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.
II.—1870-1900.
In 1864 Pereda published his first work, “Escenas montañesas,” and ten years later, and three before the death of Fernán Caballero, appeared Valera’s first novel, “Pepita Jiménez,” and Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Since 1874 scarcely a year has passed without producing a Spanish novel that deserves a high rank in literature. Yet Pereda[100] did not at once impose himself, and early in 1874 Pérez Galdós could put the following words into the mouth of one of the characters in Napoleón en Chamartín: “In the matter of novels we are so far astray that, after producing the source of all the novels of the world, and the most entertaining book ever written by man, Spain is now unable to compose a novel of more worth than a grain of mustard seed, and translates these sentimental French stories.”
Similarly, Señor Menéndez y Pelayo remarks that “about the year 1870, the date of Pérez Galdós’ first book, the Spanish novel was slumbering in the arms of insipid or monstrous productions, entre ñoñerías y monstruosidades.” There is little insipidity or sentimentalism in the more modern Spanish novel. Realism is the dominant note of Spanish literature. The very atmosphere of Spain makes for clear vision. Its artists are realistic, even brutally realistic, as Goya occasionally is; even its mystics have not been wrapped wholly from the world: they do not live in a cloud, insensible to the real facts of life. And in the same way the great Spanish novelists are realistic. There is, however, a true Castilian dignity about their realism. They do not, in George Meredith’s phrase, mistake the “muddy shallows” for the depths of Nature. They may treat of the vulgar and the base, but they do not treat of them in a way that is vulgar and base. They may be as outspoken as Martial, but their realism is eminently sane and clean.
The modern fashion, strongly in favour of realism, should do justice to the merits of Spanish novels. It is no doubt guided by the love of contrast that caused Stendhal, a romantic and an enthusiast at heart, to read pages of the “Code Civil” before writing his novels, and to adopt a style mathematically cold and thin, and Flaubert, a poet, to analyse a subject so vulgar as that of Madame Bovary. A simpler age may delight in works of a fantastic imagination, but a more complex and perhaps hypocritical age must have truth and away with vagueness and pretence.
Minds so complicated and many-sided as to be rarely themselves, admire the simple and concrete, and the Spanish genius, which is essentially objective, answers to this taste both in its literature and in its art. Yet it is characteristic that in many Spanish novels realism and mysticism go hand in hand. That peculiarly Spanish mysticism which shows its false side in Clarín’s “La Regenta,” its practical spirit in Palacio Valdés’ “Marta y María,” its sadness in Azorín’s “La Voluntad,” is by no writer more sympathetically treated than by Juan Valera, in “Pepita Jiménez” and other novels. Valera was too great an artist to belong to any school. He repeated in many prefaces that his aim was not to instruct or to edify, but rather to give pleasure. The old heresy that works of art should edify has had great influence in Spain, and it makes its presence felt in modern novels with a set purpose, romans à thèse. It cast its shadow over the work of Fernán Caballero and Pereda, and, passing to the enemy, reappears at intervals in Pérez Galdós and Blasco Ibáñez. But Valera would have none of it. A novel, he said, “should be poetry, not history, that is, it should paint things not as they are but fairer than they are, illuminating them with a light that may cast over them a certain charm.” The magic of his style, which he caught by his own confession from the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, supplied this charm, and is sufficient to make his work imperishable. It is a charm that is exquisite and escapes analysis, reminding of that metallic lustre in ancient Spanish azulejos, or glazed tiles, of which modern manufacturers in vain seek to recapture the secret. Valera was not, in a strict sense, a great novelist. The construction of his stories is often weak, and the characters all speak the language of Don Juan Valera. “In Valera,” it has been said, “there are no Sanchos, all are Valeras.” He was himself aware of these limitations. He would sometimes say in a preface that he was not certain if his book were or were not a novel, and as to the invariably polished speech of his characters, the conversation of the nurse Antoñona with Luis de Vargas, in “Pepita Jiménez,” is accounted for by the fact that she had prayed that it might be given her to speak on this occasion, not in grotesque language, as was her wont, but in elegant and cultured style. Similarly, Juana la Larga says to her discreet daughter Juanita, “All that you have said seems to be taken from the books that Don Pascual gives you to read.”
But Valera could delineate characters skilfully. In his longest novel, “Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino,” the hero, Señor Don Faustino López y Mendoza, is in some degree a typical figure of modern Spain. Living in his half ruinous ancestral house in the village of Villabermeja, he feels himself to be capable of great deeds, but achieves nothing. He laments not being of humble birth to become a brigand like the great José María, he laments not having been born in the eleventh or twelfth century to carve out for himself a kingdom with his sword, and he ends by obtaining a modest post at Madrid, which brings him little over £100 a year. Valera’s creations have only seemed unreal because, through the alchemy of his style, he is a King Midas, turning all to gold, and the excellence of his art raises his figures to the level of statues in Parian marble. They are not, therefore, less lifelike; because he has an “exquisite adjustment of word to thought,”[101] it does not follow that he is “without life and passion”[102]—rather the passion is raised to a white heat, with the flames no longer visible. And in his descriptions he is a true realist, giving us the light and laughter of Andalucía. His “Juanita la Larga” is a charming sketch of life in an Andalusian village that may recall Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Some of the most laughter-rousing scenes of “El Sombrero de tres picos” pass in the little stone-paved court in front of a flour mill, a quarter of a league from a certain cathedral town in Andalucía. The court is shaded by a huge vine-trellis, sufficiently thick and solid for the miller to sleep—or pretend to sleep—unnoticed among its leaves. It is a brief, delightful sketch, coloured and malicious, of Andalusian life in the first years of the nineteenth century. To Andalucía also belong two novels by Palacio Valdés, “La Hermana San Sulpicio” and “Los Majos de Cádiz.” But it is Andalucía described not by a native but by a stranger, for Palacio Valdés is of the North. He has a sense of humour rather English than Spanish, and he is, indeed, almost as well known out of Spain as within the Peninsula. It is a humour less bitter and aggressive than that of another Asturian, Leopoldo Alas, with whom Valdés collaborated in a volume of critical essays. As a sketcher of character, Valdés is admirable. Gloria, the typically Andalusian girl, and the Gallegan Sanjurjo are both excellently drawn in “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of his “Marta y María” is laid in an old town of Astúrias—the author is now in his native country—surrounded by a wide level of meadows and gently sloping hills to the ría, bordered by immense pine woods and the sea. It is a novel even more delightful than “La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of “La Aldea perdida” is also Astúrias. It is a pastoral symphony, an Asturian counterpart to Pereda’s “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” a charming story—in spite of its theatrical ending—of village rivalries and reconciliations in a land wooded with chestnuts and oaks and cider-apples, a land of maize and cool green fields of trefoil, and mountain paths hedged with honeysuckle. But in other works Palacio Veldés has not maintained this Spanish inspiration. In “La Espuma,” “Maximina,” “La Fe,” the influence is that of the French naturalistic School. Clarín (Leopoldo Alas), though born at Zamora also an Asturian, was likewise deeply influenced by France in his long work “La Regenta.” In one of his critical essays Clarín wrote that “Spanish realism is very Spanish; it is in the race. But it has its defects, no todo en él es flores; it is deficient in psychology and the poetry of passion.” In “La Regenta” we have passion and psychological analysis and epigrammatic wit. The scene is the old cathedral city of Vetusta (or rather Oviedo). The treatment is not characteristically Spanish. Vetusta is here a typical provincial town, such as Flaubert might have described and hated, and its inhabitants are almost all represented as ignorant, vulgar, or vicious. Their stupidity and vulgarity are lashed with an ingenious subtlety that is unsparing, and the motives guiding their actions are laid bare with an amazing skill. Clarín’s humour is often a little cruel, and the novel is crowded with terse and biting phrases. One of the readers of the Vetusta casino—the worthiest of them, Clarín is careful to assure us—is thus pilloried in a few lines: “He arrived at nine o’clock every evening without fail, took Le Figaro and The Times, which he placed over Le Figaro, put on his gold spectacles, and, lulled by the sound of the gas, fell gently asleep over the foremost paper of the world, a privilege which no one sought to dispute. Shortly after his death of apoplexy, over The Times, it was discovered that he knew no English.”