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 Picón[105] 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.