The Magic of Spain

by Aubrey F. G. Bell

In spite of Censors and Inquisitors Spanish literature was free and outspoken, for it portrayed life as it was. If it shows devotion to Church and King it is because these were deeply-rooted national convictions. But the priests sometimes meet with less respect. The Cid threatens to make of the Pope’s vestments trappings for his horse, and we have seen that Hurtado de Mendoza, the King of Spain’s ambassador in Rome, speaks of his Holiness in terms that call to mind Benvenuto Cellini’s passionate outbursts. We have seen, too, the unflattered portraits of priest and pardon-seller in “Lazarillo de Tormes.” Cervantes, who “respects and adores the Church as a Catholic and faithful Christian,” does not fail to thrust fun at the fat alforjas, the well-provisioned saddle-bags of the señores clérigos, “who rarely allow themselves to fare ill,” and he deals more sternly with the household priests who “govern princes’ houses, and, not being of princely birth themselves, are unable to guide the conduct of those who are,” and who “in trying to teach those they govern to be narrow and limited make them miserable.” He gives us the picture of the false pilgrims who travel through the length and breadth of Spain, “and there is not a village in which they do not receive meat and drink and at least a real in money, and at the end of their journey they leave the country with a treasure of over a hundred ducats,” and he even allows himself to wonder why Ginés de Pasamonte’s clever monkey has not been arraigned before the gentlemen of the Inquisition.

There are in Spanish literature occasional signs of a distorted imagination, a restless longing to materialize the invisible, which is not a fanciful dreaming, but rather a kind of super-realism, a strained and persistent effort to attain a tangible perfection—the spirit which in some Spanish buildings has added ornament to ornament till the result is a rich magnificence in an infinity of details but hideousness as a whole. One form of this we have in such works as Quevedo’s “Sueños,” another, the Churrigueresque, in the later style of Góngora. On the other hand, we have the great Spanish mystics in their sincerity, reflected in the exquisite simplicity of their style, one of the noblest glories of the literature of their country. Yet they, too, as has often been pointed out, were pre-eminently practical; Luis de León, for instance, energetic head of the Augustinian Order; Santa Teresa, the wise, untiring administrator. Their writings have the fiery transparency of Pascal, and all the clear and vivid precision of military writers of many countries, in whose case, as in that of so large a number of Spaniards, “the lance has not blunted the pen.”[95] The mystics rise to noble heights of sublimity, but the virtue of their writing is that it is to the point, with no vague rhetoric; and no advocate could surpass the lucidity with which Luis de León conducted his own defence before the Inquisition.

Perhaps the weakest side of Spanish literature is its deficiency in critical insight. Few, indeed, are the Spanish authors of whom it might be said, as Ticknor said long ago of Luis de León, that there is scarcely a line of their poetry that is not exquisite. Espronceda’s undeniable genius, for instance, shatters itself on that unwieldy fragment “El Diablo Mundo.” Excessive facility of composition has been the stumbling-block of the authors as it has been the stumbling-block of the orators of Spain. Hardly a speaker in the Spanish Cortes is ever at a loss for words to give expression to his ideas or to conceal the lack of them. Each, as Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” is one

“That hath a mint of phrases in his brain,
One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.”

Even so marvellous an orator as Emilio Castelar was at times carried away by the magnificent eloquence that flowed unfailingly from his lips. In the same way Lope de Vega could throw off a play in a few days. Over 2000 plays and autos are ascribed to him, and in the 450 that remain his most ardent admirers confess that there are arid tracts. And, ordinarily, this copiousness has been a fault, telling against Spanish literature, and it continues to be a fault: Señor Blasco Ibáñez writes his brilliant novels in evident haste; Señor Perez Galdós has entered on the fifth series of ten of his “Episodios Nacionales,” and his other novels and plays are very numerous. Such wealth of production could not but be harmful to critical judgment. In the nineteenth century Spain produced one or two excellent critics, especially Larra and Clarín, the pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, author of “La Regenta,” one of the most striking psychological novels of the century. Generally, however, if German literary criticism is circular and, however illuminating the by-paths of its learning, wanders round the point without ever quite touching it, Spanish literary criticism is superficial, and either veils the point in a polite mesh of words, or is prevented by this very rhetoric from seeing the point at all. Even Valera, who so carefully limned his own prose, and whose verse, though not inspired, is always delicate and polished, was far from being a good critic. He praised effusively works that at best deserved silence, and this insincerity in literary matters is, it is to be feared, a common weakness in Spain.

The characteristic of Spanish literature that unites it in a special bond of sympathy with English literature is its large store of humour. It meets us in the “Poema del Cid,” in the character of the Cid, and in the quick detection of the ludicrous; the poems of the Archpriest of Hita are full of merriment and of humorous portrayal of character; the humour of the Archpriest reappears in “Lazarillo de Tormes,” but without his jovial gaiety; with Quevedo its vein becomes cruelly satirical. Humour did not desert Luis de León when ill and solitary in the dark Valladolid prison of the Inquisition; and it is to be found in a large majority of Spanish authors, being but another side of their direct, unclouded observation. In the most humorous of all books, even Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, is constrained to laugh: at the sight of Sancho, we read, his melancholy was not strong enough to prevent him from joining in his laughter—and the whole world laughs with, not at him.

It is because Spanish literature is intensely national that it has so universal an interest, and in its most recent phase, the novel, it has a local character that is full of charm. José María de Pereda, for instance, scarcely ever left his native Cantabrian province. He wrote of the places and people that he understood and loved. Yet no one who has read his great novels, “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” or “Sotileza,” or “Peñas Arriba,” will contend that they are provincial, or that their interest is merely local.[96] His characters are universal, and Pereda is another instance of the truth that he who digs a little land deep reaps a better reward than he who works shallowly over a wide extent. So Señor Blasco Ibáñez is read with most delight when he cultivates his own garden—the city and province of Valencia.

XVII
THE POEM OF THE CID

1.—A Primitive Masterpiece

THE national hero of Spain has been presented in many guises, but is nowhere more intensely Spanish than in the “Poema del Cid.” Here are no marvellous events and miracles, no journeyings out of Spain to Paris and Rome; everything occurs naturally and simply in Spanish surroundings, and this the first great masterpiece of Spanish letters has a strong flavour of the soil. After winning a “victory marvellous and great” over the Moors in Spain, the Cid says, “I give thanks to God who is Master of the world; I was in want before, now I am rich, for I have goods and land and gold and honour.... Moors and Christians live in great fear of me. There, inland in Morocco, where the Mosques are, they look to have some night an inroad from me. It is but their fear, for I think not of it. I shall not go to seek them, in Valencia shall I be.” The Cid is chivalrous, brave, magnanimous, simple, with a strong sense of humour and love of fair-play. With simple good faith the poet sees no need to explain or excuse actions of his hero that may seem blameworthy to a later age, such as the deceit practised upon the two Jews. Though not historical, the poem has an air of truth and sincerity deeply impressive. It was probably composed in the middle of the twelfth century, not much more than fifty years after the Cid’s death in 1099. It has been attributed to the beginning of the thirteenth century, but intrinsic evidence warrants the earlier date. The language is more archaic than that of thirteenth-century writers. Traces of the Latin chrysalis appear. “To-morrow morning” is cras á la mañana, half Latin and half Spanish, and “each” in the same way is quiscadauno, while the word huebos, which frequently occurs in the sense of menester, is but the Latin opus thinly disguised. The poem, as it has come down to us incomplete, has nearly four thousand verses. It is written in long assonant lines of unequal number of syllables. “The poet,” as Tomas Antonio Sánchez, who first edited the “Poema del Cid” in 1779, remarks, “thought nothing of giving two or three syllables more to a line as his sentence might require,” and lines of eleven and lines of eighteen syllables occur indifferently. From beginning to end the story moves on without flagging; the style is so rapid and direct that it carries the reader with it. There is a joy and freshness in the narrative that have rarely been surpassed.[97] These events may not have happened, or may have happened differently, but that matters little, since, owing to the skill of the unknown poet, they stand out with a vividness that imprints them indelibly on the mind of the reader and proves that nothing is so real as that which has not happened. Who can forget, for instance, the arrival of King Alfonso and the Cid at Toledo, when the King passes on into the town, but the Cid remains on the further side of the Tagus, in the castle of San Serván (now a beautiful ruin with two Moorish windows still left, and surrounded by dwarf-asphodels in spring). He says to the King: “I with mine will rest in San Serván; this evening will my followers arrive. I will hold vigil in that holy place; to-morrow morning I will enter the city.” Here he and his followers “said matins and prime until the dawn,” and next day they enter Toledo, the Cid splendidly attired and accompanied by a hundred knights, riding across the bridge of Alcántara and up the steep and narrow street to the Court or Parliament.[98] Every detail of his dress is given, purple and gold and silver. But fresh and quaintly vivid details are frequent in the poem. When the counts of Carrión have outraged and abandoned their wives the poet pauses to exclaim, “What good fortune were the Cid Campeador to appear.” Félez Muñoz, on finding the Cid’s daughters almost at the point of death, brings them water in his hat: “new it was and fresh, and he had brought it from Valencia.” Mass is said “at half cock-crow, before the dawn.” The Moor Abengalvon upbraids the treachery of his guests in planning his murder as follows: “Tell me what have I done to you, Counts of Carrión? I serving you without guile, and you took counsel for my death, Hyo sirviendovos sin art, E vos conseiastes para mi muert.” Nothing could be more spontaneous and direct. With equal directness honest Pero Bermuez calls one of the Counts of Carrión “a tongue without hands,” “a mouth without truth,” and we read of Asur González, who “would breakfast before he went to prayer,” that “purple he came for he had breakfasted, and reckless was his speech.” The account of the battle is well known: “they clasp their shields before their breasts, they lower their lances with their banners, they bow their faces over the saddles, they went to smite them with bold hearts. With loud voice calls he who was born in happy hour, ‘Strike them, knights, for the love of charity. I am Ruy Diaz, the Cid Campeador of Bibar.’ All strike in the group where is Pero Bermuez. Three hundred lances are there, all with their banners. A Moor apiece they killed at a single blow, and as they turned about they kill as many more. There would you see many lances rise and fall, many a shield pierced and riddled, many a breastplate broken through, many white banners come out red with blood, many good steeds go without a rider. The Moors call on Mahomet, the Christians on St. James. In a short space a thousand and three hundred of the Moors are slain.” No version can give an idea of the vigour of the original. But it is not only battle scenes that are treated forcibly and thrown into high relief. We may take the arrival of the Cid at San Pedro de Cardeña as an example of the amazing vividness given to more quiet episodes: “The cocks are crowing and the dawn is trying to break, when the good Campeador arrived at San Pedro. The Abbot Don Sancho, servant of the Creator, was saying Matins for the return of dawn. And Doña Jimena, with five noble ladies, was praying St. Peter and the Creator: ‘O Thou who guidest all, be with my Cid the Campeador.’ He was calling at the gate and they heard the summons. Heavens! how glad was the Abbot Don Sancho! With lights and with candles they ran into the courtyard. With such joy they receive him who was born in happy hour. ‘I thank God, my Cid,’ said the Abbot Don Sancho, ‘since I see you here, accept my hospitality.’”