This small group of Italian novelists portray their countrymen as members of widely separated economic and social classes. There are the well-to-do who seem to seek order and get it with a vengeance. And there are the poor of the cities and villages who are the victims of this order, squeezed by poverty, by powerful landowners, and harnessed by a church which renders more than is his to Caesar, a church which brings politics into the confessional and divorces religion from everyday life. Something of the spirit of Garibaldi still lives, however, nourished by the deprived ones who are close to the soil. Perhaps this is a modern political parable in which the last shall be first. SPAIN: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT Robert Jordan’s love of Spain is not an abstract emotion. He has a deep feeling for its people, but he is still able to see their faults. Throughout _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ he makes conscious estimates of their national character. He says they are a truly thoughtful and considerate people who are not merely formally polite as are the French. But they are also treacherous: Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often but they always turned on everyone. They turned on themselves, too. If you had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion. These characteristics cut across party lines. The Rebel slaughter which left Jordan’s Maria orphaned and violated had an equally brutal counterpart in the Republican massacre supervised by the guerrilla chief Pablo in which twenty Fascists were beaten between two lines of men and then flung over a cliff. Jordan thinks that killing “is their extra sacrament.” Loving them, he tries to understand them: There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder people and no crueler.... Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain has never been a Christian country. It has always had its own special idol worship within the Church.... The people had grown away from the Church because the Church was in the government and the government had always been rotten. This was the only country that the reformation never reached. They were paying for the Inquisition now, all right. Occasionally one finds a Spaniard who seems almost a moderate, like Frankie Perez in _Adventures of a Young Man_, but the most persistent impression is one of a people who have a history of misrule and violence, and who tragically turn to these very weapons as the instruments of release from their consequences. GREECE: AN AMERICAN PORTRAIT