About thirty years ago there appeared in the Heraldo of Madrid a novel called La Gaviota ("The Sea-gull"). Spanish literature at the present day is poor in novels, and thirty years ago it was much poorer. La Gaviota was like a tall tiger-lily suddenly appearing among low-growing exotics. The book was what the French call a roman de moeurs: it was signed with an unknown name—Fernan Caballero. Nobody knew Fernan Caballero. Madrid concluded that it must be one of those great living writers whose names could be counted on the first five sticks of a lady's fan. Seville ascribed it to an author of local fame, and Cadiz was amazed by the fact that anything so good could come out of Spain. The novel was eagerly read, even by the Gallicanized element in society, and pronounced a success in all things, except that it was not French. Following La Gaviota, La España published Elia in its columns: then followed La Familia Alvareda, Una en Otra, Pobre Dolores, Lucas Garcia and others. It became evident that the masked writer was a woman, but not one of those femmes auteurs of whom Louis Veuillot says, with more force than elegance, "Il me semble que si ma femme signait tels livres, j'aurais scrupule à signer ses enfants." Her thoughts were pure and high, and every detail was gifted with life.
The Spanish public was not particularly pleased to discover that its admired Fernan was a woman. If Cervantes had been a woman, there would have been a precedent for it; but Cervantes was a man. Fernan Caballero's readers would have wavered in their allegiance had her stories not become a part of themselves. It was unfortunate that a woman should write such things. "A blue-stocking!" cries Don Judas Tadéo Barbo, representative of this feeling, in Una en Otra. "Ave Maria! A woman who writes and rushes into print! It is a mortal sin! A woman has as much business to write a book as a man would to have a baby. And a pretty woman, too! Who would have believed it? A woman who writes should be old, ugly and decrepit."
In spite of the attention excited by her stories, she was still tenacious of her mask. In a letter to Germonde de Lavigne, one of the French translators of her works, she said: "It was cruel of you to tear away my pseudonym. You know how much I value it. You perhaps wished me to make a buckler of my fan; but, believe me, the beautiful things I have gathered do not need it. I have not tried to put into my stories studies of the heart or the world: there is neither art nor invention nor inspiration, only the exact painting of our actual society. Spanish types of all classes, the manners, the feelings, the witty and poetical language, I have painted from the life. My personality and my name are things outside of these. All that I have written is true. I cannot invent: I possess only the talent of dovetailing facts and placing them in relief. I have passed my life in collecting those treasures of tradition, poetry, stories, legends, pious and poetic beliefs which make an atmosphere of picturesque purity—proverbs like Sancho's, maxims as beautiful as Don Quixote, couched in the forcible and flowery language of the people. I am as proud as an artist of the beauty of my model. The story of Lucas Garcia is true; I have known Simon Verde; an old woman told me the story of the lottery in La Estrella; in Una en Otra everything is true. I have caught nearly all my dialogues from the lips of the people who spoke them. I have gleaned the last grain from a beautiful field, already growing desolate. I have made a sheaf, despised perhaps to-day, although the world has gathered some corn-flowers which fell from it, but which some day will be appreciated."
"Like Sir Walter Scott," says M. de Mazade in the Revue des Deux Mondes, "Fernan Caballero has a lively feeling for the traditional and local in regions of which she writes. Her first and only inspiration is Spain. She loves even its miseries, which are not without their grandeur. Her creations, her characters, her combinations, have no reflection of imitation: they are taken from the heart of the national life. They proceed from an observation of the reality and a feeling of the poetry of things—two sentiments which, balancing each other and uniting, form true and original invention.
"Another trait in this rare talent," continues M. de Mazade—"a trait in which the imagination of the woman is shown—is the absence of complication in her tales: they have none of those hard knots that bind up action. Fernan Caballero has a genius for details. She makes everything live. She has an intuition of a thousand shades, often imperceptible to ordinary eyes, which give each mood of Nature a distinct physiognomy. Like Sir Walter—more than Sir Walter Scott—she enjoys digressions, sinuous conversations; she abandons herself to them with delight; she draws pictures and portraits, full of freshness, one after the other; she is prodigal of all that can throw light on manners or character. She passes with graceful ease from the refinements of the aristocratic world to the most humble scenes of popular life."
An author, it seems, is never sui generis in the estimation of the critics. Fernan Caballero, compared by M. Mérimée to Sterne and by others to Scott, imagined that if her talent was similar to anybody's it was like Émile Souvestre's; but her models and method were as much like Souvestre's as Spain is like France. Fernan Caballero—or, as she was known in real life, Doña Cæcilia de Baer, marquesa de Arco-Hermosa—may be compared, reservedly, to Miss Mitford. It is true that fiery thoughts and violent passion are not to be found in Miss Mitford's beautifully-enamelled miniatures; but fire and passion were not apparent in the English life she painted, while in the works of the Spanish artist passion glows under the simplest forms, as the red of an orange among its leaves and blossoms. It has been truly said of Madame de Baer that she gave a new world to Castile and Leon—an Andalusian world—almost Arcadian in its newness and simplicity. She showed to the world that the Spain of thirty years ago was still the Spain of Don Quixote. "What was true yesterday," she quotes from Calderon, "is true to-day." Our Don Quixote is not the Spanish Don Quixote. "Sir Roger de Coverley, Sir Charles Grandison and Don Quixote," said Colonel Newcome, "are the finest gentlemen in the world." The Spaniards see in Don Quixote something higher. "In Cervantes," says Madame de Baer, "the mind stifled the heart. It was not his heart that made of Don Quixote a thing for laughter. Neither the casque of Mambrino nor the love of Maritornes makes me laugh: it makes me weep."
Progress—as the word is generally understood—also makes her sad. The Andalusian, surrounded by a world of poetry and beauty, is happy in his ignorance. He reads sermons in the lives of animals, poems in the trees, maxims and proverbs everywhere. Why should he read them in books? In La Gaviota, Frederick Stein, a German surgeon who has been thrown upon the charity of some Spanish peasants, hears a shepherd mention an infallible cure for pain in the eyes. Stein asks where this remedy is to be found.
"I cannot tell you," answered the shepherd: "I know that there is such a thing."
"Who can find it, then?" asked Stein.
"The swallows," said José.