III.—In the Twentieth Century.
The novel continues to hold the field in Spanish literature. The early years of the twentieth century saw the death of two splendid writers, Valera (1824-1905), and Pereda (1833-1906), and Leopoldo Alas died in 1901. Of the older novelists, Pérez Galdós, the Condesa Pardo Bazán,[104] Palacio Valdés, and Jacinto Octavio Picón[105] still remain, and a brilliant group of younger writers is ready to pass on the torch undimmed. Pérez Galdós’ “El Caballero Encantado” is dated July-December, 1909. Writing immediately after the Barcelona riots, it was natural that the condition and future of Spain should be in his thoughts, and an allegorical figure representing Spain or the spirit of the race plays a prominent part in the book. The novel has, indeed, a little too much of the marvellous and the symbolical, and when the hero by a last transformation becomes a fish in the river Tagus, we are uncomfortably reminded of the spurious and fantastical continuation of Lazarillo de Tormes, in which Lázaro is transformed into a tunny-fish. The reason given by Señor Pérez Galdós is, however, excellent: “To this sad dwelling (the silent depths of the Tagus) come those who by their loquacity have drowned the will and thought of Spanish life in an ocean of words. Nearly all those here present are orators. They spoke much, and did nothing. Some of them are masters of high-sounding phrases, conjurers who, by the magic of their art and the vanity of their rhetoric, transformed the tower of eloquence into a tower of Babel.” The theme of the book is that Don Carlos de Tarsis, the young Marqués de Mudarra, deputy for a district of the geographical existence of which he has but a vague idea, who lives at Madrid, and spends with both hands the money drained from his estates, is magically changed into a farm-labourer on his land, or rather, on the land that was his, and now belongs in part to his agent, in part to his usurer. For to meet the expenses of his idle and dissipated life he must have money at any cost; but when the rents of his tenants are raised they emigrate, and his agent, who attributes the backwardness of agriculture in Spain to the fact that “the great land-owners live far from their estates as though they were ashamed of them,” supplies him with ever-diminishing sums, till he is reduced to penury and usurers. Tarsis recognizes that he is a most unworthy acolyte of Idleness, and that his only merit is “the brutal sincerity of his pessimism,” but he “would rather die than work.” So far the character is drawn from life, and it is only in the vagueness of the subsequent enchantments that the effect of the novel becomes veiled and uncertain. From a farm-labourer he successively becomes shepherd, quarryman, tramp, and criminal—all with much needless magic—till, by the final ordeal of silence in the golden Tagus, he is restored to his original being as Marqués de Mudarra, a chastened and a wiser marquis. Stress is laid on the miserable state of the poor, compared with the immunity of the rich. Famishing men are dragged off to prison for rooting up onions on a rich man’s estate, and shot down by the Guardia Civil when they try to escape—the official report runs: “the prisoners attempted to escape, and were overtaken by an accident from which a natural death ensued.” There is perhaps a greater air of reality about the account of the rich Caciques, owners of vast estates or latifundios, who pay to the Treasury but a tenth part of the proper land-tax, who falsify returns at elections, protect criminals, and assault honest folk, while the judges are their creatures. This Caciquismo is part of the deplorable administration of Spain. Señor Pérez Galdós who, as a native of the Canary Islands, has the double advantage of looking at Spain as it were from within and from without, returns to the question of words and deeds, the wealth of words and the scantiness of action, with an insistence which must be excessively annoying to a Spanish reader. Yet he does not despair of Spain’s future. He sees hope in the proved vitality of the race, in its quick recoveries after misfortune, its heroism even under self-inflicted sufferings: “The ineffable follies of my sons have plunged me (i.e. Spain) in despair, and in the darkness of despair my death has seemed certain and inevitable. And then in some terrible crisis that appeared to ensure my destruction, I have revived when they were carrying me from the death-bed to the grave.”
The best work of Pereda was of the Mountain, Valera and Fernán Caballero write of Andalucía, Palacio Valdés of Astúrias, and similarly the Gallegans, Valle-Inclán and Señora Pardo Bazán have found their best inspiration in Galicia, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in his native Valencia. Valencia is a fertile land of fierce heat and dazzling light—the light so wonderfully reflected in the work of the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla. Blasco Ibánez has written some striking novels that have no connection with Valencia, but his best and most delightful work is steeped in the life of the immense Valencian plain (in “La Barraca,” an intense story of a boycott of the Huerta); of the city of Valencia (in “Arroz y Tartana”); of the rice-growing, fever-stricken marshes of the Albufera, famous for its fishing and shooting, near Valencia (“Cañas y Barro”); of the fishermen and smugglers of El Grao and the Valencian coastline (“Flor de Mayo”); of love among the oranges in the orchard of Spain (“Entre Naranjos”). Blasco Ibáñez excels in portraying the lives and thoughts and struggles of the simple fisherman and peasant—hardworking as Batiste, or magnificently idle as Pimentó; and in describing popular customs and traditions,—a simple procession in floodtime (as in “Entre Naranjos”) or the dances and festeigs, courtings, of the atlóts and atlotas of Ibiza (in “Los Muertos mandan”). The hero of “Los Muertos mandan” (1909), Don Jaime or Chaume, is not a peasant, but a member of an ancient family of Mallorcan nobles, hemmed in by tradition and inherited instincts. The background, however, of descriptions of Mallorca and lawless peasant life in Ibiza, with its woods and orchards and white farms girt by a green transparent sea, contribute more powerfully to the charm of the book than the wrestling of Don Jaime against the clinging influence of the innumerable dead, who still prevail. But, indeed, Blasco Ibáñez’ presentation of any strenuous life-struggle is forcible and imposing. It reflects his own personality. His creed is one of restless striving and discontent with the apathy too frequent in Spain. His activity is immense: though little over forty years of age, his novels are already many in number, short stories and articles are continually appearing from his pen, he lectures, travels, translates, publishes, controls a Valencian paper, El Pueblo, and till the autumn of 1908 represented Valencia in Parliament as a Republican; now his energies are occupied in founding two towns—to be called New Valencia and Cervantes—for colonies of Valencians in the Argentine.
Blasco Ibáñez once wrote a long novel of the French Revolution, “Viva la República!” and in his ideas and in his art the influence of France has, no doubt, been very strong. His ideas sometimes trespass on his art, as in “La Catedral,” where, in the person of Gabriel Luna, he declaims tediously and without mercy. His novels, as a rule, show an admirable unity. In each of his heroes we see Blasco Ibáñez: but Blasco Ibáñez entirely identified with the peasant Batiste (in “La Barraca”), or the painter Renovales (in “La Maja Desnuda”), or the Socialist Luna (in “La Catedral”), or the bull-fighter Gallardo (in “Sangre y Arena”). His very manner catches the atmosphere and colour of the surroundings he describes. He becomes vulgar in the descriptions of commercial, crowded Valencia, wearisome in details of the feasts of its bourgeois and the various foods of its market-place (in “Arroz y Tartana”); he can be magnificently simple, with the soul of a peasant or a fisherman (in “La Barraca” and “Flor de Mayo”), and the fertile Huerta gives free scope to his luxuriant art, his overflow of poetry and imagination. This power of concentration, which Blasco Ibáñez possesses in so high a degree, is rare in Spanish literature. The heroes of Blasco Ibáñez’ novels are men strong to labour, persistent before defeat. They are almost always defeated and die, Gallardo in the arena, Luna assassinated in Toledo Cathedral, the Pascuals, fishermen of three generations, drowned in storms off the Valencian coast. But the dominant note of his novels is still “E pur si muove,” and in spirit his heroes are as unconquerable as Don Quixote. He has Zola’s power of describing crowds; in “La Horda” appears the multitude of hucksters and street-sellers that haunt the Madrid Rastro; and similarly the background of “Luna Benamor” (1909) is formed by a vivid description of Gibraltar, with its motley crowd of Spaniards and Jews and Moors and Englishmen. His prose is suited to these descriptions; it is living, coloured, tumultuous, sometimes hurried and careless—a Spanish critic speaks of his barbarismos gramaticales. From so voluminous and passionate a writer we should expect nothing of the polished or the exquisite, his work is in the rough; in a sense its incorrect ardour is Spanish, but its persistent energy is a refreshing note in Spain, and may well cover an occasional fault of taste or an ungrammatical sentence here and there. His works are nearly always striking and original, however hurried may have been their composition.
It has been remarked that the younger Spanish novelists are rather thinkers than artists, and Pío Baroja, Martínez Ruiz (Azorín) and Valle-Inclán have introduced an almost alien note into Spanish literature. It is significant that two at least of these writers, Azorín and Pío Baroja, are keen admirers of the essentially intellectual art of El Greco: Theotocopuli has cast over them the spell of his ascetically thin figures and cold attenuated tints. Pío Baroja is almost Russian in his pitilessly accurate descriptions, in his rebellion against the facts of life and his championship of the persecuted—outcasts, criminals, and vagabonds. In “La Ciudad de la Niebla” (1909), “The City of Fog,” he brings his clear, almost photographic, vision to bear on London, and chiefly on the dingier districts, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, the squalid labyrinth of streets off Shaftesbury Avenue, the Docks, the Embankment. Similarly in “César ó Nada” (1910) he continues to write in a spirit of mocking reckless individualism. The narrative is but a slender thread to string together his observations of men and places.[106] Azorín, again, is not concerned with the form of his novels. He is a thinker, a psychological analyst, who deliberately disregards construction. Yuste, in “La Voluntad,” voices the author’s opinions; “Particularly,” he says, “the novel must have no plot; life itself has no plot: it is varied, many-sided, floating, contradictory—everything except symmetrical, geometrical, rigid, as it appears in novels.” The novel must give fragments, separate sensations. In “Las Confesiones de un pequeño filósofo” Azorín gives us his original impressions, his fragmentary sensations of “figures et choses qui passaient” in a style full of poetry and charm. His “La Voluntad” is a book very modern in its restless thought and individualistic philosophy. It has that originality of which Yuste, the philosopher of the book, speaks as consisting in “something undefinable, a secret fascination of thought, a mysterious suggestiveness of ideas.” The rare charm of Azorín’s style and his skill in descriptions, emoción del paisaje, imaginatio locorum, clothe with serenity his “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” and with peace his purely intellectual spirit and disquieting irony. With Ramón del Valle-Inclán, again, construction and plot are secondary. The action is slightly sketched in his novels, but incidents and persons are thrown into high relief by the delicate and original character of his style. It is a style built up of all that is rare and exquisite, with a sobriety that chisels a finished picture in a single phrase. In “El Resplandor de la Hoguera,” for instance, a green path leading from a small Basque village to its cemetery is simply described as “todo en paz de oratión,” and such lonely word pictures abound in his writings. His latest work, a trilogy, is “La Guerra Carlista,” and the action of the first part, “Los Cruzados de la Causa” (1908), passes in a village of Galicia. The haughty, great-hearted Gallegan hidalgo Don Juan Manuel, perhaps the best of Valle-Inclán’s vivid character-sketches, appears in this as in many others of his novels. The second part, “El Resplandor de la Hoguera” (1909), follows the broken movements of the guerilla fighting in the intricate Basque country; and the third part (each part forming, however, a separate novel), “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909), describes the furtive but daring tactics of that sinister Carlist cabecilla, Manuel Santa Cruz, priest of Hernialde, leading his men at night, “swift and silent as a wolf,” by labyrinthine mountain paths, past maize-fields and chestnut-trees and vineyards, and scented meadows under the stars, or ordering execution after execution of men and women “with a mystical coldness and internal peace.” His cruelty was that of the peasant who lights a fire to destroy the plagues of his vineyard. He watched the smoke go up as an evening sacrifice—
“Lo que á unos encendía en amor, á los otros los encendía en odio, y el cabecilla pasaba entre el incendio y el saqueo, anhelando el amanecer de paz para aquellas aldeas húmedas y verdes, que regulaban su vida por la voz de las campanas, al ir al campo, al yantar, al cubrir el fuego de ceniza y llevar á los pesebres el recado de yerba. Era su crueldad como la del viñador que enciende hogueras contra las plagas de su viña. Miraba subir el humo como en un sacrificio, con la serena esperanza de hacer la vendimia en un día del Señor, bajo el oro del sol y la voz de aquellas campanas de cobre antiguo, bien tañidas.”
It is difficult to analyse the fascination of these novels. Their incidents seem trivial enough and the characters speak in thin, broken sentences; but the effect is a marvellously vivid picture of the flickering scenes of the last Carlist war and the hill tactics of the cabecillas. The thin lines are due not to any poverty of inspiration but to the restraint of a consummate artist. The most recent Spanish novelist of note is Ricardo León, a young writer from Málaga, whose first novel, “Casta de Hidalgos,” was published in the autumn of 1908, followed by “Comedia Sentimental” in 1909, and “Alcalá de los Zegríes,” “La Escuela de los Sofistas” (a volume of dialogues), and “El Amor de los Amores” in 1910. These books are the work of a writer who has read and assimilated the best of Spanish literature from its earliest beginnings, chronicles, legends, serranillas, fervent religious treatises. His style is, indeed, not unworthy of the Spanish mystics. It has at once richness and sobriety, it is steeped in archaic humanism, but tinged with modern sadness and disillusion; it is, as the author might himself call it, “un castellano de clásico sabor.” It has in it nothing strained or artificial, being, rather, the flowing expression of a mystical intensity. He gives admirable pictures of the thoughts and lives of old-fashioned proud hidalgos, “after the pattern of the ancient hidalgos of Castille,” such as Don Juan Manuel, who lives in ruinous Santillana with its sadness of centuries, tristeza milenaria, in “Casta de Hidalgos;” or of serious, reserved philosophers, such as Don Juan Antonio in “Comedia Sentimental.” “Alcalá de los Zegríes” contains many passages of noble Spanish prose, and others of psychological interest; but it is for the most part concerned with politics and party strife. The Spaniards, as a rule, are more interested in politics than in literature. Valera’s celebrated “Pepita Jiménez” brought him no more than eight thousand reales, or under £80, and Señor Unamuno, the Rector of Salamanca University, a prominent Spanish thinker and writer, has declared that literary opinion in Spain is formed by some five hundred persons, “quinientas personas mal contadas.” The novelists may protest, but the novel gains. There is no temptation to write in order to please the taste of a public which does not exist. If there is something commercial in the methodical output of Pérez Galdós’ or Blasco Ibáñez’ novels, commercialism has certainly, hitherto, had but little part in Spanish literature. Limited, unliterary Spain has had this advantage. The world’s debate has not vulgarized it; a half-culture has not dragged down the novel to flamboyant, self-advertising methods. The novel in Spain is at its best when it rejects, or has not come into contact with, foreign influences. It can be realistic without thought of this or that school. It fascinates by its original flavour and scent of the soil.
XX
NOVELS OF GALICIA
THE inhabitants of Galicia have been held to be the Boeotians of Spain, yet the fact that in the political world many eminent persons are Gallegans seems to show that Galicia has been maligned. To Galicia, too, belong two gifted modern writers, the Condesa Emilia Pardo Bazán and Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Señora Pardo Bazán belongs to the older group of Spanish novelists; born in 1851,[107] she published her two well-known novels of Galicia, “Los Pazos de Ulloa,” and “La Madre Naturaleza,” in 1886 and 1887, and “De mi tierra,” a book of scenes and essays of Galicia, in 1888. It is as a regional novelist that Señora Pardo Bazán has won her most glorious laurels. “Galicienne ella adore les choses de la Galice,” says M. Vézinet,[108] and he adds that she develops the same subjects as French naturalists, but avoids the licentiousness of which they are so fond. The multitude of her tasks and interests has necessarily hampered her art as a novelist. “She has unfortunately diffused her energies in all directions,” says Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly. “No one can succeed in everything—as a poet, a romancer, an essayist, a critic, a lecturer, and a politician. Yet the Condesa Pardo Bazán is all this, and more. We would gladly exchange all her miscellaneous writings for another novel like ‘Los Pazos de Ulloa.’”[109]
“Los Pazos de Ulloa” is a novel impregnated with the atmosphere of Galicia. Los Pazos is a large country-house in a remote valley of maize and vines and chestnuts, reached on horseback through a desolate wolf-country, país de lobos. Its furniture is rickety, its window-frames have no glass, though it is not so ruinous as Los Pazos de Limioso some leagues away, which lacks even window-frames. The village priest of Ulloa has but two devotions, those of the jarro and the escopeta, the wine-jar and the gun; the drinking of water and the use of soap he holds alike to be effeminate. The Marqués de Ulloa, too, frank, noble at heart, but cynical, often brutal, spends much of his time at village fairs, and shooting partridges in the maize or among pines and scented hill-plants. He is totally in the power of his servant Primitivo, who manages his estates. Primitivo, too, holds the peasants, as he says, in the palm of his hand. They are patient workers who, however, in the opinion of the Marqués de Ulloa, need a strong hand to control them—some one like Primitivo que les dé ciento de ventaja en picardía, that is, who will know two tricks to their one. When the Marqués disburdens himself to the new chaplain, Don Julián, in the wild neglected garden, on the subject of Primitivo, he becomes aware by a rustling in the undergrowth that Primitivo has been listening to the outburst. When, as a first step to freedom, he determines to leave Los Pazos on a visit to his uncle at Santiago de Compostella, Primitivo makes no open opposition, but the mare is unshod, the donkey has been mysteriously wounded. The Marqués and Julián determine to go on foot to Cebre, where they will take the diligence. The path grows wilder, the woods close in more thickly, a cross shows where a man has been killed, there is no sound but that of the woodcutters among the chestnuts. The Marqués, keenly alert, sees the glint of a gun’s barrel in the brushwood pointing at the chaplain, who is held to be the instigator of this rebellion. It is Primitivo “out shooting.” The book is a gloomy picture of a rich country ruined by mismanagement, underhand dealing, and ignorance. The Marqués de Ulloa’s agent has the peasants so completely in his power that he is able to turn the scale of an election. He began by methodically robbing his master in the administration of his estate, and the money so obtained he lends to the peasants, who are driven to borrow that they may be able to continue to work their land. Primitivo charges an interest of eight per cent. (per month), and in years of famine he raises the interest. The country and its inhabitants are described with a master-hand. Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán is one of the new school of Spanish novelists, and properly belongs to the twentieth century. He is above all things a stylist. In his sutiles prosas there is an exquisite restraint, with here and there a tinge of archaism and a haunting music of soft languid cadences. He loves the rare, the delicate, the costly, and his art is to write of luxury in sober phrases, instinct with sadness and the magic of regret. It is a style of silk and cut crystal, as of silver-work or polished ivory handled by thin ascetic fingers. In his four “Sonatas” (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter) we have the memoirs of the Marqués de Bradomín, the recollections of his former loves. The scene of “Sonata de Primavera” is an Italian palazzo with the lilacs in flower along its terraces and roses filling the garden between the cypresses, while the scene of “Sonata de Estío” is Mexico in all the luxurious growth of its summer vegetation. In the “Sonata de Invierno” the scene is the Carlist Court at Estella and the setting is more gloomy. The Marquis loses an arm in the service of King Charles VII., and from the window of his sick-room at Villareal de Navarra looks out on a road lined with leafless poplars and mountains flecked with snow. But these novels do not equal “Sonata de Otoño,” the scene of which is in Señor Valle-Inclán’s native Galicia. Two lines of Verlaine in some way describe the novel:—
“Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.”
It is a book that may be read in little more than an hour, yet it has many arresting pages. A few short sentences, words thrown here and there at random with concealed art, give a wonderfully clear picture of green, rainy Galicia, with its hills and streams. We see the hills and more hills veiled in mist, the flocks of white and black sheep, the mills, the white smoke rising from the houses among the fig-trees, the distant blue mountains tipped with the first snows, a flight of doves against green fields above the tower of a Pazo, a stony bridle-path with its bramble hedges and great pools of water at which oxen drink, the peasants arriving to pay their tribute of corn at the Palacio, the shepherds coming down from the hills wearing their capes of reeds. Women return singing from the fountain, an old man drives on his cows as they stop to graze, a half-witted woman gathers scented herbs and simples that have mickle grace to “give health to the soul and cure the ills of the herd.” And there is the Palacio de Bradomín, with its flight of wide granite steps; a path leads to it through the green, drenched countryside, and the autumn sun lights up its windows among tall chestnut-trees. A fountain trickles and birds sing in the old garden of myrtle, cedar, and cypress, still in late autumn brimmed with roses, though “the paths were covered with dry and yellow leaves that the wind swept with a slow rustling; the snails, motionless como viejos paralíticos, as old paralytics, were taking the sun on the seats of stone.” The passages of the Palacio are long and gloomy, and cold strikes through the large silent rooms, so that in all of them logs of wood burn brightly, stirred with tongs of “ancient bronze, elaborately worked.” The bare branches of the trees graze the windows of the library, where, among the parchment bindings, reigns a monastic peace, un sueño canónico y doctoral.
It is in a minute chiselling of details that lies Señor Valle-Inclán’s strength. The snails in the garden, the shape of the glasses, the silver chains of a hanging-lamp—nothing is passed over as insignificant. But the details are given in few words, with the clear precision of a skilled craftsman. And he has the power to set his characters in strong relief. Thus in “Sonata de Otoño” we have that muy gran señor Don Juan Manuel, who on his first appearance hurries away “to Villa del Prior, to thrash a clerk.” It is his custom to ride over from his country-house, his Pazo, two leagues away, tie his horse to the Palacio garden-gate, enter and call to a servant for wine—for that excellent vino de la Fontela which would be the best in the world, he says, if pressed from selected grapes—drink and fall asleep, and then waking up call loudly for his horse, whether it chances to be night or day, and ride back to his Pazo. There is a glimpse of the mother of Concha, who would tell the children stories of the saints, and with “mystic, noble fingers” slowly turn the pages to show them the pictures of the Christian Year; of the mother of Xavier, who would pass her days in the recess of a wide balcony spinning for her servants, in a chair of crimson velvet studded with silver nails. There is thin, white Concha, so saintly and so frail; there is Xavier, Marqués de Bradomín, himself, the gallant, cynical sceptic; there is the page Florisel, the old servant Candelaria, with their rare and far-sought names.
In “Flor de Santidad,” perhaps the best of Señor Valle-Inclán’s books, we have the same delicate descriptions of Galicia—the sinister inn, solitary in a gloomy brown Sierra; the shepherdess, keeping her flock and seeing mystic visions among the Celtic stones, yellowed with ancient lichens, líquenes milenarios; the simple greeting of the peasants: Alabado sea Dios, “Glory be to God”; pilgrims and witches; charms and magical incantations to preserve the flocks from evil; cunning and simplicity, superstition and crime. The same charm of mystical simplicity and innocence that surrounds Adega, the girl shepherdess of “Flor de Santidad,” surrounds all the heroines of Señor Valle-Inclán’s novels; Maximina, for instance, of the sorrowful, velvet eyes, ojos aterciopelados y tristes, in “Sonata de Invierno.” It is in “Flor de Santidad” that occurs the picture, repeated in “Jardín Novelesco,” of the old peasant woman going with her little grandson to find him a master. They meet the Archpriest of Lestrove, who is riding leisurely—de andadura mansa y doctoral—to preach at a village festival. “May God give us a holy and good day.” The Archpriest draws in his mare. “Are you going to the fair?” he asks. “The poor have nothing to do at the fair. We are going to look for a master for the boy.” “And does he know his catechism?” “Yes, Señor, he knows it. Poverty does not prevent from being a Christian.” The grandmother leaves the nine-year-old child in the service of a blind beggar. “To be the servant of a blind man is a position many would like to have,” says the beggar, and the new Lazarillo answers sorrowfully, “Sí, Señor, sí.” As she watches them go slowly away along the road through the wet green country, she murmurs, drying her tears: “Nine years old and already earning the bread he eats. Glory be to God.”
Incidents and characters are thrown into the relief given by the peculiar and original magic of Señor Valle-Inclán’s delicately chiselled prose. There is in this prose something icily fresh, something of lilacs and hydrangeas, vague reminiscences of the silver tinkling of voices in a glass-roofed market, or of the swish of a scythe in wet grass. The words are cunningly weighed and chosen and set as gouttes d’argent d’orfévrerie. And the transparent freshness of his style is admirably suited to describe the primitive simplicity and freshness of Galicia.