A much superior talent is that of the ex-soldier, Manuel Bretón de los Herreros (1796-1873), whose humour and fancy are his own, while his system is that of the younger Moratín. His Escuela del Matrimonio is the most ambitious, as it is the best, of those innumerable pieces in which he aims at presenting a picture of average society, relieved by alternate touches of ironic and didactic purpose. Bretón de los Herreros wrote far too much, and weakens his effects by the obtrusion of a flagrant moral; but even if we convict him as a caricaturist of obvious Philistinism, there is abundant recompense in the jovial wit and graceful versification of his quips. To him succeeds Tomás Rodríguez Rubí (1817-1890), who aimed at amusing a facile public in such a trifle as El Tejado de Vidrio (The Glass Roof), or at satirising political and social intriguers in La Rueda de Fortuna (Fortune's Wheel).
A Cuban like Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1816-1873), who spent most of her life in Spain, may for our purposes be accounted a Spanish writer. The proverbial gallantry of the nation and the sex of the writer account for her vogue and her repute. If such a novel as Sab, with its protest against slavery and its idealised presentation of subject races, be held for literature, then we must so enlarge the scope of the word as to include Uncle Tom's Cabin. Another novel, Espatolino, reproduces George Sand's philippics against the injustice of social arrangements, and re-echoes her lyrical advocacy of freedom in the matter of marriage. The Sra. Avellaneda is too passionate to be dexterous, and too preoccupied to be impressive; hence her novels have fallen out of sight. That she had real gifts of fancy and melody is shown by her early volume of poems (1841), and by her two plays, Alfonso Munio and Baltasar; yet, on the boards as in her stories, she is inopportune, or, in plainer words, is a gifted imitator, following the changes of popular taste with some hesitation, though with a gracefulness not devoid of charm. With her may be mentioned Carolina Coronado (b. 1823), a refined poetess with mystic tendencies, whose vogue has so diminished that to the most of Spaniards she is scarcely more than an agreeable reminiscence.
It is possible that the adroit politician, Adelardo López de Ayala (1828-1879), who passed from one party to another, and served a monarch or a republic with equal suppleness, might have won enduring fame as a dramatist and poet had he been less concerned with doctrines and theses. He was so intent on persuasion, so mindful of the arts of his old trade, so anxious to catch a vote, that he rarely troubled to draw character, contenting himself with skilful construction of plot and arrangement of incident. His Tanto por Ciento and his Consuelo are astute harangues in favour of high public and private morals, composed with extraordinary care and laudable purpose. If mere cleverness, a scrupulous eye to detail, a fine ear for sonorous verse could make a man master of the scene, López de Ayala might stand beside the greatest. His personages, however, are rather general types than individual characters, and the persistent sarcasm with which he ekes out a moral degenerates into ponderous banter. None the less he was a force during many years, and, though his reputation be now somewhat tarnished, he still counts admirers among the middle-aged.
A very conspicuous figure on the Spanish scene during the middle third of the century was Manuel Tamayo y Baus (1829-1898), who, beginning with an imitation of Schiller in Juana de Arco (1847), passed under the influence of Alfieri in Virginia (1853), venturing upon the national classic drama in La Locura de Amor (1855), the most notable achievement of his early period. The most ambitious, and unquestionably the best, of his plays is Un drama nuevo (1867), with which his career practically closed. He effaced himself, was content to live on his reputation and to yield his place as a popular favourite to so poor a playwright as José Echegaray. Compared with his successor, Tamayo shines as a veritable genius. Sprung from a family of actors, he gauged the possibilities of the theatre with greater exactness than any rival, and by his tact he became an expert in staging a situation. But it was not merely to inspired mechanical dexterity that he owed the high position which was allowed him by so shrewd a judge as Manuel de la Revilla: to his unequalled knowledge of the scene he joined the forces of passion and sympathy, the power of dramatic creation, and a metrical ingenuity which enchanted and bewildered those who heard and those who read him.
There is a feminine, if not a falsetto timbre in the voice of José Selgas y Carrasco (1824-1882), a writer on the staff of the fighting journal, El Padre Cobos, and a government clerk till Martínez Campos transfigured him into a Cabinet Minister. Selgas' verse in the Primavera is so charged with the conventional sentiment and with the amiable pessimism dear to ordinary readers, that his popularity was inevitable. Yet even Spanish indulgence has stopped short of proclaiming him a great poet, and now that his day has gone by, he is almost as unjustly decried as he was formerly overpraised. Though not a great original genius, he was an accomplished versifier whose innocent prettiness was never banal, whose simplicity was unaffected, whose faint music and caressing melancholy are not lacking in individuality and fascination.
A more powerful poetic impulse moved the Sevillan, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870). An orphan in his tenth year, Bécquer was educated by his godmother, a well-meaning woman of some position, who would have made him her heir had he consented to follow any regular profession or to enter a merchant's office. At eighteen he arrived, a penniless vagabond, in Madrid, where he underwent such extremes of hardship as helped to shorten his days. A small official post, which saved him from actual starvation, was at last obtained for him, but his indiscipline soon caused him to be set adrift. He maintained himself by translating foreign novels, by journalistic hack-work in the columns of El Contemporaneo and El Museo Universal, till death delivered him.
The three volumes by which he is represented are made up of prose legends, and of poems modestly entitled Rimas. Though Hoffmann is Bécquer's intellectual ancestor in prose, the Spaniard speaks with a personal accent in such examples of morbid fantasy as Los Ojos Verdes, wherein Fernando loses life for the sake of the green-eyed mermaiden: as the tale of Manrique's madness in El Rayo de Luna (The Moonbeam), as the rendering of Daniel's sacrilege in La Rosa de Pasión. And as Hoffmann influences Bécquer's dreamy prose, so Heine influences his Rimas. It is argued that, since Bécquer knew no German, he cannot have read Heine—an unconvincing plea, if we remember that Byron's example was followed in every country by poets ignorant of English. Howbeit, it is certain that Heine has had no more brilliant follower than Bécquer, who, however, substitutes a note of fairy mystery for Heine's incomparable irony. His circumstances, and the fact that he did not live to revise his work, account for occasional inequalities of execution which mar his magical music. To do him justice, we must read him in a few choice pieces where his apparently simple rhythms and suave assonantic cadences express his half-delirious visions in terms of unsurpassable artistry. At first sight one is deceived into thinking that the simplicity is a spontaneous result, and there has arisen a host of imitators who have only contrived to caricature Bécquer's defects. His merits are as purely personal as Blake's, and the imitation of either poet results almost inevitably in mere flatness.
During the nineteenth century Spain has produced no more brilliant master of prose than Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837), son of a medical officer in the French army. It is a curious fact that, owing to his early education in France, Larra—one of the most idiomatic writers—should have been almost ignorant of Spanish till his tenth year. Destined for the law, he was sent to Valladolid, where he got entangled in some love affair which led him to renounce his career. He took to literature, attempting the drama in his Macías, the novel in El Doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente: in neither was he successful. But if he could not draw character nor narrate incident, he could observe and satirise with amazing force and malice. Under the name of Fígaro[30] and of Juan Pérez de Munguia he won for himself such prominence in journalism as no Spaniard has ever equalled. Spanish politics, the weaknesses of the national character, are exposed in a spirit of ferocious bitterness peculiar to the writer. His is, indeed, a depressing performance, overcharged with misanthropy; yet for unflinching courage, insight, and sombre humour, Larra has no equal in modern Spanish literature, and scarcely any superior in the past. In his twenty-eighth year he blew out his brains in consequence of an amour in which he was concerned, leaving a vacancy which has never been filled by any successor. It is gloomy work to learn that all men are scoundrels, and that all evils are irremediable: these are the hopeless doctrines which have brought Spain to her present pass. Yet it is impossible to read Larra's pessimistic page without admiration for his lucidity and power.