Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World by Irving A. Leonard (review)

436 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY three final chapters. He believes that Melville evaluated the Ahab tragedy by enclosing it in the Ishmael framework, and that Ishmael was saved to tell the tale because he is the man of the most comprehensive and comprehending faith, "hard won" and "earth-bound," lyrical at moments but fundamentally sad. Professor Percival apparently has not selected the Kierkegaard ' approach merely because it is fashionable, but because there is some, real affinity between the tempers and insights of Kierkegaard and Melville, who, so far as we know now, did not read the Dane. This interpretation of M oby-Dick sacrifices some of the elements of richness in the book, but gives clarity of insight into other elements. It is a highly suggestive study that ought to send the reader back to his M obyDick again. SHORTER NOTICES Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century N ew World. By IRVING A. LEONARD. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders and Company Limited]. 1949. Pp. xviii, 381. $6.25. In the sixteenth century Spain transferred to America her whole life and culture unaltered: civil and ecclesiastical administration, universities , academies, theatres, printing presses, bookstores, and plazas -all in an incredibly short time. The New World was simply an extension of the Old, and Spaniards in Lima or Mexico lived much as they did in Madrid or Seville. In studying books read there, Mr. Leonard reviews Spanish literature of the sixteenth century, the period leading up to and including Cervantes. Chapters are devoted to romances of chivalry and Don Quixote, one being a conducted tour to Peru in the wake of a cargo of the first edition of Cervantes' novel. It was a period of much creative work, intellectual endeavour, and unusual academic freedom, as well as of geographic expansion. "I like the University of Salamanca," said Samuel Johnson, "because when Charles V asked it to decide whether he was justified in taking the Indies from the natives, he was told that he was not." With the Counter-Reformation began the supervision of reading, but, as Mr. Leonard shows, restrictions on the sale of books were easily circumvented . Spaniards can generally pit secular and clerical authorities against each other and profit by the confusion. Mr. Leonard has gone about his task the hard way, searching archives for ships' manifests and other documents. He lets the reader SHORTER NOTICES 437 share his findings about books and other matters, not the least interesting part being an account of hardships of travel by sea and land. For the general reader the work is of interest as showing a different conception of empire-at once centralized and decentralized-from what was to prevail farther north in succeeding centuries. The question is naturally raised as to what became of the books that were shipped to America in such large numbers. Many were thumbed to pieces; others in time may have been purchased by European booksellers. Mr. Leonard accepts too readily the conclusion of one investigator that none have survived. An expert bibliophile, more familiar with the ways of rare books, could probably find some. Spanish America has famous bibliographers, but their interest has lain in Americana rather than in literature proper. M. A. BUCHANAN The Forms of Value. By A. L. HILLIARD. New York: Columbia University Press [Toronto: Oxford University Press]. 1950. Pp. xvi, 343. $5.00. Three broad approaches to the theory of value are current among philosophers at the present time. At one extreme may be found the absolutists, inspired mainly by Plato or Hegel, who think of values as ontologically grounded norms. At the other extreme the logical positivists argue that normative propositions 'are "meaningless" and, therefore, all discussions about values must necessarily exhibit merely semantic confusion or emotive utterance. Attempting to achieve an Aristotelian mean between these two extremes, the empiricists maintain that value is a kind of fact in the world, and, as such, amenable to scientific investigation and control. An empirical approach to values has been developed, for the most part, by such leading American philosophers as D. W. Prall...