An eloquent priest was the first speaker to open the historic meeting, and as he laid down the program, the sovereignty of the nation to lie in the Cortes, and the King to exist for the people, not the people for the King as heretofore, Spain again had her foot on the ladder of progress. No wonder that the national military air of Spain is the Marcha de Cádiz. The clean, smokeless, plucky little city has right to a proud stand out in the Atlantic. Her age-long enemy, the ocean, had trained her well to strike a first blow for freedom.
A FEW MODERN NOVELS
"Don Quixote is not, as Montesquieu pretended, the only good Spanish book, which in reaction against the national spirit, ridiculed the others. It is rather the epitome of our national spirit, war-like and religious, full of sane realism and none the less enthusiastic for all that is great and beautiful."—Don Juan Valera.
IT was the German philosopher Hegel who called the "Romancero del Cid" the most nobly beautiful poem, ideal and real at the same time, that the Epic Muse had inspired since Homer. Ideal and real at the same time, herein lies the first characteristic of Spanish literature, of to-day as well as of the past. No keener realistic pictures of a nation were ever drawn than in "Quixote," yet no book was ever more idealistic; and the path plowed so deeply by Cervantes, has been followed by the modern novelists of Spain. Their feet are well planted on the ground, but they do not think it necessary to prove they walk the earth by wallowing in its mud. These modern Spanish romances tell of the passions and sorrows of virile men and women, and at the same time they can boast that they are free from the moral evil so rampart in French novels. "Quixote" is not exactly a prude's book, yet the "jeune fille" can read it unharmed and Cervantes has served in this point as a standard.[32]
Few realize the delightful field of modern fiction that lies ready to be explored once enough Spanish has been mastered for reading. After three months' study only we found we could take up and enjoy "Don Quixote," for contrary to the popular idea, its language is no more archaic than is the English of Hamlet or Henry IV; a great genius fixes the tongue in which he writes.
The best of the novelists of this last half century, when the revival came about, are Valera and Pereda. Some would make a triology by placing Pérez Galdós side by side with them. For instance the historian Altamira, being in sympathy with the frankly revolutionary theories which Galdós advocates, calls him the first, the Balzac of Spain, but the Balzac of a people is never against the traditions of his race as Galdós often is. "Toda comparación es odiosa" the dear Don warns us. Personally I give the first place to Valera and Pereda, in whose work is found the note of literature; Pereda the strength of the northern mountains, Valera the allurement of the south. Happily for their permanence and their value as human documents, the Spanish writers are local. Each describes his own province, his own paisanos. Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán paints her Galicia; Alacón his Andalusia; Valdés and Pérez Galdós are more cosmopolitan and I should say lose by it; Blasco Ibáñez writes of Valencia, Leopoldo Alas has vivified the Asturias.
The revival of the novela de costumbres, which suits the Spanish temperament, just as the romantic or fantastic tale suits the German, may be said to have been started by that talented Sevillian authoress who wrote under the name of Fernán Caballero. She had not the gift of a good style, and most of her books are already of the past, but in "La Gaviota," published in 1849, her passionate love for Spain and its ways has made a novel that is likely to endure. The tale tells of many old customs: how on the night of November 2d, the Brotherhood of the Rosary of the Dawn rises to pray for the souls in Purgatory, how one of the sodality goes from house to house to rouse the others, striking a bell and singing:
"I am at your door with a bell;
I do not call you; it does not call you;
'T is your mother, 't is your father who call you,
And they beg you to pray for them to God."
And each member rises and follows the fraternity. A land does not lose that has such customs among its peasantry, that weaves in its religious belief with the inextricable souvenirs of home and childhood. A Spanish child is brought up on songs of the Passion and the Virgin as naturally as we on Mother Goose. When he sees a chimney-sweep he exclaims "El Rey Melchor!" for the visit of the Three Kings of the East is real to him. He knows the owl was present at the Crucifixion, whence his terror-stricken cry of "Crux! Crux!" that the kindly swallows relieved the Saviour of the thorns, and the gold-finches of the three agonizing nails: