IBANEZ AND SPAIN.

Evening Star, Issue 19777, 30 January 1928, Page 6

IBANEZ AND SPAIN.

Ix paying tributes to the memory of Vicente Blasco Ibanez, whoso death is announced to-day, Spanish newspapers, it may bo presumed, will keep very clear of all but the most cautious references to his polities. “There is no Press” in Spain, Ibanez had said. His statement was qualified hy the explanation that “the newspapers, before going to press, arc censored by Primo de Rivera’s men.” An article displeasing to the censor may be presented to the public’s eyes ns no more than a black smudge. The authorities in Spain have not carried their resentment against one who was, till yesterday, her greatest living novelist to the extent of forbidding honors to his purely literary fame. But his death is unlikely to be mourned on any other grounds by the leaders of the present political regime. T'or years he Had been an exile from Spain, and he was accused pf being a party to plots which were connived from time to time to upset the Dictator’s Government by force. The author of ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ ‘Mare Nostrum,’ and ‘ Blood and Sand ’—-works better known to the world at large than those of any Spanish novelist have been since Cervantes—could be vitriolic with his pen when he thought he was assailing tyranny, a Republican all his life, his attacks on King Alfonso were as unsparing as those made by him on his chief Minister. “In my own country,” he wrote not much more than a year ago, “ I appear as a revolutionary, because my country at present has no freedom, and its governing powers are fostering barbarity and economic ruin. In the United States, in France, in any other country I should probably be called a Conservative.” It was not to him a sign of progress under the Directory that Spain when he wrote had “one more colonel than Germany had before the war.” There has not been much progress in any other respect, according to a writer in the latest number of ‘Current History.’ But if Spain has not advanced there is hope for her still, according to Mr Ronald M. Sherin. because she has never declined. Her strength and wealth in Elizabethan times were them-

selves illusory. Ho goes on to say: “There may, as a noted Spanish writer has recently pointed out,*be great reserve forces within the Spanish race that are yet untapped. Anyone acquainted with the sturdy Spanish peasantry would certainly hesitate before callin Spain a worn-out nation. In place of a fictitious rejuvenation, Spaniards may well look forward to a virile maturity, in which the present upheavals which are agitating the country will be' remembered as merely the necessary adjustments of a people still in a state of social and intellectual evolution.” Ibanez would have rejoiced to believe in that coming greatness.