Or the beautiful poem beginning “Virgen que el sol más pura”—

“Virgin purer than the sun,
Glory of mortals, of the heavens light,
Whose pity is not less than thy great might,...”

Without the enforced leisure of these years we cannot doubt that his “Nombres de Cristo” would never have been written, and Spanish prose would have lacked one of its most luminous and brilliant jewels.

Spanish literature owes him a great gratitude for having written in Spanish, contrary to the prejudices of the learned, who held that a writing to be profound must be obscure, and “marvelled that a theologian of whom they expected some great treatise full of deep questions had ended by writing a book in romance.” But Luis de León wished, he says, to open the “new path” of good style, that consists “both in what is said and in the way of saying it, and in the task of choosing the best words of those in common use, and considering the sound of them, and even at times of counting the letters, and weighing and measuring and mingling them, that the matter be presented not only with clearness but with softness and harmony.”

Nearly five years after his arrest Luis de León returned to Salamanca. He returned entirely justified, and the University welcomed him back with rejoicing. Over the Augustinian Order especially his trial had hung like a cloud, and the condemnation of so distinguished a professor must have been felt as a disgrace by the whole University. The legend is well known. When Luis de León resumed his lectures the entire University thronged to hear him. He was enjoined by the Inquisition to preserve complete silence as to its proceedings, but this was an occasion at least for subtle and indirect allusions, and for the excitement of general sympathy. Luis de León rose in the crowded room and began his lecture with the words: “Gentlemen, we were saying yesterday,” and so continued his course. The intervening five years were obliterated. The story is so thoroughly in keeping with the character of the man, whose simplicity and sincere humility produced an effect unattainable by the most studious artifice, that we would willingly maintain its truth. We would thrust aside the prosaic facts that Luis de León did not resume his lectures, the chair having been occupied in his absence, and he acquiescing in this on his return (la daba por bien empleada), and that, when he was assigned another course of lectures, a long dispute arose in the University as to the hour at which he should deliver them. We may say at least that, if the story is not literal in the facts, in spirit it is essentially true. The quaint kind of pulpit from which the words were spoken, and the lecture-room with its rough-hewn benches, are still preserved in the University at Salamanca, and the sublime words, “Decíamos ayer,” form part of the repertoire of the tourist’s cicerone.

Luis de León, on the recovery of his freedom, might exclaim, in the words of the Persiles of Cervantes (Cervantes, who professed himself Luis de León’s “reverent votary and follower,” á quien yo reverencio, adoro y sigo): “I give you thanks, immense and merciful Heavens, that you have brought me to die where your light may look upon my death, and not in the shades of the dark prison-house which I now leave.” He survived for fifteen years, dying on the 23rd of August, 1591, nine days after being promoted from Vicar-General to Provincial of his Order. His good humour and natural gaiety, his unselfishness and common-sense, won for him many and strong friendships—we feel, indeed, that he was a man not without failings, but entirely lovable. He had been commanded by the Inquisitor-General to publish his own works, and was entrusted with the publication of those of Santa Teresa. His second Inquisition trial arose apparently from a lecture on the vexed question of predestination and freewill. It was declared that the University of Salamanca was greatly scandalized at the boldness with which he maintained that the contrary of his own opinion was heresy. The matter, however, ended by his being “benevolently and lovingly admonished” at Toledo. Besides these and many other occupations, he gave ungrudging help to the Carmelite nuns in asserting their independence, which was threatened by a reform sanctioned by Philip II. The Pope, indeed, was favourable to the nuns, but the King opposed the Papal Brief, and Luis de León is reported to have said: “It is impossible to carry out a single order of His Holiness in Spain.” The story that Fray Luis died of grief on account of the King’s anger at this opposition is certainly untrue, although it is likely enough that the King was annoyed. He is said to have exclaimed: “Quien le mete á Frai Luis en estas cosas?—What has Fray Luis to do in this galère?” Luis de León’s life was thus not without many turmoils. But we may like best to think of him, as in the description in his “Nombres de Cristo,” “in the month of June, after the Feast of St. John when the Salamanca term breaks up,” retiring from a long year of work to the country house possessed by his monastery on the banks of the Tormes. There, in the great garden of trees growing without order, with a stream “running and pausing as if in laughter,” and with the winding river Tormes in sight—“a place far better than the professor’s chair”—he would meditate alone or converse with friends “in the cool of the morning, on a day most calm and bright;” “for,” he says elsewhere in the same work, “it may be that in towns there is more refinement of speech, but fineness of sentiment is of the country and of solitude.”

XIX
THE MODERN SPANISH NOVEL

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.