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.
XX
NOVELS OF GALICIA
The inhabitants of Galicia have been held to be the Boeotians of Spain,
yet the fact that in the political world many eminent persons are
Gallegans seems to show that Galicia has been maligned. To Galicia, too,
belong two gifted modern writers, the Condesa Emilia Pardo Bazán and Don
Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Señora Pardo Bazán belongs to the older group of
Spanish novelists; born in 1851,[107] she published her two well-known
novels of Galicia, “Los Pazos de Ulloa,” and “La Madre Naturaleza,” in
1886 and 1887, and “De mi tierra,” a book of scenes and essays of
Galicia, in 1888. It is as a regional novelist that Señora Pardo Bazán
has won her most glorious laurels. “Galicienne ella adore les choses de
la Galice,” says M. Vézinet,[108] and he adds that she develops the same
subjects as French naturalists, but avoids the licentiousness of which
they are so fond. The multitude of her tasks and interests has
necessarily hampered her art as a novelist. “She has unfortunately
diffused her energies in all directions,” says Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly.
“No one can succeed in everything--as a poet, a romancer, an essayist, a
critic, a lecturer, and a politician. Yet the Condesa Pardo Bazán is all
this, and more. We would gladly exchange all her miscellaneous writings
for another novel like ‘Los Pazos de Ulloa.’”[109]
“Los Pazos de Ulloa” is a novel impregnated with the atmosphere of
Galicia. Los Pazos is a large country-house in a remote valley of maize
and vines and chestnuts, reached on horseback through a desolate
wolf-country, _país de lobos_. Its furniture is rickety, its
window-frames have no glass, though it is not so ruinous as Los Pazos de
Limioso some leagues away, which lacks even window-frames. The village
priest of Ulloa has but two devotions, those of the _jarro_ and the
_escopeta_, the wine-jar and the gun; the drinking of water and the use
of soap he holds alike to be effeminate. The Marqués de Ulloa, too,
frank, noble at heart, but cynical, often brutal, spends much of his
time at village fairs, and shooting partridges in the maize or among
pines and scented hill-plants. He is totally in the power of his servant
Primitivo, who manages his estates. Primitivo, too, holds the peasants,
as he says, in the palm of his hand. They are patient workers who,
however, in the opinion of the Marqués de Ulloa, need a strong hand to
control them--some one like Primitivo _que les dé ciento de ventaja en
picardía_, that is, who will know two tricks to their one. When the
Marqués disburdens himself to the new chaplain, Don Julián, in the wild
neglected garden, on the subject of Primitivo, he becomes aware by a
rustling in the undergrowth that Primitivo has been listening to the
outburst. When, as a first step to freedom, he determines to leave Los
Pazos on a visit to his uncle at Santiago de Compostella, Primitivo
makes no open opposition, but the mare is unshod, the donkey has been
mysteriously wounded. The Marqués and Julián determine to go on foot to
Cebre, where they will take the diligence. The path grows wilder, the
woods close in more thickly, a cross shows where a man has been killed,
there is no sound but that of the woodcutters among the chestnuts. The
Marqués, keenly alert, sees the glint of a gun’s barrel in the brushwood
pointing at the chaplain, who is held to be the instigator of this
rebellion. It is Primitivo “out shooting.” The book is a gloomy picture
of a rich country ruined by mismanagement, underhand dealing, and
ignorance. The Marqués de Ulloa’s agent has the peasants so completely
in his power that he is able to turn the scale of an election. He began
by methodically robbing his master in the administration of his estate,
and the money so obtained he lends to the peasants, who are driven to
borrow that they may be able to continue to work their land. Primitivo
charges an interest of eight per cent. (per month), and in years of
famine he raises the interest. The country and its inhabitants are
described with a master-hand. Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán is one of the
new school of Spanish novelists, and properly belongs to the twentieth
century. He is above all things a stylist. In his _sutiles prosas_ there
is an exquisite restraint, with here and there a tinge of archaism and a
haunting music of soft languid cadences. He loves the rare, the
delicate, the costly, and his art is to write of luxury in sober
phrases, instinct with sadness and the magic of regret. It is a style of
silk and cut crystal, as of silver-work or polished ivory handled by
thin ascetic fingers. In his four “Sonatas” (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and
Winter) we have the memoirs of the Marqués de Bradomín, the
recollections of his former loves. The scene of “Sonata de Primavera” is
an Italian palazzo with the lilacs in flower along its terraces and
roses filling the garden between the cypresses, while the scene of
“Sonata de Estío” is Mexico in all the luxurious growth of its summer
vegetation. In the “Sonata de Invierno” the scene is the Carlist Court
at Estella and the setting is more gloomy. The Marquis loses an arm in
the service of King Charles VII., and from the window of his sick-room
at Villareal de Navarra looks out on a road lined with leafless poplars
and mountains flecked with snow. But these novels do not equal “Sonata
de Otoño,” the scene of which is in Señor Valle-Inclán’s native Galicia.
Two lines of Verlaine in some way describe the novel:--
“Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.”
It is a book that may be read in little more than an hour, yet it has
many arresting pages. A few short sentences, words thrown here and there
at random with concealed art, give a wonderfully clear picture of green,
rainy Galicia, with its hills and streams. We see the hills and more
hills veiled in mist, the flocks of white and black sheep, the mills,
the white smoke rising from the houses among the fig-trees, the distant
blue mountains tipped with the first snows, a flight of doves against
green fields above the tower of a _Pazo_, a stony bridle-path with its
bramble hedges and great pools of water at which oxen drink, the
peasants arriving to pay their tribute of corn at the Palacio, the
shepherds coming down from the hills wearing their capes of reeds. Women
return singing from the fountain, an old man drives on his cows as they
stop to graze, a half-witted woman gathers scented herbs and simples
that have mickle grace to “give health to the soul and cure the ills of
the herd.” And there is the Palacio de Bradomín, with its flight of wide
granite steps; a path leads to it through the green, drenched
countryside, and the autumn sun lights up its windows among tall
chestnut-trees. A fountain trickles and birds sing in the old garden of
myrtle, cedar, and cypress, still in late autumn brimmed with roses,
though “the paths were covered with dry and yellow leaves that the wind
swept with a slow rustling; the snails, motionless _como viejos
paralíticos_, as old paralytics, were taking the sun on the seats of
stone.” The passages of the Palacio are long and gloomy, and cold
strikes through the large silent rooms, so that in all of them logs of
wood burn brightly, stirred with tongs of “ancient bronze, elaborately
worked.” The bare branches of the trees graze the windows of the
library, where, among the parchment bindings, reigns a monastic peace,
_un sueño canónico y doctoral_.
It is in a minute chiselling of details that lies Señor Valle-Inclán’s
strength. The snails in the garden, the shape of the glasses, the silver
chains of a hanging-lamp--nothing is passed over as insignificant. But
the details are given in few words, with the clear precision of a
skilled craftsman. And he has the power to set his characters in strong
relief. Thus in “Sonata de Otoño” we have that _muy gran señor_ Don Juan
Manuel, who on his first appearance hurries away “to Villa del Prior, to
thrash a clerk.” It is his custom to ride over from his country-house,
his _Pazo_, two leagues away, tie his horse to the Palacio garden-gate,
enter and call to a servant for wine--for that excellent _vino de la
Fontela_ which would be the best in the world, he says, if pressed from
selected grapes--drink and fall asleep, and then waking up call loudly
for his horse, whether it chances to be night or day, and ride back to
his _Pazo_. There is a glimpse of the mother of Concha, who would tell
the children stories of the saints, and with “mystic, noble fingers”
slowly turn the pages to show them the pictures of the Christian Year;
of the mother of Xavier, who would pass her days in the recess of a
wide balcony spinning for her servants, in a chair of crimson velvet
studded with silver nails. There is thin, white Concha, so saintly and
so frail; there is Xavier, Marqués de Bradomín, himself, the gallant,
cynical sceptic; there is the page Florisel, the old servant Candelaria,
with their rare and far-sought names.
In “Flor de Santidad,” perhaps the best of Señor Valle-Inclán’s books,
we have the same delicate descriptions of Galicia--the sinister inn,
solitary in a gloomy brown Sierra; the shepherdess, keeping her flock
and seeing mystic visions among the Celtic stones, yellowed with ancient
lichens, _líquenes milenarios_; the simple greeting of the peasants:
_Alabado sea Dios_, “Glory be to God”; pilgrims and witches; charms and
magical incantations to preserve the flocks from evil; cunning and
simplicity, superstition and crime. The same charm of mystical
simplicity and innocence that surrounds Adega, the girl shepherdess of
“Flor de Santidad,” surrounds all the heroines of Señor Valle-Inclán’s
novels; Maximina, for instance, of the sorrowful, velvet eyes, _ojos
aterciopelados y tristes_, in “Sonata de Invierno.” It is in “Flor de
Santidad” that occurs the picture, repeated in “Jardín Novelesco,” of
the old peasant woman going with her little grandson to find him a
master. They meet the Archpriest of Lestrove, who is riding
leisurely--_de andadura mansa y doctoral_--to preach at a village
festival. “May God give us a holy and good day.” The Archpriest draws in
his mare. “Are you going to the fair?” he asks. “The poor have nothing
to do at the fair. We are going to look for a master for the boy.” “And
does he know his catechism?” “Yes, Señor, he knows it. Poverty does not
prevent from being a Christian.” The grandmother leaves the
nine-year-old child in the service of a blind beggar. “To be the servant
of a blind man is a position many would like to have,” says the beggar,
and the new _Lazarillo_ answers sorrowfully, “Sí, Señor, sí.” As she
watches them go slowly away along the road through the wet green
country, she murmurs, drying her tears: “Nine years old and already
earning the bread he eats. Glory be to God.”
Incidents and characters are thrown into the relief given by the
peculiar and original magic of Señor Valle-Inclán’s delicately chiselled
prose. There is in this prose something icily fresh, something of lilacs
and hydrangeas, vague reminiscences of the silver tinkling of voices in
a glass-roofed market, or of the swish of a scythe in wet grass. The
words are cunningly weighed and chosen and set as _gouttes d’argent
d’orfévrerie_. And the transparent freshness of his style is admirably
suited to describe the primitive simplicity and freshness of Galicia.
XXI
NOVELS OF THE MOUNTAIN
I.--“SAVOUR OF THE SOIL”
Fifty years ago, before Zola and the naturalistic school were on the
lips of men, a Spanish novelist, José María de Pereda, was beginning to
write who can only not be called a naturalist, because of the
associations given to the name in France. Humour and frankness run
through Spanish literature; there is less artificial refinement and more
vigour and broadly human sympathy than in the literature of France. The
very language is frank and outspoken rather than subtle and insinuating.
And the nobly independent character of Spaniards of all classes counts
for much in the admirable sanity of Spanish realism. “Our lowest social
strata,” says the Condesa Pardo Bazán, “differ not a little from those
described by Zola and the Goncourts.” The Spanish realist has thus no
cause to dissect common people and vulgar events from a superior point
of view, putting on gloves, as it were, to keep his hands clean. He
knows that virtue perches in strange places and learns to see _le
sublime d’en bas_, and there is a wide gulf between French naturalism
and Spanish realism. Pereda,[110] a _hidalgo_ of the old school, born at
Santander on the 6th of February, 1833, spent the greater part of his
life in the _Montaña_, at Santander, or at his country estate of
Polanco, only leaving Cantabria to study for a few years at Madrid, and
later to sit for a few months in the Cortes as a Carlist. The rest of
his life he passed among his family and books and friends in his beloved
_Montaña_.[111] His friend in private life, Señor Pérez Galdós,
describes him as dark, sunburnt, of medium height, with moustache and
pointed beard, of a character fundamentally Spanish, and of very nervous
temperament, with a horror of conventionality and pretence. It was about
the year 1859 that custom and character sketches from Pereda’s pen began
to appear in a Santander paper, _La Abeja Montañesa_. They were
collected in 1864, and published under the title of “Escenas
montañesas.” “Escenas montañesas” gives the essence of Pereda’s art,
and, though he later wrote long novels and occasionally attained an
admirable unity of treatment, the delight is still in the descriptions
of fast-vanishing customs and in the characters of his peasants and
fishermen rather than in the thread of the action, which is generally
slight; and the strength of his novels lies not in their heroes and
heroines but in the secondary figures and the side-shows. “Escenas
montañesas” shows us life in Santander and the neighbouring
mountain-country as it was half a century ago, and as it now lives
permanently in Pereda’s art. Scenes and people are presented to us with
extraordinary vividness, and only now and then the sketches read almost
too much like observations taken directly from the note-book. We have
the picaresque sketch of the _raquero_, the Santander _gamin_ who lives
by petty larceny from ships along the quays; the old-fashioned household
in a mountain village--by a hereditary privilege Saint John is looked
upon as one of the family, and the Saint’s procession raiment figures in
the washing list; the wake at a village funeral, with the frequent
toast, “to the glory of the dead,” _á la buena gloria del defunto_; tía
Nisca, going her long homeward journey on foot after bidding farewell to
her son on a ship bound for “the Indies,” and reproaching the unfertile
soil that causes its sons to emigrate, though there is a song that men
who go to the Indies in order to get rich would find the Indies at home,
were they but willing to work:--
“A las Indias van los hombres
A las Indias por ganar,
Las Indias aquí las tienen
Si quisieran trabajar;”