A Great European
MEYER, PETER
WRITERS and WRITING A Great European Portrait of Europe. By Salvador de Madariaga. Roy. 204 pp. $3.50. Revieived by Peter. Meyer Co-author, "The Jews in the Soviet Satellites"; contributor,...
...Or read why the adjective French suggests to the Englishman all kinds of agreeable things, more or less prohibited or at any rate out of bounds, and how the ethical-esthetic polarization between the two peoples finds an outlet in the English saying that the French have a hundred sauces but only one joke, to which the Frenchman may reply that the English have a hundred jokes but only one sauce...
...They share this quality with the Spaniards, whose propensity to the absurd contains no aggressiveness but rather a certain pity for the outside world foolish enough to insist on going its own way instead of the way the Spaniard is sure it is going...
...But connoisseurs distinguish the brands and vintages with an infallibility which is better than scientific...
...from the practical and placid Swiss to the keen, esthetic Italian...
...They are the nations which go on fighting even when they know that they are defeated...
...But Madariaga has a lot of good thing to say for the English and not all of it is due to the fact that many of them admire France...
...The word glove fits its meaning like a glove...
...Only an homme de lettres, philosopher and historian, as well as a statesman, could write this intellectual and spiritual portrait of the unity in diversity which is called Europe...
...Not only the "great" nations are dealt with...
...All we can answer is: Sorry for science...
...Though evoked in only a few lines, you can see and feel the European landscapes and cities, from Uppsala to Seville, from Bath to Cracow, from Chartres to Budapest, from Copenhagen to Siena...
...And you will enjoy the truly marvelous wealth of national types from the burly, slow Swede to the mercurial, swift Frenchman...
...But let us not be pedantic...
...Good quality but too much of it, adds Madariaga with an almost audible sigh...
...Are sherry, claret, burgundy, tokay scientific terms...
...The Englishman has reduced the number of sounds to a minimum...
...be says what he has to say by describing a vivid, concrete fact, and using an image turned into a verb: drop...
...What do we care...
...to defend the honor and rights of Catherine of Aragon, so unjustly repudiated by Henry VIII...
...The seven defects turn out to be seven excesses, as every man who has ever listened to Wagner might have guessed...
...National characters are too elusive to lend themselves to generally accepted characterizations...
...One slightly suspects that Madariaga is not quite impartial in this controversy when he says that the English do not even realize the existence of the world of enjoyment, because they eat anything, even shepherd's pie and kidney pudding, and seem to reproduce themselves by a form of spontaneous generation not yet fully understood by the biologists...
...The sound, too...
...and to remind us that Flemish and Dutch regents of the Hapsburg kings had suppressed an uprising of the Spanish Cortes before Philip II--who was a Dutchman, anyway--began to pacify the Netherlands with an army in which there were more Germans, Dutchmen, Flemings and Walloons than Spaniards...
...A scientific mind would perhaps reply that chemical analysis, if driven far enough, could discover what constitutes the flavor of burgundy as it has discovered the composition of various perfumes...
...from the fiery Irishman to the subtle Greek...
...The image is perfect...
...The bulk of the hook is devoted to European tensions, to the spiritual relations between its nations, and to the images the nations form of each other...
...Madariaga tries to understand them all...
...And he succeeds because he loves them all...
...Well, what of it...
...That's why you will always enjoy the book even if you do not always agree with the author...
...As if a character could exist without changing or indeed change without existing...
...This reminds Madariaga of the seven defects of the German language, defined as too many books in the language, too many chapters in the books, too many sentences in the chapters, too many words in the sentences, too many letters in the words, too many strokes in the letters, and too much ink in the strokes...
...from the gregarious but arrogant German to the rebellious Iberian...
...contributor, "Commentary" This is a book that nobody who has lived in Europe can read without nostalgia...
...Italy and Spain...
...We can afford to smile at those who warn us that such terms are not scientific...
...to assert that no adequate view of the Portuguese is possible unless it starts from the fact that they are Spaniards...
...says Madariaga...
...from the empirical Englishman to the uncompromising Pole...
...And that it remains to be proven that the Victorian character is another stage in the evolution of some basic English substance which manifested itself, at a previous stage, in Falstaff...
...But, being a good Spaniard, Madariaga is also a great European...
...The Irish and the Poles are especially favored because of their "familiarity with the absurd," a "somewhat rare quality in Europe...
...No wonder that he is one of the most outstanding truly European statesmen, one of the leaders of the most farsighted and progressive political movement, the movement for a united Europe...
...from the elegant poplars meandering between the chateaux de la Loire to the "Salzburg dream of Mozartean days...
...Madariaga is Spanish enough to lament that the French invented the term Latin America for what should rightly be called Spanish America...
...But the German needs almost twice as many sounds, describes the glove as a shoe for the hand--a heavy and ungraceful concept, without subtlety and humor--and adds the over-explanatory ist heruntergefallen, a whole treatise on the art of falling, a word for slow minds which need a lot of explaining...
...Chemical analysis dares not define them...
...What Madariaga has to say about his national types in the form of historical and cultural apercus is certainly more entertaining, and in some ways more enlightening, than some national-character studies of cultural anthropology...
...So let us enjoy rather than criticize the way in which Madariaga derives certain traits of the English and German character from the comparison of the English sentence I have dropped my glove with its German equivalent Mein Handschuh ist heruntergefallen...
...Is there such a thing as a national character...
...from the "leafy streets of Amsterdam placidly reflected on the liquid fairway" to the "splendors of Naples" painted in vivid colors by the sun...
...He loves the whole continent, its countries, its landscapes, its rivers, its cities, its nations and its common cultural heritage...
...Were Elizabethan Englishmen different from their Victorian descendants...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 4
