This might well be also the conclusion of Professor Altainira who writes in that spirit of "active pessimism" which has animated the generation that grew up after the salutary shock of 1898. As Azorin reminds us, " Spain " is the peninsula and the twenty American peoples, and for that reason alone it is worth while having an abridgment in the present form of Senor Altamira's large four-volume history. It happens, too, that the most interesting section is that in which the author dispels most of our current notions about Spain as a colonial power. It is a fact that the Spanish State was the first to 'exchange the ordinary European attitude to barbarian people, savages, for ideas of the juridical equality of mankind which became the basis of Spain's colonial system. Not only were the natives of America declared free in the eyes of the law, but also there was framed special legislation for labour, which was a model of its kind. Hence the terri- tories colonized by the Spaniards are those in which the Indian inhabitants survive in the greatest numbers.
After the artistry of Azorin—although, indeed, there is nothing florid about that—this volume by Serior Altamira appears rather bare and spare. The excuse may be that the book is intended, as he tells us, at the same time for the larger public which does not pretend to specialize in historical studies and for students in Spanish schools and colleges—an impossible tour de force. This edition is valuable, at any rate, for an exhaustive bibliography and for the inclusion of fifty eollotype plates representing examples of Spanish art and architecture, which arc eloquent of Spanish civilization, and are such finished photography as one rarely meets with in historical
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