I
The contemporary school of Spanish fiction dates from about the
revolution of 1868, which drove out Isabel II. and brought in a more
liberal form of government. Without this revolution, it would scarcely
have found opportunity for the free expression of opinion and the bold
critical tone towards ancient institutions which are among its leading
characteristics. It is a fresh stirring of the human intellect, a
distinctly new product, and a valuable contribution to the world's
literature. It has affiliation with the Russian, the English, and
other vital modern movements in fiction, and yet it can by no means be
confused with that of any other country. Its method is realistic; but
one of its leading figures, De Pereda, a strong delineator of rural
life, protests, as to him and his works, against the use of the
word,--"if," he says vigorously, "it means to rank me under the
triumphal French banner of foul-smelling realism." That is to say,
they consider the best material for fiction to be the better and
sweeter part of life and its higher aspirations, and not that coarse
part of it to which the French would seem to have devoted an undue
amount of attention. The reader of Anglo-Saxon origin approaches this
fiction with ease and sympathy; he has not to acquire any new point of
view in order to understand it, nor to unlearn any wonted standards of
taste or morals.
An informing Spanish critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan, herself a novelist of
talent, points out that the present Spanish school cannot be said to
have a "yesterday," but only "a day before yesterday." She means that
it has skipped a certain interval, and connects itself with remoter,
and not with recent, tradition. It really comes down from a time
antedating even the great "Golden Age." It takes its rise in the
wonderful naturalness of the 'Celestina,' a quaint "tragi-comedy" of
the year 1499. It bears a close relationship, next, to Don Quixote and
to the "Novelas Picarescas," the stories of amusing knaves in very low
life, of which 'Lazarillo de Tormes' and 'Guzman de Alfarache' are the
best examples, and that French imitation, 'Gil Blas,' better than the
originals. A period of very stiff Classicism in the eighteenth
century, and of extravagant Romanticism in the beginning of the
nineteenth, followed, constituting the omitted "yesterday"; and then
arrived the vigorous literature of the present time, here in question.
The qualities of truth to nature, practical good sense, genuine humor,
and play of imagination, have nearly always characterized Spanish
fiction, and these qualities seem possessed by the contemporary
novelists in a higher degree than ever before. The Picaresque or Rogue
stories seem to be--their naturalness admitted--a mere string of
disconnected adventures, written to the taste of a period that had not
the habit of keeping its attention fixed upon anything long; and we
scarcely know any leading character more intimately at the end than at
the beginning. As against this, we have now complete and lengthy
novels, in which situations and characters are all worked out upon a
symmetrical plan, and in which the conclusions generally follow like
those of fate; that is to say, they are not arbitrary, but inevitably
result from the conditions and circumstances given.
So far as there is English influence in this literature, it may be
said to be more in the form of example than as a direct component. It
has given the Spanish movement courage and persistence, to see the
same ideals elsewhere affording profit and pleasure to millions of
men. Otherwise it is a mere coloring, a superficial trace. In
particular, Perez Galdos is fond of introducing English characters.
Some of them have the Dickens-like trait of a beaming, exuberant
benevolence, and the athletic parson in 'Gloria' who risks his life
pulling out to the rescue of a wrecked steamer is like Barrie's Little
Minister. Many of his leading characters are of that mixed blood, at
Cadiz and elsewhere in the South, where one parent is English and the
other Spanish, and the offspring have had the advantage of an
education in England. He admires English types and ways, and yet with
a reluctance too; which brings it about that they are generally
introduced subject to considerable satire and mockery. English
steadiness and thrift,--yes, very well; but he has a lingering
tenderness still for Spanish levity and improvidence. In 'Halma,' all
the Marquis de Feramor's children have English names, as "Sandy"
(_Alexandrito_), "Frank" (_Paquito_), and "Kitty" (_Catalanita_). The
Marquis has been a student at Cambridge, and he imports into his
career in Spanish politics the thorough study of the question at
issue, the conservative temper and abhorrence of extremes, and the
correct "good form" of some finished English statesman. These ideas of
English policy and conservatism are talked over again, in the
_tertulias_ of the amusing family in 'El Amigo Manso,' who have come
back wealthy from Cuba, the head of the household with the purpose of
going into Parliament and securing a title. The English and the
Spanish literary movements may be said to accompany each other
amicably, much as Wellington's red-coats and the Spanish troops
marched side by side in the War of Independence, which has left a
feeling of friendship between the two nations ever since.
At the head of the school of fiction in question are four writers,
namely, Jose Maria de Pereda, Armando Palacio Valdes, Benito Perez
Galdos, and Juan Valera. They may be considered, in their various
ways, as of well-nigh equal merit; each one has some very
distinguished and distinguishing quality, in virtue of which he cannot
justly be rated below the others. De Pereda occupies a position apart
in devoting himself wholly to the lives of humble people, the
mountaineers and fishermen of the Biscayan Provinces. He never
willingly departs from these scenes either in his literary or personal
excursions; he has his home among them, near Santander. Valera stands
apart in a different way, and would occupy himself by preference with
the opposite class of society. He is the most learned and scholarly of
the quartette, and his writing is the most carefully polished in
style. He is a scholarly critic and essayist as well as a novelist. He
is a realist like the rest, yet eschews, for instance, the imitation
of dialect: he is not a realist in quite the same energetic and
conscientious way; his atmosphere, while no doubt equally true, is
rather dreamy and poetic. Valdes and Galdos are much more vividly
modern, and they treat many of the same kind of subjects, the events
of real life such as we see it all around us. Of the four, Valdes has
perhaps, in certain passages, the truest tenderness and most delicate
pathos, and the most genuine humor, of that sunny kind which allows us
to laugh without bitterness. He can sometimes be bitter too, and such
a severe social satire as 'Froth' and such books as 'The Grandee' and
'The Origin of Thought' leave, like many of those of Galdos, an
impression of gloom; yet even in these we are charmed on the way by
his light touch and easy grace of treatment. Galdos is he who takes
the gravest attitude; many great problems of life and destiny occupy
him seriously; he not only is very earnest, but seems so,--which does
not however preclude a plentiful use of humor, as will be seen in the
examples given. Furthermore, he is much the most prolific of the
distinguished group, and to that extent he may be said to have the
widest range.
These writers are a highly beneficent influence in Spain at the
present time, spreading over it as they do a multitude of stimulating
pictures and liberalizing ideas, cast into charming literary form.
They cannot fail to have a considerable effect upon conduct. In its
manner, its aversion to obscurity, and fondness for floods of daylight
that almost abolish shadow, this fiction is like the Spanish-Roman
school of art, the painting of Fortuny, the two Madrazos, and others:
the two seem but manifestations of a common impulse. On another side
it is to be recommended to foreigners, as affording a body of
information about Spain such as the mere traveler could never attain,
and which it is useless to look for in fiction depending for its
interest upon clever devices of plot and fantastic adventure. It lets
an illumination into the heart of what has been the most reserved and
mysterious country of Europe. It shows the true Spain, and not merely
the conventional one of strumming guitars and jingling mule bells.
With all its strangeness, we see it full of that genuine human nature
that makes the world akin; and we see, with pleasure and hope, the
breaking up of the forces of mediaevalism, the working of a mental and
moral turmoil that is preparing the way for a general betterment.
It would not be reasonable to suppose that Spanish literature remained
wholly unaffected by the vigorous French movement just across the
border. On the contrary, it clearly shows the trace of the robust
modern style that has prevailed in France from Balzac to Zola. This
trace, however, is in the style and not in the matter. It may possibly
have aided the plainness of speech in the Spanish work, which is
greater than in English books; and yet this plainness of speech is
probably not greater than all books should be allowed, in the interest
of their own usefulness, and in order not to be narrow instead of
broad pictures of life. The tone towards sexual problems is never
flippant; immorality is never put in an attractive light; there is
hardly anywhere a more severe homily on the text that "the wages of
sin is death" than is found in the wretched career of the
transgressors in such books as Galdos's 'Lo Prohibido,' 'Tormento,'
and 'La Desheredada.'
Just as in English books, the young girl, her aspirations and her
innocent love affairs before marriage, figure largely in these novels.
It is not necessary for her to wait until she is married in order to
become a suitable heroine for fiction. Religious revolt or dissent,
again, is one of the features most often used. There is still a very
close union of Church and State in Spain, and life has a very
ecclesiastical coloring. Nearly every family has ties of relationship
or intimacy with some ecclesiastical person of either sex. This brings
it about that such figures are as frequent in books as,
correspondingly, in real life. In Valera's 'Pepita Ximenez' we find an
earnest young student, a candidate for the priesthood, son of a noble
house, turned aside from his holy career--through his father's
connivance--by the fascinations of a most charming woman, their
neighbor. In Valdes's 'Sister San Sulpicio' it is a young novice, a
delightfully gay and bright creature, whom love and matrimony withdraw
from her convent. In the same author's 'Marta y Maria' a fair young
girl is seen endeavoring to conform in the midst of modern life to
the ascetic ideals of the mediaeval saints, even to the point of
wearing hair-cloth and beating her tender shoulders with a scourge.
Galdos's 'Dona Perfecta' and 'The Family of Leon Roch' combat the
undue influence of the confessor, or religious adviser, in the family,
and 'Gloria' combats the immemorial bitter prejudice against the Jews.
As may be seen, many of these subjects, if approached in a flippant
way, might easily lend themselves to grossness and scandal; but such
is not the Spanish spirit. The tone towards the Church is severely
critical, but not destructive. It is the true secular tone of this
century, which holds that a conventional attention to the things of
the next world is only due when all demands for benevolence towards
living men are satisfied. Howells points out that Galdos attacks only
the same intolerant eccelesiastical spirit that elsewhere would be
known by another name. These critics would "reform the party from
within"; and as they handle with so much skill and consideration the
sensibilities of their countrymen who still adhere to the fold, their
efforts are the more likely to have a potent effect. It seems a
curious anomaly that Pereda, the one of them who is the most modern
and stirring in the intellectual way, professes himself the champion
of monarchy in its most absolute form.
The beginnings of the present fiction are somewhat feebly found in
Antonio de Trueba, and Madame Boehl de Faber, who signed herself
"Fernan Caballero,"--one of the first of those who took a man's name,
after the fashion of George Sand. These first wrote of other things
than the romantic knights and castles, Moors and odalisques, of Scott
and Victor Hugo. Fernan Caballero (1797 to 1877), a genial optimist
who wrote idealized descriptions of nature, still has a certain vogue.
Perez Escrich produced a large number of novels of a humanitarian
cast; Fernandez y Gonzalez poured them out, of a cheap order, in a
torrent, and became the very type of hasty production. Pedro de
Alarcon figures as a kind of link uniting the earlier period to the
present, and such a book as his 'El Sombrero de Tres Picos' (The
Three-Cornered Hat) is said to be read by some of the present
generation with admiration. But it seems to others a trifle, of no
great merit, marred by an excessive straining after effect; nothing in
it is simply or naturally said. Students of the more realistic side of
the movement should read Madame Pardo Bazan's valuable critical study,
'La Cuestion Palpitante' (The Vital Question). Various books by the
leading authors named have been well translated into English by Clara
Bell, Mrs. Mary J. Serrano, Mary Springer, Rollo Ogden, Nathan Haskell
Dole, and others.