While the War of Independence was in progress men were otherwise engaged than in novel-reading, and in Ferdinand VII.’s reign literature was apt to be a perilous trade. The banishment or flight of almost every Spaniard of liberal opinions or intellectual distinction had one result which might have been foreseen, if there had been a clear-sighted man in the reactionary party. It brought to an end the period of cut-and-dry classical domination. The exiles returned with new ideals in literature as well as in politics. There was a restless ferment of the libertarian, romantic spirit. Interest revived in the old national romantic drama which had fallen out of fashion, and had been known chiefly in recasts of a few stock pieces. Quaint signs of change are discernible in unexpected quarters. When the termagant Carlota, the Queen’s sister, snatched a state-paper out of Calomarde’s hands and boxed his ears soundly, the crafty minister put the affront aside by wittily quoting the title of one of Calderón’s plays: ‘Las manos blancas no ofenden.’ Fifteen years earlier he would probably have quoted from some wretched playwright like Comella. French books were still eagerly read, but they were not ‘classical’ works. Chateaubriand and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre became available in translations. Joaquín Telesforo de Trueba y Cosío, a montañés residing in London, came under the spell of Walter Scott, and had the courage to write two historical romances in English: I have read many worse novels than Gomez Arias and The Castilians, and every day I see novels written in much worse English. The shadow of Scott was projected far and wide over Spain, and those who read The Bride of Lammermoor usually went on to read Notre-Dame de Paris. If Scott had never written historical novels, and if Ferdinand VII. had not made many excellent Spaniards feel that they were safer anywhere than in Spain, we should not have had Espronceda’s Sancho Saldaña ó El Castellano de Cuéllar, nor Martínez de la Rosa’s Doña Isabel de Solís, nor perhaps even Enrique Gil’s much more engaging story, El Señor de Bembibre, which appeared in 1844. The first two are unsuccessful imitations of Scott, and El Señor de Bembibre is charged with reminiscences of The Bride of Lammermoor.
It is one of life’s little ironies that the first writer of this period to give us a genuinely Spanish story was not a writer of pure Spanish origin. Fernán Caballero, as she chose to call herself,—and as it is most convenient to call her, for she was married thrice, and therefore used four different legal signatures, apart from her pseudonym,—was the daughter of Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber, who settled in Spain and did useful journeyman’s work in literature. Born and partly educated abroad, with a German father and a Spanish mother, it is not surprising that she had the gift of tongues, and that one or two of her early stories should have been originally written in French or in German. Yet nothing could be less French or German than La Gaviota, which appeared four years after El Señor de Bembibre in a Spanish version said (apparently on good authority) to be by Joaquín de Mora. But, though Mora may be responsible for the style, nobody has ever supposed that he was responsible for the matter, and any such theory would be absurd, considering that Fernán Caballero wrote many similar tales long after Mora’s death. In La Gaviota, in La Familia de Albareda, in the Cuadros de costumbres, and the rest—transcriptions of the simplest provincial customs, long since extirpated from the soil in which they seemed to be irradicably implanted—there is for us nowadays an historical interest; but there is nothing historical about them: they are records of personal observation. Fortunately for herself Fernán Caballero, who had no elaborate learning, did not attempt any reconstruction of the past, and was mostly content to note what she saw around her. In this sense she may be considered as a pioneer in realism. The title would probably not have pleased her, owing to the connotation of the word ‘realism’; but nevertheless she belongs to the realistic school, and she expressly admits that she describes instead of inventing. To prevent any possible misapprehension, it should be said at once that her realism is gentle, peaceful and demure. She had some small pretensions of her own, felt a mistaken vocation to do good works among the heathen, and to be a trumpeter of orthodoxy. Each of us is convinced, of course, that orthodoxy is his doxy, and that heterodoxy is other people’s doxy; but Fernán Caballero’s insistence has a self-righteous note which may easily grow tiresome. There are some who find pleasure in her exhortations—especially amongst those who regard them as expositions of obsolete doctrine; but very few of us have reached this stage of cynicism.
These moralisings are the unessential and disfiguring element in Fernán Caballero’s unconscious art. It is something to be able to tell a story with intelligence and point, and this she does constantly. And, besides the power of narration, she has the characteristic Spanish faculty of undimmed sight. When she limits herself to what she has actually seen (and, to be just, her expeditions afield are rare), she is always alert, always attractive by virtue of her delicate, feminine perception. Many phases of life are unknown to her; from other phases she deliberately turns away; hence her picture is necessarily incomplete. But she sympathises with what she knows, and the figures on her narrow stage are rendered with dainty adroitness. There is no great variety in her tableau of that mild Human Comedy which, with its frugal joys and meek sorrows, it was her office to describe; but it has the note of sincerity. Her methods are as realistic as those used in later romances professing to be based on ‘human documents’—a phrase now worn threadbare, but not yet invented when she began to write. She reverted by instinct to realism of the national type,—realism which was fully developed centuries before the French variety was dreamed of,—and it was in the realistic field that her successors won triumphs greater than her own.
Some ten or twelve years after the appearance of La Gaviota, Antonio de Trueba leapt into popularity with a succession of stories all of which might have been called—as one volume was called—Cuentos de color de rosa. In the past my inability to appreciate Trueba as he is appreciated in his native province of Vizcaya has brought me into trouble. Each of us has his limitations, and, fresh from reading Trueba once more, I stand before you impenitent, persuaded that, if he flickers up into infantile prettiness, he sputters out in insipid optimism. We cannot all be Biscayans, and must take the consequences. In the circumstances I do not propose to deal with Trueba,—who, like the rest of us, appears to have had a tolerably good conceit of himself,—nor to spend much time in discussing the more brilliant Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Alarcón seems likely to be remembered better by El Sombrero de tres picos—a lively expansion in prose of a well-known romance—than by any of his later books. All literatures have their disappointing personalities: men who at the outset seemed capable of doing anything, who insist on doing everything, and who end by doing next to nothing. Nobody who knows the meaning of words would say that the author of El Sombrero de tres picos did next to nothing, but much more was expected of him. Whether there was, or was not, any reasonable ground for these high hopes is another question. The ‘Might-Have-Been’ is always vanity. Save in such rare cases as that of Cervantes, who published the First Part of Don Quixote when he was fifty-eight (the age at which Alarcón died in 1891), imaginative writers have generally done their best work earlier in their careers. But, however this may be, our expectations were not fulfilled in Alarcón’s case. A few short stories represent him to posterity: like M. Bourget, he ‘found salvation,’ lost much of his art, and, in his more elaborate novels, became tedious. Fortunately, about ten years before the publication of El Sombrero de tres picos, a new talent had revealed itself to those who had eyes to see; and, as always happens everywhere, these were not many.
While Trueba was writing the rose-coloured tales which endeared him to the general public, José María de Pereda was growing up to manhood in the north of Spain.[107] Though the verdict of the capital still counts for much, it would not be true nowadays to say that the rest of Spain accepts without question the dictation of Madrid in matters of literary taste and fashion; but it was true enough of all the provinces—with the possible exception of Cataluña—in the late fifties and early sixties, when Pereda began to write for a Santander newspaper, La Abeja montañesa. Though he was over thirty, he had then no wide experience of life; he had been reared in a simple, old-fashioned circle where everybody stood fast in the ancient ways, and where there was no literary chatter. He seems to have had the usual traditional stock of knowledge flogged into him in the old familiar way by the irascible pedagogue whose portrait he has drawn not too kindly. From Santander Pereda went to Madrid, studied there a short while, joyfully returned home, and, till his health failed, scarcely ever left Polanco again, except during the short period when he was sent as a deputy to the Cortes. He hated the life of the capital, and remained till the end of his days an incorrigibly faithful montañesuco.
It is necessary to bear these circumstances in mind, for they help us to understand Pereda’s attitude. Hostile critics never tired of charging him with provincialism, but ‘provincialism’ is not the right word. The man was a born aristocrat, with no enthusiasm for novelties in abstract speculation, no liking for political and social theories which involved a rupture with the past; but his mind was not irreceptive, and, if his outlook is circumscribed, what he does see is conveyed with a pitiless lucidity. This power of imparting a concentrated impression is noticeable in the Escenas montañesas which appeared in 1864 with an introductory notice by Trueba, then in the flush of success. It is an amusing spectacle, this of the lamb standing as sponsor to the lion; and, with a timorous bleat, the lamb disengages its responsibility as far as decency allows. The book was praised by Mesonero Romanos—to whom Pereda subsequently dedicated Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera; but with few exceptions outside Santander, where local partiality rather than æsthetic taste led to a more favourable judgment, all Spain agreed with Trueba’s implied view that Pereda’s temperate realism was a morose caricature. The hastiest commonplaces of criticism are the most readily accepted, and Pereda was henceforth provided with a reputation which it took him about a dozen years to live down. He lived it down, but not by compromising with his censors. He remained unchanged in all but the mastery of his art which gradually increased till Bocetos al temple was recognised as a work of something like genius.
It is a striking volume, but the distinguishing traits of Bocetos al temple are precisely those which characterise Escenas montañesas. Pereda has developed in the sense that his touch is more confident, but his point of view is the same as before. Take, for example, La Mujer del César, the first story in the book: the moral simply is that it is not enough to be beyond reproach, but that one must also seem to be so. You may call this trite or old-fashioned in its simplicity, but it is not ‘provincial.’ What is true is that the atmosphere of Bocetos al temple is ‘regional.’ The writer is not so childish as to suppose that Madrid is peopled with demons, and the country hill-side with angels. Pereda had no larger an acquaintance with angels than you or I have, and his personages are pleasingly human in their blended strength and weakness; but he had convinced himself that the constant virtues of the antique world are hard to cultivate in overgrown centres of population, and that the best of men is likely to suffer from the contagion of city life. To this thesis he returned again and again: in Pedro Sánchez, in El Sabor de la Tierruca, in Peñas arriba, he argues his point with the pertinacity of conviction. There is nothing provincial in the thesis, and it is good for those of us who are condemned to live in fussy cities to know that we, too, seem as narrow-minded as any fisherman or agricultural labourer. Can anything be more laughably provincial than the Cockney, or the boulevardier, who conceives that London, or New York, or Paris is the centre of the universe, that the inhabitants of these places are foremost in the files of time? Nobody is more provincial than an ordinary dweller in one of these large, straggling, squalid villages. Pereda is not afflicted with megalomania; he is not impressed by numbers; he does not ‘think in continents.’ He believes all this to be the bounce of degenerate vulgarians, and leaves us with a disquieting feeling that he may not be very far wrong.
He is not one of those who look forward to a new heaven and a new earth next week. If you expect to find in him the qualities which you find in Rousseau, or in any other wonder-child of the earthquake and the tempest, you will assuredly be disappointed. But, if we take him for what he is—a satirical observer of character, an artist whose instantaneous presentation of character and of the visible world has a singular relief and saliency—we shall be compelled to assign him a very high place among the realists of Spain. No one who has once met with the frivolous and vindictive Marquesa de Azulejo, with the foppish Vizconde del Cierzo, with the futile Condesa de la Rocaverde, or with Lucas Gómez, the purveyor of patchouli literature, can ever forget them. In this particular of making his secondary figures memorable, Pereda somewhat resembles Dickens, and both use—perhaps abuse—caricature as a weapon. But the element of caricature is more riotous in Dickens than in Pereda, and the acumen in Pereda is more contemptuous than in Dickens. Pereda is in Spanish literature what Narváez was in Spanish politics: he ‘uses the stick, and hits hard.’ Cervantes sees through and through you, notes every silly foible, and yet loves you as though you were the most perfect of mortals, and he the dullest fellow in the world. Pereda has something of Cervantes’s seriousness without his constant amenity. He is nearer to Quevedo’s intolerant spirit. Exasperated by absurdity and pretence, he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly, he gladly makes fools suffer. The collection entitled Tipos trashumantes contains admirable examples of his dexterity in malicious portraiture—the political quack in El Excelentísimo Señor who, like the rest of us Spaniards (says Pereda dryly), is able to do anything and everything; the scrofulous barber in Un Artista, whose father was killed in the opéra-comique revolution of ’54, who condescends to visit Santander professionally in the summer, and familiarly refers to Pérez Galdós by his Christian name; the hopeless booby in Un Sabio, who has addled his poor brain by drinking German philosophy badly corked by Sanz del Río, and who abandons the belief in which he was brought up for spiritualistic antics which enable him to commune with the departed souls of Confucius and Sancho Panza. These performances are models of cruel irony.
Bocetos al temple was the first of Pereda’s books to attract the public, and it may be recommended to any one who wishes to judge the writer’s talent in its first phase. Pereda did greater things afterwards, but nothing more characteristic. It was always a source of weakness to his art that he had a didactic intention—an itch to prove that he is right, and that his opponents are wrong, often criminally wrong—and this tendency became more pronounced in some of his later books. Such novels as El Buey suelto, and the still more admirable De tal palo, tal astilla, have an individual interest of their own, but we are never allowed the privilege of forgetting that the one is a refutation of Balzac’s Petites misères de la vie conjugale, and the other a refutation of Pérez Galdós’s Doña Perfecta. To Pereda the problem seems perfectly simple. You have been discouraged from matrimony by Balzac, who has told you that the life of a married man is a canker of trials and disappointments—small, but so numerous that at last they amount to a tragedy, and so cumulative that the doomed creature feels himself a complete failure both as a husband and a father. Pereda seeks to encourage you by exhibiting the other side of the medal. Gedeón is a bachelor, a buey suelto: he has freedom, but it is the desolate freedom of the stray steer—or rather of the wild ass. He is worried to death by the nagging and quarrelling of his maid-servants; he gets rid of them, and is plundered by men-servants; he is miserable in a boarding-house, he is neglected in an hôtel; he has no family ties, is profoundly uncomfortable, goes from bad to worse, and finally expiates by marrying his mistress shortly before his death. The picture of well-to-do discomfort is powerful, but, as a refutation of Balzac, it is not convincing. So, again, in De tal palo, tal astilla. Fernando encounters the pious Águeda; his suit fails, he commits suicide, and she finds rest in religion, the only consoling agent. This is all far too simple. Are we to believe that every bachelor is a selfish dolt, or that only atheists commit suicide? Pereda, no doubt, lived to learn differently, but meanwhile his insistence on his own views had spoiled two works of art.
Something of this polemical strain runs through all his romances, and, after the fall of the republic and the restoration of the Bourbons, his conservatism may have contributed to make him popular in the late seventies and the early eighties. But we are twenty or thirty years removed from the passions of that period, and Pereda’s work stands the crucial test of time. He is not specially skilful in construction, and digresses into irrelevant episodes; but he can usually tell his tale forcibly, and, when he warms to it, with grim conciseness; he is seldom declamatory, is a master of diction untainted by gallicisms, and records with caustic humour every relevant detail in whatever passes before his eyes. He is the chronicler of a Spain, reactionary and picturesque, which is fast disappearing, and will soon have vanished altogether. If the generations of the future feel any curiosity as to a social system which has passed away, they will turn to Pereda for a description of it just before its dissolution. He paints it with the desperate force of one who feels that he is on the losing side. His interpretation may be—it very often is—imperfect and savagely unjust; but its vigour is imposing, and, if his world contains rather too many degraded types, it is also rich in noble figures like Don Román Pérez de la Llosía in Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera, and in profiles of humble illiterates who, in the eyes of their artistic creator, did more real service to their country than many far better known to fame.