The writer of these tales was a young poet, oppressed by illness, care
and poverty. His brief life held many troubles. Born in Seville,
February 17, 1836, of a distinguished family that came to Andalusia from
Flanders at about the end of the sixteenth century, he was but five
years old, the fourth of eight little sons, when he lost his father. The
bereavement was greater than anyone knew, for Don José Dominguez
Becquer, a genre painter of repute, could have given this imaginative
child, a genius in germ, parental sympathy and guidance in an unusual
degree. Less than five years later, the mother died, and the disposition
of the orphans became a puzzling problem for relatives and friends.
Gustavo, who had already attended the day school of San Antonio Abad,
was admitted, through the efforts of an uncle, to the _Colegio de San
Telmo_, a naval academy, maintained by the government, on the banks of
the Guadalquivir. This famous school of Seville was originally founded
by the companions of Columbus in gratitude to St. Elmo, patron of
mariners. Here Gustavo found a friend of congenial tastes, Narciso
Campillo, with whom he composed and presented before their admiring
mates what Señor Campillo, who also made a name for himself in Spanish
letters, has described as “a fearful and extravagant drama.” But Gustavo
had enjoyed barely a year of this new life when Isabella II suppressed
the academy, bestowing building and grounds on her newly wedded sister,
the Duchesse de Montpensier. Visitors to modern Seville know well the
_Palacio de Santelmo_, with the fountains playing in its marble courts,
with its gardens of orange trees, palms and aloes, of trellised roses
and luxuriant tropic shrubs; but who gives a thought there to the exiled
boy thrown again, at the age of ten, upon the chances of the world?
His godmother, Doña Manuela Monchay, opened her doors to the waif, and
in her comfortable home he dwelt for the next eight years. His schooling
was over, but he read his way through Doña Manuela’s library and, at
fourteen, entered the studio of a Seville painter; here for two years he
trained his talent for drawing. Then he changed to the rival studio,
that of his father’s brother, who was sufficiently impressed by the
lad’s literary promise to have him taught a little Latin. Meanwhile his
godmother, childless and well-to-do, was urging him to adopt a
mercantile career. Had he consented, it is supposed that she would have
made him her heir, and his manhood, instead of the exhausting struggle
it was for bread and shelter, might have been, from the worldly point of
view, prosperous enough. But the visionary youth, who, says his friend
Correa,[1] “had learned to draw while he was yet learning to write,
whose unbounded passion for reading had given him wider horizons than
those of book-keeping, and who could never do a sum in mental
arithmetic,” would not betray his ideal. While his prudent godmother was
making her own plans for his future, he was composing with Campillo the
opening cantos of an epic on _The Conquest of Seville_, or wandering
alone on the banks of the Guadalquivir, his “majestic Bétis, the river
of nymphs, naiads and poets, which, crowned with belfries and laurels,
flows to the sea from a crystal amphora.” In the shade of the white
poplars he would lie and dream “of an independent, blissful life, like
that of the bird, which is born to sing, while God provides it with
food, ... that tranquil life of the poet, which glows with a soft lustre
from generation to generation.” And when that life should be over, he
saw his grateful city, the Sultana of Andalusia, laying her poet down
“to dream the golden dream of immortality on the banks of the Bétis,
whose praise I should have sung in splendid odes, in that very spot
where I used to go so often to hear the sweet murmur of its waves.” His
pensive fancy loved to picture that white cross under the poplars whose
green and silver leaves, as they rustled in the wind, would seem to be
praying for his soul, while the birds in their branches would carol at
dawn a joyous resurrection hymn. And when the river reeds and the wild
morning-glories, his favorite “blue morning-glories with a disk of
carmine at the heart,” hovered over by “golden insects with wings of
light,” should have grown up about the marble, hiding his time-blurred
name with a leafy curtain, what matter? “Who would not know that I was
sleeping there?” And so, to escape commercial drudgery and realize these
fair visions, the young Andalusian, at eighteen, the mid-point of his
life, with no more than sufficed for the costs of the journey to Madrid,
started forth on his quest of glory.
It may truly be said of Becquer that, like Hakluyt’s staunch old
worthies, he was “content to take his adventure gladly.” Nobody ever
knew how narrow were the straits of those first years in Madrid. He had
to turn his hand to anything, from odds and ends of journalism to a
day’s job of fresco-painting. Homesick, hungry, ill, he kept through it
all a brave buoyancy of spirits and a manly reticence as to his
sufferings. “He was never known,” testifies Correa, “to complain of his
hard life or his physical distresses, nor to curse his fate. Silent as
long as he was unhappy, he would find voice only to express a moment’s
pleasure.” He made fun of his troubles, which he, more easily than
grosser souls, could indeed forget in the ecstatic contemplation of
beauty or in giving form to the crowding fantasies that clamored in his
brain. A friend, more concerned over his privations than was Becquer
himself, found him a position as copyist in an office of one of the
state departments at a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars a year.
The poet, more out of gratitude for the intended kindness than from any
sense of personal relief, for he would rather starve body than mind,
undertook the irksome employment. But the national finances, under the
drain of the Carlist wars and the popular uprisings and official
corruption of Isabella’s disastrous reign, had become so embarrassed
that economy in the public service was imperative, and Becquer was
pointed out--perhaps, after all, by his good angel--for a victim. In the
_Dirección de Bienes Nacionales_, as in other departments, superfluous
men were to be weeded out. The Director, as chance would have it, came
into the office one day when all the clerks were gathered about
Becquer’s stool, eagerly looking over his shoulders, lost in admiration
of the sketches that his facile pen was turning off. The Director,
joining the group and peering with the rest, demanded: “What is this?”
Not recognizing the voice, the culprit, absorbed in the joy of art,
innocently answered: “This is Ophelia, plucking the leaves from her
garland. That old uncle is a grave-digger. Over there”--At this point
the awful silence smote his senses and he looked up only to meet the
verdict: “Here is one that can be spared.”
But although Becquer thus failed to serve his country with proper zeal
in the only direct opportunity she afforded him, the touch of the
capital, with its sense of impending crisis, its call for patriotic
leadership, had given a new turn to his dreams. Or perhaps it would be
truer to say that the Gothic cathedrals, old castles and ruined abbeys
so abundant in Castile, though not in the Crowned City itself, had
fastened the hold of the feudal world, with its military ideals, upon
his imagination. In these days he longed--or fancied that he longed--to
be “a thunderbolt of war,” to exert a mighty influence on the destinies
of Spain, so that every revolution of the future might be, as it were, a
personification of himself, but most of all he indulged his musings in
the glorious picture of a warrior’s death and burial. He would have
chosen, his “thirst for triumphs and acclaim assuaged, to fall in
battle, hearing as the last sound of earth the shrill clamor of the
trumpets of my valiant hosts,--to be borne upon a shield, wrapped in the
folds of my tattered banner, emblem of a hundred victories, finding the
peace of the grave in the depths of one of those holy cloisters where
dwells eternal silence and to which the centuries lend majesty and a
mysterious, indefinable hue.” And then the artist in him revelled in all
the detailed beauty of that visioned tomb “bathed in dusky shadow,” on
which his statue, “of richest, transparent alabaster,” with sword on
breast and couchant lion at the feet, was to sleep an august sleep under
the hushed watch of long-robed, praying angels.
Meanwhile, bad lodging and uncertain fare were telling on his delicate
constitution. In one respect, Becquer was always fortunate--in friends.
Early in his Madrid life he had won the faithful affection of Correa,
another young literary aspirant leading a hand-to-mouth existence, but
of vigorous physique and practical capabilities. When in the third year
of his struggle Becquer fell seriously ill--“horribly” ill, says
Correa--this devoted comrade not only nursed him through, but, finding
among the poet’s papers a long legend purporting to be an East Indian
tradition, managed to get it published in _La Crónica_,--the beginning
of success. This legend, _The Chieftain of the Crimson Hands_, has to do
with the expiation of a fratricide by a pilgrimage up the Ganges to its
far sources in the Himalayas, that in the most secret of those sacred
springs the clinging bloodstains might be washed away. But after forty
moons of weary travel across the broad plains of India up into the very
shadow of the dread Himalayan wall, a law of the pilgrimage was broken,
and Vishnu could no longer shield the slayer from the wrath of Siva,
who, himself the Destroyer, resents all other destruction as an
infringement on his great prerogative.
Another Indian subject, _The Creation_, on which Becquer had tried his
hand with a peculiarly light, ironic touch, yielded a more
characteristic result. The fable tells how Brahma, utterly bored by the
contemplation of his own perfections, took to chemistry. The astonished
cherubs fluttered on their thousand-colored wings about the smoking,
roaring tower where the Deity had his laboratory and where his eight
arms and sixteen hands were all kept busy with managing his test-tubes
and retorts, for he was shaping worlds to people space. But one day,
tired of his experiments, he went out to take the air and, for all his
omniscience, absent-mindedly failed to lock the door. In swarmed the
cherubs, ripe for mischief, and lost no time in turning everything
topsy-turvy. They flung the parchments into the fire, pulled the
stoppers out of the flasks, overturned the great glass vessels, breaking
not a few of them and spilling their contents, and wound up their
meddling by blowing a ridiculous, soap-bubble planet of their own. This
imperfect globe, all awry, with flattened poles and with contradictory
elements, heat and cold, joy and grief, good and evil, life and death,
at war within itself, went rolling so grotesquely on its axis, that the
peals of cherubic laughter brought Brahma hurrying back. In his vexation
he was about to crush that preposterous, misformed world, our world, but
the appealing cries of the celestial children moved him to let them toss
their absurd toy out into the ether among his own beautiful,
self-consistent, harmonious spheres. Ever since, the cherubs have been
trundling it about the sky, to the amazement of the other planets and
the despair of us poor mortals; but it will not last. “There is nothing
more tender nor more terrible than the hands of little children; in
these the plaything cannot long endure.”
It was not literature like this that the Spanish periodicals were
seeking in the stormy fifties. It was a time of the keenest political
strife, when even poets and novelists were bought by one party or
another and made to fight in the midst of the newspaper arena. But no
extremity could bring Becquer to be a politician’s tool. “Incapable of
hatred,” says Correa, “he never placed his enviable powers as a writer
at the service of animosity ... nor was his noble character fitted for
adulation or assiduous servility.” Yet in his own way he played the
patriot by earnest effort, continued unceasingly throughout his life, to
assist in recording by pen and pencil the architectural beauties and
devout traditions of Spain before these should have utterly perished
under the march of progress. Putting politics out of his mind as a
matter of little moment, Becquer undertook, with a few kindred spirits,
what might have proved, with adequate support, a monumental work on the
Spanish churches. As it was, there appeared only one volume, to which he
contributed the Introduction, the chapters on the famous Toledo
monastery, _San Juan de los Reyes_, and a number of drawings. In his
story _Three Dates_, more descriptive than narrative, we catch a few
fleeting glimpses of him, always with his sketch-book, pursuing his
artistic and archæological researches in Toledo. A similar errand, in
all probability, took him to Soria, an ancient city peculiarly rich in
mediæval buildings, situated on the Douro, to the north-east of Madrid.
In Soria he found several of his legends and, less fortunately, a wife,
Carta Estéban y Navarro. The marriage, which took place about 1861, soon
resulted in separation. Becquer retained possession of the children, two
baby boys, for whom he tenderly cared, as best he could in his Bohemian
life, until the last.
It would seem to have been the unwonted sense of an assured income that
gave him courage to undertake the support of a wife, for in this year
1861 his constant friend Correa obtained for him a position on the staff
of a new Madrid daily, _El Contemporáneo_, a journal into whose labors
he threw himself with a zest far beyond his strength and which he came
to love with a touching enthusiasm. “_El Contemporáneo_ is not for me a
newspaper like any other; its columns are yourselves, my friends, my
comrades in hope or disappointment, in failure or triumph, in joy or
bitterness.” It was in _El Contemporáneo_ that many of his legends
appeared. But even as he thus became more and more closely identified
with the life of Madrid, homesickness grew upon him for his own
Andalusia “with her golden days and luminous, transparent nights,”--for
his own Seville, “with her Giralda of lace-work mirrored in the
trembling Guadalquivir, ... with her barred windows and her serenades,
her iron door-screens and her night watchmen that chant the hour, her
shrines and her stories, her brawls and her music, her tranquil nights
and fiery afternoons, her rosy dawns and azure twilights,--Seville, with
all the traditions that twenty centuries have heaped upon her brow, with
all the pageantry and festal beauty of her southern nature, with all
the poetry that imagination lends to a beloved memory.”
He re-visited Seville, if _The Tavern of the Cats_ can be taken as
testimony, at about this time, and may so have renewed intercourse with
his family, for in 1862 his next older brother, Valeriano, who,
following in their father’s path, had entered on a promising career as a
painter of Andalusian types, came to him in Madrid. Valeriano, too, was
of frail physique; he, too, had been unhappy in his marriage; yet the
brothers affectionately joined such forces as they had and set up, with
the little children, a makeshift for a home. But in a year or two some
wasting illness, apparently the early stages of consumption, forced the
poet to leave “the Court” and seek renewal of health in the mountain
valley of Veruela. During this sojourn he gathered several legends of
the Moncayo, that precipitous granite wall--known to Martial as the
haunt of Æolus--which bars Old Castile from Aragon and divides the basin
of the Douro, the river of Soria, from that of the Ebro, the river of
Saragossa. To Becquer its snowy crests looked “like the waves of a
motionless, gigantic sea.” But the main literary result of that
retirement is found in the series of eight exquisite letters, _From My
Cell_, the high-water mark of Becquer’s prose, sent back to _El
Contemporáneo_. In these he gives a vivid, humorous account of his
journey, by rail to Tudela, by diligence to Tarazona, and by mule up the
Moncayo to Veruela, in whose walled and towered old Cistercian abbey he
found an austere refuge. He had his Shakespeare with him and his Byron,
but the event of the day, in the earlier weeks of his banishment, was
the arrival of the mounted postman with _El Contemporáneo_. He could not
wait for it in the Gothic cloisters, but would wander halfway down the
poplar avenue to the Black Cross of Veruela and, seated at its foot on
one of the marble steps, would wait sometimes the afternoon long
listening for the far-off beat of the horse’s hoofs. The journal came
to him like a personal greeting from the life he had left behind. He
loved even the odor of the damp paper and the printer’s ink, an odor
that brought back to him “the incessant pounding and creaking of the
presses” and all the eager activity of those hurrying nights in which
the words “came palpitating from the pen.” But with sunset the feverish
memories of Madrid fell from him and his thoughts took on the serenity
of faith, “the faith in something grander, in a coming, unknown destiny
beyond this life, the faith in eternity.” Again he found himself
dreaming of death, but not now of a poet’s cherished grave beside the
Guadalquivir, not now of a great patriot’s tomb in some sublime
cathedral, but of a mound in a village burial-plot, forgotten under
nettles, thistles and grass. Long tormented by insomnia, it seemed sweet
to him to slumber in such untroubled peace, “wrapt in a light cloak of
earth,” without having over him “even the weight of a sepulchral stone.”
As the mountain air brought strength, he began to ramble over the
Moncayo, sketching and gathering up traditions, while through _El
Contemporáneo_ he passionately urged the claims of the past, and
proposed the state organization of archæological expeditions in groups
made up of an artist, an architect and a man of letters, to explore the
provinces for their hidden, perishing traces of that bygone Spain of
Roman, Visigoth, Moor, mailed knight and saintly vision. Bent, as ever,
on doing his part in this unprized service, he wrote out, in the quiet
and leisure that had been so seldom his, masterly descriptions of the
market-place of Tarazona, and of the peasant-women of the Amazonian
hamlet of Añón. In the sixth letter he narrates, with a pen almost
unendurably graphic, the recent doing to death of a reputed hereditary
witch, a wretched old woman whom the superstitious Aragonese peasants
had, in very truth, hunted to a peak of the Moncayo off which, bleeding
from stones and knives, she had been thrust down the precipice. In the
seventh and eighth letters he goes on to relate, in his most attractive
manner, two local legends of witchcraft,--one of the necromancer who
built in a night the castle of Trasmoz, and one of the pious priest who
exorcised the witches that had come, in course of time, to make its
ruined tower their tryst, only to have his work undone by the girlish
vanity of his niece. She tampered with the holy water and restored to
the witches the freedom of the castle in return for their kind offices
in scrambling down her chimney, gray cats, black cats, all manner of
cats, the night before a festival, and stitching up for her such
fascinating finery that she forthwith won a husband.
His brother followed Becquer to Veruela and together they made trial of
the neighboring Baths of Fitero in Navarre, but they were in Madrid
again by 1865, often sorely put to it in the effort to carry the costs
of their little household. If one of the children fell ill and a doctor
must be called in, a friend might be entreated for an emergency loan of
three or four dollars; but as a rule these invalid brothers bore their
burden unassisted. Valeriano drew woodcuts for such market as he could
find, talking, says Correa, of “the great pictures he would paint as
soon as he could get the canvases,” and Gustavo translated the trashy
French novels that were in demand, writing, in the intervals of such
hack work, an occasional fantasy of delicate beauty, as _Withered
Leaves_, and ever looking forward to the time when he should have golden
hours of calm in which he might give his higher and more mystical
conceptions fitting utterance. Twice it seemed as if the way were
opening. Isabella’s last prime minister, Luis González Bravo, became
interested in the poet and made him censor of novels. Becquer
immediately availed himself of the comparative leisure thus afforded to
gather together a volume of his poems, which González Bravo was
proposing to print at his own expense. Then burst the long-gathering
storm of 1868, the genial, unprincipled queen was dethroned, and her
prime minister of literary tastes fled to the frontier with such
precipitation that the precious manuscript entrusted to his keeping was
lost. Becquer, with that scrupulous honor well known to his friends,
promptly resigned his censorship; Valeriano’s pension for the study of
national types was withdrawn; and the year 1869 saw them again in
straits. Yet they took daily comfort in their close brotherly love and
their artistic sympathies, even though, in those troublous times, their
joint enthusiasm for the beauties of Toledo once landed them in jail.
They were then temporarily residing, with their little family, in their
favorite city, “the city sombre and melancholy _par excellence_,” and
had sallied out, one evening, to contemplate its ghostly charms by
moonlight. Their disordered dress, long beards, excited gestures and
eager talk roused the suspicion of a brace of Civil Guards, who, drawing
near and overhearing such dangerous terms as “apses, squinches, ogives,”
seized the conspirators without more ado and lodged them, for their
further artistic illumination, in one of the historic dungeons of
Toledo. The next morning the editorial room of _El Contemporáneo_
resounded with merriment as a letter from Becquer went the rounds,--a
letter “all full,” says Correa, “of sketches representing in detail the
probable passion and death of both innocents.” The entire staff united
in a written protest and explanation to the jailer, and it was long
remembered in that office with what shining eyes and peals of laughter
the delivered prisoners, on their return, set out their adventure in
exuberant wit of words and pencil.
The second opportunity came with the founding of that now famous
periodical, _La Ilustración de Madrid_; but it came too late. Becquer
was appointed director and looked to for regular contributions, while
Valeriano furnished many of the illustrations. The management had large
schemes in hand, including a _Library of Great Authors_, for which
Becquer began a translation of Dante. But now, when a certain degree of
freedom, relief and recognition had been at last attained, the strained
and fretted cord of life gave way. The first number of _La Ilustración_
appeared January 12, 1870. On September 23, Valeriano died in his
brother’s arms. On December 22, the poet, surrounded by devoted friends
to whom, with his failing breath, he commended his children, sank
exhausted into that mysterious repose on which, from boyhood, his
musings had so often dwelt. But his mocking destiny was not yet content.
His body was buried in one of those crowded city cemeteries always so
repugnant to him, San Nicolás in Madrid. His younger son did not live to
manhood; the elder, his namesake, went wrong.
His loyal friends, after raising what money they could for the children,
gathered together and published in three small volumes the most
characteristic of Becquer’s writings,--a series of lyrical poems,[2] the
letters _From My Cell_,[3] some legends and tales of unequal merit;[4]
and a few miscellaneous articles[3] on architecture, literature and the
like.
The _Rimas_ almost immediately established Becquer’s fame. He is counted
to-day among the chief lyrists of the nineteenth century. These poignant
snatches of song pass, in theme, from life to love and from love to
death. So far as they give, or purport to give, a history of the poet’s
heart, they tell of passion at first requited, then of estrangement and
despair. It is supposed that a certain Julia Espín y Guillén, later the
wife of Don Benigno Quiroga Ballesteros, a living Spaniard of
distinction, figures to some extent in the _Rimas_. The house of her
father, director of the orchestra in the _Teatro Reál_, was a resort of
young musicians, artists and men of letters, and here Becquer, during
his earlier years in Madrid, was a frequent guest. There seems little
doubt that his youthful devotion was given, though in silence, to this
disdainful brunette, but the poems likewise tell of a love “of gold and
snow.” There is a green-eyed maiden, too, whom he essays to comfort for
this peculiarity,--though, indeed, eyes of jewel green, strangely
fascinating, are not rare in Spain. He may have had her in mind in
writing his legend of _The Emerald Eyes_. And one of the most beautiful
lyrics follows out the slight thread of story in _Three Dates_,
representing the poet as gazing night after night up from that ancient
Toledo square, with its glorified rubbish-heap, to the ogive windows of
the convent where the nun who had so thrilled his imagination was
immured. Over the spirit of Becquer, to whom the immaterial was ever
more real than the material, no one actual woman held lasting sway. He
tells the truth of the matter in his eleventh lyric:
I am black and comely; my lips are glowing;
I am passion; my heart is hot;
The rapture of life in my veins is flowing.
For me thou callest?--I call thee not.
Pale is my forehead and gold my tresses;
Endless comforts are locked in me,
Treasure of hearthside tendernesses.
’Tis I whom thou seekest?--Nay, not thee.
I am a dream, afar, forbidden.
Vague as the mist on the mountain-brow,
A bodiless glory, haunting, hidden;
I cannot love thee.--Oh, come! come thou!
Becquer himself was wont to ascribe the premature death of poets, that
breaking of the harp while yet the golden chords have yielded but their
least of melodies, to a restless fulness of life, the imprisoned vapor
that bursts the vessel. This appears with pathetic emphasis in the
_Introduction_ that he wrote, not long before his death, for a projected
volume of tales and fantasies. He felt that he must rid his fevered
brain of their importunity, but he had begun to give expression to only
one, _The Woman of Stone_, when death broke the magic pen. The story
remains a fragment,[5] not passing beyond its opening pages of rich
artistic description, nor can its course be clearly conjectured even
though in _The Kiss_, and in the closing passages of his _Literary
Letters to a Woman_, his imagination hovers about the theme. He left,
like Hawthorne, many tantalizing titles that suggest the greatness of
our loss. That drama on “The Brothers of Sorrow,” that poem on the
discovery of America, those Andalusian novels on “The Last Minstrel,”
“To Live or Not to Live,” those Toledo legends on “The Foundress of
Convents,” “_El Cristo de la Vega_,” “The Angel Musicians,” those
fantasies on “Light and Snow,” “The Diana of the Indies,” “The Life of
the Dead,”--these are but a few of the conceptions that teemed in his
mind but found no outlet to the world. It seemed to his friends, who
knew the man and had listened to his marvellous talk, that the scanty
handful of tales they could collect from newspapers here and there made
so inadequate a showing as almost to misrepresent his powers. Yet
however thwarted and wronged by circumstance this harvest of his
imagination may be, it deserves attention if only for its finer and less
obvious qualities. Becquer charges himself with a melancholy
temperament, and seldom, in fact, do we find in these pages the blither
humor playing in _The Set of Emeralds_; but the occasional morbidness of
his tone is due rather, it would seem, to illness and its consequent
despondency than to any native quality of his thought. He deals too much
in the horrible for modern taste, but he cannot claim, like Baudelaire,
to have “invented a new shudder.” Tales grounded in folk-lore are bound
to contain elements of superstitious terror, and the affinity of these
legends in that respect is rather with German balladry and the earlier
romanticism in general than with the genius of Poe. Becquer’s truer
kinship is with Hawthorne, whose outer faculty of close and minute
observation is his as well as the inner preoccupation with mystery and
symbol. All the senses of this young Spaniard seem to have been of the
finest, his exquisite hearing entering into these tales as effectively
as his keen sight; but he is most himself in presence of the dim, the
fugitive, the impalpable. His mind was essentially mystical. His
religion was not without its human side. In brooding on the inequalities
of the mortal lot, he finds comfort in the reflection: “God, though
invisible, yet holds a hand outreached to lift a little the burden that
presses on the poor.” But faith in him was of the very fibre of
imagination. He even lent a certain sympathetic credence to the mediæval
legends of the Church, at least when the spell of Toledo was upon him.
“Outside the place that guards their memory,” he says, “far from the
precincts which still preserve their traces, and where we seem yet to
breathe the atmosphere of the ages that gave them being, traditions lose
their poetic mystery, their inexplicable hold upon the soul. At a
distance we question, we analyze, we doubt; but there faith, like a
secret revelation, illuminates the spirit, and we believe.” In a letter
from Veruela to a lady of his acquaintance, a letter relating a brief
but lovely legend[6] of an appearance of the Virgin, he asserts: “Only
the hand of faith can touch the delicate flowers of tradition.” “God,”
he elsewhere says, “is the glowing, eternal centre of all beauty.”
The writer of these tales described himself thus: “I have a special
predilection for all that which cannot be vulgarized by the touch and
the judgment of the indifferent multitude. If I were to paint
landscapes, I would paint them without figures. I like the fleeting
ideas that slip away without leaving a trace on the understandings of
practical folk, like a drop of water over a marble shelf. In the cities
I visit, I seek the narrow, lonely streets; in the edifices I examine,
the dusky nooks and corners of the inner courts, where grass springs up,
and moisture enriches with its patches of greenish color the parched
tint of the wall; in the women who impress me, the hint of mystery that
I think I see shining with wavering light in the depths of their eyes,
like the glimmer of a lamp that burns unknown and unsuspected in the
sanctuary of their hearts; even in the blossoms of a shrub, I believe
there is for me something more potent and exciting in the one that
hides beneath the leaves and there, concealed, fills the air with
fragrance, unprofaned by human gaze. In all this I find a certain
unsullied purity of feelings and of things.”
Becquer goes on to admit that this “pronounced inclination sometimes
degenerates into extravagances.”