SPAIN AND PORTUGAL

THE modern Spanish school of scientific historians is not favour ably disposed towards the legacy of Islam. A hundred years ago the importance of 'the Moors in Spain' was unduly exag gerated; to-day the subject is out of fashion among serious workers and apt to be despised by intelligent readers. This attitude may be regrettable, but there are reasons for it, and not all of them are bad reasons. The inaccuracies in Conde's Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España, the somewhat unfortunate conclusions reached by Dozy regarding the Cid conclusions which subsequent research has proved to be fallacious, and lastly the tendency emanating from French and American universities to trace everything, if possible, to a Latin origin, have led Hispanists to regard oriental studies with a certain feeling of distrust, from which not even the solid achievements of an Asín or a Ribera have altogether been able to save them. Other influences also have been at work, as a result of the

social and political conditions of modern Spain. An idea has gained ground that oriental studies, and Islamic solutions for the problems of Spanish history, philology, and art, belong to that romantic but disastrous tradition, which, after a nineteenth century of invasion, civil war, and unrest, ended in the Spanish American conflict of 1898. The movement for reform and re cuperation, begun by 'the generation of 1898' and encouraged by the inspired teaching and blameless life of Francisco Giner, led to the development of that sense of accurate scholarship which is so conspicuously manifest in the work of Professor Menéndez Pidal. Yet it was singularly unfortunate that wherever Pidal turned to the old ballads, to the poem of the Cid, to the origins of the Spanish language-he found a body of ill-supported assumptions concerning 'Moorish origins', assumptions which had to be cleared away before any real progress could be made