The Magic of Spain

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

I.—Revival. Fernán Caballero

THE success of “Don Quixote” might have been expected to fire a host of imitators, but the seventeenth century in Spain was given rather to the drama than to the novel, and the eighteenth century “was an age of barrenness in Spain, so far as concerns romance.”[99] In the first half of the nineteenth century the Spanish novel was for the most part a pale imitation of Sir Walter Scott, and these somewhat insipid romances, in spite of the wealth of subjects afforded by Spanish history, were not genuinely Spanish; they were due to a taste imported by returning exiles, and were not a natural growth of the soil. Thus the Condesa Pardo Bazán could say that in Spain the novel has no yesterday, only an anteayer, a day before yesterday, and the appearance of Fernán Caballero’s “La Gaviota” was hailed by a Spanish critic as a link between Cervantes and the nineteenth century. It marked, indeed, the revival of realistic fiction in Spain. Cecilia Böhl von Faber, daughter of a distinguished German settled in Spain, was born in Switzerland in 1796, but passed nearly the whole of her life in Spain, and chiefly at Seville. She combined German depth with the wit and clear vision of Andalucía. A discerning Madrid critic reviewing “La Gaviota,” the first published work of the then unknown Fernán Caballero—it had been written first in French, and now appeared in Spanish in the pages of “El Heraldo” (1848-49)—said that it displayed a mixture of the German and Andalusian Schools, the pencil of Dürer, and the colouring of Murillo. A character in “La Gaviota” observes: “Were I Queen of Spain, I would command a novel of customs to be written in every province.” It was the novela de costumbres that Fernán Caballero wrote with such brilliant success. She wished, she said, to show Spain as it really was, and not as it was commonly painted by foreigners.

Cecilia Böhl von Faber was thrice married—to Spaniards—and it was as Marquesa de Arco Hermoso, living on her husband’s estate at Dos Hermanas, a small village near Seville, that the idea first occurred to her to collect the fast-disappearing customs and traditions of the peasants. She came into frequent touch with them owing to her wish to learn their individual needs, and know how best to administer her charity. The thirteen years from her second marriage in 1822, to the death of the Marqués de Arco Hermoso, in 1835, were spent mainly at Seville, at their house in the Plaza de San Vicente, or in the neighbourhood. The story La Familia de Albareda, the scene of which is Dos Hermanas, was then written, from events that actually occurred in this village, although it was not published till later. It was when her third husband was absent in Australia that she thought of publishing her stories, and took her nom de plume from a small village of La Mancha, called Fernán Caballero. The appearance of “La Gaviota,” which is, indeed, one of the best, if not the best, of Fernán’s novels, aroused considerable surprise and enthusiasm, and many surmises as to who might be the author. It was a work so unlike the romantic tales and insipid imitations then in vogue; it showed so fresh and spontaneous an inspiration. Here were no echoes of older novelists; all was written from keen personal observation, and the reader was enabled by the author’s art to realize in words scenes and characters which he had known and felt, but had been unable to express.

After the tragic death of her third husband, in 1859, Fernán Caballero was firmly resolved to enter a convent, but her friends did their utmost to dissuade her, and she believed, moreover, that the only books she would be allowed to read would be those of devotion. Finally she gave up this idea, and lived for nearly ten years in one of the houses of the Patio de las Banderas in the Seville Alcázar, granted to her by Queen Isabel II. It would be difficult to imagine a more pleasant home for a writer. On one side the beautiful gardens of the Alcázar, with their myrtles, palms, and oranges, clipped box-hedges, and white marble fountains; on the other the Plaza del Triunfo, planted with orange-trees, acacias and palms, and the Cathedral and wonderful Giralda tower. The Revolution of 1868 came to destroy this peace. The Alcázar became for the time the property of the nation, and Fernán Caballero was driven to seek a home elsewhere. She was for other reasons, as a devout Roman Catholic and Royalist, deeply distressed by the Revolution and its sacrilegious results in Seville. The pettiness of many revolutionary measures was shown by the fact that the night-watchmen—the serenos—of Seville were forbidden, in calling out the hours, to use the traditional preface “Ave María Purísima.” Fernán Caballero obtained the reversal of this decree. She lived to listen with tears of joy to the bells of the Giralda, as they rang out the news of the Restoration and the beginning of Alfonso XII.’s reign. She was then living in the curving, silent bye-steet that now bears her name. No. 14 is distinguished from the other houses by having, besides the patio, a garden with a large lemon-tree, and other shrubs. Here she died in the spring of 1877, in her eighty-first year. The Queen came to visit her here, and a memorial tablet was placed above the entrance of the house by her friends the Duke and Duchess of Montpensier.

The quality that gives imperishable value to Fernán’s work is its truth: the scenes are at once felt to be real, the characters are living. She reproduces the lively mirth and malicious wit of the andaluz peasant, the gay laughter-loving nature of the Sevillians, with their keen perception of the false and the ridiculous. She describes a Seville patio (in “Elia”), or a bull-fight (in “La Gaviota”), or a country house, quinta (in “Clemencia”), or a deserted convent (in “La Gaviota”) with a delicate minuteness of detail that brings them vividly before us. Writing of simple, everyday events, as in the preface she characterizes those of “Elia,” she paints them with unsurpassed clearness and vigour, and much of the piquancy and charm, the sal y pimienta, of the South is in her pages. There are in her works some scenes that in sobriety and psychological skill are worthy of Stendhal. Her characters are drawn from life with the sure and penetrating analysis of genius. Perhaps the best example of all is the character of Marisalada in “La Gaviota,” but the slighter figures, the conservative General Santa María and the bull-fighter Pepe Vera, in the same novel, the vivacious, charitable Asistenta in “Elia” (having much in common with Fernán’s own character), who is unmoved by the discovery of a Roman epitaph on one of her farms and refuses to believe that there is a land where bishops marry, Marcial and Jenaro in “Lágrimas”—all these and many more are sketched with masterly skill. It is when they treat of country scenes and peasant life that the novels of Fernán Caballero are at their best, as the first half of “La Gaviota” in the village of Villamar, or a part of “Clemencia” (1852) in the village of Villa-María. The character of Don Martín of Villa-María and the scene of his interview with the importunate Tía Latrana are thoroughly in the manner of Pereda. So, too, is the wife of the village mayor in “Lágrimas.” “Haber gastadu mis cuartus” she exclaims—and the use of dialect, so freely employed by Pereda, is noticeable—“en facere de esse fillu meu un hulgazán! Non me lo dejú para esu mi tíu Bartulumé, es verdad.” The foreigners at Seville are portrayed with less sympathy; so we have Sir John Burnwood, who has come to Seville in order to ride up the Giralda, and, finding this impossible, proposes to buy the Alcázar, or Sir George Percy, who is admitted to have noble qualities, but allowed to show unmistakably bad taste.

Fernán Caballero is not afraid of interrupting her story by digressions, whether their object be to inculcate virtue, to exalt the Roman Catholic religion, or to ridicule the importers of foreign fashions and foreign phrases into Spain. Sometimes, as in “Lágrimas,” this is carried to excess and rather spoils the effect of the story, but in most of her works the digressions are never altogether wearisome; the original and fascinating character that won for Cecilia Böhl von Faber a host of friends is not often or for long absent from the novels and relaciones of Fernán Caballero. It has been observed that “La Gaviota,” though it contains scarcely any action, has not a line too much. “No aspiramos á causar efecto,” says the preface of “La Familia de Albareda,” and it is this very absence of thrilling action or melodramatic effect that gives so permanent a charm to Fernán’s works. For a proper appreciation of Seville and Andalucía they are invaluable: there is not one of them in which some trait explanatory of the Sevillian and andaluz characters does not appear. A recent Spanish writer quite unjustly denies that Fernán Caballero shows any of the sal andaluza, and is of opinion that her work has not left a deep trace in Spanish literature, but must be considered rather as a preparation for the higher flights of the novelists who followed. It is difficult to agree with this view. Fernán Caballero not only hoisted the flag of true Spanish realism, and pointed to a land of promise, but carved for herself a very real and abiding empire in this land of her rediscovery.