The Magic of Spain

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

I.—“Savour of the Soil”

FIFTY years ago, before Zola and the naturalistic school were on the lips of men, a Spanish novelist, José María de Pereda, was beginning to write who can only not be called a naturalist, because of the associations given to the name in France. Humour and frankness run through Spanish literature; there is less artificial refinement and more vigour and broadly human sympathy than in the literature of France. The very language is frank and outspoken rather than subtle and insinuating. And the nobly independent character of Spaniards of all classes counts for much in the admirable sanity of Spanish realism. “Our lowest social strata,” says the Condesa Pardo Bazán, “differ not a little from those described by Zola and the Goncourts.” The Spanish realist has thus no cause to dissect common people and vulgar events from a superior point of view, putting on gloves, as it were, to keep his hands clean. He knows that virtue perches in strange places and learns to see le sublime d’en bas, and there is a wide gulf between French naturalism and Spanish realism. Pereda,[110] a hidalgo of the old school, born at Santander on the 6th of February, 1833, spent the greater part of his life in the Montaña, at Santander, or at his country estate of Polanco, only leaving Cantabria to study for a few years at Madrid, and later to sit for a few months in the Cortes as a Carlist. The rest of his life he passed among his family and books and friends in his beloved Montaña.[111] His friend in private life, Señor Pérez Galdós, describes him as dark, sunburnt, of medium height, with moustache and pointed beard, of a character fundamentally Spanish, and of very nervous temperament, with a horror of conventionality and pretence. It was about the year 1859 that custom and character sketches from Pereda’s pen began to appear in a Santander paper, La Abeja Montañesa. They were collected in 1864, and published under the title of “Escenas montañesas.” “Escenas montañesas” gives the essence of Pereda’s art, and, though he later wrote long novels and occasionally attained an admirable unity of treatment, the delight is still in the descriptions of fast-vanishing customs and in the characters of his peasants and fishermen rather than in the thread of the action, which is generally slight; and the strength of his novels lies not in their heroes and heroines but in the secondary figures and the side-shows. “Escenas montañesas” shows us life in Santander and the neighbouring mountain-country as it was half a century ago, and as it now lives permanently in Pereda’s art. Scenes and people are presented to us with extraordinary vividness, and only now and then the sketches read almost too much like observations taken directly from the note-book. We have the picaresque sketch of the raquero, the Santander gamin who lives by petty larceny from ships along the quays; the old-fashioned household in a mountain village—by a hereditary privilege Saint John is looked upon as one of the family, and the Saint’s procession raiment figures in the washing list; the wake at a village funeral, with the frequent toast, “to the glory of the dead,” á la buena gloria del defunto; tía Nisca, going her long homeward journey on foot after bidding farewell to her son on a ship bound for “the Indies,” and reproaching the unfertile soil that causes its sons to emigrate, though there is a song that men who go to the Indies in order to get rich would find the Indies at home, were they but willing to work:—

“A las Indias van los hombres
A las Indias por ganar,
Las Indias aquí las tienen
Si quisieran trabajar;”

and especially the noble figure of tío Tremontorio (the first and foremost of Pereda’s long line of masterly portraits in humble life, and the last of that race of hardy fishermen who, with the Basques, rivalled English whalers in the North Seas and made treaties with English kings during the Middle Ages), net-making, or eating his bread and raw bacalao on his balcony in the squalid Calle Alta, or consoling the wives and mothers of fishermen on the Muelle Anaos (in “La Leva”), and dying cheerfully (in “El fin de una raza”), after many hours of battling with the waves, glad to die quietly in his house, although he had nearly perished in the storm owing to his unwillingness to lose an escapulario of the Vírgen del Carmen. “We are all sailors of that further sea,” he says, in his rough language, as he lies dying, “all bound for the same port. If the devil does not block it against us, I to-morrow and you another day will cast anchor there.” “Suum cuique” is the longest and not the least excellent of these Escenas. A poor hidalgo of the mountain, Don Silvestre Seturas, visits a powerful friend at Madrid, and is speedily disillusioned of the capital and only court. His friend in turn accompanies him to his ancestral country-house, and is delighted at first with the country and its idyllic peace. But the rat de ville begins to discover, after some months, that the country has neither peace nor poetry—“Barbarus híc ego sum quia non intelligor ulli”—and returns to Madrid. Several incidents contribute to his change of opinion, incidents which reveal the character of the peasants and illustrate the fact that Pereda, while he makes us love the peasants of the Montaña, is never blind to their faults and weaknesses. The rich madrileño had decided to give a clock for the tower of the village church. But distrust occupies a large place in the character of the villagers, and they fear the rich even when bringing gifts. What hidden intention is there in this unwonted generosity? The Mayor calls the Council together, and the result is a long document for the donor to sign. He is to undertake to place the clock in the tower at his own cost; he is to give an annuity of two thousand reales to meet any expenses connected with the clock; he is to build another tower if the present one falls down “in my time or in that of all the generations and heirs that may come after me”; he is to pay for all lawsuits arising from the clock in the village, or in the neighbourhood. When he tears up the paper, the villagers’ suspicion of some afterthought in his gift is irrefragably confirmed. Lawsuits are the passion of the Mountain. One has continued in Don Silvestre’s family for seven generations, and he himself, having through poverty to choose between remaining a bachelor all his life and giving up the lawsuit, chooses the former without wavering. The last straw in his friend’s patience is a lawsuit drawn up against him because, when he was out shooting, part of a wall of loose stones round a peasant’s fields crumbled down shortly after he happened to have fired at a bird.

“Bocetos al temple” (1876), and “Tipos Trashumantes” (1877), show the same power of keen observation. Pereda, who treats the failings of the peasants with unsparing, but withal benevolent humour, becomes merciless and even cruel when dealing with the pretentiousness of the vulgar and the inanity of rich désœuvrés. It has been wittily said of him that “he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly, he gladly makes fools suffer.” Without going outside his province he found matter ready to his hand in the veraneantes, the flâneurs from Madrid, who passed the hot months in Santander.

Thus in “Tipos Trashumantes” he pillories the sabio, the learned man, who allows that Cervantes was not an entirely common man, but regrets that neither Cervantes nor Calderón possessed the “philosophy of æsthetics,” or who despises the inhabitants of Santander because they have not heard of Jeeéguel (Hegel); the literato or journalist who, because a speaker in Cortes had rendered Dante popular by a quotation, murmurs, “come corpo morto cade” if he drops his stick or cigar; the barber who misses in Santander that indefinable “air” of Madrid;—in fact, a procession of quacks and knaves, and fools and snobs: perhaps the only “sympathetic” figure is that of the Barón de la Rescoldera, who “has never a good word nor a bad deed.” It is pleasant to turn back to village scenes in “Tipos y Paisajes” (forming a second part of “Escenas montañesas,” 1871). Here we find the enriched “Indian” (that is a montañés who has returned to his country after making a fortune in South America); the schoolmaster, in a serviceable coat of black, who writes letters for the whole village, and shuts himself up in his house to get, if not drunk, at least very intoxicated; the peasant Blas, who, after inheriting thirty thousand dollars, is miserable, but feels that he must live como un señor now that he is rich, and dismisses as a temptation to be resisted the wish to go as of old, with goad on shoulder, along the high-road by the side of his oxen; the practical, rough, kindly priest, Don Perfecto; Don Robustiano, an old-fashioned hidalgo, who does not allow the modern use of matches in his household, and who, from the experiences of his own poverty, is not easily misled, when he visits a neighbouring hidalgo, by the excuses for “my wife and daughter at church.” “I see through you,” says Don Robustiano to himself, “no doubt they are hidden away in some corner of the house for lack of clothes.” But especially is the sketch entitled El Amor de los tizones admirable and worthy of Cervantes. It is a description of a rustic gathering or tertulia in the kitchen of one of the poor houses of a mountain village. The peasants—each of them a clearly defined character—enter one by one with the greeting, “Dios nos acompañe” or, “Dios sea aquí,” and round the log fire, the flicker of the flames lighting up their faces against the immense smoke-blackened chimney, they pray a rosario for the dead, or tell stories of brigands, and witches, and enchantments. “Los hombres de pró” (originally published with “Bocetos al temple”) and “El Buey Suelto” (written in 1877) are still collections of sketches, the first of a canvassing for an election in rural parts of Spain, the second, of the miseries of bachelors, and the scenes in both are touched with Pereda’s vividness and humour. Pereda, as a novelist proper, begins with “Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera” (written in 1878), which describes the effects of the revolution of 1868 on a small village of the Mountain, with “De tal palo tal astilla” (1879), an answer to Pérez Galdós’ “Doña Perfecta,” “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (1882) and “Pedro Sánchez” (1883). “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (Savour of the Soil) is a whole-hearted book of the Montaña; its serenity is scarcely disturbed by the frequent village fights and rivalries in which the weapons are stout sticks cut from the mountain-side. The book is filled with a fresh and acrid smell of the earth and autumn scents, and has the peace of still days when not a leaf stirs, and there is no movement in the ripe and yellow maize-fields. It is a life lived and felt by the author and not superficially observed, so that there is no trace of artificiality or false sentiment in the descriptions. Cumbrales and Rinconeda are rival villages, Cumbrales lying high among orchards, Rinconeda lower down on the edge of the plain, in thick oak and chestnut woods. Rinconeda rejoices when the raging ábrego, the south wind, sweeps in furious gusts from the hills and ravages Cumbrales; Cumbrales rejoices when the rain turns every street of Rinconeda into a rushing torrent. The characters of the inhabitants of Cumbrales are drawn with all Pereda’s skill; Juanguirle, for instance, a rich, hard-working peasant, the simple, sensible Mayor of Cumbrales; Baldomero, who “cannot understand how doing nothing, thinking of nothing, troubling about nothing, can be unpleasant to any sensible person”; his father, Don Valentín, “hero of Luchana” and worshipper of Espartero, who, after a frugal meal, says to his son that it is not the part of good Liberals to be so indulging themselves when the Carlists are flaunting “the black flag of tyranny,” to which Baldomero answers laconically that it would have sounded more convincing before the meal. There is an epic fight between the two villages which rages so violently that the Mayor, Juanguirle, in vain attempts to stop it “in the name of la Josticia, in the name of the law, of la Costitución, of God Himself, if necessary, since, for lack of a better, I am now His representative here.” A few moments afterwards sad to relate, Juanguirle, stung by an insult hurled at Cumbrales, is in the very thickest of the fray. In “Escenas montañesas” Pereda had slightly sketched a deshoja, the harvest task of separating the ripe cob of maize from its sheath. A certain number of cobs (from two to six) are set aside from each large basketful for the poor, for the souls in purgatory, and other pious purposes. In “El Sabor de la Tierruca” the scene is described more fully. The workers, over fifty in number, sing songs and slow ballads as the heaps of shining yellow cobs and the heaps of crisp, white leaves grow and grow, and their singing is accompanied at intervals by the noise of torrents of maize-cobs emptied from the baskets. We have, too, a description of a derrota, when flocks and herds are turned out promiscuously to graze, of the game of cachurra, a kind of rustic hockey, and the simple feasts of roasted chestnuts with a bota of wine. Yet all is not “jest and youthful jollity.” The peasants, in their prudent distrust, have a keen eye for witches, and a weak old woman, of few words, poor and lonely, and in league with the Devil, plays a sadly large part in the history of Cumbrales. So in “Tipos y Paisajes,” the witch is feared not only by the boys whom she surprises stealing the grapes in the garden of her hut, but by the whole village. If a cow dies, it is the fault of the witch; if a man spends his days drinking in the tavern, the misery of his family is traced, not to him, but to the witch.