find so much of his work antipathetic that, as he has not a good style
and often offends good taste, I cannot force a liking. Brunetière speaks
of the intolerance of the naturalist school of novelists, the
intolerance of the free-thinker. Those who advocate the extreme
republican, anti-clerical theories in Spain have this intolerance to a
marked degree. Pérez Galdós is so biassed that he distorts his
characters from their natural evolution by making them voice his own
ideas. The "roman à thèse" may win a greater fame for the first hour,
but it is sure to pass with the changing questions of the time. The
much-praised "Doña Perfecta" struck me as absurdly untrue to human
nature. The heroine is presented as a not uncommon type of religious
development, naturally where there is intense religious feeling there is
a bigot here and there, but this Lady Perfection is not a consistent
human being, but a monster. While anxious for her nephew to leave she
yet urges him to stay, no reason why; she could easily have rid herself
of him yet she brings about his death. Her character of the beginning
does not match with her character of the end (the novelist offends
several times in this way). The thin-visaged, oily priest-villain gives
an aside over the footlights: "I have tried tricks, but there is no sin
in tricks. My conscience is clear": evidently old-fashioned
melodramatics are not yet extinct. It is quite impossible for a
well-bred Spaniard to have insulted his kind hosts, as does Pepe, by
telling them crudely that their Christian belief is a fable as past as
paganism, "all the absurdities, falsities, illusions, dreams, are over,"
to-day there is no more multiplication of bread and fishes, but the
rule of industry and machines. I think most people will feel that the
characters of this book can intrigue and murder and throw in realistic
asides as much as they will, we do not hate them because they fail to
convince us that they ever really existed. They are just mouthpieces for
their author's theories. In another novel, "Gloria," a beautiful
passionate girl of sixteen is incapable of being the pedantic prig
Galdós makes her in the opening chapters. Happily for the romance and
for the weary reader, once the novelist warms to his story, religious
discussions go to the wall and he presents a moving tragedy. Would that
he could have kept up to the level of parts of this novel, that which
presents Gloria's uncles, for instance, but he is very unequal. After
scenes so true to life that they are a joy, he will indulge in the
pseudo-giantesque of some of Hugo's purple patches, and only high genius
can take such liberties. Thus in a tempest a church lamp falls; it
breaks the glass of the urn in which lies the Dead Christ, it slaps St.
Joseph in the face, it knocks the sword from the hand of St. Michael,
and finishes its zig-zag career by crashing into a confessional. Lamps
of anti-clerics only seem to act in this all-round, satisfying way;
realists, like Pereda and Valera, are incapable of such exaggeration.
Some critics hold "Angel Guerra" and "Fortuna y Jacinta" to be the best
of Galdós. His "Episodios Nacionales" are a series of novels on the
events of the past century in Spain. In spite of vivid scenes, they
seemed to me long-winded and confusing; one must be Spanish, they say,
to appreciate them.
Benito Pérez Galdós was born in 1845 in the Canary Islands. He has been
an artist, a lawyer, a politician, and a journalist; in twenty years he
has produced forty-two volumes, a record which makes his inequalities
easy to understand. Personally he is a sincere and upright character.
Although an avowed free-thinker he sits in reverence at the feet of his
fellow novelist, Pereda, an ardent believer, and it was to be near him
that he fixed his home in Santander: "Our master," he calls him, "a
great poet in prose, the most classic and at the same time the greatest
innovator of our writers."
Far below Pérez Galdós, who, if not the first, is a distinguished and
talented novelist, is Blasco Ibáñez, of the same school of anti-clerics
and extreme republicanism. His stories are vigorous, crude studies of
Valencia, that province which the proverb says is "a paradise inhabited
by demons," and because so local, the books are valuable; personally I
lay down such a tale as "Flor de Mayo" or "Arroz y Tartana" depressed
and sick at heart. Ibáñez lacks ideality and elevation of sentiment; he
pictures ignoble lives in monotonous detail, all is labored description,
for the characters never speak themselves, the author _describes_ their
conversation. One sentence of Sancho, one sentence of the Don and you
know who speaks! It is to this minor novelist that a recent French book,
"Les Maîtres du Roman Espagnol Contemporain," by a Monsieur F. Vézinet,
devotes a fourth of its pages, while dismissing Pereda contemptuously,
and not even mentioning "Sotileza," his great sea-masterpiece. Under the
guise of literary criticism, the French writer veils a polemic against
religion: "For Christians actually do find solace in a belief in a
future life," is one of his remarks. On meeting in Spanish fiction a
dignified reserve in scenes of passion, this teacher of young men--he is
professor in the Lycée of Lyons--supplies the pepper lacking by telling
how a French naturalist would have described the same scenes.
Another Spanish writer of the free-thinking school, but of good literary
quality, is Leopoldo Alas, author of "La Regenta," and a caustic,
intelligent critic who under the name of _Clarín_ did much to prick
Spain awake to intellectual interest. Though born in Zamora (1852) he so
associated himself with Oviedo, where he studied and later was professor
in the University, that he may be called a son of the Asturias. "La
Regenta" is a powerful psychological novel, set in Oviedo, somewhat
long drawn out, for the minute following of Ana Ozores in her downfall
too closely approaches pathology. Ana, who resembles a little her
namesake of Russia, (Alas has treated the real issue with the same
uncompromising morality as Tolstoi) is a brilliant, lovable woman,
capable of the highest, a girl who at sixteen can read St. Augustine
with emotion; but she is fatally doomed by the limitations of a woman's
life in her station. The acute Alas here puts his finger on a real evil
in his country, the lack of wide interests for the women of the upper
classes if no family duties are given them. They seem to have forgotten
Isabella's day when Doña Lucía de Medrano lectured on the Latin classics
in the University of Salamanca, and Doña Francesca de Lebrija filled the
chair of rhetoric in the University of Alcalá, when the Queen read her
New Testament in Greek, and her youngest daughter, the unfortunate wife
of Henry VIII, won the admiration of Erasmus by her solid acquirements.
To-day the idleness enforced by fashion leads often to morbid
religiosity or to moral disaster. Toward the end, "La Regenta" like "El
Escándalo" flags, especially is the canon De Pas a failure. Such a man
would have been either a great saint or a great sinner, never could he
have steered the mean middle course he did. In this book, unlike the
average romance, is much of the trail of the serpent of Zola's school,
more the result of a too warm partisanship of the French novelist than
innate in Alas.
The talented Padre Coloma, author of "Pequeñeces," may be called, like
the professor of Oviedo, a man of one novel. Born in Andalusia (1851), a
literary protégé of Fernán Caballero, he led the life of a man of the
world till about twenty-five, when a violent change of heart caused him
to enter the Jesuit Order. There he has passed uneventful, useful years
of study and teaching. His book, which is a harsh satire on the vices of
the smart set of Madrid, made an immediate sensation. I cannot say I
find the Padre Coloma a great writer by any means, he is too unequal;
whole chapters drag heavily. But some of his scenes deserve the highest
praise, such as the presentation of the heroine Currita Albornoz, or
that truly noble description of one of Spain's proud usages, the twelve
grandees of the first rank presenting themselves before their new
monarch, the young Alfonso XII, on his return in 1875, a picture that
rings with the heroic spirit of the past.
We turn next to a novelist with so long a list of books to her credit
that it is impossible to enumerate them, the Señora Emilia Pardo Bazán
who has been called the most notable woman of letters in Europe. Her
salon in Madrid is one of the best known in the capital, but she has so
deeply associated herself with her native province (born in Coruña in
1851) that she is the boast of every Gallego. Mountain lands are noted
for the loyalty they rouse in their sons, but few such enthusiasms equal
that of Doña Emilia. She has told of the lonely hills, the chestnut
forests, the never-failing streams of the Norway of Spain, and made
alive the ancient usages, and the crabbed originality of the peasantry.
"Los Pazos de Ulloa" (_pazos_ is dialect for palace) and its sequel, "La
Madre Naturaleza," have in them the very breath of outdoor life,--the
last is an idyll in prose. She describes the untrained young _cura_
leaving Santiago to step into the unhappy coil of events in the ruined
manor house, his vain efforts to help the pathetic young wife and her
brutalized husband. The tragedy is carried on to the second generation,
and we see the two children growing up in solitude and desertion,
roaming the countryside day and night, Perucho, blue-eyed, handsome as a
Greek statue, the girl Manolita slender and dark; then the
heart-breaking misery of the end. Work such as this is exquisite and
sure to last. Madam Pardo Bazán edits one of the best reviews in Madrid,
and she has written many stories that treat of life in the capital, but,
like the novels of Valdés, they might have been written elsewhere, in
Paris or St. Petersburg. It is in the novels of her loved _paisanos_ she
will live.
English-speaking people probably know Palacio Valdés better than any
other Spanish writer, for his novels, of the regulation Parisian type,
have been repeatedly translated. I care not at all for the Madrid
novels, but sometimes in a dashing local romance he carries all before
him: such is "La Hermana de San Sulpicio," _sal salada_, that
untranslatable phrase of Andalusia where sparkle and verve are
considered as highly as beauty in women. The story is facile, witty,
light both in manner and matter, full of laughter following swift on
tears, like its sprightly chatterbox of a heroine, an alluring creature
who is sincere underneath the sparkle. Seville and the brilliant summer
life of its patios, the sky raining stars, lovers talking all night at
the _reja_ in the scented air,--no one would tell on an _enamorado_, the
very men drinking in a tavern send out a glass to the patient lover to
wish him good luck. The friendly equality of the different classes is
shown again here, and other traits not so praiseworthy, such as the
intensity of local antipathies, the Andalusian's contempt for the
Gallego, the Catalan's for the Andalusian. A Barcelona business man
grumbles all day in Seville: "A glass of cognac 30 c. one day and 35 c.
the next in the same café. Is that business?" Two men from the northern
mountains meet: "You too are from Asturias?" asks one. "No, from
Galicia." "Then you are not _mi paisano_," and the first turns away in
disdain.
While the mundain, easy stories of Palacio Valdés are translated and
widely read, one of the first of Spanish novelists is scarcely known
outside his own country. Don José María de Pereda was born in 1835 and
died in 1906, the year following Don Juan Valera's death. He is a true
son of the _Montaña_, the coast country round Santander, whose Picos de
Europa rise to a height of 9000 feet, and he has described his home with
beautiful realism in some robust and primitive tales: "Escenas
Montañesas; "El Sabor de la Tierruca"; "Sotileza," called his best, a
very strong picture of fisher folk; "De tal Palo tal Astillo," which,
like Galdós' "Gloria," is greatly spoiled by being a "roman à thèse";
"Peñas Arriba," and many others. Pereda is a champion against skepticism
and the weakening luxury of cities: he is so partial to his _patria
chica_ that he often abuses the patience of readers by his too free use
of its dialect. With him, plot and action are of slight account, for his
interest lies in the eternal human characters and in the countryside
that molded them. A realist more exact than Flaubert, he yet fulfills
the prophecy of Huysmans as to the best type of novel for the future:
"The truth of the document, the precision of detail, the condensed,
nervous language of realism must be kept, but it must be clarified with
soul, and mystery must no longer be explained by _maladies of the
senses_. The romance should divide itself into two parts, welded or
interbound as they are in life, that of the soul and that of body, and
it should treat of their reaction, of their conflicts, of their mutual
understandings." M. René Bazin has described a visit to Pereda at
Polanco, his beautiful estate near Santander, where he led a life of
cultured retirement, proving the theory which his books preach, that
one's native home is the best paradise. To the French visitor, with his
nation's swiftness to discern high distinction, it seemed as if it were
Quixote himself, the man who came forward to meet him, of the pure
hidalgo type, long face and aquiline nose, with that noble gesture of
the hand that said, "My house is yours."
Of Pereda's books, my favorite is "Peñas Arriba," which does for the
mountain folk what "Sotileza" does for the coast life of the _Montaña_.
It was while writing this that there fell on him the heart-rending blow
of his young son's suicide, and a cross and date long stood in the
rough draft of the novel to mark the separation of the past from his
saddened later life: only by force of will could he continue. Much of
himself shows in the tale, which would entice a Parisian himself to live
contentedly on a mountain side. There is a scene, the death of the
squire of Tablanca, which indeed proclaims a master hand. Spain's best
critic, Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (himself from Santander, born
1856) writes of Pereda: "For me and all born _de peñas al mar_, these
books are felt before judged, they are something of our mountain land
like the breezes of the coast, one loves the author as one does one's
family."
Perhaps it is not fair to speak of a writer who is not a romancist, when
good minor talents among the novelists have to be passed over, but I
cannot resist ending with the name of this famous scholar, Menéndez y
Pelayo,[34] who may be said to be discovering Spain to herself after her
long discouragement. His books are on the history of philosophy and
literature: "Historía de las Ideas Estéticas en España"; "Horacio en
España," being graphic pages on the lyric poets; "Crítica Literaria";
"Ciencia Española," "Calderón y su Teatro," and others. Faithful to the
best traditions of his race, he is boldly asserting her past, her poets,
her scientists, her mystics,--they have been ignored too long; he holds
that the peoples of the _mediodía_ are the civilizing races par
excellence. All the warring factions of Spain agree that here is a man
of stupendous talent. "Every time I meet him, I find him with a new
language. Never have I met a student of such prodigious erudition,"
wrote the skeptic Alas. Menéndez y Pelayo may be called a literary
phenomenon. Before twenty-five he had ransacked the libraries of Spain,
Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium, and was given a professorship in
the University of Madrid. To-day his reputation is European among
scholars. His profound knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew
literatures, helps a swift, unerring sense to perceive the best. His
work is not only that of a scholar, for it has in it the life-giving
touch of imagination, which is wisdom, and makes a writer a classic.
An anecdote that has the ring of the simplicity of a Cervantes or a
Valera, the self-effacing of a Luis de León, is told of the young
scholar of twenty-two. When spending an evening with some celebrated men
where wit and learning flowed fast and copious, he poured out quotations
so erudite and spontaneous that in modest embarrassment he took a paper
from his pocket as if quoting from it. At the end of the evening a
friend seized on the magic bit of paper, to find it a washerwoman's
bill. Praise cannot hurt such a man. When a race can produce in a short
fifty years a Pereda, a Valera, a Menéndez y Pelayo, have we the right
to call it spent and out of the running?
ESTREMADURA
"I have always felt that the two most precious things in life are
faith and love. As I grow older I think so more and more. Ambition
and achievement are out of the running; the disappointments are
many and the prizes few, and by the time they are attained seem
small. The whole thing is vanity and vexation of spirit without
faith and love. I have come to see that cleverness, success,
attainment, count for little; that goodness, 'character,' is the
important factor in life."
GEORGE J. ROMANES.
Literally worn out with the noise of Seville's Holy Week, we took the
night train, that chill, rainy Good Friday, and left the Andalusian
excitement behind. As carriages are forbidden in the city on both Holy
Thursday and Good Friday, we had expected to walk to the station--they
told us that the King, the year before, had walked to his train--but the
regulation ceased at sunset on Friday and we were able to drive.
As usual we had the _Reservado para Señoras_ compartment to ourselves,
and so exhausted were we that we slept heavily with only an occasional
waking to look out on the cold hills we were crossing. There was a moon
which hurrying black clouds obscured fitfully. Under the somber sky the
desolate hills seemed like the fantastic sepia drawing of a Turner:
swift unforgettable memories one carries away from night journeys in
Spain.
We left the train at Mérida, now a poor place with some few thousand
inhabitants, but up to the fourth century a splendid Roman city, the
capital of Lusitania. The castle built by Romans, Moors, Knights of
Santiago, and bishops; the theater, the aqueduct, the bridge, the
triumphal arch, and the baths show what it once was. We could not have
visited this solitary province at a happier hour. Field flowers made the
countryside as beautiful for the moment as Umbria or Devonshire; the
wheat fields, always so articulate and lovely, had their own charm even
after the magnificent outburst of roses and orange blossoms a month
earlier in Seville.
Mérida is small,--frugal and neat, as are the larger number of Spanish
towns. As we explored it, the people greeted us with kindly "_Vayan
Ustedes con Dios_"; we had left behind the tourist-infested south with
its insolent city loafers. It seemed too good to believe that we had
come again among the grave, dignified Spaniards of the north. In order
not to miss the Holy Saturday services, I hastened to the Cathedral.
There was a cracked old organ and the singing was little better, but
devout, heart-moving peasants rose and knelt, up and down, during the
long Flectamus Genua! Levate! ceremony of that day, and the bells burst
into the riotous clamor they seem to achieve so individually all over
Spain. It may have been ungrateful, but it was without the slightest
regret that I thought of the display going on at the same hour in
Seville.
We had taken the trip into Estremadura to see the Roman remains, the
best in the Peninsula. The ruins are more fortunate in their setting
here than in many places, for there are none of the bustling cafés nor
electric cars of Nîmes or Verona. Paestum is more poetic, Baalbec a
hundred times more grandiose, but Mérida on a showery, sunshiny day in
spring is an ideal spot for musing and rambling. In the city itself are
some ancient remains, such as a temple of Mars, and the fluted columns
of a temple of Diana built into a mediæval house, which, by the way, has
a lovely Plateresque window, but most of the ruins lie completely
outside the present town. The amphitheatre, when we saw it, had a
comfortable troop of goats asleep in the warm shelter of its oval, and
the remarkable theatre, known as _Las Siete Sillas_, from the seven
divisions of its upper seats that crown it like a coronet, was gay with
poppies and buttercups,--the national colors gleamed everywhere.
Swallows in cool, metallic, blue-black coats, dipped and swept in their
swift, graceful way. Looking out on the view which embraced Mérida on
one side and a line of rugged hills on the other, we lingered for hours
in that Theatre of the Seven Seats. Children, like gentle fawns, one by
one crept out from the town suburbs and gathered in a smiling, lovable
circle round the strangers. We talked to them tranquilly, our map of
their city seemed a fascinating wonder to them. They came and went
smiling; now one returned to the town to fetch his mother, now a shy
little girl laid an armful of poppies beside us, with no thought of
pennies, but just out of primitive human kindliness. The dear Don's age
of gold seemed a reality. And a day before we had angrily scattered
those diabolical little pests, the street children of Seville! Could
these enchanting little people belong to the same race, and live only a
hundred and fifty miles away? Journeys in unfrequented parts of Spain
give one a truer picture than is possible for the hurried tourist on the
beaten track; every time we turned aside into the unspoiled country we
met the people and ways which Cervantes has described. Never were
gentler human beings than those little girls of Mérida, those young
mothers, those big half-awkward lads, whose gazelle eyes would gaze
at us inquiringly, then turn to look at the scene we so obviously
admired, then back to us with pleasure at our appreciation of what they
too held most beautiful. We are told that peasants get no æsthetic
pleasure from landscape, but I am sure romantic Roman ruins and perfect
spring-time weather had much to do with giving those children faces of
such pure outline.
[Illustration: _Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood_
A ROADSIDE SCENE IN SPAIN]
Perhaps later, when the sun scorches the first freshness, Mérida may be
a desolate enough spot; we probably knew her best hour, the lovely April
of her prime. We were loath to tear ourselves away; we read to our
interested audience accounts of their city's past, when Emperors' armies
marched along the Roman road that led from Cadiz north, and alert to
catch the meaning, they listened with that vividness of the eye that
shows the imagination is roused. Then from the daily paper we read to
them that in Madrid on Holy Thursday, two days before, the King had
washed the feet of a dozen poor men, kissed them in humility, then
waited on them at table, assisted by the grandees of Spain; that on Good
Friday he had set free some criminals. When the bishop's words rang
through the church: "Señor, human laws condemn these men to death," Don
Alfonso answered with moved voice: "I pardon them, and may God pardon
me!" And somehow, Alfonso XIII is not jarring or theatric among such
ancient usages of Spanish Christianity. Very modern with his automobile,
his polo, his careless ease, this charming king is one with his people
in a radical sympathy with ways that symbolize soul and heart emotions.
Mérida has a bridge built by the Emperor Trajan. And it has ruins of a
very stately aqueduct standing in wheat and poppy fields. This is built
of stone and brick ranged in regular lines, and though only about a
hundred feet high, is truly majestic, the entrancing touch being given
by the hundreds of storks who have built nests on the top of the arches.
Some of our little friends had accompanied us through the fields to the
aqueduct, and when we took a final ramble through the town, many were
the smiling greetings, "_Buenas Tardes_." Mérida is too small to have
visitors pass a day there without making friends among its courteous
people.
We took an evening train on to Cáceres ten miles away, for its hotels
sounded inviting; and a second happy day, a holy and tranquil _Domingo
de Resurrección_, gave us another memory of Estremadura. Cáceres is an
unspoiled mediæval town climbing up a crag, just such a place as
Albrecht Dürer loved to paint. It is very individual. From the plaza
with its acacia trees we mounted the steep grass-grown streets, past one
baronial mansion after another, with old escutcheoned doorways blazoned
with plumed helmet and shield. In one of them, the house of the
Golfines, _los Reyes Católicos_ stayed on a visit. Nowhere in the world
save in Spain could such a bit of the Middle Ages stand untouched and
unnoticed, giving one that thrilling sensation of the traveler, the
meeting unheralded with a very rare thing. The views caught between the
granite mansions were lovely, for Cáceres lies in the most cultivated
district of the county. Across the river rose another steep crag, turned
into a Way of Calvary, with a picturesque church crowning it.
The town has some excellent hotels, and we were well-fed and slept well
for five pesetas a day in one of them. Easter Sunday morning I awoke to
the sound of bleating animals, and looking out, there at every doorway
was tied a tiny white or black lamb, with a bunch of soft greens to
nibble on. It is the custom for each family to have this symbol of peace
and innocence on the Christian Passover. All day long the children
played with them, and toward evening when the toy-like legs trembled
with fatigue, the little boys carried the lambs across their shoulders
as shepherds do. In the midst of patriarchal ways, we kept
congratulating ourselves that we had escaped the noisy city to the
south, whose Easter crowds were pouring in eager excitement to the
first bull-fight of the year; it was the thought of the scene being
enacted in Seville that made us a little unjust to the city where so
happy a winter had been passed.
After Mass in a gray old church on the hill, a procession formed to
carry the _pasos_ of Cáceres. Each house was hung with the national
colors, and on the balconies tall men of the hidalgo type and proud
Spanish ladies (Madrid has not drained the provincial places of their
leading families) knelt respectfully as the cortège passed. The statues
were simple and poor, they were borne by pious peasants, and the silent
crowd dropped to its knees on the pavement with a prayer. Not a tourist
was there, save two who felt so in sympathy with old Spain that they
disclaimed the title. To think that the gorgeous materialistic _pasos_
of Seville had once begun in this way! Easter afternoon made as pastoral
a memory as the hours in Mérida. We walked out with the people to the
hill of the Stations of the Cross. Life seemed a happy and normal thing
when all, old and young, grandee and peasant, gave courteous greeting to
those who passed; also it was a joy to hear pure Castilian after the
somewhat slovenly Andalusian dialect.