To write an account of contemporary literature is an undertaking not less tempting than to write the history of contemporary politics. Its productions are likely to be familiar to us; its authors have probably expressed ideas with which we are more or less in sympathy; and in dealing with these we are free from the burdens of authority and tradition. On the other hand, criticism of contemporaries is so prone to be coloured by the prejudice of sects and cliques, that the liberal historian of the past is in danger of exhibiting himself as a blind observer of the present, or as a ludicrous prophet of the future. A book on current literature is often, like Hansard, a melancholy register of mistaken forecasts. Probably no critic of 1820 would have ventured to place Keats among the greatest poets of the world. But the risk of failing to recognise a Keats is, in the nature of things, very slight; and for our present purpose we are only concerned with those who, by general admission, are among the living influences of the moment, the chiefs of a generation which is now almost middle-aged.
No Spaniard would contest the title of the Asturian, Ramón de Campoamor y Campoosorio (b. 1817), to be considered as the actual doyen of Spanish literature. He purposed entering the Society of Jesus in his youth, then turned to medicine as his true vocation, and finally gave himself up to poetry and politics. A fierce conservative, Campoamor has served as Governor of Alicante and Valencia, and has combated democracy by speech and pen; but he has never been taken seriously as a politician, and his few philosophic essays have caused his orthodoxy to be questioned by writers with an imperfect sense of humour. His controversy with Valera on metaphysics and poetry is a manifest joke to which both writers have lent themselves with an affectation of profound solemnity; and it may well be doubted if Campoamor's professed convictions are more than occasions for humoristic ingenuity.
He has attempted the drama without success in such pieces as El Palacio de la Verdad and in El Honor. So also in the eight cantos of a grandiose poem entitled El Drama Universal (1873) he has failed to impress with his version of the posthumous loves of Honorio and Soledad, though in the matter of technical execution nothing finer has been accomplished in our day. His chief distinction, according to Peninsular critics, is that he has invented a new poetic genre under the names of doloras, humoradas or pequeños poemas (short poems). It is not, however, an easy matter to distinguish any one of these from its brethren, and Campoamor's own explanation lacks clearness when he lays it down that a dolora is a dramatised humorada, and that a pequeño poema is an amplified dolora. This is to define light in terms of darkness. An acute critic, M. Peseux-Richard, has noted that this definition is not only obscure, but that it is an evident afterthought.[31] The dolora is the first in order of invention, and it is also the performance upon which, to judge by his Poética, Campoamor sets most value. What, then, is a dolora? It is, in fact, a "transcendental" fable in which men and women, their words and acts, are made to typify eternal "verities": a poem which aims at brevity, delicacy, pathos, and philosophy in an ironical setting. The "transcendental" truth to be conveyed is the supreme point: exquisiteness of form is unimportant.
M. Peseux-Richard dryly remarks that humoradas are as old as anything in literature, and that Campoamor's exploit consists in inventing the name, not the thing. This is true; and it is none the less true that the writing of doloras (and the rest), after the recipe of the master, has become a plague of recent Spanish literature. Fortunately Campoamor is better than his theories, which, if he were consistent, would lead him straight to conceptismo. Doubtless, at whiles, he condescends upon the banal, mistakes sentimentalism for sentiment, substitutes a commonplace for an aphorism, a paradox for an epigram; doubtless, also, he is wanting in the right national note of exaltation and rhetorical splendour. But for all his profession of indifference to form, he is—at his best—a most accomplished craftsman, an admirable artist in miniature, an expert in the art of concise expression, and, in so much, a healthy influence—though not without a concealed germ of evil. For if in his own hands the ingenious antithesis often reaches the utmost point of condensation, in the hands of imitators it is degraded to an obscure conceit, a rhymed conundrum. His vogue has always been considerable, and he is one of the few Spanish poets whose reputation extends beyond the Pyrenees; still, he is not in any sense a national poet, a characteristic product of the soil, and with all his distinguished scepticism, his picturesque pessimistic pose, and his sound workmanship, he is more likely to be remembered for a score of brilliant apophthegms than for any essentially poetic quality.
It was as a poet that Juan Valera y Alcalá Galiano (b. 1827) made his first appearance in literature in 1856. Few in Europe have seen more aspects of life, or have snatched more profit from their opportunities. Born at Córdoba, educated at Málaga and Granada, Valera has so enjoyed life from the outset that his youth is now the subject of a legend. Passing from law to diplomacy, he learned the world in the legations at Naples, Lisbon, Rio Janeiro, Dresden, St. Petersburg; he helped to found El Contemporaneo, once a journal of great influence; he entered the Cortes, and became minister at Frankfort, Washington, Brussels, and Vienna. His native subtlety, his cosmopolitan tact, have served him no less in literature than in affairs. To literature he has given the best that is in him. He has protested, with the ironical humility in which he excels, against the public neglect of his poems; and when one reflects upon what has found favour in this kind, the protest is half justified. Valera's verses, falling short as they do of inspired perfection, are wrought with curious delicacy of technique. But his very cultivation is against him: such poems as Sueños or Último Adiós or El Fuego divino, admirable as they are, recall the work of predecessors. Memories of Luis de León, traces of Dante and Leopardi, are encountered on his best page; and yet he brings with him into modern verse qualities which, in the actual stage of Spanish literature, are of singular worth—repose and refinement and dignity and metrical mastery.
As a critic his diplomatic training has been a hindrance to him. He rarely writes without establishing some ingenious and suggestive parallel or pronouncing some luminous judgment; but he is, so to say, in fear of his own intelligence, and his instinctive courtesy, his desire to please, often stay him from arriving at a clear conclusion. His manifold interests, the incomparable beauty of his style, his wide reading, his cold lucidity, are an almost ideal equipment for critical work. Expert in ingratiation as he is, his suave complaisance becomes a formidable weapon in such a performance as the Cartas Americanas, where excessive urbanity has all the effect of commination: you set the book down with the impression that the writers of the South American continent have been complimented out of existence by a stately courtier.
But whatever reserves may be made in praising the poet and the critic, Valera's triumph as a novelist is incontestable. Mr. Gosse has so introduced him to English readers as to make further criticism almost superfluous. Valera, for all his polite scepticism, is a Spaniard of the best: a mystic by intuition and inheritance, a doubter by force of circumstances and education. He himself has told us in the Comendador Mendoza how Pepita Jiménez came into life as the result of much mystic reading, which held him fascinated but not captive; and were we to accept his humorous confession literally, we should take it that he became a novelist by accident. It is, however, true that when he wrote Pepita Jiménez he still had much to learn in method. Writers with not a tithe of his natural gift would have avoided his obvious faults—his digressions, his episodes which check the current of his story. But Pepita Jiménez, whatever its defects, is of capital importance in literary history, for from its publication dates the renaissance of the Spanish novel. Here at last was a book owing nothing to France, taking its root in native inspiration, arabesquing the motives of Luis de Granada, León, Santa Teresa, displaying once more what Coventry Patmore has well described as "that complete synthesis of gravity of matter and gaiety of manner which is the glittering crown of art, and which, out of Spanish literature, is to be found only in Shakespeare, and even in him in a far less obvious degree."
And Valera has continued to progress in art. In construction, in depth, in psychological insight, Doña Luz exceeds its predecessor, as the Comendador Mendoza outshines both in vigour of expression, in tragic conception, in pathetic sincerity. Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino has found less favour with critics and with general readers, perhaps because its humour is too refined, its observation too merciless, its style too subtle. Nor is Valera less successful in the short story, and in the dialogue, in which sort Asclepigenia may be held for an absolute masterpiece in little. His work lies before us, complete for all purposes; for though he still publishes for our delight, advancing age compels him to dictate instead of writing—a harassing condition for an artist whose talent is free from any touch of declamation. It is hard for us who have undergone the spell of Prospero, who have been fascinated by his truth and grace and sympathy, to judge him with the impartiality of posterity. But we may safely anticipate its general verdict. It may be that some of his improvisations will lack durability; but these are few. Valera, like the rest of the world, is entitled to be judged at his best, and his best will be read as long as Spanish literature endures; for he is not simply a dexterous craftsman using one of the noblest of languages with an exquisite delicacy and illimitable variety of means, nor a clever novelist exercising a superficial talent, nor even (though he is that in a very special sense) the leader of a national revival. He is something far rarer and more potent than an accomplished man of letters: a great creative artist, and the embodiment of a people's genius.
A less cosmopolitan, but scarcely less original talent is that of José María de Pereda (b. 1834), who comes, like so many distinguished Spaniards, from "the mountain." Born at Polanco, trained as a civil engineer in his province of Santander, Pereda was—and, perhaps, still is, theoretically—a stout Carlist, an intransigent ultramontane whose social position has enabled him to despise the politics of expediency. His earliest essays in a local newspaper, La Abeja Montañesa, attracted no attention; nor was he much more fortunate with his amazingly brilliant Escenas Montañesas (1864). Fernán Caballero, and a gentle sentimentalist now wholly forgotten, Antonio Trueba (1821-89), satisfied readers with graceful insipidities, beside which the new-comer's manly realism seemed almost crude. The conventional villager, simple, Arcadian, and impossible, held the field; and Pereda's revelation of unveiled rusticity was esteemed displeasing, unnecessary, inartistic. He had to educate his public. From the outset he found a few enthusiasts to appreciate him in his native province; and, by slow degrees, he succeeded in imposing himself first upon the general audience, and then, with much more difficulty, upon official critics. It is commonly alleged against him that even in his more ambitious novels—in Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera, in Pedro Sánchez, where he deals with town life, and in Sotileza, which is salt with the sea—his personages are local. The observation is intended as a reproach; but, in truth, Pereda's men and women are only local as Sancho Panza and Maritornes are local—local in particulars, universal as types of nature. His true defects are his tendency to abuse his knowledge of dialect, to insist on a moral aim, to caricature his villains. These are spots on the sun. On the whole, he pictures life as he sees it, with unblenching fidelity; his people live and move; and—not least—he is a master of nervous, energetic phrase. No writer outdoes him as a landscape-painter in rendering the fertile valleys, the cold hills, the vexed Cantabrian sea, to which he returns with the intimate passion of a lover.
The representative of a younger school is Benito Pérez Galdós (b. 1845), who left the Canary Islands in his nineteenth year with the purpose of reading law in Madrid. A brief trial of journalism, previous to the revolution of 1868, led to the publication of his first novel, La Fontana de Oro (1870), and since 1873 he has shown a wondrous persistence and suppleness of talent. His Episodios Nacionales alone fill twenty volumes, and as many more exist detached from that series. He has composed the modern national epic in the form of novels: novels which have for their setting the War of Independence, and the succeeding twenty years of civil combat; novels in which not less than five hundred characters are presented. Galdós is in singular contrast with his friend Pereda. The prejudiced Tory has educated his public; the Liberal reformer has been educated by his contemporaries. Galdós has always had his fingers on the general pulse; and when the readers in the late seventies wearied of the historico-political novel, Galdós was ready with La Familia de León Roch, with Gloria, and with Doña Perfecta, in which the religious difficulty is posed ten years before Robert Elsmere was written. His third stage of development is exampled in Fortuna y Jacinta, a most forcible study of contemporary life. A prolific inventor, a minute observer of detail, Galdós combines realism with fantasy, flat prose with poetic imagination, so that he succeeds best in drawing psychological eccentricities like Ángel Guerra. He is perhaps too Spanish to endure translation, too prone to assume that his readers are familiar with the minutiæ of Peninsular life and history, and his construction, broad as it is, lacks solidity; but that he deserves the greater part of his fame is unquestionable, and if there be doubters, Fortuna y Jacinta and Ángel Guerra are at hand to vindicate the judgment.