Chapters on Spanish Literature

A perfect contrast in every way was Juan Valera, whose ductile talent had concerned itself with many matters before it found an outlet in fiction. Pereda was stubbornly regional and fanatically orthodox: Valera was a cosmopolitan strayed out of Andalusia, a careless Gallio, observing with serene amusement the fussiness of mankind over to be, or not to be. Pereda tends to tragic or melodramatic pessimism: Valera is a bland and disinterested spectator, to whom life is a brilliant, diverting comedy. He had lived much, reflected long, and seen through most people and most things before committing himself to the delineation of character. To the end of his life he never learned the trick of construction, but he was a born master of style and had an unsurpassed power of ingratiation. He had scarcely come up from Córdoba when he became ‘Juanito’ to all his acquaintances in Madrid, and his personal charm accompanied him into literature. Macaulay says somewhere that if Southey wrote nonsense, he would still be read with pleasure. This is true also of Valera, who, unlike Southey, never borders on nonsense. Though he has no prejudices to embarrass him, he has a rare dramatic sympathy with every mental attitude, and this keen, intelligent comprehension lends to all his creative work a savour of universality which makes him—of all modern Spanish novelists—the most acceptable abroad. Yet, despite his sceptical cosmopolitanism, which is by no means Spanish, Valera is an authentic Spaniard of the best age in his fusion of urbanity and authoritative insight. This politely incredulous man of the world is profoundly interested in mysticism, and still more in its practical manifestations. Nothing human is alien to him, and nothing is too transcendental to escape criticism.

In this frame of mind, habitual with him, he sat down to write Pepita Jiménez. The story is the simplest imaginable. Pepita, a young widow, is on the point of marrying Don Pedro de Vargas, when she meets his son Luis, a young seminarist with exaggerated ideas of his own spiritual gifts. Luis is a complete clerical prig, who disdains such everyday work as preaching the gospel in his own country, and vapours about being martyred by pagans. As he has not a vestige of religious vocation, the end is easily foretold. At some cost to her own character Pepita pricks the bubble, and all the young man’s aspirations melt into the air; he is made to perceive that his pretensions to sanctity are silly, marries the heroine who was to have been his stepmother, and subsides into a worthy, commonplace husband. In his Religio Poetae Patmore praises Pepita Jiménez as an example of ‘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.’ Patmore has almost always something striking to say, and even his critical paradoxes are interesting. We have no means of knowing how far his Spanish studies went, but we may guess that his acquaintance with Spanish literature was perhaps not very wide, and not very deep. As regards Pepita Jiménez his verdict is conspicuously right: it is conspicuously wrong with respect to Spanish literature as a whole. The perfect blending of which he speaks is as rare in Spain as elsewhere. In Valera it is the result of deliberate artistic method; his gravity is a necessity of the situation; his gaiety is rooted in his sceptical politeness. In his critical work his politeness is decidedly overdone; he praises and lauds in terms which would seem excessive if applied to Dante or Milton. He knows the stuff of which most authors are made, presumes on their proverbial vanity, and flatters so violently that he oversteps the limits of good-breeding. Some of you may remember the dignified rebuke of these tactics by Sr. Cuervo. But in his novels Valera strikes no attitude of impertinent or sublime condescension. He analyses his characters with a subtle and admirably patient delicacy.

A hostile critic might perhaps urge that Valera’s novels are too much alike; that Doña Luz is cast in the same mould as Pepita Jiménez, that Enrique is a double of Luis, and so forth. There is some truth in this. Valera does repeat the situations which interest him most, but so does every novelist; his treatment differs in each case, and is logically consistent with each character. There is more force in the objection that he overcharges his books with episodical arabesques which, though masterly tours de force, retard the development of the story. Now that we have them, we should be sorry to lose the brilliant passages in which the quintessence of the great Spanish mystics is distilled; but it is plainly an error of judgment to assign them to Pepita. However, this objection applies less to Doña Luz than to Pepita Jiménez, and it applies not at all to El Comendador Mendoza—doubtless a transfigured piece of autobiography, both poignant and gracious in its evocation of a far-off passion. And in his shorter stories Valera often attains a magical effect of disquieting irony. Most authors write far too much, either from necessity or from vanity, and Valera, who was too acute to be vain, wasted his energies in too many directions and on too many subjects. Still he has improvised comparatively little in the shape of fiction, and, even in extreme old age, when the calamity of blindness had overtaken him, he surprised and enchanted his admirers with more than one arresting volume. Speaking broadly, the characteristics of the best Spanish art are force and truth, and in these respects Valera holds his own. Yet he is more complicated and elaborate than Spaniards are wont to be. His work is penetrated with subtleties and reticences; his force is scrupulously measured, and his truth is conveyed by implication and innuendo, never by emphasis nor crude insistency. Compared with his exquisite adjustment of word to thought, the methods of other writers seem coarse and brutal. You may refuse to recognise him as a great novelist, if you choose; but it is impossible to deny that he was a consummate literary artist.

At this point I should prefer to bring my review to a close. The authors of whom we have been speaking belong to history. So, too, does Leopoldo Alas, the author of La Regenta, an analytical novel which will be read long after his pungent criticisms are forgotten, though as a critic he did excellent work. It is a more delicate matter to judge contemporaries. You will not expect me to compile a list of names as arid and interminable as an auctioneer’s catalogue. How many important novelists are there in France, or England, or Russia? Not more than two or three in each, and we shall be putting it fairly high if we assume that Spain has as many notable novelists as these three countries put together. Passing by a crowd of illustrious obscurities, we meet with Benito Pérez Galdós, and with innumerable examples of his diffuse talent. Copiousness has always been more highly esteemed in Spain than elsewhere, and in this particular Pérez Galdós should satisfy the exacting standard of his countrymen. But to some of us copiousness is no great recommendation. There are forty volumes in the series of Episodios Nacionales, and who knows how many more in the series of Novelas Españolas Contemporáneas? Frankly there is a distasteful air of commercialism in this huge and punctual production. It would seem as though in Spain, as in England, literature is in danger of becoming a business, and of ceasing to be an art. This is not the way in which masterpieces have been written hitherto; but masterpieces are rare, and there is no recipe for producing them.

If there had been, we may feel sure that Pérez Galdós would have hit upon it, for his acumen and perseverance are undoubted. Not one of the Episodios Nacionales is a great book, but also not one is wanting in great literary qualities—the faculty of historical reconstruction, the evaluation of the personal factor in great events, and the gift of picturesque detail. If the power of concentration were added to his profuse equipment, Pérez Galdós would be an admirable master. Even as it is, to any one who wishes to obtain—and in the most agreeable way—a just idea of the political and social evolution of Spain from the time of Charles IV. to the time of the Republic, the Episodios Nacionales may be heartily commended. And, in these crowded pages, some figures stand out with remarkable saliency—as, for instance, the guerrilla priest in Carlos VI. en la Rápita, a volume which shows the author to be unwearied as he draws near the end of his long task, and as vivid as ever in historical narrative. He is, moreover, an astute observer of the present, far-seeing in Fortunata y Jacinta and humoristic in El Doctor Centeno. You perhaps remember the description of the cigar which Felipe smoked, the account of the banquet presided over by the solemn and amiable Don Florencio—Don Florencio with alarming eyebrows, so thick and dark that they looked like strips of black velvet. These peculiarities are hit off in Dickens’s best manner, and yet with a certain neutral touch. Not that Pérez Galdós is habitually neutral: he is an old-fashioned Liberal with a thesis to prove—the admirable thesis that liberty is the best thing in the world. But this is not an obviously Spanish idea. The modernity of Pérez Galdós is exotic in Spain. He gives us an interesting view of Spanish society in all its aspects. Still,—let us never forget it,—the picture is painted not by a native, but by a colonial, hand. Born in the Canary Islands, Pérez Galdós lives in Spain, but is not of it; he dwells a little apart from the high road of its secular life. And this lends a peculiar value to his presentation; for what it loses in force, it gains in objectivity.

A foreign influence is unquestionably visible in the novels of both Armando Palacio Valdés and the Condesa Pardo Bazán—perhaps the most gifted authoress now before the public. The existence of this foreign element is denied by partisans, but it would not be disputed by the writers themselves. Was not the Condesa Pardo Bazán the standard-bearer of French naturalism in Spain during the early nineties? We are apt to forget it, for what she then called ‘the palpitating question’ palpitates no more. Who can read the Condesa Pardo Bazán’s Madre Naturaleza without being reminded of Zola, or Palacio Valdés’s La Hermana San Sulpicio without being reminded of the Goncourts? Yet in La Hermana San Sulpicio, where Gloria is the very type of the sparkling Andalusian, and in the still more charming Marta y María which appeared some years earlier, there is a genuine original talent which fades out in La Espuma and La Fe. In these last two books Palacio Valdés does moderately well what half a dozen French novelists had done better. One vaguely feels that Palacio Valdés is losing his way, but he finds it again in the Spanish atmosphere of Los Majos de Cádiz where we see Andalusia once more through Asturian spectacles. As to the Condesa Pardo Bazán, she has unfortunately diffused her energies in all directions. No one can succeed in everything—as a poet, a romancer, an essayist, a critic, a lecturer, and a politician. Yet the Condesa Pardo Bazán is all this, and more. We would gladly exchange all her miscellaneous writings for another novel like Los Pazos de Ulloa, where the peasant is displayed in a light which must have pained Pereda. Is Galicia so different from the Mountain? But extremes meet at last. Dr. Máximo Juncal in La Madre Naturaleza thinks with Pereda that townsfolk are beyond salvation: only—and the difference is capital—he would leave nature to work her will without the restraints of traditional ethics. Clearly all women are not hampered by timidity and conservative instincts! But Palacio Valdés may be read for the constant, acrid keenness of his appreciation of character, and the Condesa Pardo Bazán for her vigorous portraiture of the Galician peasantry, and her art as a landscape painter.

We have the measure of what they can do, and they are at least as well known out of Spain as they deserve. A more enigmatic personality is Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. It is the charm of most modern Spanish novelists that they are intensely local. Pérez Galdós is an exception; but Valera is at his best in Andalusia, Pereda in Cantabria, Palacio Valdés in Asturias, and the Condesa Pardo Bazán in Galicia. Blasco Ibáñez is a Valencian; he knows the orchard of Spain as Mr. Hardy knows Dorsetshire, and he is most himself in the Valencian surroundings of Flor de Mayo, La Barraca, and Cañas y barro. But his allegiance is divided between literature and politics. Not content with propagating his ideas in the columns of his newspaper, El Pueblo, he propagates them under cover of fiction. He is the novelist of the social revolution, and the revolution is needed everywhere. The scene of La Catedral is laid in Toledo, the scene of El Intruso in Bilbao, and in La Horda we have the proletariate of Madrid in squalid truthfulness. Each of these is a roman à thèse, or, if you prefer it, an incitement to rebellion. Blasco Ibáñez is the apostle of combat, he knows the strength of the established system, and his revolutionary heroes die defeated by the organised forces of social and ecclesiastical conservatism. But he is fundamentally optimistic, convinced that the final victory of the revolution is assured if the struggle be maintained. We may not sympathise with his views, and may doubt whether they will prevail; but the gospel of constancy in labour needs preaching in Spain, and Blasco Ibáñez preaches it with impressive (and sometimes rather incorrect) eloquence. His latest story, La Maja desnuda, is more in the French manner, but it is no mere imitation; it is original in treatment, a record of gradual disillusion, a painful, cruel, true account of the intense wretchedness of a pair who once were lovers. Blasco Ibáñez has given us three or four admirable novels, and he is still young enough to reconsider his theories, and to grow in strength and sanity.

He is not alone. In Paradox, Rey, and in Los últimos románticos Pío Baroja introduces a fresh and reckless note of social satire, while novelty of thought and style characterise Martínez Ruiz in Las confesiones de un pequeño filósofo and Valle-Inclán in Flor de Santidad and Sonata de otoño. These are the immediate hopes of the future. But prophecy is a vain thing: the future lies on the knees of the gods.

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