Spain and Holland
Letters from Holland. By Karel Capek. (Faber and Faber. 3s. 6d.) Towards the New Spain. By Joseph A. -Brandt. (University of Chicago Press. 22s.)
ONE naturally distrusts people who write about places in series : the author of a book entitled Scotland For Ever, who follows it up with France for a Fortnight, and then writes The Sweden of the Swedes, is a man one suspects. As his net widens, our faith in his authority weakens. But Karel Capek only writes letters from places—Letters from England, Letters from Spain, and now these Letters from Holland. He is the very best sort of traveller, which means, among other things, that he is not a bore. He is modest about the places he has been to, and about himself in relation to
them ; his letters are a joy to receive because they are full of the zest of his own enjoyment. He illustrates them with delicious, unaffected little drawings, but he writes rather better than he draws. And as he surely travels as well as he writes, he must be a wonderful person to go about with— so good that he deserves the supreme pleasure of travelling alone. He skims just a little more than the surface of things as they are in different places, and is content to have enjoyed his trip immensely; so that one does not quarrel with him even when he describes places one happens to love oneself, because he is almost always beautifully right, so far as he goes. How could he be wrong, when he knows what travelling is all about and has such good eyes to see with ? His present book is shorter than the others ; after reading it, one would very much like to go to Holland—though of course one wouldn't have as much fun there as Mr. Capek.
On the other hand, there is little profit and less pleasure to be extracted from reading this history of Spain in the nineteenth century ; one might wonder whether many people found pleasure in living it. Welter of Constitutions, pronunci- amientos, treacheries, bombast and poverty ; the spectacle of a great nation in ruins, misgoverned, struggling for improvement and misgoverned again, is depressing. Mr. Brandt seeks to point a moral and adorn his tale, but it sinks under a weight of dates, only a few of which are significant, though in an unhappy hunting-ground of politicians all will appear transcendental. His moral is that Spain has at last achieved the Second Republic it deserves ; and his adornos are scanty.
It is said in Spain that one Spaniard alone is always Don Quixote, two are the Don and Sancho, and more are a herd of mules. The life of the mules is not the concern of this book, for it is a political history. But, if not one and all Quixotes, many of the prohombres of Republican liberalism and Royalist reaction were characters of an exceptional interest which Mr. Brandt does not succeed in conveying to his readers. His admiration for Castelar could not perhaps be expected to make of that magnificent orator an interesting personality, nor could appreciation of his rhetoric bring its fervour, in translation, up to date. Yet, with many others, the names and the actions of Prim, Espartero, Primo de Rivera, Romanones and Alfonso XIII are to be found in these pages ; their qualities are missing. Sr. de Madariaga, covering the same ground in his Spain (written before the change of regime), gave us both events and Quixotes against a distant background of the mules. Mr. Brandt, writing now, has travelled a long route towards the New Spain, but much of both the new and the old in his book escapes us.
JonN MARKS.
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