REPUBLICAN SPAIN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 46, 23 February 1935, Page 7 (Supplement)

REPUBLICAN SPAIN.

SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED.

THE WINDS OP FREEDOM.

PAST AND PRESENT CONTRASTS.

It is only around the fringes of the European continent that the wind still blow s fresh and free. In the interior the shadow grows and deepens.

But there was one country on the Atlantic seaboard which, when I visited it some years ago, still seemed dark and constricted, like a medieval fortress. This was Spain. A few weeks before revolution again flared up, I set forth on another Spanish journey. Something had happened, writes Louis Colding in the "New York Herald Tribune."

I don't merely mean in the political sense of the word. It is obvious that in that sense a great deal has happened. I mean that there was a chance in the souls of men and women, and in their faces. There was an air of freedom abroad. The clean winds were blowing. And in a Europe where it grows increasingly more difficult to utter a casual word just when and liow one feels it, to stretch out the lungs and draw a fearless breath—l can hardly say with what a shock of delight it came that here in Spain was a large and lovely country where the concept "freedom"- means something from day to day more important, whether among the Catalonian vineyards, the Biscayan mines or the Andalusian orange groves. A Sombre Land of Castles.

When I was last in Spsin, it seemed to mo a sombre land of castles. Spain itself seemed a monstrous castle set four square against the winds of modern spirit. The Spaniard's home was his castle in a sense much more exact than the Englishman's. He kept his wife and daughters there as firmly clamped as ever the medieval crusader did when he set forth on crusade, to have as gay a time as pleased him with the wenches of Rhodes and Smyrna, while his pale womenfolk pined and grieved behind their thick-barred windows.

The choirs of the great cathedrals stood massive and rectangular under the soaring columns, as if these also were the cathedrals of the spirit, whence all knowledge of our mortal, fallible day must be kept out.

But above all it was the cities themselves which were castles, with a circuit of ancient walls about them, and bridges over the encompassing rivers. These very bridges semed rather liko medieval drawbridges, to be drawn up at the sound of a trumpet's warning. It seemed indeed as if it were the intention of the people who lived in the cities and had knowledge of the graces of civilisation never to let the sad peasants from the sombre surrounding countrysides in to partake of those amenities, the music of orchestras, the miming of players. I particularly remember Toledo, at the very heart of the peninsula. On three sides of the city its walls fall sheer in enormous precipices into the Tagus. No city irf Europe was more obviously as a castle to keep out all intruders, whether these were the armies of rival princes or the ideas of alien liberalistic philosophies. And the houses and churches of the city itself seemed to be not so much separate buildings as the very substance of that hostile rock conforming into habitable shape. So that Toledo was not a city such, as our cities are in England, dwindling imperceptibly into green meadow land. It was a carved mountain, a huge buttress against such wandering winds of free fancy as might find their way across the Pyrenees from France and (I speak of several years gone by) from Germany. A New Spirit Abroad. When, therefore, I say that on my recent visit I listened to wild and gay and free conversations in Toledo, such as I have participated in on the Boulevard St. Michel over a glass of pernod, or at the Romanisches Kaffeeliaus on the Kurfurstenclamm over a large Dunkles, vou will realise that that was a peculiarly heartening adventure. Much more than if I should say: I heard such ferocious schemes of an anarchisticUtopia discussed at a cafe on the Ramblae, in Barcelona, that the most woollyheaded orator in Hyde Park would have gone green with fright at the sound of

it. For Barcelona is, after all. a seaport town. Its folk have long listened to strange ideas propounded to them by ■men that came down for a drink from ships they had boarded in Hamburg and Odessa. But to hear intellectual debate, to liear untramelled laughter, at the heart of that bronzen city called Toledo—there, I submit to you. was a phenomenon to make the blood course quickly" in the veins; for, as I say, since I was last in Spain, ,a trumpet has been lifted to ghostly lips; the blast of it has gone out through the high arid spaces of Castille and'the torrid flats of Murcia. A new spirit is abroad. What Has Happened ? What has happened, then? Tt is something profounder than the substitution of a President # for a King. For instance, a day or .two after I got into Barcelona the whole city put on the semblance of an open-air Bodleian. 1" other words, they began to celebrate an official "Book Week." Street stalls that had been odorous with flowers or flimsy with pale blue camesoles ruthlessly eliminated these frivolities an(. put out l)'ooks for sale. Books, books, everywhere books! You got 10 per cent off your purchases. Hucksters who a week ago had been expounding the infallibility of their cough cures, which, under different labels, also cured diabetes, eczema, mastoids, and <0)i--blains, roared forth into the public highways the merits of Pio Baroja, Unamuno, and a foreign writer, Elinor Glyn by name, who seemed to be quite P °DuHng 1 1he course of the Book Week, two distinguished people arrived in Barcelona. One was a bullfighter, the other was a novelist. I put it on record that bv mv stopwatch it took three more minutes for my taxi to get through the crowd that greeted the novelist than tlie crowd that greeted the bullfighter. It is, not without a slightly morbid blush of pleasure and a slightly wistful hope for the future of his profession that a novelist records that golden three minutes. Thousands of Village Libraries. Pc-rhape the most encouraging feature about that Book Week was the fact that while some of the purchasers came from tha Paseo di Gracia in their HispanoSuizas, more of them came up from the country in their creaking Catalonian carts. For no fq,\ver than 4000 village libraries have been set up in Spain during these last few years, and great numbers of young men and women have gone into the darkest recesses of the coyntry to combat the secular illiteracy of'the Spanish peasantry.

That has been reinforced by the organisation of a chain of travelling theatres whose level of acting I found astonishingly high. It was gratifying to see that such dramatists as the new German Government has found lit to banish from their miserably impoverished stage —a Kaiser, a, Zwcig, a Bruckner—are finding enthusiastic audiences here.

Ought I to say tliis too; that many thousands of schools have been set up in the Peninsula since I was last there? Ought I to say that their newspapers, even the minor ones, display a wit and a tolerance worthy of the best Pa risian and London newspapers (which, I suddenly remember, are produced in Marseilles and Manchester) ? I have said enough, I think, to explain how it was that luy lungs seemed to be filling again with an air which seems to be growing thinner and. fainter daily elsewhere in Europe. Spain for fresh air, I say!