Spain has done excellent work in prose fiction during the last fifty or sixty years past, but this work is little known outside of the Spanish-speaking countries. Even those people who are, for the most part, well read in the literatures of Europe are generally ignorant of recent Spanish fiction. Or if they have read a few of the best Spanish novels in French or English versions, they may not have found them very interesting. This is explained, I take it, by the fact that Spanish literature is essentially national, and if you do not know the Spanish people you can not fully understand their literature. This is largely true of all literatures, but it is especially true of the Spanish. The French literature, for instance, is more universal and less national than the Spanish, perhaps by the very force of geographical position. Spain is nearly surrounded by water, and on land it is separated from the rest of Europe,—excepting only Portugal,—by an almost insurmountable barrier of lofty mountains. France, on the other hand, is so situated as to feel the cross-currents of European life. Do not these facts explain, at least in part, the relatively insular characteristics of much contemporary Spanish literature? The Spanish literature, however, by its very provincialism is fascinating to those who are interested in Spanish civilization.
Although it is doubtless quite true that there has been in modern Spain no writer of short stories who rivals Guy de Maupassant, nor has there been any writer of longer stories who may compare favorably with Honoré de Balzac, yet, as a whole, the Spain of the nineteenth century has probably been pictured as faithfully as France by native authors. And Spain has to-day a group of vigorous young writers, who give promise of carrying the work forward to an even greater future.
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Spanish America has done little work of merit in prose fiction, but it has produced much lyric poetry. If we may believe the statements of Juan Valera in his Cartas americanas, the Spanish Americans have written more good verse than have the English Americans. In the domain of letters the Spanish-speaking peoples of America have been slower than their Peninsular cousins to throw off the yoke of French imitation. Most young men of wealth in Spanish America are educated in Paris, and their Castilian shows unmistakably the effect of their long residence in France. This influence may be studied in the works of Manuel Ugarte (even in his Introducción to La joven literatura hispano-americana, Paris, 1906) and of Rubén Darío (cf. La muerte de la emperatriz de China).
But among the younger writers there are some who show little French influence, or none at all. These may be divided into two classes: (1) those who write only in pure classical Castilian, and who, if they use Americanisms at all, use them consciously and with due apologies; and (2) those who write freely and naturally in the current language of the educated classes of their own particular Spanish-American country. To represent the first of these two types, Un alma, by Ricardo Fernández Guardia,[N] has been selected for this volume of Spanish Short Stories. Juan Neira, by Joaquín Díaz Garcés,[O] has been chosen to represent the other type. They are both thoroughly good stories, and they speak well for the future of prose fiction in Spanish America.
E. C. H.
Footnotes to the Introduction:
[A] Don Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, born in 1836 at Seville. An orphan in his tenth year, he was educated by his godmother, whom he left at the age of eighteen to go penniless to Madrid. He suffered many hardships, and died in 1870 at the early age of thirty-four. Works: three volumes of prose and verse.
[B] Don Mariano José de Larra, born in 1809. His father was a medical officer in the French army (then stationed in Spain) of Joseph Bonaparte, whom he followed to France after the defeat of the French. Larra returned to Spain at the age of eight. Read law at Valladolid, but did not complete the prescribed course. Removed to Madrid, and engaged in journalism. Killed himself February 13, 1837, in his twenty-eighth year. Works: Essays on manners, critical reviews, several unimportant plays, and a novel,—El doncel de D. Enrique el Doliente (1834).