II.—1870-1900.
In 1864 Pereda published his first work, “Escenas montañesas,” and ten years later, and three before the death of Fernán Caballero, appeared Valera’s first novel, “Pepita Jiménez,” and Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Since 1874 scarcely a year has passed without producing a Spanish novel that deserves a high rank in literature. Yet Pereda[100] did not at once impose himself, and early in 1874 Pérez Galdós could put the following words into the mouth of one of the characters in Napoleón en Chamartín: “In the matter of novels we are so far astray that, after producing the source of all the novels of the world, and the most entertaining book ever written by man, Spain is now unable to compose a novel of more worth than a grain of mustard seed, and translates these sentimental French stories.”
Similarly, Señor Menéndez y Pelayo remarks that “about the year 1870, the date of Pérez Galdós’ first book, the Spanish novel was slumbering in the arms of insipid or monstrous productions, entre ñoñerías y monstruosidades.” There is little insipidity or sentimentalism in the more modern Spanish novel. Realism is the dominant note of Spanish literature. The very atmosphere of Spain makes for clear vision. Its artists are realistic, even brutally realistic, as Goya occasionally is; even its mystics have not been wrapped wholly from the world: they do not live in a cloud, insensible to the real facts of life. And in the same way the great Spanish novelists are realistic. There is, however, a true Castilian dignity about their realism. They do not, in George Meredith’s phrase, mistake the “muddy shallows” for the depths of Nature. They may treat of the vulgar and the base, but they do not treat of them in a way that is vulgar and base. They may be as outspoken as Martial, but their realism is eminently sane and clean.
The modern fashion, strongly in favour of realism, should do justice to the merits of Spanish novels. It is no doubt guided by the love of contrast that caused Stendhal, a romantic and an enthusiast at heart, to read pages of the “Code Civil” before writing his novels, and to adopt a style mathematically cold and thin, and Flaubert, a poet, to analyse a subject so vulgar as that of Madame Bovary. A simpler age may delight in works of a fantastic imagination, but a more complex and perhaps hypocritical age must have truth and away with vagueness and pretence.
Minds so complicated and many-sided as to be rarely themselves, admire the simple and concrete, and the Spanish genius, which is essentially objective, answers to this taste both in its literature and in its art. Yet it is characteristic that in many Spanish novels realism and mysticism go hand in hand. That peculiarly Spanish mysticism which shows its false side in Clarín’s “La Regenta,” its practical spirit in Palacio Valdés’ “Marta y María,” its sadness in Azorín’s “La Voluntad,” is by no writer more sympathetically treated than by Juan Valera, in “Pepita Jiménez” and other novels. Valera was too great an artist to belong to any school. He repeated in many prefaces that his aim was not to instruct or to edify, but rather to give pleasure. The old heresy that works of art should edify has had great influence in Spain, and it makes its presence felt in modern novels with a set purpose, romans à thèse. It cast its shadow over the work of Fernán Caballero and Pereda, and, passing to the enemy, reappears at intervals in Pérez Galdós and Blasco Ibáñez. But Valera would have none of it. A novel, he said, “should be poetry, not history, that is, it should paint things not as they are but fairer than they are, illuminating them with a light that may cast over them a certain charm.” The magic of his style, which he caught by his own confession from the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, supplied this charm, and is sufficient to make his work imperishable. It is a charm that is exquisite and escapes analysis, reminding of that metallic lustre in ancient Spanish azulejos, or glazed tiles, of which modern manufacturers in vain seek to recapture the secret. Valera was not, in a strict sense, a great novelist. The construction of his stories is often weak, and the characters all speak the language of Don Juan Valera. “In Valera,” it has been said, “there are no Sanchos, all are Valeras.” He was himself aware of these limitations. He would sometimes say in a preface that he was not certain if his book were or were not a novel, and as to the invariably polished speech of his characters, the conversation of the nurse Antoñona with Luis de Vargas, in “Pepita Jiménez,” is accounted for by the fact that she had prayed that it might be given her to speak on this occasion, not in grotesque language, as was her wont, but in elegant and cultured style. Similarly, Juana la Larga says to her discreet daughter Juanita, “All that you have said seems to be taken from the books that Don Pascual gives you to read.”
But Valera could delineate characters skilfully. In his longest novel, “Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino,” the hero, Señor Don Faustino López y Mendoza, is in some degree a typical figure of modern Spain. Living in his half ruinous ancestral house in the village of Villabermeja, he feels himself to be capable of great deeds, but achieves nothing. He laments not being of humble birth to become a brigand like the great José María, he laments not having been born in the eleventh or twelfth century to carve out for himself a kingdom with his sword, and he ends by obtaining a modest post at Madrid, which brings him little over £100 a year. Valera’s creations have only seemed unreal because, through the alchemy of his style, he is a King Midas, turning all to gold, and the excellence of his art raises his figures to the level of statues in Parian marble. They are not, therefore, less lifelike; because he has an “exquisite adjustment of word to thought,”[101] it does not follow that he is “without life and passion”[102]—rather the passion is raised to a white heat, with the flames no longer visible. And in his descriptions he is a true realist, giving us the light and laughter of Andalucía. His “Juanita la Larga” is a charming sketch of life in an Andalusian village that may recall Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Some of the most laughter-rousing scenes of “El Sombrero de tres picos” pass in the little stone-paved court in front of a flour mill, a quarter of a league from a certain cathedral town in Andalucía. The court is shaded by a huge vine-trellis, sufficiently thick and solid for the miller to sleep—or pretend to sleep—unnoticed among its leaves. It is a brief, delightful sketch, coloured and malicious, of Andalusian life in the first years of the nineteenth century. To Andalucía also belong two novels by Palacio Valdés, “La Hermana San Sulpicio” and “Los Majos de Cádiz.” But it is Andalucía described not by a native but by a stranger, for Palacio Valdés is of the North. He has a sense of humour rather English than Spanish, and he is, indeed, almost as well known out of Spain as within the Peninsula. It is a humour less bitter and aggressive than that of another Asturian, Leopoldo Alas, with whom Valdés collaborated in a volume of critical essays. As a sketcher of character, Valdés is admirable. Gloria, the typically Andalusian girl, and the Gallegan Sanjurjo are both excellently drawn in “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of his “Marta y María” is laid in an old town of Astúrias—the author is now in his native country—surrounded by a wide level of meadows and gently sloping hills to the ría, bordered by immense pine woods and the sea. It is a novel even more delightful than “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of “La Aldea perdida” is also Astúrias. It is a pastoral symphony, an Asturian counterpart to Pereda’s “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” a charming story—in spite of its theatrical ending—of village rivalries and reconciliations in a land wooded with chestnuts and oaks and cider-apples, a land of maize and cool green fields of trefoil, and mountain paths hedged with honeysuckle. But in other works Palacio Veldés has not maintained this Spanish inspiration. In “La Espuma,” “Maximina,” “La Fe,” the influence is that of the French naturalistic School. Clarín (Leopoldo Alas), though born at Zamora also an Asturian, was likewise deeply influenced by France in his long work “La Regenta.” In one of his critical essays Clarín wrote that “Spanish realism is very Spanish; it is in the race. But it has its defects, no todo en él es flores; it is deficient in psychology and the poetry of passion.” In “La Regenta” we have passion and psychological analysis and epigrammatic wit. The scene is the old cathedral city of Vetusta (or rather Oviedo). The treatment is not characteristically Spanish. Vetusta is here a typical provincial town, such as Flaubert might have described and hated, and its inhabitants are almost all represented as ignorant, vulgar, or vicious. Their stupidity and vulgarity are lashed with an ingenious subtlety that is unsparing, and the motives guiding their actions are laid bare with an amazing skill. Clarín’s humour is often a little cruel, and the novel is crowded with terse and biting phrases. One of the readers of the Vetusta casino—the worthiest of them, Clarín is careful to assure us—is thus pilloried in a few lines: “He arrived at nine o’clock every evening without fail, took Le Figaro and The Times, which he placed over Le Figaro, put on his gold spectacles, and, lulled by the sound of the gas, fell gently asleep over the foremost paper of the world, a privilege which no one sought to dispute. Shortly after his death of apoplexy, over The Times, it was discovered that he knew no English.”
The most prominent figure among living Spanish novelists is undoubtedly Don Benito Pérez Galdós. In his “Episodios Nacionales,” the troubled history of Spain in the nineteenth century, from the wars against Napoleon to the death of Prim, passes before us in a Spanish human comedy. We see the noble death of Churruca in the battle of Trafalgar, we witness the brief, feverish defence of Madrid before Napoleon, the heroic sieges of Zaragoza and Gerona, the stubborn resistance of Bilbao to the troops of Zumalacárregui in the first Carlist war; later we see Isabel II. silently crossing the French frontier at Irun, the effect of Castelar’s eloquence in the Cortes, Prim landing at Cadiz—these and a hundred more principal actors and events are marshalled in a succession of novels now numbering over forty. Pérez Galdós continues to write with undiminished vigour. The forty-second episode, “España Trágica” (1909), pictures Madrid opinion in street and café during the year 1870, when Spain was “in high fever,” choosing a king. The book ends with a vivid account of the assassination of Prim. His long and difficult task was crowned with success, but his presence was needed now more than ever to check the hostility of the federalists on the one hand, of the aristocracy on the other. It was the 27th December, 1870, and on the following day he was to travel to Cartagena in order to receive the Duke of Aosta. He had just left the Congreso. The night was bitterly cold and the carriage rolled silently through the snow in almost deserted streets. It was noticed that first one man and then a second stopped in the street to light a cigar. This was apparently a signal. A little further on, in the Calle del Turco, a carriage blocked the way, and almost immediately the windows of Prim’s carriage crashed in on both sides and he fell back, wounded by more than one bullet. The forty-third Episode, “Amadeo I.” (1910), describes the reign of the Italian prince which began thus tragically with the murder of Prim, continued for two years in a tragi-comedy, and ended with the dignified withdrawal of the loyal and disinterested “rey caballero,” who had been wilfully and persistently misunderstood and slighted by the subjects who had invited him to reign over them. With the Queen and their three children, including the infant Duke of the Abruzzi, he descended the steps of the Palacio del Oriente for the last time “entre alabarderos rígidos, sin música ni voces que turbaran el fúnebre silencio. Sólo el rumor de las pisadas marcaba el lento caminar de una época” (February, 1873). With this and a volume on the first Spanish Republic,[103] the fifth and final series of the Episodes marches rapidly towards completion. For forty years novels and plays from Pérez Galdós’ pen have appeared at the rate of two or more a year, and some of the novels are of considerable length—“Fortunata y Jacinta” has something like two thousand pages. Well-drawn characters and skilfully reconstructed scenes abound, but a weariness sometimes overcomes the reader. For these novels scarcely seem to have an end or a beginning; there is no plot or concentration of interest. Perhaps for this very reason they are an extremely faithful presentation of life. No one would dispute Pérez Galdós’ great talent as a writer, but his admirers may regret that he does not pause to draw more complete pictures with finished art. In his anti-clerical novel, “Doña Perfecta,” Don Inocencio represents the influence of the priest in the family. Doña Perfecta, in league with the priest, secretly sets the whole force of her wealth and power in mediæval Orbajosa in the scale against her nephew, Pepe, who wishes to marry her only child, Rosario. Pepe is looked upon in Orbajosa as an atheist and hors la loi, although he is merely a modern man of science. There is no acknowledged opposition: Doña Perfecta meets him invariably with a pleasant smile; but his letters are opened and confiscated, he finds a spirit of steady though veiled hostility in Doña Perfecta’s house and in Orbajosa, he is assured that Rosario does not love him, and he cannot convince or overcome insidious enemies who never come into the open. Finally, Doña Perfecta becomes the murderess of her nephew, though in such a way that her conscience is entirely free from sense of guilt. The end justifies the means. The character of Doña Perfecta is developed with consummate skill; Palacio Valdés thirteen years later drew a slighter sketch on the same lines—Doña Tula, Gloria’s mother (in “La Hermana San Sulpicio,” 1889). No doubt there are towns in Spain such as Orbajosa, where the spirit of the Church is bigoted and Jesuitical, opposed to all progress; or such as Nieva, in “Marta y María,” where the people consider María to be a saint who can work miracles, and bring children for her to cure them with a look, and her confessor encourages the belief; or such as Vetusta, in “La Regenta,” where Don Fermín combines a high position in the Chapter of the Cathedral with a steady traffic in Church furniture and ornaments. Yet one may sometimes wonder whether the anti-Clericals are not too inclined to attribute all the ills of Spain to the influence of the priests. “Valgame Dios y qué vida nos hemos de dar, Sancho amigo,” they seem to say, as if the dissolution of the religious orders and the separation of Church and State would at once spell prosperity in Spain. The religious communities are numerous and rich; beggars, as at Orbajosa, are also numerous (and occasionally rich), but it would be unfair to lay the blame of poverty and backwardness entirely on the Church. There are many other causes, one of them the dissipated, careless life of society in the large towns, sketched by el padre Luis Coloma in his novel “Pequeñeces,” and by Pérez Galdós himself in “El Caballero Encantado.”