XIX The Modern Spanish Novel
I — Revival. Fernán Caballero
The success of “Don Quixote” might have been expected to fire a host of imitators, but the seventeenth century in Spain was given rather to the drama than to the novel, and the eighteenth century “was an age of barrenness in Spain, so far as concerns romance.”99 In the first half of the nineteenth century the Spanish novel was for the most part a pale imitation of Sir Walter Scott, and these somewhat insipid romances, in spite of the wealth of subjects afforded by Spanish history, were not genuinely Spanish; they were due to a taste imported by returning exiles, and were not a natural growth of the soil. Thus the Condesa Pardo Bazán could say that in Spain the novel has no yesterday, only an anteayer, a day before yesterday, and the appearance of Fernán Caballero’s “La Gaviota” was hailed by a Spanish critic as a link between Cervantes and the nineteenth century. It marked, indeed, the revival of realistic fiction in Spain. Cecilia Böhl von Faber, daughter of a distinguished German settled in Spain, was born in Switzerland in 1796, but passed nearly the whole of her life in Spain, and chiefly at Seville. She combined German depth with the wit and clear vision of Andalucía. A discerning Madrid critic reviewing “La Gaviota,” the first published work of the then unknown Fernán Caballero—it had been written first in French, and now appeared in Spanish in the pages of “El Heraldo” (1848-49)—said that it displayed a mixture of the German and Andalusian Schools, the pencil of Dürer, and the colouring of Murillo. A character in “La Gaviota” observes: “Were I Queen of Spain, I would command a novel of customs to be written in every province.” It was the novela de costumbres that Fernán Caballero wrote with such brilliant success. She wished, she said, to show Spain as it really was, and not as it was commonly painted by foreigners.
Cecilia Böhl von Faber was thrice married—to Spaniards—and it was as Marquesa de Arco Hermoso, living on her husband’s estate at Dos Hermanas, a small village near Seville, that the idea first occurred to her to collect the fast-disappearing customs and traditions of the peasants. She came into frequent touch with them owing to her wish to learn their individual needs, and know how best to administer her charity. The thirteen years from her second marriage in 1822, to the death of the Marqués de Arco Hermoso, in 1835, were spent mainly at Seville, at their house in the Plaza de San Vicente, or in the neighbourhood. The story La Familia de Albareda, the scene of which is Dos Hermanas, was then written, from events that actually occurred in this village, although it was not published till later. It was when her third husband was absent in Australia that she thought of publishing her stories, and took her nom de plume from a small village of La Mancha, called Fernán Caballero. The appearance of “La Gaviota,” which is, indeed, one of the best, if not the best, of Fernán’s novels, aroused considerable surprise and enthusiasm, and many surmises as to who might be the author. It was a work so unlike the romantic tales and insipid imitations then in vogue; it showed so fresh and spontaneous an inspiration. Here were no echoes of older novelists; all was written from keen personal observation, and the reader was enabled by the author’s art to realize in words scenes and characters which he had known and felt, but had been unable to express.
After the tragic death of her third husband, in 1859, Fernán Caballero was firmly resolved to enter a convent, but her friends did their utmost to dissuade her, and she believed, moreover, that the only books she would be allowed to read would be those of devotion. Finally she gave up this idea, and lived for nearly ten years in one of the houses of the Patio de las Banderas in the Seville Alcázar, granted to her by Queen Isabel II. It would be difficult to imagine a more pleasant home for a writer. On one side the beautiful gardens of the Alcázar, with their myrtles, palms, and oranges, clipped box-hedges, and white marble fountains; on the other the Plaza del Triunfo, planted with orange-trees, acacias and palms, and the Cathedral and wonderful Giralda tower. The Revolution of 1868 came to destroy this peace. The Alcázar became for the time the property of the nation, and Fernán Caballero was driven to seek a home elsewhere. She was for other reasons, as a devout Roman Catholic and Royalist, deeply distressed by the Revolution and its sacrilegious results in Seville. The pettiness of many revolutionary measures was shown by the fact that the night-watchmen—the serenos—of Seville were forbidden, in calling out the hours, to use the traditional preface “Ave María Purísima.” Fernán Caballero obtained the reversal of this decree. She lived to listen with tears of joy to the bells of the Giralda, as they rang out the news of the Restoration and the beginning of Alfonso XII.’s reign. She was then living in the curving, silent bye-steet that now bears her name. No. 14 is distinguished from the other houses by having, besides the patio, a garden with a large lemon-tree, and other shrubs. Here she died in the spring of 1877, in her eighty-first year. The Queen came to visit her here, and a memorial tablet was placed above the entrance of the house by her friends the Duke and Duchess of Montpensier.
The quality that gives imperishable value to Fernán’s work is its truth: the scenes are at once felt to be real, the characters are living. She reproduces the lively mirth and malicious wit of the andaluz peasant, the gay laughter-loving nature of the Sevillians, with their keen perception of the false and the ridiculous. She describes a Seville patio (in “Elia”), or a bull-fight (in “La Gaviota”), or a country house, quinta (in “Clemencia”), or a deserted convent (in “La Gaviota”) with a delicate minuteness of detail that brings them vividly before us. Writing of simple, everyday events, as in the preface she characterizes those of “Elia,” she paints them with unsurpassed clearness and vigour, and much of the piquancy and charm, the sal y pimienta, of the South is in her pages. There are in her works some scenes that in sobriety and psychological skill are worthy of Stendhal. Her characters are drawn from life with the sure and penetrating analysis of genius. Perhaps the best example of all is the character of Marisalada in “La Gaviota,” but the slighter figures, the conservative General Santa María and the bull-fighter Pepe Vera, in the same novel, the vivacious, charitable Asistenta in “Elia” (having much in common with Fernán’s own character), who is unmoved by the discovery of a Roman epitaph on one of her farms and refuses to believe that there is a land where bishops marry, Marcial and Jenaro in “Lágrimas”—all these and many more are sketched with masterly skill. It is when they treat of country scenes and peasant life that the novels of Fernán Caballero are at their best, as the first half of “La Gaviota” in the village of Villamar, or a part of “Clemencia” (1852) in the village of Villa-María. The character of Don Martín of Villa-María and the scene of his interview with the importunate Tía Latrana are thoroughly in the manner of Pereda. So, too, is the wife of the village mayor in “Lágrimas.” “Haber gastadu mis cuartus” she exclaims—and the use of dialect, so freely employed by Pereda, is noticeable—“en facere de esse fillu meu un hulgazán! Non me lo dejú para esu mi tíu Bartulumé, es verdad.” The foreigners at Seville are portrayed with less sympathy; so we have Sir John Burnwood, who has come to Seville in order to ride up the Giralda, and, finding this impossible, proposes to buy the Alcázar, or Sir George Percy, who is admitted to have noble qualities, but allowed to show unmistakably bad taste.
Fernán Caballero is not afraid of interrupting her story by digressions, whether their object be to inculcate virtue, to exalt the Roman Catholic religion, or to ridicule the importers of foreign fashions and foreign phrases into Spain. Sometimes, as in “Lágrimas,” this is carried to excess and rather spoils the effect of the story, but in most of her works the digressions are never altogether wearisome; the original and fascinating character that won for Cecilia Böhl von Faber a host of friends is not often or for long absent from the novels and relaciones of Fernán Caballero. It has been observed that “La Gaviota,” though it contains scarcely any action, has not a line too much. “No aspiramos á causar efecto,” says the preface of “La Familia de Albareda,” and it is this very absence of thrilling action or melodramatic effect that gives so permanent a charm to Fernán’s works. For a proper appreciation of Seville and Andalucía they are invaluable: there is not one of them in which some trait explanatory of the Sevillian and andaluz characters does not appear. A recent Spanish writer quite unjustly denies that Fernán Caballero shows any of the sal andaluza, and is of opinion that her work has not left a deep trace in Spanish literature, but must be considered rather as a preparation for the higher flights of the novelists who followed. It is difficult to agree with this view. Fernán Caballero not only hoisted the flag of true Spanish realism, and pointed to a land of promise, but carved for herself a very real and abiding empire in this land of her rediscovery.
II — 1870-1900
In 1864 Pereda published his first work, “Escenas montañesas,” and ten years later, and three before the death of Fernán Caballero, appeared Valera’s first novel, “Pepita Jiménez,” and Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Since 1874 scarcely a year has passed without producing a Spanish novel that deserves a high rank in literature. Yet Pereda100 did not at once impose himself, and early in 1874 Pérez Galdós could put the following words into the mouth of one of the characters in Napoleón en Chamartín: “In the matter of novels we are so far astray that, after producing the source of all the novels of the world, and the most entertaining book ever written by man, Spain is now unable to compose a novel of more worth than a grain of mustard seed, and translates these sentimental French stories.”
Similarly, Señor Menéndez y Pelayo remarks that “about the year 1870, the date of Pérez Galdós’ first book, the Spanish novel was slumbering in the arms of insipid or monstrous productions, entre ñoñerías y monstruosidades.” There is little insipidity or sentimentalism in the more modern Spanish novel. Realism is the dominant note of Spanish literature. The very atmosphere of Spain makes for clear vision. Its artists are realistic, even brutally realistic, as Goya occasionally is; even its mystics have not been wrapped wholly from the world: they do not live in a cloud, insensible to the real facts of life. And in the same way the great Spanish novelists are realistic. There is, however, a true Castilian dignity about their realism. They do not, in George Meredith’s phrase, mistake the “muddy shallows” for the depths of Nature. They may treat of the vulgar and the base, but they do not treat of them in a way that is vulgar and base. They may be as outspoken as Martial, but their realism is eminently sane and clean.
The modern fashion, strongly in favour of realism, should do justice to the merits of Spanish novels. It is no doubt guided by the love of contrast that caused Stendhal, a romantic and an enthusiast at heart, to read pages of the “Code Civil” before writing his novels, and to adopt a style mathematically cold and thin, and Flaubert, a poet, to analyse a subject so vulgar as that of Madame Bovary. A simpler age may delight in works of a fantastic imagination, but a more complex and perhaps hypocritical age must have truth and away with vagueness and pretence.
Minds so complicated and many-sided as to be rarely themselves, admire the simple and concrete, and the Spanish genius, which is essentially objective, answers to this taste both in its literature and in its art. Yet it is characteristic that in many Spanish novels realism and mysticism go hand in hand. That peculiarly Spanish mysticism which shows its false side in Clarín’s “La Regenta,” its practical spirit in Palacio Valdés’ “Marta y María,” its sadness in Azorín’s “La Voluntad,” is by no writer more sympathetically treated than by Juan Valera, in “Pepita Jiménez” and other novels. Valera was too great an artist to belong to any school. He repeated in many prefaces that his aim was not to instruct or to edify, but rather to give pleasure. The old heresy that works of art should edify has had great influence in Spain, and it makes its presence felt in modern novels with a set purpose, romans à thèse. It cast its shadow over the work of Fernán Caballero and Pereda, and, passing to the enemy, reappears at intervals in Pérez Galdós and Blasco Ibáñez. But Valera would have none of it. A novel, he said, “should be poetry, not history, that is, it should paint things not as they are but fairer than they are, illuminating them with a light that may cast over them a certain charm.” The magic of his style, which he caught by his own confession from the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, supplied this charm, and is sufficient to make his work imperishable. It is a charm that is exquisite and escapes analysis, reminding of that metallic lustre in ancient Spanish azulejos, or glazed tiles, of which modern manufacturers in vain seek to recapture the secret. Valera was not, in a strict sense, a great novelist. The construction of his stories is often weak, and the characters all speak the language of Don Juan Valera. “In Valera,” it has been said, “there are no Sanchos, all are Valeras.” He was himself aware of these limitations. He would sometimes say in a preface that he was not certain if his book were or were not a novel, and as to the invariably polished speech of his characters, the conversation of the nurse Antoñona with Luis de Vargas, in “Pepita Jiménez,” is accounted for by the fact that she had prayed that it might be given her to speak on this occasion, not in grotesque language, as was her wont, but in elegant and cultured style. Similarly, Juana la Larga says to her discreet daughter Juanita, “All that you have said seems to be taken from the books that Don Pascual gives you to read.”
But Valera could delineate characters skilfully. In his longest novel, “Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino,” the hero, Señor Don Faustino López y Mendoza, is in some degree a typical figure of modern Spain. Living in his half ruinous ancestral house in the village of Villabermeja, he feels himself to be capable of great deeds, but achieves nothing. He laments not being of humble birth to become a brigand like the great José María, he laments not having been born in the eleventh or twelfth century to carve out for himself a kingdom with his sword, and he ends by obtaining a modest post at Madrid, which brings him little over £100 a year. Valera’s creations have only seemed unreal because, through the alchemy of his style, he is a King Midas, turning all to gold, and the excellence of his art raises his figures to the level of statues in Parian marble. They are not, therefore, less lifelike; because he has an “exquisite adjustment of word to thought,”101 it does not follow that he is “without life and passion”102—rather the passion is raised to a white heat, with the flames no longer visible. And in his descriptions he is a true realist, giving us the light and laughter of Andalucía. His “Juanita la Larga” is a charming sketch of life in an Andalusian village that may recall Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Some of the most laughter-rousing scenes of “El Sombrero de tres picos” pass in the little stone-paved court in front of a flour mill, a quarter of a league from a certain cathedral town in Andalucía. The court is shaded by a huge vine-trellis, sufficiently thick and solid for the miller to sleep—or pretend to sleep—unnoticed among its leaves. It is a brief, delightful sketch, coloured and malicious, of Andalusian life in the first years of the nineteenth century. To Andalucía also belong two novels by Palacio Valdés, “La Hermana San Sulpicio” and “Los Majos de Cádiz.” But it is Andalucía described not by a native but by a stranger, for Palacio Valdés is of the North. He has a sense of humour rather English than Spanish, and he is, indeed, almost as well known out of Spain as within the Peninsula. It is a humour less bitter and aggressive than that of another Asturian, Leopoldo Alas, with whom Valdés collaborated in a volume of critical essays. As a sketcher of character, Valdés is admirable. Gloria, the typically Andalusian girl, and the Gallegan Sanjurjo are both excellently drawn in “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of his “Marta y María” is laid in an old town of Astúrias—the author is now in his native country—surrounded by a wide level of meadows and gently sloping hills to the ría, bordered by immense pine woods and the sea. It is a novel even more delightful than “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of “La Aldea perdida” is also Astúrias. It is a pastoral symphony, an Asturian counterpart to Pereda’s “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” a charming story—in spite of its theatrical ending—of village rivalries and reconciliations in a land wooded with chestnuts and oaks and cider-apples, a land of maize and cool green fields of trefoil, and mountain paths hedged with honeysuckle. But in other works Palacio Veldés has not maintained this Spanish inspiration. In “La Espuma,” “Maximina,” “La Fe,” the influence is that of the French naturalistic School. Clarín (Leopoldo Alas), though born at Zamora also an Asturian, was likewise deeply influenced by France in his long work “La Regenta.” In one of his critical essays Clarín wrote that “Spanish realism is very Spanish; it is in the race. But it has its defects, no todo en él es flores; it is deficient in psychology and the poetry of passion.” In “La Regenta” we have passion and psychological analysis and epigrammatic wit. The scene is the old cathedral city of Vetusta (or rather Oviedo). The treatment is not characteristically Spanish. Vetusta is here a typical provincial town, such as Flaubert might have described and hated, and its inhabitants are almost all represented as ignorant, vulgar, or vicious. Their stupidity and vulgarity are lashed with an ingenious subtlety that is unsparing, and the motives guiding their actions are laid bare with an amazing skill. Clarín’s humour is often a little cruel, and the novel is crowded with terse and biting phrases. One of the readers of the Vetusta casino—the worthiest of them, Clarín is careful to assure us—is thus pilloried in a few lines: “He arrived at nine o’clock every evening without fail, took Le Figaro and The Times, which he placed over Le Figaro, put on his gold spectacles, and, lulled by the sound of the gas, fell gently asleep over the foremost paper of the world, a privilege which no one sought to dispute. Shortly after his death of apoplexy, over The Times, it was discovered that he knew no English.”
The most prominent figure among living Spanish novelists is undoubtedly Don Benito Pérez Galdós. In his “Episodios Nacionales,” the troubled history of Spain in the nineteenth century, from the wars against Napoleon to the death of Prim, passes before us in a Spanish human comedy. We see the noble death of Churruca in the battle of Trafalgar, we witness the brief, feverish defence of Madrid before Napoleon, the heroic sieges of Zaragoza and Gerona, the stubborn resistance of Bilbao to the troops of Zumalacárregui in the first Carlist war; later we see Isabel II. silently crossing the French frontier at Irun, the effect of Castelar’s eloquence in the Cortes, Prim landing at Cadiz—these and a hundred more principal actors and events are marshalled in a succession of novels now numbering over forty. Pérez Galdós continues to write with undiminished vigour. The forty-second episode, “España Trágica” (1909), pictures Madrid opinion in street and café during the year 1870, when Spain was “in high fever,” choosing a king. The book ends with a vivid account of the assassination of Prim. His long and difficult task was crowned with success, but his presence was needed now more than ever to check the hostility of the federalists on the one hand, of the aristocracy on the other. It was the 27th December, 1870, and on the following day he was to travel to Cartagena in order to receive the Duke of Aosta. He had just left the Congreso. The night was bitterly cold and the carriage rolled silently through the snow in almost deserted streets. It was noticed that first one man and then a second stopped in the street to light a cigar. This was apparently a signal. A little further on, in the Calle del Turco, a carriage blocked the way, and almost immediately the windows of Prim’s carriage crashed in on both sides and he fell back, wounded by more than one bullet. The forty-third Episode, “Amadeo I.” (1910), describes the reign of the Italian prince which began thus tragically with the murder of Prim, continued for two years in a tragi-comedy, and ended with the dignified withdrawal of the loyal and disinterested “rey caballero,” who had been wilfully and persistently misunderstood and slighted by the subjects who had invited him to reign over them. With the Queen and their three children, including the infant Duke of the Abruzzi, he descended the steps of the Palacio del Oriente for the last time “entre alabarderos rígidos, sin música ni voces que turbaran el fúnebre silencio. Sólo el rumor de las pisadas marcaba el lento caminar de una época” (February, 1873). With this and a volume on the first Spanish Republic,103 the fifth and final series of the Episodes marches rapidly towards completion. For forty years novels and plays from Pérez Galdós’ pen have appeared at the rate of two or more a year, and some of the novels are of considerable length—“Fortunata y Jacinta” has something like two thousand pages. Well-drawn characters and skilfully reconstructed scenes abound, but a weariness sometimes overcomes the reader. For these novels scarcely seem to have an end or a beginning; there is no plot or concentration of interest. Perhaps for this very reason they are an extremely faithful presentation of life. No one would dispute Pérez Galdós’ great talent as a writer, but his admirers may regret that he does not pause to draw more complete pictures with finished art. In his anti-clerical novel, “Doña Perfecta,” Don Inocencio represents the influence of the priest in the family. Doña Perfecta, in league with the priest, secretly sets the whole force of her wealth and power in mediæval Orbajosa in the scale against her nephew, Pepe, who wishes to marry her only child, Rosario. Pepe is looked upon in Orbajosa as an atheist and hors la loi, although he is merely a modern man of science. There is no acknowledged opposition: Doña Perfecta meets him invariably with a pleasant smile; but his letters are opened and confiscated, he finds a spirit of steady though veiled hostility in Doña Perfecta’s house and in Orbajosa, he is assured that Rosario does not love him, and he cannot convince or overcome insidious enemies who never come into the open. Finally, Doña Perfecta becomes the murderess of her nephew, though in such a way that her conscience is entirely free from sense of guilt. The end justifies the means. The character of Doña Perfecta is developed with consummate skill; Palacio Valdés thirteen years later drew a slighter sketch on the same lines—Doña Tula, Gloria’s mother (in “La Hermana San Sulpicio,” 1889). No doubt there are towns in Spain such as Orbajosa, where the spirit of the Church is bigoted and Jesuitical, opposed to all progress; or such as Nieva, in “Marta y María,” where the people consider María to be a saint who can work miracles, and bring children for her to cure them with a look, and her confessor encourages the belief; or such as Vetusta, in “La Regenta,” where Don Fermín combines a high position in the Chapter of the Cathedral with a steady traffic in Church furniture and ornaments. Yet one may sometimes wonder whether the anti-Clericals are not too inclined to attribute all the ills of Spain to the influence of the priests. “Valgame Dios y qué vida nos hemos de dar, Sancho amigo,” they seem to say, as if the dissolution of the religious orders and the separation of Church and State would at once spell prosperity in Spain. The religious communities are numerous and rich; beggars, as at Orbajosa, are also numerous (and occasionally rich), but it would be unfair to lay the blame of poverty and backwardness entirely on the Church. There are many other causes, one of them the dissipated, careless life of society in the large towns, sketched by el padre Luis Coloma in his novel “Pequeñeces,” and by Pérez Galdós himself in “El Caballero Encantado.”
III — In the Twentieth Century
The novel continues to hold the field in Spanish literature. The early years of the twentieth century saw the death of two splendid writers, Valera (1824-1905), and Pereda (1833-1906), and Leopoldo Alas died in 1901. Of the older novelists, Pérez Galdós, the Condesa Pardo Bazán,104 Palacio Valdés, and Jacinto Octavio Picón105 still remain, and a brilliant group of younger writers is ready to pass on the torch undimmed. Pérez Galdós’ “El Caballero Encantado” is dated July-December, 1909. Writing immediately after the Barcelona riots, it was natural that the condition and future of Spain should be in his thoughts, and an allegorical figure representing Spain or the spirit of the race plays a prominent part in the book. The novel has, indeed, a little too much of the marvellous and the symbolical, and when the hero by a last transformation becomes a fish in the river Tagus, we are uncomfortably reminded of the spurious and fantastical continuation of Lazarillo de Tormes, in which Lázaro is transformed into a tunny-fish. The reason given by Señor Pérez Galdós is, however, excellent: “To this sad dwelling (the silent depths of the Tagus) come those who by their loquacity have drowned the will and thought of Spanish life in an ocean of words. Nearly all those here present are orators. They spoke much, and did nothing. Some of them are masters of high-sounding phrases, conjurers who, by the magic of their art and the vanity of their rhetoric, transformed the tower of eloquence into a tower of Babel.” The theme of the book is that Don Carlos de Tarsis, the young Marqués de Mudarra, deputy for a district of the geographical existence of which he has but a vague idea, who lives at Madrid, and spends with both hands the money drained from his estates, is magically changed into a farm-labourer on his land, or rather, on the land that was his, and now belongs in part to his agent, in part to his usurer. For to meet the expenses of his idle and dissipated life he must have money at any cost; but when the rents of his tenants are raised they emigrate, and his agent, who attributes the backwardness of agriculture in Spain to the fact that “the great land-owners live far from their estates as though they were ashamed of them,” supplies him with ever-diminishing sums, till he is reduced to penury and usurers. Tarsis recognizes that he is a most unworthy acolyte of Idleness, and that his only merit is “the brutal sincerity of his pessimism,” but he “would rather die than work.” So far the character is drawn from life, and it is only in the vagueness of the subsequent enchantments that the effect of the novel becomes veiled and uncertain. From a farm-labourer he successively becomes shepherd, quarryman, tramp, and criminal—all with much needless magic—till, by the final ordeal of silence in the golden Tagus, he is restored to his original being as Marqués de Mudarra, a chastened and a wiser marquis. Stress is laid on the miserable state of the poor, compared with the immunity of the rich. Famishing men are dragged off to prison for rooting up onions on a rich man’s estate, and shot down by the Guardia Civil when they try to escape—the official report runs: “the prisoners attempted to escape, and were overtaken by an accident from which a natural death ensued.” There is perhaps a greater air of reality about the account of the rich Caciques, owners of vast estates or latifundios, who pay to the Treasury but a tenth part of the proper land-tax, who falsify returns at elections, protect criminals, and assault honest folk, while the judges are their creatures. This Caciquismo is part of the deplorable administration of Spain. Señor Pérez Galdós who, as a native of the Canary Islands, has the double advantage of looking at Spain as it were from within and from without, returns to the question of words and deeds, the wealth of words and the scantiness of action, with an insistence which must be excessively annoying to a Spanish reader. Yet he does not despair of Spain’s future. He sees hope in the proved vitality of the race, in its quick recoveries after misfortune, its heroism even under self-inflicted sufferings: “The ineffable follies of my sons have plunged me (i.e. Spain) in despair, and in the darkness of despair my death has seemed certain and inevitable. And then in some terrible crisis that appeared to ensure my destruction, I have revived when they were carrying me from the death-bed to the grave.”
The best work of Pereda was of the Mountain, Valera and Fernán Caballero write of Andalucía, Palacio Valdés of Astúrias, and similarly the Gallegans, Valle-Inclán and Señora Pardo Bazán have found their best inspiration in Galicia, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in his native Valencia. Valencia is a fertile land of fierce heat and dazzling light—the light so wonderfully reflected in the work of the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla. Blasco Ibánez has written some striking novels that have no connection with Valencia, but his best and most delightful work is steeped in the life of the immense Valencian plain (in “La Barraca,” an intense story of a boycott of the Huerta); of the city of Valencia (in “Arroz y Tartana”); of the rice-growing, fever-stricken marshes of the Albufera, famous for its fishing and shooting, near Valencia (“Cañas y Barro”); of the fishermen and smugglers of El Grao and the Valencian coastline (“Flor de Mayo”); of love among the oranges in the orchard of Spain (“Entre Naranjos”). Blasco Ibáñez excels in portraying the lives and thoughts and struggles of the simple fisherman and peasant—hardworking as Batiste, or magnificently idle as Pimentó; and in describing popular customs and traditions,—a simple procession in floodtime (as in “Entre Naranjos”) or the dances and festeigs, courtings, of the atlóts and atlotas of Ibiza (in “Los Muertos mandan”). The hero of “Los Muertos mandan” (1909), Don Jaime or Chaume, is not a peasant, but a member of an ancient family of Mallorcan nobles, hemmed in by tradition and inherited instincts. The background, however, of descriptions of Mallorca and lawless peasant life in Ibiza, with its woods and orchards and white farms girt by a green transparent sea, contribute more powerfully to the charm of the book than the wrestling of Don Jaime against the clinging influence of the innumerable dead, who still prevail. But, indeed, Blasco Ibáñez’ presentation of any strenuous life-struggle is forcible and imposing. It reflects his own personality. His creed is one of restless striving and discontent with the apathy too frequent in Spain. His activity is immense: though little over forty years of age, his novels are already many in number, short stories and articles are continually appearing from his pen, he lectures, travels, translates, publishes, controls a Valencian paper, El Pueblo, and till the autumn of 1908 represented Valencia in Parliament as a Republican; now his energies are occupied in founding two towns—to be called New Valencia and Cervantes—for colonies of Valencians in the Argentine.
Blasco Ibáñez once wrote a long novel of the French Revolution, “Viva la República!” and in his ideas and in his art the influence of France has, no doubt, been very strong. His ideas sometimes trespass on his art, as in “La Catedral,” where, in the person of Gabriel Luna, he declaims tediously and without mercy. His novels, as a rule, show an admirable unity. In each of his heroes we see Blasco Ibáñez: but Blasco Ibáñez entirely identified with the peasant Batiste (in “La Barraca”), or the painter Renovales (in “La Maja Desnuda”), or the Socialist Luna (in “La Catedral”), or the bull-fighter Gallardo (in “Sangre y Arena”). His very manner catches the atmosphere and colour of the surroundings he describes. He becomes vulgar in the descriptions of commercial, crowded Valencia, wearisome in details of the feasts of its bourgeois and the various foods of its market-place (in “Arroz y Tartana”); he can be magnificently simple, with the soul of a peasant or a fisherman (in “La Barraca” and “Flor de Mayo”), and the fertile Huerta gives free scope to his luxuriant art, his overflow of poetry and imagination. This power of concentration, which Blasco Ibáñez possesses in so high a degree, is rare in Spanish literature. The heroes of Blasco Ibáñez’ novels are men strong to labour, persistent before defeat. They are almost always defeated and die, Gallardo in the arena, Luna assassinated in Toledo Cathedral, the Pascuals, fishermen of three generations, drowned in storms off the Valencian coast. But the dominant note of his novels is still “E pur si muove,” and in spirit his heroes are as unconquerable as Don Quixote. He has Zola’s power of describing crowds; in “La Horda” appears the multitude of hucksters and street-sellers that haunt the Madrid Rastro; and similarly the background of “Luna Benamor” (1909) is formed by a vivid description of Gibraltar, with its motley crowd of Spaniards and Jews and Moors and Englishmen. His prose is suited to these descriptions; it is living, coloured, tumultuous, sometimes hurried and careless—a Spanish critic speaks of his barbarismos gramaticales. From so voluminous and passionate a writer we should expect nothing of the polished or the exquisite, his work is in the rough; in a sense its incorrect ardour is Spanish, but its persistent energy is a refreshing note in Spain, and may well cover an occasional fault of taste or an ungrammatical sentence here and there. His works are nearly always striking and original, however hurried may have been their composition.
It has been remarked that the younger Spanish novelists are rather thinkers than artists, and Pío Baroja, Martínez Ruiz (Azorín) and Valle-Inclán have introduced an almost alien note into Spanish literature. It is significant that two at least of these writers, Azorín and Pío Baroja, are keen admirers of the essentially intellectual art of El Greco: Theotocopuli has cast over them the spell of his ascetically thin figures and cold attenuated tints. Pío Baroja is almost Russian in his pitilessly accurate descriptions, in his rebellion against the facts of life and his championship of the persecuted—outcasts, criminals, and vagabonds. In “La Ciudad de la Niebla” (1909), “The City of Fog,” he brings his clear, almost photographic, vision to bear on London, and chiefly on the dingier districts, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, the squalid labyrinth of streets off Shaftesbury Avenue, the Docks, the Embankment. Similarly in “César ó Nada” (1910) he continues to write in a spirit of mocking reckless individualism. The narrative is but a slender thread to string together his observations of men and places.106 Azorín, again, is not concerned with the form of his novels. He is a thinker, a psychological analyst, who deliberately disregards construction. Yuste, in “La Voluntad,” voices the author’s opinions; “Particularly,” he says, “the novel must have no plot; life itself has no plot: it is varied, many-sided, floating, contradictory—everything except symmetrical, geometrical, rigid, as it appears in novels.” The novel must give fragments, separate sensations. In “Las Confesiones de un pequeño filósofo” Azorín gives us his original impressions, his fragmentary sensations of “figures et choses qui passaient” in a style full of poetry and charm. His “La Voluntad” is a book very modern in its restless thought and individualistic philosophy. It has that originality of which Yuste, the philosopher of the book, speaks as consisting in “something undefinable, a secret fascination of thought, a mysterious suggestiveness of ideas.” The rare charm of Azorín’s style and his skill in descriptions, emoción del paisaje, imaginatio locorum, clothe with serenity his “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” and with peace his purely intellectual spirit and disquieting irony. With Ramón del Valle-Inclán, again, construction and plot are secondary. The action is slightly sketched in his novels, but incidents and persons are thrown into high relief by the delicate and original character of his style. It is a style built up of all that is rare and exquisite, with a sobriety that chisels a finished picture in a single phrase. In “El Resplandor de la Hoguera,” for instance, a green path leading from a small Basque village to its cemetery is simply described as “todo en paz de oratión,” and such lonely word pictures abound in his writings. His latest work, a trilogy, is “La Guerra Carlista,” and the action of the first part, “Los Cruzados de la Causa” (1908), passes in a village of Galicia. The haughty, great-hearted Gallegan hidalgo Don Juan Manuel, perhaps the best of Valle-Inclán’s vivid character-sketches, appears in this as in many others of his novels. The second part, “El Resplandor de la Hoguera” (1909), follows the broken movements of the guerilla fighting in the intricate Basque country; and the third part (each part forming, however, a separate novel), “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909), describes the furtive but daring tactics of that sinister Carlist cabecilla, Manuel Santa Cruz, priest of Hernialde, leading his men at night, “swift and silent as a wolf,” by labyrinthine mountain paths, past maize-fields and chestnut-trees and vineyards, and scented meadows under the stars, or ordering execution after execution of men and women “with a mystical coldness and internal peace.” His cruelty was that of the peasant who lights a fire to destroy the plagues of his vineyard. He watched the smoke go up as an evening sacrifice—
“Lo que á unos encendía en amor, á los otros los encendía en odio, y el cabecilla pasaba entre el incendio y el saqueo, anhelando el amanecer de paz para aquellas aldeas húmedas y verdes, que regulaban su vida por la voz de las campanas, al ir al campo, al yantar, al cubrir el fuego de ceniza y llevar á los pesebres el recado de yerba. Era su crueldad como la del viñador que enciende hogueras contra las plagas de su viña. Miraba subir el humo como en un sacrificio, con la serena esperanza de hacer la vendimia en un día del Señor, bajo el oro del sol y la voz de aquellas campanas de cobre antiguo, bien tañidas.”
It is difficult to analyse the fascination of these novels. Their incidents seem trivial enough and the characters speak in thin, broken sentences; but the effect is a marvellously vivid picture of the flickering scenes of the last Carlist war and the hill tactics of the cabecillas. The thin lines are due not to any poverty of inspiration but to the restraint of a consummate artist. The most recent Spanish novelist of note is Ricardo León, a young writer from Málaga, whose first novel, “Casta de Hidalgos,” was published in the autumn of 1908, followed by “Comedia Sentimental” in 1909, and “Alcalá de los Zegríes,” “La Escuela de los Sofistas” (a volume of dialogues), and “El Amor de los Amores” in 1910. These books are the work of a writer who has read and assimilated the best of Spanish literature from its earliest beginnings, chronicles, legends, serranillas, fervent religious treatises. His style is, indeed, not unworthy of the Spanish mystics. It has at once richness and sobriety, it is steeped in archaic humanism, but tinged with modern sadness and disillusion; it is, as the author might himself call it, “un castellano de clásico sabor.” It has in it nothing strained or artificial, being, rather, the flowing expression of a mystical intensity. He gives admirable pictures of the thoughts and lives of old-fashioned proud hidalgos, “after the pattern of the ancient hidalgos of Castille,” such as Don Juan Manuel, who lives in ruinous Santillana with its sadness of centuries, tristeza milenaria, in “Casta de Hidalgos;” or of serious, reserved philosophers, such as Don Juan Antonio in “Comedia Sentimental.” “Alcalá de los Zegríes” contains many passages of noble Spanish prose, and others of psychological interest; but it is for the most part concerned with politics and party strife. The Spaniards, as a rule, are more interested in politics than in literature. Valera’s celebrated “Pepita Jiménez” brought him no more than eight thousand reales, or under £80, and Señor Unamuno, the Rector of Salamanca University, a prominent Spanish thinker and writer, has declared that literary opinion in Spain is formed by some five hundred persons, “quinientas personas mal contadas.” The novelists may protest, but the novel gains. There is no temptation to write in order to please the taste of a public which does not exist. If there is something commercial in the methodical output of Pérez Galdós’ or Blasco Ibáñez’ novels, commercialism has certainly, hitherto, had but little part in Spanish literature. Limited, unliterary Spain has had this advantage. The world’s debate has not vulgarized it; a half-culture has not dragged down the novel to flamboyant, self-advertising methods. The novel in Spain is at its best when it rejects, or has not come into contact with, foreign influences. It can be realistic without thought of this or that school. It fascinates by its original flavour and scent of the soil.