(CECILIA BOeHL DE FABER)
(1796-1877)
England, France, and Spain have each produced within this century a
woman of genius, taking rank among the very first writers of their
respective countries. Fernan Caballero, without possessing the breadth
of intellect or the scholarship of George Eliot, or the artistic sense
of George Sand, is yet worthy to be named with these two great novelists
for the place she holds in Spanish literature. Interesting parallels
might be drawn between them, aside from the curious coincidence that
each chose a masculine pen-name to conceal her sex, and to gain the ear
of a generation suspicious of feminine achievements. Each portrayed both
the life of the gentleman and that of the rustic, and each is at her
best in her homelier portraitures.
Unlike her illustrious compeers, Fernan Caballero did not grow up amid
the scenes she drew. In the scanty records of her life it does not
appear whether, like George Sand, she had first to get rid of a
rebellious self before she could produce those objective masterpieces of
description, where the individuality of the writer disappears in her
realization of the lives and thoughts of a class alien to her own. Her
inner life cannot be reconstructed from her stories: her outward life
can be told in a few words. She was born December 25th, 1796, in Morges,
Switzerland, the daughter of Juan Nicholas Boehl de Faber, a German
merchant in Cadiz, who had married a Spanish lady of noble family. A
cultivated man he was, greatly interested in the past of Spain, and had
published a collection of old Castilian ballads. From him Cecilia
derived her love of Spanish folk-lore. Her earliest years were spent
going from place to place with her parents, now Spain, now Paris, now
Germany. From six to sixteen she was at school in Hamburg. Joining her
family in Cadiz, she was married at the age of seventeen. Left a widow
within a short time, she married after five years the wealthy Marquis de
Arco-Hermaso. His palace in Seville became a social centre, for his
young wife, beautiful, witty, and accomplished, was a born leader of
society. She now had to the full the opportunity of studying those types
of Spanish ladies and gentlemen whose gay, inconsequent chatter she has
so brilliantly reproduced in her novels dealing with high life. The
Marquis died in 1835, and after two years she again married, this time
the lawyer De Arrom. Losing his own money and hers, he went as Spanish
consul to Australia, where he died in 1863. She remained behind, retired
to the country, and turned to literature. From 1857 to 1866 she lived in
the Alcazar in Seville, as governess to the royal children of Spain. She
died April 7th, 1877, in Seville,--somewhat solitary, for a new life of
ideas flowing into Spain, and opposing her intense conservatism,
isolated her from companionship.
Fernan Caballero began to publish when past fifty, attained instant
success, and never again reached the high level of her first book. 'La
Gaviota' (The Sea-Gull) appeared in 1849 in the pages of a Madrid daily
paper, and at once made its author famous. 'The Family of Alvoreda,' an
earlier story, was published after her first success. Washington Irving,
who saw the manuscript of this, encouraged her to go on. Her novels were
fully translated, and she soon had a European reputation. Her work may
be divided into three classes: novels of social life in Seville, such as
'Elia' and 'Clemencia'; novels of Andalusian peasant life, as 'The
Family of Alvoreda' ('La Gaviota' uniting both); and a number of short
stories pointing a moral or embodying a proverb. She published besides,
in 1859, the first collection of Spanish fairy tales.
Fernan Caballero created the modern Spanish novel. For two hundred years
after Cervantes there are few names of note in prose fiction. French
taste dominated Spanish literature, and poor imitations of the French
satisfied the reading public. A foreigner by birth and a cosmopolitan by
education, the clever new-comer cried out against this foreign
influence, and set herself to bring the national characteristics to the
front. She belonged to the old Spanish school, with its Catholicism, its
prejudices, its reverence for the old, its hatred of new ideas and
modern improvements. She painted thus Old Spain with a master's brush.
But she especially loved Andalusia, that most poetic province of her
country, with its deep-blue luminous sky, its luxuriant vegetation, its
light-hearted, witty populace, and she wrote of them with rare insight
and exquisite tenderness. Tasked with having idealized them, she
replied:--"Many years of unremitting study, pursued _con amore_, justify
me in assuring those who find fault with my portrayal of popular life
that they are less acquainted with them than I am." And in another place
she says:--"It is amongst the people that we find the poetry of Spain
and of her chronicles. Their faith, their character, their sentiment,
all bear the seal of originality and of romance. Their language may be
compared to a garland of flowers. The Andalusian peasant is elegant in
his bearing, in his dress, in his language, and in his ideas."
Her stories lose immensely in the translation, for it is almost
impossible to reproduce in another tongue the racy native speech, with
its constant play on words, its wealth of epigrammatic proverbs, its
snatches of ballad or song interwoven into the common talk of the day.
The Andalusian peasant has an inexhaustible store of bits of poetry,
_coplas_, that fit into every occurrence of his daily life. Fernan
Caballero gathered up these flowers of speech as they fell from the lips
of the common man, and wove them into her tales. Besides their pictures
of Andalusian rural life, these stories reveal a wealth of popular
songs, ballads, legends, and fairy tales, invaluable alike to the
student of manners and of folk-lore. She has little constructive skill,
but much genius for detail. As a painter of manners and of nature she is
unrivaled. In a few bold strokes she brings a whole village before our
eyes. Nor is the brute creation forgotten. In her sympathy for animals
she shows her foreign extraction, the true Spaniard having little
compassion for his beasts. She inveighs against the national sport, the
bull-fight; against the cruel treatment of domestic animals. Her work is
always fresh and interesting, full of humor and of pathos. A close
observer and a realist, she never dwells on the unlovely, is never
unhealthy or sentimental. Her name is a household word in Spain, where a
foremost critic wrote of 'La Gaviota':--"This is the dawn of a beautiful
day, the first bloom of a poetic crown that will encircle the head of a
Spanish Walter Scott."
Perhaps the best summary of her work is given in her own words, where
she says:--
"In composing this light work we did not intend to write a
novel, but strove to give an exact and true idea of Spain, of
the manners of its people, of their character, of their habits.
We desired to sketch the home life of the people in the higher
and lower classes, to depict their language, their faith, their
traditions, their legends. What we have sought above all is to
paint after nature, and with the most scrupulous exactitude, the
objects and persons brought forward. Therefore our readers will
seek in vain amid our actors for accomplished heroes or
consummate villains, such as are found in the romances of
chivalry or in melodramas. Our ambition has been to give as true
an idea as possible of Spain and the Spaniards. We have tried to
dissipate those monstrous prejudices transmitted and preserved
like Egyptian mummies from generation to generation. It seemed
to us that the best means of attaining this end was to replace
with pictures traced by a Spanish pen those false sketches
sprung from the pens of strangers."