Heroic Spain Part 12

Though so remotely ancient, there is nothing of old architecture here.

The ramparts have been turned into esplanades, where it is a joy to walk, for the views are beautiful past description; now across the bay to the mainland and the mountains of Ronda, and down on the quay of the town itself with its bay full of fis.h.i.+ng boats; then to the north the eye seeks farther along the coast toward Palos whence three caravels, the Pinta, the Nina and the Santa Maria turned westward on a memorable third of August, 1492. On the other side of Cadiz is the ocean itself and I hope the enterprising town will some day carry the park along this western wall, where the rollers break so magnificently. Just past the public gardens, a narrow causeway leads to the lighthouse of San Sebastian, set well out to sea, a favorite walk for us at sunset time to watch the fis.h.i.+ng boats with their high prows come sailing back to the harbor each evening. The sunsets we saw in Cadiz were flaming pink and gold and red like those of the world on the other side of the Atlantic; also we saw a sunrise exquisite as a dream. It was here the ancients first met the suggestive wonder of the open ocean, and their philosophers pondered over the phenomenon of the tides. They thought that subterranean animals or winds sucked them in; and the sun, they said, when it had sunk in the western ocean, returned to the east by subterranean pa.s.sages,--guesses about as wise as some that we are making to-day on phenomena of the soul.

I do not know if it was just chance good fortune, but Cadiz will always be an exhilarating memory. Its air was so bracing, balmy yet full of vitality. The moral atmosphere seemed joyous and contented; a hurdy-gurdy would strike up below in the street with the bang of a tambourine, and from all the windows near, pennies would gayly rattle down. The people were courteous without second thought. A working man walked out of his way for ten minutes to direct us through the complicated streets, and then ran off with a laugh to avoid the fee; a shopman straightened eye-gla.s.ses and genuinely refused to be paid for so small a service; wonder of wonders when our luggage got carried in the wrong hotel diligence, the landlord refused to let us pay. Three such episodes of disinterestedness in one morning give one a pleasant impression of a place; and this town has presented itself to other travelers as happily. Byron, to whom this "renowned romantic land" as he called her, was eminently sympathetic, wrote to his mother, in 1809, "Cadiz, sweet Cadiz! it is the first spot in the creation. The beauty of its streets and mansions are only excelled by the loveliness of its inhabitants, the finest women in Spain."

Cadiz is enough of a place, with a bishopric and a garrison, to have the air of a capital; we noticed many men of the best hidalgo type, like those who stand behind Spinola in the "Surrender of Breda." In the park was an outdoor theater; children played _diavolo_; and nice little Spanish girls walked up and down with their English governesses. One could write or sew outdoors without exciting a glance of surprise. We used to spend hours under the palm trees of the _Alameda_ sewing and reading and watching the groups about us, for in spite of its being mid-winter, the air was warm enough for spending the day out-of-doors.

Cleanliness and G.o.dliness: Cadiz can boast of excellent public inst.i.tutions. The new hospital that faces the Atlantic breezes, and where only a fraction of a franc is paid daily, could well be envied by the rich of new world cities. Its poor house is noted, and it has a host of minor charities; a _Casa de Viudas_ for widows, a _Casa de Hermanos_, a _Casa de Locos_ for the insane, tended, as are the others, by alert, willing nuns. It is a public-spirited little city, with a school of music and art, an _Inst.i.tuto_ whose physical laboratory is the best in Spain, two Public Libraries, for that of the Bishop is also open free to the people.

The tourist sights here are soon seen; the Capuchin church where Murillo painted his last picture, and where he fell from the scaffold, soon after dying in Seville from the accident. There are two Cathedrals, one so sacked by English bucaneers that there is little to be seen, and the other a quite dreadful eighteenth century affair. The dull _Museo_ has some good modern works, a bishop's head in profile by Garcia y Ramos that is first rate art; and there is a triptych by a very early painter, Gallegos, the Spanish Primitive, which to my mind is more religious than the Murillos and the Zurbarans. It is a _Pieta_, and the eyes of the mourners are navely red from weeping, like Francia's _Pietas_ in Parma.

Almost impregnable walls and moats shut off the isthmus that leads to the mainland, and their strength explains how Cadiz could have defied the French for two years during the War of Liberation, without suffering the horrors of the Gerona siege. The blockade began in 1808, soon after the heroic _Dos de Mayo_ in Madrid. Quintana's poem rang like a trumpet call over the land: "_Antes la muerte que consentir jamas ningun tirano!_" No idle boast! Spain was celebrating the centenary of the second of May during our visit, and the scenes were moving and patriotic. You realized Lord Peterborough's remark, that this was an unconquerable land if her people resisted the invader. Statues and tablets for the war heroes were unveiled, and songs and marches composed for the anniversary. The artillery officers organized a splendid parade of children that marched under the arch of Montleon, where Ruiz, and Velarde, and Daoiz fought, and there the King, holding the baby Prince of Asturias in his arms, showed him how to kiss his country's flag.

Memorial Ma.s.s was said in the street outside the house where Velarde died, and toward evening one of the Madrid parishes marched out, its priests leading, to the cemetery where the _Dos de Mayo_ victims were buried, and deposited wreaths in patriotic reverence.

Cadiz' old church, St. Philip Neri, is where the permanent endurance of the first outburst of patriotism in 1808 was made possible. Here the Cortes met again after three hundred years' suppression under the Hapsburgs and Bourbons, here they abolished the Inquisition, and here they drew up the Const.i.tution of 1812, which was to be tossed backward and forward during the next half century of disorders, to emerge finally with victory.

An eloquent priest was the first speaker to open the historic meeting, and as he laid down the program, the sovereignty of the nation to lie in the Cortes, and the King to exist for the people, not the people for the King as heretofore, Spain again had her foot on the ladder of progress. No wonder that the national military air of Spain is the _Marcha de Cadiz_. The clean, smokeless, plucky little city has right to a proud stand out in the Atlantic. Her age-long enemy, the ocean, had trained her well to strike a first blow for freedom.

A FEW MODERN NOVELS

"Don Quixote is not, as Montesquieu pretended, the only good Spanish book, which in reaction against the national spirit, ridiculed the others. It is rather the epitome of our national spirit, war-like and religious, full of sane realism and none the less enthusiastic for all that is great and beautiful."--DON JUAN VALERA.

It was the German philosopher Hegel who called the "Romancero del Cid"

the most n.o.bly beautiful poem, ideal and real at the same time, that the Epic Muse had inspired since Homer. _Ideal and real at the same time_, herein lies the first characteristic of Spanish literature, of to-day as well as of the past. No keener realistic pictures of a nation were ever drawn than in "Quixote," yet no book was ever more idealistic; and the path plowed so deeply by Cervantes, has been followed by the modern novelists of Spain. Their feet are well planted on the ground, but they do not think it necessary to prove they walk the earth by wallowing in its mud. These modern Spanish romances tell of the pa.s.sions and sorrows of virile men and women, and at the same time they can boast that they are free from the moral evil so rampart in French novels. "Quixote" is not exactly a prude's book, yet the "jeune fille" can read it unharmed and Cervantes has served in this point as a standard.[32]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. FRANCIS OF a.s.sISI

A wood-carving by Carmona, Museum of Leon]

Few realize the delightful field of modern fiction that lies ready to be explored once enough Spanish has been mastered for reading. After three months' study only we found we could take up and enjoy "Don Quixote,"

for contrary to the popular idea, its language is no more archaic than is the English of Hamlet or Henry IV; a great genius fixes the tongue in which he writes.

The best of the novelists of this last half century, when the revival came about, are Valera and Pereda. Some would make a triology by placing Perez Galdos side by side with them. For instance the historian Altamira, being in sympathy with the frankly revolutionary theories which Galdos advocates, calls him the first, the Balzac of Spain, but the Balzac of a people is never against the traditions of his race as Galdos often is. "_Toda comparacion es odiosa_" the dear Don warns us.

Personally I give the first place to Valera and Pereda, in whose work is found the note of literature; Pereda the strength of the northern mountains, Valera the allurement of the south. Happily for their permanence and their value as human doc.u.ments, the Spanish writers are local. Each describes his own province, his own _paisanos_. Dona Emilia Pardo Bazan paints her Galicia; Alacon his Andalusia; Valdes and Perez Galdos are more cosmopolitan and I should say lose by it; Blasco Ibanez writes of Valencia, Leopoldo Alas has vivified the Asturias.

The revival of the _novela de costumbres_, which suits the Spanish temperament, just as the romantic or fantastic tale suits the German, may be said to have been started by that talented Sevillian auth.o.r.ess who wrote under the name of Fernan Caballero. She had not the gift of a good style, and most of her books are already of the past, but in "La Gaviota," published in 1849, her pa.s.sionate love for Spain and its ways has made a novel that is likely to endure. The tale tells of many old customs: how on the night of November 2d, the Brotherhood of the Rosary of the Dawn rises to pray for the souls in Purgatory, how one of the sodality goes from house to house to rouse the others, striking a bell and singing:

"I am at your door with a bell; I do not call you; it does not call you; 'T is your mother, 't is your father who call you, And they beg you to pray for them to G.o.d."

And each member rises and follows the fraternity. A land does not lose that has such customs among its peasantry, that weaves in its religious belief with the inextricable souvenirs of home and childhood. A Spanish child is brought up on songs of the Pa.s.sion and the Virgin as naturally as we on Mother Goose. When he sees a chimney-sweep he exclaims "_El Rey Melchor!_" for the visit of the Three Kings of the East is real to him.

He knows the owl was present at the Crucifixion, whence his terror-stricken cry of "_Crux! Crux!_" that the kindly swallows relieved the Saviour of the thorns, and the gold-finches of the three agonizing nails:

"En el monte Calvario En el monte Calvario Las golondrinas Los jilgueritos Le quitaron a Cristo Le quitaron a Cristo Las cinco espinas. Los tres clavitos."

The serpent according to Spanish lore, went proudly erect after his success with Eve, until down in Egypt one day, he tried to bite the little Infant Jesus, whereupon St. Joseph indignantly rebuked him and ordered him never to rise again. The rosemary is loved and given away as presents because when formerly a common plant, once the Blessed Virgin hung out on it to dry the clothes of her divine Infant, and it became forever green and fragrant. The children at play sing these legends and folk-songs; on Christmas eve they dance their "Alegria! Alegria!

Alegria!" A suggestive young writer of Granada, Angel Ganivet, says that in Spain Christian philosophy did not remain hidden in books, but worked its way into the very life of the people, where it is found in the popular songs and customs: "_Nuestra_ 'Summa' _teologica y filosofica esta en nuestro 'Romancero_.'"

Fernan Caballero started the revival of the novel and its flowering soon followed. Don Juan Valera, though always interested in literature, had been prevented by his active life from himself writing till middle age.

When in 1874 "Pepita Jimenez" appeared, it took his countrymen by storm, and this first novel, written by chance, was soon followed by others; a true creative artist had tardily discovered his genius. I cannot speak of Don Juan Valera without an admiration which to those who do not know his works may seem extreme. From his books his personality stands out as clearly as that of Cervantes, equable, high-minded, with that mellow wisdom which has gleaned the best from a life full of opportunities. In his "Discursos Academicos," two volumes that make enchanting reading--enchanting and academical do not often go together--he disclaims the t.i.tle of thinker, yet he was a profound observer. His satire is of that kindly quality that leaves no sting. He has charm, that salt of the writer; he is never exaggerated nor embittered. This quality of amenity he shares too with his master, whom he can write of with an absolute comprehension just as Cervantes himself could make a Quixote because he was akin. It was a happy chance that the last words of the modern novelist (over eighty and blind, yet alert in mental interests) should have been the unfinished paper for the Royal Academy, to celebrate in 1904 the three hundredth anniversary of "Don Quixote."

His Spanish blood let Valera understand the heights of mysticism, skeptic though he was by force of circ.u.mstances; he could write with enthusiasm of St. Teresa. On woman he held advanced ideas, he advocated her highest education, especially the cultivation of letters, for he said that if man alone wrote half the knowledge of the human soul would be lost; civilizations where women are not given education and knowledge never arrive at their full flowering; it is as if the collective soul of the nation had clipped one of its wings. His own culture was an all-round one. He had the intimate knowledge that residence in foreign lands gives: English thought, German, Italian, Austrian, American north and south, the Orient and its religions, in every country his literary interests had been alert. Thus he had a curiously minute knowledge of the North American poets. Of his own race essentially, he yet was cosmopolitan in the higher meaning of the word. All that went to make up dislike and division between nations he deplored as ignorance of man's higher destiny of brotherhood. It is not hard to read between the lines sometimes of his sensitive shrinking in his travels under the uncomprehending criticism of his native land; the world, especially the English-speaking world, has but a veiled contempt for things Spanish. He has righted his country in his books without a touch of aggressive impatience, by simply describing things as they are.

Valera has set his romances in the Andalusia he knew best. He was born at Cabra in the province of Cordova in 1824, the son of a naval officer and the Marquesa de Paniega. He received the best of educations and when twenty-two accompanied the Spanish amba.s.sador, the poet-duke de Rivas to Naples. Then followed half a life-time of diplomatic posts: Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, St. Petersburg, as Minister Plenipotentiary to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1883 and later to Brussels, finally as Amba.s.sador to Vienna. He was also a member of the Cortes, a Councilor of State, and was one of the emba.s.sy sent to Florence to offer the Crown to Amadeus I. During the two years of the Republic he retired, but returned to active life on the advent of Alfonso XII. Although a man of the world Valera was a born artist. Only in his first romance did he show the hand of the novice. His literary style is a simple and limpid medium that leaves behind unfading pictures of country and town; he has done what Balzac calls adding new beings _a l'etat civil_.

"Pepita Jimenez" came out in 1874, "Dona Luz" in 1879, two vignettes of Andalusian women immortalizing two very different types; Pepita of grace, pa.s.sion, charm, compact, of the very heart of femininity, adorable despite her failings, achieving her own happiness against all odds; Dona Luz, idealistic, dignified in mind and manner, of the type of a Vittoria Colonna, proudly bearing the heart-outrage fate sent her, since her soul, for her the essential, had found its mystic way out. I do not think that in any fiction there is a more subtly given relations.h.i.+p than that of this n.o.ble creature Luz and the Dominican missionary from the Philippines, Padre Enrique, scholar and dumb poet.

What with a Zola had been revolting, with Valera is humanly heart-breaking and spiritually enn.o.bling, it could shock no piety; only a man of elevated character and the most sensitive discernment could so touch on undefined emotions. The friends.h.i.+p of Dona Luz and the doctor's captivating daughter is a warm-hearted relations.h.i.+p of two young and pretty women declared impossible by many novelists. This tale of beautiful and tragic sincerity had been preceded by another, also set in one of the smaller Andalusian towns, and written with the lightness of manner and seriousness of matter that show the master hand: "El Comendador Mendoza," I cannot help feeling veils much of the author's own self. These stories show the soundness of the simple people. Swift marriages are looked on with disapproval; how, they ask, can esteem or true knowledge of character be gained in a few months.[33] So in Spain the opportunities allowed the _novios_, the young people who choose each other from mutual attraction, are unheard of in France or Italy.

High-born or lowly, a Spanish girl can savor the romance of life, without disrepute, by talking at the _reja_ during the midnight hours; before marriage she is allowed a freedom of speech, a _sal_, a self-development, denied her sisters in other Latin countries.

It is not possible to touch on all of Valera's stories, for his vein once discovered, proved a rich one. His longest novel has a poorly-chosen name, "Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino" and is not very well constructed, not enough is eliminated for art; but always there is the charm of the south, the midnight talking at the _reja_--those happy _novios_ of Spain!--the drowsiness of the noontime siesta, the vivacity of the evening _tertulia_, that innocent way of diverting themselves every night from nine to twelve, the same group of friends meeting year after year. Constantly, as I read Spanish novels, I say a people that get so much out of so little are a lovable people, wholesome and of vigorous promise.

It was indeed with very different eyes that I looked out on the distant towns as we pa.s.sed in the train, they were peopled now with living people, a Pepita, a high-minded Luz, a philosophic Don Fresco, a kindly Dona Araceli, I felt that I was not quite a stranger here, now that Don Juan Valera had lifted from me the curtain of ignorance and prejudice that hides the everyday life of Spain.

The same year that saw the appearance of "Pepita Jimenez" brought to light another tale that will last as long, it does not seem too much to say, as the "Quixote" itself. In "El Sombrero de Tres Picos," Alacon has achieved a masterpiece. It is a slight tale of a few hundred pages, in the genre style, a picture of the old regime before the French invasion of 1808 broke down the Chinese wall of the Pyrenees. No description can do justice to its crisp, sparkling charm, to Frasquita, beautiful as a G.o.ddess, Eve herself, with a laugh like the _repique de Sabado de Gloria_; to her ugly, ironical, adorably malicious and sympathetic husband Lucas, the vibrant note of whose voice won all hearts, to whom his Frasquita was _mas bueno que el pan_. Lucas and his wife are Shakespearean creations. Then there is that pompous vanity, the Corregidor, Don Eugenio de Zunigo y Ponce de Leon, in his red cape, gold shoe buckles, and hat of three peaks. What a scene is that of the Bishop's visit to the miller's garden! And in what country but democratic Spain would a bishop stroll out with canons and grandees to while away a friendly hour with a miller? Inimitable tale, Spanish to the core, it is this that make a nation's glory, a "Don Quixote," a "Sotileza," a "Dona Luz," a "Sombrero de Tres Picos."

Don Pedro Antonio de Alacon belonged, like Valera, to an old family of Andalusia, but not in the elder novelist's fortunate circ.u.mstances; one of ten sons, he had more or less to place himself in life. He was born in Gaudix in 1833; studied law at the University of Granada; and naturally gravitated toward Madrid, the center of political and literary interests. He flung himself headlong into the republican anti-clerical ideas of that troubled time, but in later life his theories toned down so that he ended as a believer and a liberal conservative. Throughout a long political career Alacon kept his honor unstained; although often with friends in power, it was only after twenty-one years of politics that he accepted a post, on the advent of Alfonso XII, whose return he had advocated long before it came about. He had begun writing when very young, thus "El Clavo," a powerful sketch, was done when barely twenty.

Like many of Spain's authors, he turned soldier when the call came, and served in the 1860 campaign in Africa of which he has left a vivid chronicle, "Diario de un Testigo de la Guerra en Africa." "El Sombrero"

was followed by "El Escandalo," a novel widely discussed in Spain. The story opens strongly, but it scatters toward the end; Alacon is better in the tale than in sustained work. He can snap his fingers at our criticism, his Corregidor and his Molinera have made him one of the immortals.

To another modern novelist, to Perez Galdos, I feel I am not fair, but I find so much of his work antipathetic that, as he has not a good style and often offends good taste, I cannot force a liking. Brunetiere speaks of the intolerance of the naturalist school of novelists, the intolerance of the free-thinker. Those who advocate the extreme republican, anti-clerical theories in Spain have this intolerance to a marked degree. Perez Galdos is so bia.s.sed that he distorts his characters from their natural evolution by making them voice his own ideas. The "roman a these" may win a greater fame for the first hour, but it is sure to pa.s.s with the changing questions of the time. The much-praised "Dona Perfecta" struck me as absurdly untrue to human nature. The heroine is presented as a not uncommon type of religious development, naturally where there is intense religious feeling there is a bigot here and there, but this Lady Perfection is not a consistent human being, but a monster. While anxious for her nephew to leave she yet urges him to stay, no reason why; she could easily have rid herself of him yet she brings about his death. Her character of the beginning does not match with her character of the end (the novelist offends several times in this way). The thin-visaged, oily priest-villain gives an aside over the footlights: "I have tried tricks, but there is no sin in tricks. My conscience is clear": evidently old-fas.h.i.+oned melodramatics are not yet extinct. It is quite impossible for a well-bred Spaniard to have insulted his kind hosts, as does Pepe, by telling them crudely that their Christian belief is a fable as past as paganism, "all the absurdities, falsities, illusions, dreams, are over,"

to-day there is no more multiplication of bread and fishes, but the rule of industry and machines. I think most people will feel that the characters of this book can intrigue and murder and throw in realistic asides as much as they will, we do not hate them because they fail to convince us that they ever really existed. They are just mouthpieces for their author's theories. In another novel, "Gloria," a beautiful pa.s.sionate girl of sixteen is incapable of being the pedantic prig Galdos makes her in the opening chapters. Happily for the romance and for the weary reader, once the novelist warms to his story, religious discussions go to the wall and he presents a moving tragedy. Would that he could have kept up to the level of parts of this novel, that which presents Gloria's uncles, for instance, but he is very unequal. After scenes so true to life that they are a joy, he will indulge in the pseudo-giantesque of some of Hugo's purple patches, and only high genius can take such liberties. Thus in a tempest a church lamp falls; it breaks the gla.s.s of the urn in which lies the Dead Christ, it slaps St.

Joseph in the face, it knocks the sword from the hand of St. Michael, and finishes its zig-zag career by cras.h.i.+ng into a confessional. Lamps of anti-clerics only seem to act in this all-round, satisfying way; realists, like Pereda and Valera, are incapable of such exaggeration.

Some critics hold "Angel Guerra" and "Fortuna y Jacinta" to be the best of Galdos. His "Episodios Nacionales" are a series of novels on the events of the past century in Spain. In spite of vivid scenes, they seemed to me long-winded and confusing; one must be Spanish, they say, to appreciate them.

Benito Perez Galdos was born in 1845 in the Canary Islands. He has been an artist, a lawyer, a politician, and a journalist; in twenty years he has produced forty-two volumes, a record which makes his inequalities easy to understand. Personally he is a sincere and upright character.

Although an avowed free-thinker he sits in reverence at the feet of his fellow novelist, Pereda, an ardent believer, and it was to be near him that he fixed his home in Santander: "Our master," he calls him, "a great poet in prose, the most cla.s.sic and at the same time the greatest innovator of our writers."

Far below Perez Galdos, who, if not the first, is a distinguished and talented novelist, is Blasco Ibanez, of the same school of anti-clerics and extreme republicanism. His stories are vigorous, crude studies of Valencia, that province which the proverb says is "a paradise inhabited by demons," and because so local, the books are valuable; personally I lay down such a tale as "Flor de Mayo" or "Arroz y Tartana" depressed and sick at heart. Ibanez lacks ideality and elevation of sentiment; he pictures ign.o.ble lives in monotonous detail, all is labored description, for the characters never speak themselves, the author _describes_ their conversation. One sentence of Sancho, one sentence of the Don and you know who speaks! It is to this minor novelist that a recent French book, "Les Maitres du Roman Espagnol Contemporain," by a Monsieur F. Vezinet, devotes a fourth of its pages, while dismissing Pereda contemptuously, and not even mentioning "Sotileza," his great sea-masterpiece. Under the guise of literary criticism, the French writer veils a polemic against religion: "For Christians actually do find solace in a belief in a future life," is one of his remarks. On meeting in Spanish fiction a dignified reserve in scenes of pa.s.sion, this teacher of young men--he is professor in the Lycee of Lyons--supplies the pepper lacking by telling how a French naturalist would have described the same scenes.

Another Spanish writer of the free-thinking school, but of good literary quality, is Leopoldo Alas, author of "La Regenta," and a caustic, intelligent critic who under the name of _Clarin_ did much to p.r.i.c.k Spain awake to intellectual interest. Though born in Zamora (1852) he so a.s.sociated himself with Oviedo, where he studied and later was professor in the University, that he may be called a son of the Asturias. "La Regenta" is a powerful psychological novel, set in Oviedo, somewhat long drawn out, for the minute following of Ana Ozores in her downfall too closely approaches pathology. Ana, who resembles a little her namesake of Russia, (Alas has treated the real issue with the same uncompromising morality as Tolstoi) is a brilliant, lovable woman, capable of the highest, a girl who at sixteen can read St. Augustine with emotion; but she is fatally doomed by the limitations of a woman's life in her station. The acute Alas here puts his finger on a real evil in his country, the lack of wide interests for the women of the upper cla.s.ses if no family duties are given them. They seem to have forgotten Isabella's day when Dona Lucia de Medrano lectured on the Latin cla.s.sics in the University of Salamanca, and Dona Francesca de Lebrija filled the chair of rhetoric in the University of Alcala, when the Queen read her New Testament in Greek, and her youngest daughter, the unfortunate wife of Henry VIII, won the admiration of Erasmus by her solid acquirements.

To-day the idleness enforced by fas.h.i.+on leads often to morbid religiosity or to moral disaster. Toward the end, "La Regenta" like "El Escandalo" flags, especially is the canon De Pas a failure. Such a man would have been either a great saint or a great sinner, never could he have steered the mean middle course he did. In this book, unlike the average romance, is much of the trail of the serpent of Zola's school, more the result of a too warm partisans.h.i.+p of the French novelist than innate in Alas.

The talented Padre Coloma, author of "Pequeneces," may be called, like the professor of Oviedo, a man of one novel. Born in Andalusia (1851), a literary protege of Fernan Caballero, he led the life of a man of the world till about twenty-five, when a violent change of heart caused him to enter the Jesuit Order. There he has pa.s.sed uneventful, useful years of study and teaching. His book, which is a harsh satire on the vices of the smart set of Madrid, made an immediate sensation. I cannot say I find the Padre Coloma a great writer by any means, he is too unequal; whole chapters drag heavily. But some of his scenes deserve the highest praise, such as the presentation of the heroine Currita Albornoz, or that truly n.o.ble description of one of Spain's proud usages, the twelve grandees of the first rank presenting themselves before their new monarch, the young Alfonso XII, on his return in 1875, a picture that rings with the heroic spirit of the past.

We turn next to a novelist with so long a list of books to her credit that it is impossible to enumerate them, the Senora Emilia Pardo Bazan who has been called the most notable woman of letters in Europe. Her salon in Madrid is one of the best known in the capital, but she has so deeply a.s.sociated herself with her native province (born in Coruna in 1851) that she is the boast of every Gallego. Mountain lands are noted for the loyalty they rouse in their sons, but few such enthusiasms equal that of Dona Emilia. She has told of the lonely hills, the chestnut forests, the never-failing streams of the Norway of Spain, and made alive the ancient usages, and the crabbed originality of the peasantry.

"Los Pazos de Ulloa" (_pazos_ is dialect for palace) and its sequel, "La Madre Naturaleza," have in them the very breath of outdoor life,--the last is an idyll in prose. She describes the untrained young _cura_ leaving Santiago to step into the unhappy coil of events in the ruined manor house, his vain efforts to help the pathetic young wife and her brutalized husband. The tragedy is carried on to the second generation, and we see the two children growing up in solitude and desertion, roaming the countryside day and night, Perucho, blue-eyed, handsome as a Greek statue, the girl Manolita slender and dark; then the heart-breaking misery of the end. Work such as this is exquisite and sure to last. Madam Pardo Bazan edits one of the best reviews in Madrid, and she has written many stories that treat of life in the capital, but, like the novels of Valdes, they might have been written elsewhere, in Paris or St. Petersburg. It is in the novels of her loved _paisanos_ she will live.

English-speaking people probably know Palacio Valdes better than any other Spanish writer, for his novels, of the regulation Parisian type, have been repeatedly translated. I care not at all for the Madrid novels, but sometimes in a das.h.i.+ng local romance he carries all before him: such is "La Hermana de San Sulpicio," _sal salada_, that untranslatable phrase of Andalusia where sparkle and verve are considered as highly as beauty in women. The story is facile, witty, light both in manner and matter, full of laughter following swift on tears, like its sprightly chatterbox of a heroine, an alluring creature who is sincere underneath the sparkle. Seville and the brilliant summer life of its patios, the sky raining stars, lovers talking all night at the _reja_ in the scented air,--no one would tell on an _enamorado_, the very men drinking in a tavern send out a gla.s.s to the patient lover to wish him good luck. The friendly equality of the different cla.s.ses is shown again here, and other traits not so praiseworthy, such as the intensity of local antipathies, the Andalusian's contempt for the Gallego, the Catalan's for the Andalusian. A Barcelona business man grumbles all day in Seville: "A gla.s.s of cognac 30 c. one day and 35 c.

the next in the same cafe. Is that business?" Two men from the northern mountains meet: "You too are from Asturias?" asks one. "No, from Galicia." "Then you are not _mi paisano_," and the first turns away in disdain.

While the mundain, easy stories of Palacio Valdes are translated and widely read, one of the first of Spanish novelists is scarcely known outside his own country. Don Jose Maria de Pereda was born in 1835 and died in 1906, the year following Don Juan Valera's death. He is a true son of the _Montana_, the coast country round Santander, whose Picos de Europa rise to a height of 9000 feet, and he has described his home with beautiful realism in some robust and primitive tales: "Escenas Montanesas; "El Sabor de la Tierruca"; "Sotileza," called his best, a very strong picture of fisher folk; "De tal Palo tal Astillo," which, like Galdos' "Gloria," is greatly spoiled by being a "roman a these"; "Penas Arriba," and many others. Pereda is a champion against skepticism and the weakening luxury of cities: he is so partial to his _patria chica_ that he often abuses the patience of readers by his too free use of its dialect. With him, plot and action are of slight account, for his interest lies in the eternal human characters and in the countryside that molded them. A realist more exact than Flaubert, he yet fulfills the prophecy of Huysmans as to the best type of novel for the future: "The truth of the doc.u.ment, the precision of detail, the condensed, nervous language of realism must be kept, but it must be clarified with soul, and mystery must no longer be explained by _maladies of the senses_. The romance should divide itself into two parts, welded or interbound as they are in life, that of the soul and that of body, and it should treat of their reaction, of their conflicts, of their mutual understandings." M. Rene Bazin has described a visit to Pereda at Polanco, his beautiful estate near Santander, where he led a life of cultured retirement, proving the theory which his books preach, that one's native home is the best paradise. To the French visitor, with his nation's swiftness to discern high distinction, it seemed as if it were Quixote himself, the man who came forward to meet him, of the pure hidalgo type, long face and aquiline nose, with that n.o.ble gesture of the hand that said, "My house is yours."

Of Pereda's books, my favorite is "Penas Arriba," which does for the mountain folk what "Sotileza" does for the coast life of the _Montana_.

It was while writing this that there fell on him the heart-rending blow of his young son's suicide, and a cross and date long stood in the rough draft of the novel to mark the separation of the past from his saddened later life: only by force of will could he continue. Much of himself shows in the tale, which would entice a Parisian himself to live contentedly on a mountain side. There is a scene, the death of the squire of Tablanca, which indeed proclaims a master hand. Spain's best critic, Don Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo (himself from Santander, born 1856) writes of Pereda: "For me and all born _de penas al mar_, these books are felt before judged, they are something of our mountain land like the breezes of the coast, one loves the author as one does one's family."

Perhaps it is not fair to speak of a writer who is not a romancist, when good minor talents among the novelists have to be pa.s.sed over, but I cannot resist ending with the name of this famous scholar, Menendez y Pelayo,[34] who may be said to be discovering Spain to herself after her long discouragement. His books are on the history of philosophy and literature: "Historia de las Ideas Esteticas en Espana"; "Horacio en Espana," being graphic pages on the lyric poets; "Critica Literaria"; "Ciencia Espanola," "Calderon y su Teatro," and others. Faithful to the best traditions of his race, he is boldly a.s.serting her past, her poets, her scientists, her mystics,--they have been ignored too long; he holds that the peoples of the _mediodia_ are the civilizing races par excellence. All the warring factions of Spain agree that here is a man of stupendous talent. "Every time I meet him, I find him with a new language. Never have I met a student of such prodigious erudition,"

wrote the skeptic Alas. Menendez y Pelayo may be called a literary phenomenon. Before twenty-five he had ransacked the libraries of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium, and was given a professors.h.i.+p in the University of Madrid. To-day his reputation is European among scholars. His profound knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literatures, helps a swift, unerring sense to perceive the best. His work is not only that of a scholar, for it has in it the life-giving touch of imagination, which is wisdom, and makes a writer a cla.s.sic.