foremost of Pereda’s long line of masterly portraits in humble life, and
the last of that race of hardy fishermen who, with the Basques, rivalled
English whalers in the North Seas and made treaties with English kings
during the Middle Ages), net-making, or eating his bread and raw
_bacalao_ on his balcony in the squalid _Calle Alta_, or consoling the
wives and mothers of fishermen on the _Muelle Anaos_ (in “La Leva”), and
dying cheerfully (in “El fin de una raza”), after many hours of battling
with the waves, glad to die quietly in his house, although he had nearly
perished in the storm owing to his unwillingness to lose an
_escapulario_ of the _Vírgen del Carmen_. “We are all sailors of that
further sea,” he says, in his rough language, as he lies dying, “all
bound for the same port. If the devil does not block it against us, I
to-morrow and you another day will cast anchor there.” “Suum cuique” is
the longest and not the least excellent of these _Escenas_. A poor
_hidalgo_ of the mountain, Don Silvestre Seturas, visits a powerful
friend at Madrid, and is speedily disillusioned of the capital and only
court. His friend in turn accompanies him to his ancestral
country-house, and is delighted at first with the country and its
idyllic peace. But the _rat de ville_ begins to discover, after some
months, that the country has neither peace nor poetry--“Barbarus híc ego
sum quia non intelligor ulli”--and returns to Madrid. Several incidents
contribute to his change of opinion, incidents which reveal the
character of the peasants and illustrate the fact that Pereda, while he
makes us love the peasants of the _Montaña_, is never blind to their
faults and weaknesses. The rich _madrileño_ had decided to give a clock
for the tower of the village church. But distrust occupies a large place
in the character of the villagers, and they fear the rich even when
bringing gifts. What hidden intention is there in this unwonted
generosity? The Mayor calls the Council together, and the result is a
long document for the donor to sign. He is to undertake to place the
clock in the tower at his own cost; he is to give an annuity of two
thousand _reales_ to meet any expenses connected with the clock; he is
to build another tower if the present one falls down “in my time or in
that of all the generations and heirs that may come after me”; he is to
pay for all lawsuits arising from the clock in the village, or in the
neighbourhood. When he tears up the paper, the villagers’ suspicion of
some afterthought in his gift is irrefragably confirmed. Lawsuits are
the passion of the Mountain. One has continued in Don Silvestre’s
family for seven generations, and he himself, having through poverty to
choose between remaining a bachelor all his life and giving up the
lawsuit, chooses the former without wavering. The last straw in his
friend’s patience is a lawsuit drawn up against him because, when he was
out shooting, part of a wall of loose stones round a peasant’s fields
crumbled down shortly after he happened to have fired at a bird.
“Bocetos al temple” (1876), and “Tipos Trashumantes” (1877), show the
same power of keen observation. Pereda, who treats the failings of the
peasants with unsparing, but withal benevolent humour, becomes merciless
and even cruel when dealing with the pretentiousness of the vulgar and
the inanity of rich _désœuvrés_. It has been wittily said of him that
“he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly,
he gladly makes fools suffer.” Without going outside his province he
found matter ready to his hand in the _veraneantes_, the _flâneurs_ from
Madrid, who passed the hot months in Santander.
Thus in “Tipos Trashumantes” he pillories the _sabio_, the learned man,
who allows that Cervantes was not an entirely common man, but regrets
that neither Cervantes nor Calderón possessed the “philosophy of
æsthetics,” or who despises the inhabitants of Santander because they
have not heard of Jeeéguel (Hegel); the _literato_ or journalist who,
because a speaker in Cortes had rendered Dante popular by a quotation,
murmurs, “_come corpo morto cade_” if he drops his stick or cigar; the
barber who misses in Santander that indefinable “air” of Madrid;--in
fact, a procession of quacks and knaves, and fools and snobs: perhaps
the only “sympathetic” figure is that of the Barón de la Rescoldera, who
“has never a good word nor a bad deed.” It is pleasant to turn back to
village scenes in “Tipos y Paisajes” (forming a second part of “Escenas
montañesas,” 1871). Here we find the enriched “Indian” (that is a
_montañés_ who has returned to his country after making a fortune in
South America); the schoolmaster, in a serviceable coat of black, who
writes letters for the whole village, and shuts himself up in his house
to get, if not drunk, at least very intoxicated; the peasant Blas, who,
after inheriting thirty thousand dollars, is miserable, but feels that
he must live _como un señor_ now that he is rich, and dismisses as a
temptation to be resisted the wish to go as of old, with goad on
shoulder, along the high-road by the side of his oxen; the practical,
rough, kindly priest, Don Perfecto; Don Robustiano, an old-fashioned
_hidalgo_, who does not allow the modern use of matches in his
household, and who, from the experiences of his own poverty, is not
easily misled, when he visits a neighbouring _hidalgo_, by the excuses
for “my wife and daughter at church.” “I see through you,” says Don
Robustiano to himself, “no doubt they are hidden away in some corner of
the house for lack of clothes.” But especially is the sketch entitled
_El Amor de los tizones_ admirable and worthy of Cervantes. It is a
description of a rustic gathering or _tertulia_ in the kitchen of one of
the poor houses of a mountain village. The peasants--each of them a
clearly defined character--enter one by one with the greeting, “Dios nos
acompañe” or, “Dios sea aquí,” and round the log fire, the flicker of
the flames lighting up their faces against the immense smoke-blackened
chimney, they pray a _rosario_ for the dead, or tell stories of
brigands, and witches, and enchantments. “Los hombres de pró”
(originally published with “Bocetos al temple”) and “El Buey Suelto”
(written in 1877) are still collections of sketches, the first of a
canvassing for an election in rural parts of Spain, the second, of the
miseries of bachelors, and the scenes in both are touched with Pereda’s
vividness and humour. Pereda, as a novelist proper, begins with “Don
Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera” (written in 1878), which describes the
effects of the revolution of 1868 on a small village of the Mountain,
with “De tal palo tal astilla” (1879), an answer to Pérez Galdós’ “Doña
Perfecta,” “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (1882) and “Pedro Sánchez” (1883).
“El Sabor de la Tierruca” (Savour of the Soil) is a whole-hearted book
of the _Montaña_; its serenity is scarcely disturbed by the frequent
village fights and rivalries in which the weapons are stout sticks cut
from the mountain-side. The book is filled with a fresh and acrid smell
of the earth and autumn scents, and has the peace of still days when not
a leaf stirs, and there is no movement in the ripe and yellow
maize-fields. It is a life lived and felt by the author and not
superficially observed, so that there is no trace of artificiality or
false sentiment in the descriptions. Cumbrales and Rinconeda are rival
villages, Cumbrales lying high among orchards, Rinconeda lower down on
the edge of the plain, in thick oak and chestnut woods. Rinconeda
rejoices when the raging _ábrego_, the south wind, sweeps in furious
gusts from the hills and ravages Cumbrales; Cumbrales rejoices when the
rain turns every street of Rinconeda into a rushing torrent. The
characters of the inhabitants of Cumbrales are drawn with all Pereda’s
skill; Juanguirle, for instance, a rich, hard-working peasant, the
simple, sensible Mayor of Cumbrales; Baldomero, who “cannot understand
how doing nothing, thinking of nothing, troubling about nothing, can be
unpleasant to any sensible person”; his father, Don Valentín, “hero of
Luchana” and worshipper of Espartero, who, after a frugal meal, says to
his son that it is not the part of good Liberals to be so indulging
themselves when the Carlists are flaunting “the black flag of tyranny,”
to which Baldomero answers laconically that it would have sounded more
convincing before the meal. There is an epic fight between the two
villages which rages so violently that the Mayor, Juanguirle, in vain
attempts to stop it “in the name of _la Josticia_, in the name of the
law, of _la Costitución_, of God Himself, if necessary, since, for lack
of a better, I am now His representative here.” A few moments afterwards
sad to relate, Juanguirle, stung by an insult hurled at Cumbrales, is in
the very thickest of the fray. In “Escenas montañesas” Pereda had
slightly sketched a _deshoja_, the harvest task of separating the ripe
cob of maize from its sheath. A certain number of cobs (from two to
six) are set aside from each large basketful for the poor, for the souls
in purgatory, and other pious purposes. In “El Sabor de la Tierruca” the
scene is described more fully. The workers, over fifty in number, sing
songs and slow ballads as the heaps of shining yellow cobs and the heaps
of crisp, white leaves grow and grow, and their singing is accompanied
at intervals by the noise of torrents of maize-cobs emptied from the
baskets. We have, too, a description of a _derrota_, when flocks and
herds are turned out promiscuously to graze, of the game of _cachurra_,
a kind of rustic hockey, and the simple feasts of roasted chestnuts with
a _bota_ of wine. Yet all is not “jest and youthful jollity.” The
peasants, in their prudent distrust, have a keen eye for witches, and a
weak old woman, of few words, poor and lonely, and in league with the
Devil, plays a sadly large part in the history of Cumbrales. So in
“Tipos y Paisajes,” the witch is feared not only by the boys whom she
surprises stealing the grapes in the garden of her hut, but by the whole
village. If a cow dies, it is the fault of the witch; if a man spends
his days drinking in the tavern, the misery of his family is traced, not
to him, but to the witch.
II.--“ON THE HEIGHTS”
In “Pedro Sánchez” Pereda, not without trepidation, travelled outside
his native region to Madrid, then, in 1854, “a large tumbledown village,
parched, old, and dirty;”[112] but Pedro Sanchez is a _montañés_, and
the first part of the book, before he leaves his native _Montaña_, in
style far exceeds the rest. The chief[113] works of Pereda, after “El
Sabor de la Tierruca” and “Pedro Sánchez,” were “Sotileza” (1885), “La
Puchera” (1889), and “Peñas arriba” (1895). “Sotileza” is a novel of the
old, now vanished, Santander. Both in the characters and the language it
is the most local of Pereda’s novels, and it is perhaps the one which
has become most famous. It has an atmosphere of pitch and tar and
sea-weed, and in the _Calle Alta_ nets and tattered rags hang from the
balconies, fishwives quarrel shrilly, and the strident, piercing cry of
the sardine-seller rends the air. Andrés, Muergo, and Cleto are all in
love with Silda, and Silda, growing up slight and graceful, and called
_Sotileza_ from the name for the thin wire or gut to which the fish-hook
is attached, is not naturally prone to let her feelings appear. But
Andrés, the son of a prosperous captain in the merchant service, cannot
marry beneath him; Muergo, the half-brutish, half-childish nephew of
tío Mechelín and tía Sidora, with whom Sotileza, an orphan, lives, is
conveniently drowned in a storm; and we leave Sotileza engaged to Cleto,
the honest son of tío Mocejón, who, with his wife, la Sargüeta, and his
daughter, Carpia, are the terror of the _Calle Alta_ and of _el pae
Polinar_. El padre Apolinar is a charitable, homely priest who receives
his poor petitioners with gruff words, but ends by giving them the
little that he possesses. One night, as he is writing his important
sermon, he is interrupted--not for the first time--by a poor woman whose
husband is ill. “Let her go to the doctor,” he exclaims; but when he
finds they are starving, “_Ave María Purísima_,” he cries twice, “and he
has three children and a wife, and there is no more honest man.” He
orders his old servant to bring the _puchero_ containing potatoes and a
little meat--the priest’s evening meal. After sniffing it deliciously,
he sends it off to the sick man, and as he resumes his sermon he says to
himself: “I have certainly read somewhere that to keep in good health
when engaged on so difficult a task as the one I now have in hand, there
is nothing better than to go to bed hungry. Well, there is no doubt as
to my being hungry, wolfishly hungry, to-night.” Sotileza leaves an
impression of wind-driven spray and tossing seas, of manly courageous
effort and vigour and zest of living; the difficulty of the language and
the roughness of the life described alike contribute to the power and
convincing character of the work. Pereda never showed more admirably his
capacity to raise the commonest lives, the most vulgar incidents and
the language of the street--of the strident _Calle Alta_ from which _pae
Polinar_ fled in comical dismay--to the region of high art. There is
something epical about his figures, in the clamorous feuds of the
fishwives not less than in the serene heroism of the deep-sea fishermen.
“La Puchera” is only half a sea-novel. The inhabitants of Robleces only
go sea-fishing to eke out the miserable pittance won by cultivation of
the soil. Thus in the house of Juan Pedro (called _El Lebrato_) and
Pedro Juan, his son (nicknamed _El Josco_, from his ferocious shyness),
fishing-tackle and oars mingle with agricultural tools. Juan Pedro is a
widower, and father and son are entirely devoted to one another, but
their house is untidy and uncomfortable for lack of a woman’s care.
Pedro Juan is in love with Pilara, Pilara is in love with Pedro Juan,
her family encourages the match, his father asks for nothing better, but
Pedro Juan cannot break through his timidity and bring himself to speak.
At last, however, he is emboldened when Pilara at the haymaking, in
scarlet skirt, bodice of striped blue, and headkerchief of many colours,
arranging the hay on the cart as he forks it up to her, leaps laughingly
from the last hay-cart into his arms. “Pilara, from here to the Church
for the señor priest to marry us. Will you agree to it?” And she
answers, “We might have been back long ago, _hijo de mi alma_, if you
had been different.” Though the miser of the book, Don Baltasar, is most
skilfully drawn, its interest centres more especially in the life of
Juan Pedro and Pedro Juan: Juan Pedro, gay and talkative, appearing on
festival days with his famous sea-boots, his Cochin-China medal, and a
silk necktie; Pedro Juan, who at his wedding, when asked by the priest,
Don Alejo, if he will have Pilara to be his wife, answers: “And will I
not indeed? She knows well I will, and you know it too.”
In 1895 appeared “Peñas arriba” (On the heights), the crown and
masterpiece of Pereda’s work. It is a novel of the high mountain, as
“Sotileza” is a novel of the sea. Don Celso lives in Tablanca in his
ancestral house which holds lordship over a whole valley and has had the
honour of lodging two prelates, the Bishops of León and Santander; but
Don Celso is old and in failing health, and he so urgently begs his
nephew Marcelo to come to him that, against his will, the latter leaves
Madrid and his comfortable rooms in the _Calle del Arenal_. After a long
ride on and on over high mountain passes and narrow, precipitous paths
and haunts of bears, he reaches Tablanca after nightfall. A whistle from
his attendant, Chisco, the barking of dogs, an uncertain light moving to
and fro, black shapes round the light, a sound of voices, and Marcelo is
received into his uncle’s arms. Next day, from the wide balconies, he
discovers the mountains on one side nearly touching the house, on the
other a chequer-work of green meadows and yellow stubble-fields of maize
against a background of mountains green and brown and grey, and the
village among rocks and brushwood and intricate paths. There is a saying
in the village that the largest piece of flat ground is the floor of
Don Celso’s dining-room. Of the characters of the book Don Sabas belongs
to that noble army of humble parish priests described by Pereda--the
village priest in “De tal palo tal astilla”; Don Frutos, discreet and
talkative, in “Don Gonzalo”; the joyous priest of Robleces, _regocijado
de humor_, in “La Puchera,” whose only vice is to go out to sea twice a
week with the fishing-boats; and the incomparable _pae Polinar_ in
“Sotileza.” Don Sabas has a passion for the mountain, and, once upon the
heights, the exact word and the right phrase come to him in which to
express his enthusiasm and his deep knowledge of their plants and
animals. To have given him a bishopric in a flat country would have
meant death to him. He is fearless and untiring whether he is tracking a
bear, or out in a snow-blizzard on the heights to rescue some peasant or
herdsman who has not returned to the village, or visiting the sick on a
black night of storm. Don Celso is also a noble figure, practical and
imposing, and in his immense kitchen of an evening he holds a
patriarchal gathering of peasants. We have, too, the splendid Tolstoian
figure of the _hidalgo_ of ancient race, Gómez de Pomar, the author of
many books, unloading a cart of hay in his simple peasant’s dress. He is
a model of noble courtesy--_hidalga cortesía_, his style is “spirited
and vigorous, pure Castilian untainted, as the blood that flows in his
veins.” Consciously or unconsciously, it is a self-portrait of Pereda.
The book abounds in impressive scenes and characters; it was a subject
dear to Pereda’s heart, and he produced a work which ranks among the
great novels of the world. There is a certain solidity in Pereda’s
writing well suited to describe the stern deep-shadowed
mountain-country, while his unlatin love of the wild and desolate
rejoices in the hurricanes that tear up trees and whirl the snow-drifts
on the mountain-side. “Peñas arriba” represents the whole life and being
of the author and gives us a full measure of the true _sabor de la
tierruca_, the savour of the soil. In “Esbozos y Rasguños” Pereda
ridicules those mad Cervantists who prove that Cervantes was omniscient,
an excellent theologian, a cook, a sailor, a geographer, a freethinker,
and who will soon prove that neither is Cervantes Cervantes, nor _Don
Quixote Don Quixote_. But of the true spirit of Cervantes he had imbibed
a large part, even though he never attained to his great-hearted
tolerance and the wider outlook of those more spacious times. His
prose[114] is robust and austerely free from foreign idioms, laden with
dialect and phrases native to the soil. It has caught the vigorous
freshness of the mountain air, and the scent of earth and woods and
moors, the rush of the sea and the elemental simplicity of men ennobled
by constant contact with earth and ocean. Pereda wrote out of the
fulness of his heart, without seeking popularity. His rough grandeur,
rugged as the country of “Peñas arriba,” his frequent use of dialect,
his untranslatableness, make for few readers. But those who, like Don
Sabas, care to leave the level country and climb the mountain height,
will find in Pereda a classic, high and steadfast as the hills. Blindly
though the iniquity of oblivion scattereth her poppy, it is perhaps not
“prodigiously temerarious” to suspect that Pereda may still be read when
Zola is forgotten.
XXII
CASTILIAN PROSE
“The Spanish language,” said an English writer in 1701, “is properly
none at all, for if the Spaniards were to restore to the Egyptians,
Grecians, Arabians, Moors, Jews, Romans, Vandals, Huns, Goths, French,
and, lastly, Italians, the words they have taken from them, they must of
necessity remain dumb.” And, again, the Spanish language “consists of
a’s and o’s, and nothing else but mouthing and grimace.” Another
Englishman, sixty years later, says of the Spanish language, that “As
there is something pompous and magnificent in the length of its words
and the sound of them, so there is also a peculiarity in the turn and
manner of their phrases and expressions.” In the time of Spain’s
greatness a larger measure of justice is bestowed on the Spanish
language. “It is expressive, noble, and grave,” says Mme. d’Aulnoy; “it
is only our own (_i.e._ French) which excels it.” But with the decay of
Spain’s material prosperity the language seems to have fallen into a
disrepute; can a nation that possesses no gold currency and no
battleships possess a language or literature worthy of the name? It may
be admitted that many modern Spaniards themselves do not write correct
or idiomatic Spanish; the language has been crowded with foreign
importations, and while it is the easiest language to learn
superficially, it is, by reason of its immense wealth of words and
baffling reserves of idioms, one of the most difficult to learn well.
“The best Castilian is here spoken,” said Mme. d’Aulnoy of Burgos, and
it is still in Castille that the purest Spanish is to be learnt, in
regions, _i.e._ where, owing to the climate, the foreigner makes but a
briefest stay. Toledo is more likely to be visited for two days to see
its churches, than for two months to learn the language; it gives no
inviting impression of comfort to the stranger. In “Don Quixote” we read
that “They cannot speak so well who are brought up in the Zocodover as
those who spend the day walking to and fro in the cloisters of the
Cathedral, yet all are Toledans.” But although among the peasants of
Spain there are many _prevaricadores del buen lenguaje_, with reckless
transposition of consonants (such as _probe_ for _pobre_), their
language is often essentially purer and more idiomatic, with “a
peculiarity in the turn and manner of their phrases,” than that of the
_reprochadores de voquibles_, who cast it in their teeth, and who would
die rather than offend _la grammaire_, but allow themselves the constant
use of foreign words and expressions in the construction of their
sentences. True Castilian has a combined softness and vigour, enabling
it to be at once impassioned and concise, a harmony and strength
scarcely to be found in any other language, and a pithiness which
springs from the soil and has not its origin in books. Many of Spain’s
greatest writers have wielded lance and pen alternately; they are not
“grammarians who hack and slash for the genitive case,” but in the clear
shock and flow of vowels, scarcely interrupted by their setting of
slurred consonants, we seem to hear a rumour of battle, and their words
can be, like those of St. Francis of Assisi preaching, _a modo che
saette acute_--very sharp arrows. This native vigour corrects the
tendency to rich magnificence and trailing growth of words; while
without this richness the Castilian language might be like staccato
Catalan--a succession of quick pistol-shots, as it were, not the stately
tones of an organ. It is not too much to say that Castilian--not the
miserable Castilian of many of the newspapers and many modern authors,
but Castilian at its best--has been excelled only by Greek. It is thus a
language truly worth studying, and it is easily learnt; it has, next to
English, the widest extension in the world, and it possesses a splendid
literature of eight centuries, continued at the present day in a number
of characteristic and fascinating novels. Yet the Castilian language,
literarily, is so little studied that it seems to be considered to be
“properly none at all;” and these novels when read in translations lose
their savour. Cervantes prophesied that “Don Quixote” would be
translated into all nations and languages, but, as Dante said that
poetry cannot be translated “senza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e
armonia,” so Cervantes likens translations to the reverse side of
Flemish tapestries--the figures still visible, but obscured by a crowd
of thread-ends. The best Spanish is still to be found in the writers of
the golden age of Spanish literature, and especially in the writings of
the mystics.
The style of Cervantes changes with his characters, who are allowed to
murder Castilian in Spanish-Basque or Gascon-Catalan, but he is a master
at will of the purest Castilian, in him never divorced from the full
flavour of life, and he refers scornfully to the spurious continuation
of “Don Quixote” as “written in Aragonese.” Equally _castizo_, hardily
idiomatic and flavoured pungently, is the style of Quevedo. Of modern
writers, Valera and Pereda, differing so widely, are alike in this, that
they are both masters of noble Castilian prose, and have nothing to say
to the imported phraseologies which pervade a large proportion of modern
Spanish writing. Pérez Galdós, too, has a thoroughly Spanish style,
robust and vigorous, rich in words, idiomatic. The most recent Spanish
writers in a novellizing spirit tread more delicately; they resemble
Sancho Panza, who, “when he was Governor, learnt to eat fastidiously, _á
lo melindroso_, so that he would eat grapes and even the seeds of a
pomegranate with a fork.” The style of León, indeed, is full and
fine-sounding, and, like that of Valera, carries us back to the writings
of the mystics in the sixteenth century; but Valle-Inclán (guilty only
very occasionally of words such as _madama_ or _dandy_) and _Azorín_
have a mastery of deliberately thin, exquisitely clear-cut prose.[115]
“Llovía menudo y ligero en aquella fertil valle del Baztan....”; in this
passage of Valle-Inclán’s “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909), as in so many
others, we have a delicate finished picture, reached after much labour
of rejection and compression, though he has the art to conceal his
_affres du style_. In a language so inexhaustibly rich as the Spanish,
and with the tendency of Spaniards to write in hurried, copious fashion,
this choice and sifting of words is welcome, and is in no danger of
being carried to excess.
XXIII
TOLEDO AND EL GRECO