An essayist of more patriotic tone is Serafín Estébanez Calderón (1799-1867), whose biography has been elaborately written by his nephew, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the late Prime Minister of Spain. Estébanez' verses are well-nigh as forgotten as his Conquista y Pérdida de Portugal, and his Escenas Andaluzas (1847) have never been popular, partly through fault of the author, who enamels his work with local or obsolete words in the style of Wardour Street, and who assumes a posture of superiority which irritates more than it amuses. A record of Andalucían manners and of fading customs, the Escenas has special value as embodying the impression of an observer who valued picturesqueness—valued it so highly, in fact, that one is haunted (perhaps unjustly) by the suspicion that he heightened his tones for the sake of effect. Another series of "documents" is afforded by Ramón de Mesonero Romanos (1803-82), who is often classed as a follower of Larra, whereas the first of his Escenas Matritenses appeared before Larra's first essays. He has no trace of Larra's energetic condensation, tending, as he does, to a not ungraceful diffuseness; but he has bequeathed us a living picture of the native Madrid before it sank to being a poor, pale copy of Paris, and has enabled us to reconstruct the social life of sixty years since. Mesonero, who has none of Estébanez' airs and graces, though he is no less observant, and is probably more accurate, writes as a well-bred man speaks—simply, naturally, directly; and those qualities are seen to most advantage in his Memorias de un Setentón, which are as interesting as the best of reminiscences can be.
These records of customs and manners influenced a writer of German origin on her father's side, Cecilia Böhl de Faber, who was thrice married, and whom it is convenient to call by her pseudonym, Fernán Caballero (1796-1877), a village in Don Quixote's country. Her first novel, La Gaviota (1848), has probably been more read by foreigners than any Spanish book of the century, and, with all its sensibility and moralisings, we can scarcely grudge its vogue; for it is true to common life as common life existed in an Andalucían village, and its style is natural, if not distinguished. Even in La Gaviota there is an air of unreality when the scene is shifted from the country to the drawing-room, and the suspicion that Fernán Caballero could invent without observing deepens in presence of such a wooden lay-figure as Sir George Percy in Clemencia. Her didactic bent increased with time, so that much of her later work is bedevilled with sermons and gospellings; yet so long as she deals with the rustic episodes which were her earliest memories, so long as she is content to report and to describe, she produces a delightful series of pictures, touched in with an almost irreproachable refinement. She is not far enough from us to be a classic; but she is sufficiently removed to be old-fashioned, and she suffers accordingly. Still it is safe to prophesy that La Gaviota will survive most younger rivals.
In all likelihood Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833-1891), who, like most literary Spaniards, injured his work by meddling in politics, will live by his shorter, more unambitious stories. His Escándalo (1875), after creating a prodigious sensation as a defence of the Jesuits from an old revolutionist, is already laid aside, and La Pródiga is in no better case. The true Alarcón is revealed in El Sombrero de tres Picos, a picture of rustic manners, rendered with infinite enjoyment and merry humour; in the rapid, various sketches entitled Historietas Nacionales; and in that gallant, picturesque account of the Morocco campaign called the Diario de un Testigo de la Guerra en África—as vivid a piece of patriotic chronicling as these latest years have shown.
Of graver prose modern Spain has little to boast. Yet the Marqués de Valdegamas, Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853) has written an Ensayo sobre el Catolicismo, el Liberalismo y el Socialismo, which has been read and applauded throughout Europe. Donoso, the most intolerant of Spaniards, overwhelms his readers with dogmatic statement in place of reasoned exposition; but he writes with astonishing eloquence, and with a superb conviction of his personal infallibility that has scarcely any match in literature. At the opposite pole is the Vich priest, Jaime Balmes y Uspia (1810-48), whose Cartas á un Escéptico and Criterio are overshadowed by his Protestantismo comparado en el Catolicismo, a performance of striking ingenuity, among the finest in the list of modern controversy. Donoso denounced man's reason as a gin of the devil, as a faculty whose natural tendency is towards error. Balmes appeals to reason at every step of the road. With him, indeed, it is unsafe to allow that two and two are four until it is ascertained what he means to do with that proposition; for his subtlety is almost uncanny, and his dexterity in using an opponent's admission is surprising. If anything, Balmes is even too clever, for the most simple-minded reader is driven to ask how it is possible that any rational being can hold the opposite view. Still, from the Catholic standpoint, Balmes is unanswerable, and—in Spain at least—he has never been answered, while his vogue abroad has been very great. Setting aside its doctrinal bearing, his treatise is a most striking example of destructive criticism and of marshalled argument.
Footnote:
[30] M. Morel-Fatio points out that Fígaro, which seems so Castilian by association, is not a Castilian name. See his Études sur l'Espagne (Paris, 1895), vol. i. p. 76. If it be not Catalan, if Beaumarchais invented it, it is among the most successful of his coinage.