The Magic of Spain

It is a book that may be read in little more than an hour, yet it has many arresting pages. A few short sentences, words thrown here and there at random with concealed art, give a wonderfully clear picture of green, rainy Galicia, with its hills and streams. We see the hills and more hills veiled in mist, the flocks of white and black sheep, the mills, the white smoke rising from the houses among the fig-trees, the distant blue mountains tipped with the first snows, a flight of doves against green fields above the tower of a Pazo, a stony bridle-path with its bramble hedges and great pools of water at which oxen drink, the peasants arriving to pay their tribute of corn at the Palacio, the shepherds coming down from the hills wearing their capes of reeds. Women return singing from the fountain, an old man drives on his cows as they stop to graze, a half-witted woman gathers scented herbs and simples that have mickle grace to “give health to the soul and cure the ills of the herd.” And there is the Palacio de Bradomín, with its flight of wide granite steps; a path leads to it through the green, drenched countryside, and the autumn sun lights up its windows among tall chestnut-trees. A fountain trickles and birds sing in the old garden of myrtle, cedar, and cypress, still in late autumn brimmed with roses, though “the paths were covered with dry and yellow leaves that the wind swept with a slow rustling; the snails, motionless como viejos paralíticos, as old paralytics, were taking the sun on the seats of stone.” The passages of the Palacio are long and gloomy, and cold strikes through the large silent rooms, so that in all of them logs of wood burn brightly, stirred with tongs of “ancient bronze, elaborately worked.” The bare branches of the trees graze the windows of the library, where, among the parchment bindings, reigns a monastic peace, un sueño canónico y doctoral.

It is in a minute chiselling of details that lies Señor Valle-Inclán’s strength. The snails in the garden, the shape of the glasses, the silver chains of a hanging-lamp—nothing is passed over as insignificant. But the details are given in few words, with the clear precision of a skilled craftsman. And he has the power to set his characters in strong relief. Thus in “Sonata de Otoño” we have that muy gran señor Don Juan Manuel, who on his first appearance hurries away “to Villa del Prior, to thrash a clerk.” It is his custom to ride over from his country-house, his Pazo, two leagues away, tie his horse to the Palacio garden-gate, enter and call to a servant for wine—for that excellent vino de la Fontela which would be the best in the world, he says, if pressed from selected grapes—drink and fall asleep, and then waking up call loudly for his horse, whether it chances to be night or day, and ride back to his Pazo. There is a glimpse of the mother of Concha, who would tell the children stories of the saints, and with “mystic, noble fingers” slowly turn the pages to show them the pictures of the Christian Year; of the mother of Xavier, who would pass her days in the recess of a wide balcony spinning for her servants, in a chair of crimson velvet studded with silver nails. There is thin, white Concha, so saintly and so frail; there is Xavier, Marqués de Bradomín, himself, the gallant, cynical sceptic; there is the page Florisel, the old servant Candelaria, with their rare and far-sought names.

In “Flor de Santidad,” perhaps the best of Señor Valle-Inclán’s books, we have the same delicate descriptions of Galicia—the sinister inn, solitary in a gloomy brown Sierra; the shepherdess, keeping her flock and seeing mystic visions among the Celtic stones, yellowed with ancient lichens, líquenes milenarios; the simple greeting of the peasants: Alabado sea Dios, “Glory be to God”; pilgrims and witches; charms and magical incantations to preserve the flocks from evil; cunning and simplicity, superstition and crime. The same charm of mystical simplicity and innocence that surrounds Adega, the girl shepherdess of “Flor de Santidad,” surrounds all the heroines of Señor Valle-Inclán’s novels; Maximina, for instance, of the sorrowful, velvet eyes, ojos aterciopelados y tristes, in “Sonata de Invierno.” It is in “Flor de Santidad” that occurs the picture, repeated in “Jardín Novelesco,” of the old peasant woman going with her little grandson to find him a master. They meet the Archpriest of Lestrove, who is riding leisurely—de andadura mansa y doctoral—to preach at a village festival. “May God give us a holy and good day.” The Archpriest draws in his mare. “Are you going to the fair?” he asks. “The poor have nothing to do at the fair. We are going to look for a master for the boy.” “And does he know his catechism?” “Yes, Señor, he knows it. Poverty does not prevent from being a Christian.” The grandmother leaves the nine-year-old child in the service of a blind beggar. “To be the servant of a blind man is a position many would like to have,” says the beggar, and the new Lazarillo answers sorrowfully, “Sí, Señor, sí.” As she watches them go slowly away along the road through the wet green country, she murmurs, drying her tears: “Nine years old and already earning the bread he eats. Glory be to God.”

Incidents and characters are thrown into the relief given by the peculiar and original magic of Señor Valle-Inclán’s delicately chiselled prose. There is in this prose something icily fresh, something of lilacs and hydrangeas, vague reminiscences of the silver tinkling of voices in a glass-roofed market, or of the swish of a scythe in wet grass. The words are cunningly weighed and chosen and set as gouttes d’argent d’orfévrerie. And the transparent freshness of his style is admirably suited to describe the primitive simplicity and freshness of Galicia.

XXI

NOVELS OF THE MOUNTAIN

FIFTY years ago, before Zola and the naturalistic school were on the lips of men, a Spanish novelist, José María de Pereda, was beginning to write who can only not be called a naturalist, because of the associations given to the name in France. Humour and frankness run through Spanish literature; there is less artificial refinement and more vigour and broadly human sympathy than in the literature of France. The very language is frank and outspoken rather than subtle and insinuating. And the nobly independent character of Spaniards of all classes counts for much in the admirable sanity of Spanish realism. “Our lowest social strata,” says the Condesa Pardo Bazán, “differ not a little from those described by Zola and the Goncourts.” The Spanish realist has thus no cause to dissect common people and vulgar events from a superior point of view, putting on gloves, as it were, to keep his hands clean. He knows that virtue perches in strange places and learns to see le sublime d’en bas, and there is a wide gulf between French naturalism and Spanish realism. Pereda,[110] a hidalgo of the old school, born at Santander on the 6th of February, 1833, spent the greater part of his life in the Montaña, at Santander, or at his country estate of Polanco, only leaving Cantabria to study for a few years at Madrid, and later to sit for a few months in the Cortes as a Carlist. The rest of his life he passed among his family and books and friends in his beloved Montaña.[111] His friend in private life, Señor Pérez Galdós, describes him as dark, sunburnt, of medium height, with moustache and pointed beard, of a character fundamentally Spanish, and of very nervous temperament, with a horror of conventionality and pretence. It was about the year 1859 that custom and character sketches from Pereda’s pen began to appear in a Santander paper, La Abeja Montañesa. They were collected in 1864, and published under the title of “Escenas montañesas.” “Escenas montañesas” gives the essence of Pereda’s art, and, though he later wrote long novels and occasionally attained an admirable unity of treatment, the delight is still in the descriptions of fast-vanishing customs and in the characters of his peasants and fishermen rather than in the thread of the action, which is generally slight; and the strength of his novels lies not in their heroes and heroines but in the secondary figures and the side-shows. “Escenas montañesas” shows us life in Santander and the neighbouring mountain-country as it was half a century ago, and as it now lives permanently in Pereda’s art. Scenes and people are presented to us with extraordinary vividness, and only now and then the sketches read almost too much like observations taken directly from the note-book. We have the picaresque sketch of the raquero, the Santander gamin who lives by petty larceny from ships along the quays; the old-fashioned household in a mountain village—by a hereditary privilege Saint John is looked upon as one of the family, and the Saint’s procession raiment figures in the washing list; the wake at a village funeral, with the frequent toast, “to the glory of the dead,” á la buena gloria del defunto; tía Nisca, going her long homeward journey on foot after bidding farewell to her son on a ship bound for “the Indies,” and reproaching the unfertile soil that causes its sons to emigrate, though there is a song that men who go to the Indies in order to get rich would find the Indies at home, were they but willing to work:—

and especially the noble figure of tío Tremontorio (the first and foremost of Pereda’s long line of masterly portraits in humble life, and the last of that race of hardy fishermen who, with the Basques, rivalled English whalers in the North Seas and made treaties with English kings during the Middle Ages), net-making, or eating his bread and raw bacalao on his balcony in the squalid Calle Alta, or consoling the wives and mothers of fishermen on the Muelle Anaos (in “La Leva”), and dying cheerfully (in “El fin de una raza”), after many hours of battling with the waves, glad to die quietly in his house, although he had nearly perished in the storm owing to his unwillingness to lose an escapulario of the Vírgen del Carmen. “We are all sailors of that further sea,” he says, in his rough language, as he lies dying, “all bound for the same port. If the devil does not block it against us, I to-morrow and you another day will cast anchor there.” “Suum cuique” is the longest and not the least excellent of these Escenas. A poor hidalgo of the mountain, Don Silvestre Seturas, visits a powerful friend at Madrid, and is speedily disillusioned of the capital and only court. His friend in turn accompanies him to his ancestral country-house, and is delighted at first with the country and its idyllic peace. But the rat de ville begins to discover, after some months, that the country has neither peace nor poetry—“Barbarus híc ego sum quia non intelligor ulli”—and returns to Madrid. Several incidents contribute to his change of opinion, incidents which reveal the character of the peasants and illustrate the fact that Pereda, while he makes us love the peasants of the Montaña, is never blind to their faults and weaknesses. The rich madrileño had decided to give a clock for the tower of the village church. But distrust occupies a large place in the character of the villagers, and they fear the rich even when bringing gifts. What hidden intention is there in this unwonted generosity? The Mayor calls the Council together, and the result is a long document for the donor to sign. He is to undertake to place the clock in the tower at his own cost; he is to give an annuity of two thousand reales to meet any expenses connected with the clock; he is to build another tower if the present one falls down “in my time or in that of all the generations and heirs that may come after me”; he is to pay for all lawsuits arising from the clock in the village, or in the neighbourhood. When he tears up the paper, the villagers’ suspicion of some afterthought in his gift is irrefragably confirmed. Lawsuits are the passion of the Mountain. One has continued in Don Silvestre’s family for seven generations, and he himself, having through poverty to choose between remaining a bachelor all his life and giving up the lawsuit, chooses the former without wavering. The last straw in his friend’s patience is a lawsuit drawn up against him because, when he was out shooting, part of a wall of loose stones round a peasant’s fields crumbled down shortly after he happened to have fired at a bird.

“Bocetos al temple” (1876), and “Tipos Trashumantes” (1877), show the same power of keen observation. Pereda, who treats the failings of the peasants with unsparing, but withal benevolent humour, becomes merciless and even cruel when dealing with the pretentiousness of the vulgar and the inanity of rich désœuvrés. It has been wittily said of him that “he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly, he gladly makes fools suffer.” Without going outside his province he found matter ready to his hand in the veraneantes, the flâneurs from Madrid, who passed the hot months in Santander.

Thus in “Tipos Trashumantes” he pillories the sabio, the learned man, who allows that Cervantes was not an entirely common man, but regrets that neither Cervantes nor Calderón possessed the “philosophy of æsthetics,” or who despises the inhabitants of Santander because they have not heard of Jeeéguel (Hegel); the literato or journalist who, because a speaker in Cortes had rendered Dante popular by a quotation, murmurs, “come corpo morto cade” if he drops his stick or cigar; the barber who misses in Santander that indefinable “air” of Madrid;—in fact, a procession of quacks and knaves, and fools and snobs: perhaps the only “sympathetic” figure is that of the Barón de la Rescoldera, who “has never a good word nor a bad deed.” It is pleasant to turn back to village scenes in “Tipos y Paisajes” (forming a second part of “Escenas montañesas,” 1871). Here we find the enriched “Indian” (that is a montañés who has returned to his country after making a fortune in South America); the schoolmaster, in a serviceable coat of black, who writes letters for the whole village, and shuts himself up in his house to get, if not drunk, at least very intoxicated; the peasant Blas, who, after inheriting thirty thousand dollars, is miserable, but feels that he must live como un señor now that he is rich, and dismisses as a temptation to be resisted the wish to go as of old, with goad on shoulder, along the high-road by the side of his oxen; the practical, rough, kindly priest, Don Perfecto; Don Robustiano, an old-fashioned hidalgo, who does not allow the modern use of matches in his household, and who, from the experiences of his own poverty, is not easily misled, when he visits a neighbouring hidalgo, by the excuses for “my wife and daughter at church.” “I see through you,” says Don Robustiano to himself, “no doubt they are hidden away in some corner of the house for lack of clothes.” But especially is the sketch entitled El Amor de los tizones admirable and worthy of Cervantes. It is a description of a rustic gathering or tertulia in the kitchen of one of the poor houses of a mountain village. The peasants—each of them a clearly defined character—enter one by one with the greeting, “Dios nos acompañe” or, “Dios sea aquí,” and round the log fire, the flicker of the flames lighting up their faces against the immense smoke-blackened chimney, they pray a rosario for the dead, or tell stories of brigands, and witches, and enchantments. “Los hombres de pró” (originally published with “Bocetos al temple”) and “El Buey Suelto” (written in 1877) are still collections of sketches, the first of a canvassing for an election in rural parts of Spain, the second, of the miseries of bachelors, and the scenes in both are touched with Pereda’s vividness and humour. Pereda, as a novelist proper, begins with “Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera” (written in 1878), which describes the effects of the revolution of 1868 on a small village of the Mountain, with “De tal palo tal astilla” (1879), an answer to Pérez Galdós’ “Doña Perfecta,” “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (1882) and “Pedro Sánchez” (1883). “El Sabor de la Tierruca” (Savour of the Soil) is a whole-hearted book of the Montaña; its serenity is scarcely disturbed by the frequent village fights and rivalries in which the weapons are stout sticks cut from the mountain-side. The book is filled with a fresh and acrid smell of the earth and autumn scents, and has the peace of still days when not a leaf stirs, and there is no movement in the ripe and yellow maize-fields. It is a life lived and felt by the author and not superficially observed, so that there is no trace of artificiality or false sentiment in the descriptions. Cumbrales and Rinconeda are rival villages, Cumbrales lying high among orchards, Rinconeda lower down on the edge of the plain, in thick oak and chestnut woods. Rinconeda rejoices when the raging ábrego, the south wind, sweeps in furious gusts from the hills and ravages Cumbrales; Cumbrales rejoices when the rain turns every street of Rinconeda into a rushing torrent. The characters of the inhabitants of Cumbrales are drawn with all Pereda’s skill; Juanguirle, for instance, a rich, hard-working peasant, the simple, sensible Mayor of Cumbrales; Baldomero, who “cannot understand how doing nothing, thinking of nothing, troubling about nothing, can be unpleasant to any sensible person”; his father, Don Valentín, “hero of Luchana” and worshipper of Espartero, who, after a frugal meal, says to his son that it is not the part of good Liberals to be so indulging themselves when the Carlists are flaunting “the black flag of tyranny,” to which Baldomero answers laconically that it would have sounded more convincing before the meal. There is an epic fight between the two villages which rages so violently that the Mayor, Juanguirle, in vain attempts to stop it “in the name of la Josticia, in the name of the law, of la Costitución, of God Himself, if necessary, since, for lack of a better, I am now His representative here.” A few moments afterwards sad to relate, Juanguirle, stung by an insult hurled at Cumbrales, is in the very thickest of the fray. In “Escenas montañesas” Pereda had slightly sketched a deshoja, the harvest task of separating the ripe cob of maize from its sheath. A certain number of cobs (from two to six) are set aside from each large basketful for the poor, for the souls in purgatory, and other pious purposes. In “El Sabor de la Tierruca” the scene is described more fully. The workers, over fifty in number, sing songs and slow ballads as the heaps of shining yellow cobs and the heaps of crisp, white leaves grow and grow, and their singing is accompanied at intervals by the noise of torrents of maize-cobs emptied from the baskets. We have, too, a description of a derrota, when flocks and herds are turned out promiscuously to graze, of the game of cachurra, a kind of rustic hockey, and the simple feasts of roasted chestnuts with a bota of wine. Yet all is not “jest and youthful jollity.” The peasants, in their prudent distrust, have a keen eye for witches, and a weak old woman, of few words, poor and lonely, and in league with the Devil, plays a sadly large part in the history of Cumbrales. So in “Tipos y Paisajes,” the witch is feared not only by the boys whom she surprises stealing the grapes in the garden of her hut, but by the whole village. If a cow dies, it is the fault of the witch; if a man spends his days drinking in the tavern, the misery of his family is traced, not to him, but to the witch.

II.—“On the Heights”

In “Pedro Sánchez” Pereda, not without trepidation, travelled outside his native region to Madrid, then, in 1854, “a large tumbledown village, parched, old, and dirty;”[112] but Pedro Sanchez is a montañés, and the first part of the book, before he leaves his native Montaña, in style far exceeds the rest. The chief[113] works of Pereda, after “El Sabor de la Tierruca” and “Pedro Sánchez,” were “Sotileza” (1885), “La Puchera” (1889), and “Peñas arriba” (1895). “Sotileza” is a novel of the old, now vanished, Santander. Both in the characters and the language it is the most local of Pereda’s novels, and it is perhaps the one which has become most famous. It has an atmosphere of pitch and tar and sea-weed, and in the Calle Alta nets and tattered rags hang from the balconies, fishwives quarrel shrilly, and the strident, piercing cry of the sardine-seller rends the air. Andrés, Muergo, and Cleto are all in love with Silda, and Silda, growing up slight and graceful, and called Sotileza from the name for the thin wire or gut to which the fish-hook is attached, is not naturally prone to let her feelings appear. But Andrés, the son of a prosperous captain in the merchant service, cannot marry beneath him; Muergo, the half-brutish, half-childish nephew of tío Mechelín and tía Sidora, with whom Sotileza, an orphan, lives, is conveniently drowned in a storm; and we leave Sotileza engaged to Cleto, the honest son of tío Mocejón, who, with his wife, la Sargüeta, and his daughter, Carpia, are the terror of the Calle Alta and of el pae Polinar. El padre Apolinar is a charitable, homely priest who receives his poor petitioners with gruff words, but ends by giving them the little that he possesses. One night, as he is writing his important sermon, he is interrupted—not for the first time—by a poor woman whose husband is ill. “Let her go to the doctor,” he exclaims; but when he finds they are starving, “Ave María Purísima,” he cries twice, “and he has three children and a wife, and there is no more honest man.” He orders his old servant to bring the puchero containing potatoes and a little meat—the priest’s evening meal. After sniffing it deliciously, he sends it off to the sick man, and as he resumes his sermon he says to himself: “I have certainly read somewhere that to keep in good health when engaged on so difficult a task as the one I now have in hand, there is nothing better than to go to bed hungry. Well, there is no doubt as to my being hungry, wolfishly hungry, to-night.” Sotileza leaves an impression of wind-driven spray and tossing seas, of manly courageous effort and vigour and zest of living; the difficulty of the language and the roughness of the life described alike contribute to the power and convincing character of the work. Pereda never showed more admirably his capacity to raise the commonest lives, the most vulgar incidents and the language of the street—of the strident Calle Alta from which pae Polinar fled in comical dismay—to the region of high art. There is something epical about his figures, in the clamorous feuds of the fishwives not less than in the serene heroism of the deep-sea fishermen. “La Puchera” is only half a sea-novel. The inhabitants of Robleces only go sea-fishing to eke out the miserable pittance won by cultivation of the soil. Thus in the house of Juan Pedro (called El Lebrato) and Pedro Juan, his son (nicknamed El Josco, from his ferocious shyness), fishing-tackle and oars mingle with agricultural tools. Juan Pedro is a widower, and father and son are entirely devoted to one another, but their house is untidy and uncomfortable for lack of a woman’s care. Pedro Juan is in love with Pilara, Pilara is in love with Pedro Juan, her family encourages the match, his father asks for nothing better, but Pedro Juan cannot break through his timidity and bring himself to speak. At last, however, he is emboldened when Pilara at the haymaking, in scarlet skirt, bodice of striped blue, and headkerchief of many colours, arranging the hay on the cart as he forks it up to her, leaps laughingly from the last hay-cart into his arms. “Pilara, from here to the Church for the señor priest to marry us. Will you agree to it?” And she answers, “We might have been back long ago, hijo de mi alma, if you had been different.” Though the miser of the book, Don Baltasar, is most skilfully drawn, its interest centres more especially in the life of Juan Pedro and Pedro Juan: Juan Pedro, gay and talkative, appearing on festival days with his famous sea-boots, his Cochin-China medal, and a silk necktie; Pedro Juan, who at his wedding, when asked by the priest, Don Alejo, if he will have Pilara to be his wife, answers: “And will I not indeed? She knows well I will, and you know it too.”

In 1895 appeared “Peñas arriba” (On the heights), the crown and masterpiece of Pereda’s work. It is a novel of the high mountain, as “Sotileza” is a novel of the sea. Don Celso lives in Tablanca in his ancestral house which holds lordship over a whole valley and has had the honour of lodging two prelates, the Bishops of León and Santander; but Don Celso is old and in failing health, and he so urgently begs his nephew Marcelo to come to him that, against his will, the latter leaves Madrid and his comfortable rooms in the Calle del Arenal. After a long ride on and on over high mountain passes and narrow, precipitous paths and haunts of bears, he reaches Tablanca after nightfall. A whistle from his attendant, Chisco, the barking of dogs, an uncertain light moving to and fro, black shapes round the light, a sound of voices, and Marcelo is received into his uncle’s arms. Next day, from the wide balconies, he discovers the mountains on one side nearly touching the house, on the other a chequer-work of green meadows and yellow stubble-fields of maize against a background of mountains green and brown and grey, and the village among rocks and brushwood and intricate paths. There is a saying in the village that the largest piece of flat ground is the floor of Don Celso’s dining-room. Of the characters of the book Don Sabas belongs to that noble army of humble parish priests described by Pereda—the village priest in “De tal palo tal astilla”; Don Frutos, discreet and talkative, in “Don Gonzalo”; the joyous priest of Robleces, regocijado de humor, in “La Puchera,” whose only vice is to go out to sea twice a week with the fishing-boats; and the incomparable pae Polinar in “Sotileza.” Don Sabas has a passion for the mountain, and, once upon the heights, the exact word and the right phrase come to him in which to express his enthusiasm and his deep knowledge of their plants and animals. To have given him a bishopric in a flat country would have meant death to him. He is fearless and untiring whether he is tracking a bear, or out in a snow-blizzard on the heights to rescue some peasant or herdsman who has not returned to the village, or visiting the sick on a black night of storm. Don Celso is also a noble figure, practical and imposing, and in his immense kitchen of an evening he holds a patriarchal gathering of peasants. We have, too, the splendid Tolstoian figure of the hidalgo of ancient race, Gómez de Pomar, the author of many books, unloading a cart of hay in his simple peasant’s dress. He is a model of noble courtesy—hidalga cortesía, his style is “spirited and vigorous, pure Castilian untainted, as the blood that flows in his veins.” Consciously or unconsciously, it is a self-portrait of Pereda. The book abounds in impressive scenes and characters; it was a subject dear to Pereda’s heart, and he produced a work which ranks among the great novels of the world. There is a certain solidity in Pereda’s writing well suited to describe the stern deep-shadowed mountain-country, while his unlatin love of the wild and desolate rejoices in the hurricanes that tear up trees and whirl the snow-drifts on the mountain-side. “Peñas arriba” represents the whole life and being of the author and gives us a full measure of the true sabor de la tierruca, the savour of the soil. In “Esbozos y Rasguños” Pereda ridicules those mad Cervantists who prove that Cervantes was omniscient, an excellent theologian, a cook, a sailor, a geographer, a freethinker, and who will soon prove that neither is Cervantes Cervantes, nor Don Quixote Don Quixote. But of the true spirit of Cervantes he had imbibed a large part, even though he never attained to his great-hearted tolerance and the wider outlook of those more spacious times. His prose[114] is robust and austerely free from foreign idioms, laden with dialect and phrases native to the soil. It has caught the vigorous freshness of the mountain air, and the scent of earth and woods and moors, the rush of the sea and the elemental simplicity of men ennobled by constant contact with earth and ocean. Pereda wrote out of the fulness of his heart, without seeking popularity. His rough grandeur, rugged as the country of “Peñas arriba,” his frequent use of dialect, his untranslatableness, make for few readers. But those who, like Don Sabas, care to leave the level country and climb the mountain height, will find in Pereda a classic, high and steadfast as the hills. Blindly though the iniquity of oblivion scattereth her poppy, it is perhaps not “prodigiously temerarious” to suspect that Pereda may still be read when Zola is forgotten.

XXII

CASTILIAN PROSE

“THE Spanish language,” said an English writer in 1701, “is properly none at all, for if the Spaniards were to restore to the Egyptians, Grecians, Arabians, Moors, Jews, Romans, Vandals, Huns, Goths, French, and, lastly, Italians, the words they have taken from them, they must of necessity remain dumb.” And, again, the Spanish language “consists of a’s and o’s, and nothing else but mouthing and grimace.” Another Englishman, sixty years later, says of the Spanish language, that “As there is something pompous and magnificent in the length of its words and the sound of them, so there is also a peculiarity in the turn and manner of their phrases and expressions.” In the time of Spain’s greatness a larger measure of justice is bestowed on the Spanish language. “It is expressive, noble, and grave,” says Mme. d’Aulnoy; “it is only our own (i.e. French) which excels it.” But with the decay of Spain’s material prosperity the language seems to have fallen into a disrepute; can a nation that possesses no gold currency and no battleships possess a language or literature worthy of the name? It may be admitted that many modern Spaniards themselves do not write correct or idiomatic Spanish; the language has been crowded with foreign importations, and while it is the easiest language to learn superficially, it is, by reason of its immense wealth of words and baffling reserves of idioms, one of the most difficult to learn well. “The best Castilian is here spoken,” said Mme. d’Aulnoy of Burgos, and it is still in Castille that the purest Spanish is to be learnt, in regions, i.e. where, owing to the climate, the foreigner makes but a briefest stay. Toledo is more likely to be visited for two days to see its churches, than for two months to learn the language; it gives no inviting impression of comfort to the stranger. In “Don Quixote” we read that “They cannot speak so well who are brought up in the Zocodover as those who spend the day walking to and fro in the cloisters of the Cathedral, yet all are Toledans.” But although among the peasants of Spain there are many prevaricadores del buen lenguaje, with reckless transposition of consonants (such as probe for pobre), their language is often essentially purer and more idiomatic, with “a peculiarity in the turn and manner of their phrases,” than that of the reprochadores de voquibles, who cast it in their teeth, and who would die rather than offend la grammaire, but allow themselves the constant use of foreign words and expressions in the construction of their sentences. True Castilian has a combined softness and vigour, enabling it to be at once impassioned and concise, a harmony and strength scarcely to be found in any other language, and a pithiness which springs from the soil and has not its origin in books. Many of Spain’s greatest writers have wielded lance and pen alternately; they are not “grammarians who hack and slash for the genitive case,” but in the clear shock and flow of vowels, scarcely interrupted by their setting of slurred consonants, we seem to hear a rumour of battle, and their words can be, like those of St. Francis of Assisi preaching, a modo che saette acute—very sharp arrows. This native vigour corrects the tendency to rich magnificence and trailing growth of words; while without this richness the Castilian language might be like staccato Catalan—a succession of quick pistol-shots, as it were, not the stately tones of an organ. It is not too much to say that Castilian—not the miserable Castilian of many of the newspapers and many modern authors, but Castilian at its best—has been excelled only by Greek. It is thus a language truly worth studying, and it is easily learnt; it has, next to English, the widest extension in the world, and it possesses a splendid literature of eight centuries, continued at the present day in a number of characteristic and fascinating novels. Yet the Castilian language, literarily, is so little studied that it seems to be considered to be “properly none at all;” and these novels when read in translations lose their savour. Cervantes prophesied that “Don Quixote” would be translated into all nations and languages, but, as Dante said that poetry cannot be translated “senza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia,” so Cervantes likens translations to the reverse side of Flemish tapestries—the figures still visible, but obscured by a crowd of thread-ends. The best Spanish is still to be found in the writers of the golden age of Spanish literature, and especially in the writings of the mystics.

The style of Cervantes changes with his characters, who are allowed to murder Castilian in Spanish-Basque or Gascon-Catalan, but he is a master at will of the purest Castilian, in him never divorced from the full flavour of life, and he refers scornfully to the spurious continuation of “Don Quixote” as “written in Aragonese.” Equally castizo, hardily idiomatic and flavoured pungently, is the style of Quevedo. Of modern writers, Valera and Pereda, differing so widely, are alike in this, that they are both masters of noble Castilian prose, and have nothing to say to the imported phraseologies which pervade a large proportion of modern Spanish writing. Pérez Galdós, too, has a thoroughly Spanish style, robust and vigorous, rich in words, idiomatic. The most recent Spanish writers in a novellizing spirit tread more delicately; they resemble Sancho Panza, who, “when he was Governor, learnt to eat fastidiously, á lo melindroso, so that he would eat grapes and even the seeds of a pomegranate with a fork.” The style of León, indeed, is full and fine-sounding, and, like that of Valera, carries us back to the writings of the mystics in the sixteenth century; but Valle-Inclán (guilty only very occasionally of words such as madama or dandy) and Azorín have a mastery of deliberately thin, exquisitely clear-cut prose.[115] “Llovía menudo y ligero en aquella fertil valle del Baztan....”; in this passage of Valle-Inclán’s “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909), as in so many others, we have a delicate finished picture, reached after much labour of rejection and compression, though he has the art to conceal his affres du style. In a language so inexhaustibly rich as the Spanish, and with the tendency of Spaniards to write in hurried, copious fashion, this choice and sifting of words is welcome, and is in no danger of being carried to excess.

XXIII

TOLEDO AND EL GRECO

THE fame of El Greco[116] has of late years spread and deepened, although the full fascination of his pictures will perhaps never be understood, except by a few. Of his life we have but one or two threadbare details, and this is the more tantalizing because we feel that his life and character were of a strange, alluring interest. Before his coming to Spain, the most interesting fact we learn concerning him is contained in a letter of the artist Julio Clovio, written in November, 1570: “There has arrived in Rome a young Cretan, a disciple of Titian, and, in my opinion, an excellent painter—parmi raro nella pittura.” The date of El Greco’s birth is uncertain, but if he was a giovine in 1570, he would hardly have been seventy-seven at the time of his death in 1614. This assertion as to his age was made when the date of his death was given as 1625. It has been conjectured that it arose from an easy confusion between sesenta and setenta, and that he was not seventy-seven but sixty-seven; the year of his birth would then be 1547. The exact date of his arrival at Toledo is unknown, but it was about the year 1575; certainly in or before 1577. Toledo had ceased to be the capital and court of Spain, yet still remained the home not only of princes of the Church, but of many men of letters, and the Arabic MS. of “Don Quixote” was discovered in its market-place. Its cathedral was “the richest church in Christendom.” An Italian work published at Venice in 1563 records that “the priests reign triumphant in Toledo—trionfano—and give themselves up to good living, and no one reproves them.” The power of the Inquisition was at its height. From the gloom of the Escorial, Philip II.’s narrow, unbending spirit found many echoes in the stern cities of Castille. El Greco lived to see the expulsion of the Moriscos, and the utter decay of the trade and industry of Toledo and other cities. Antonelli’s project to make the Tagus navigable as far as Toledo was rejected scornfully: would not God have made it navigable had it been His will? Yet it was the golden age of Spanish letters, and during El Greco’s sojourn at Toledo the most humorous and broadly human figure of all literature was being elaborated in Cervantes’ brain. El Greco died at Toledo two years before the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare.

Pacheco says of El Greco that he was “in all things as singular as in his paintings.” Other stray notices represent him as “a great philosopher,” “eloquent in discourse,” a witty, acute speaker—de agudos dichos—a writer on painting, sculpture and architecture. We are further told that he earned many ducats but spent them in pomp and display, even keeping musicians to play to him during his meals. He would seem to have retained the soft atmosphere of Italian luxury amid the narrow, gloomy Toledo streets, and to have introduced an alien note of pleasure into the cold, intense existence of Castille. But if his life preserved about it a certain tinge of Venice (Venice that spent what Venice earned), his art was essentially Spanish. The mannerism of his painting might be deemed extravagant, as his caprices might not be understood, by many Spaniards. He was, they might say, “too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate.” They are the epithets of Holofernes describing a Spaniard; and what could be more Spanish than El Greco’s mingling of keen vision and realistic power as a portrait painter with an intense, unfailing spiritualism; than his vehement, almost tortured desire to shun the common and the vulgar—not the mere seeking after originality but a wish to be sincere, to express his own soul? His manner has not the sensuous richness of Italy but a Castilian, nay, a Toledan austerity. It is as “a sword of Spain, the ice-brook’s temper.” Already in his famous “Expolio” (in the Sacristy of Toledo Cathedral), painted not long after he had arrived in Spain, he had, as Señor Cossío says, abandoned the reds and golds of Italy for blue and carmine and ashen grey. As to the price of this picture he had a quarrel with the Chapter of Toledo Cathedral.[117] Assessors were appointed to value it and they found that, though the picture was beyond all price—no tiene prescio ni estimación—a verdict with which all who have seen the “Expolio” will readily agree, yet, having regard to “these poverty-stricken times,” they assessed it at nine hundred ducats, an extraordinarily high price for that period. The Chapter, on the other hand, offered a much smaller sum, and that under the condition that he should remove certain “improprieties”—ynpropiedades—from the picture, among them the figures of “the Virgin and the saints—las marias y nuestra señora—whose presence in the picture is contrary to the gospel, seeing that they were not actually present.” El Greco held out for his own price, but the Mayor, siding with the Chapter, decreed that he must either give up the picture or go to prison, and the painter submitted. The exquisitely beautiful figures that he was to have removed are, however, still in the picture, as well as the other ynpropiedades, so that he seems at least to have defied the narrow spirit of the letter in the priests who “reigned triumphant” at Toledo. Perhaps—in the temper of Alonso Cano towards the Chapter of Granada Cathedral—he threatened to destroy the “Expolio,” and the Chapter, having given him a hundred and fifty ducats on account, would be unwilling to lose their picture. Certainly El Greco would not say to himself with Frà Lippo Lippi—

El Greco painted to please no one but himself and his individual vision. His next great picture, the “San Mauricio,” was painted by command of Philip II., but it did not please the King and in his lifetime was not placed in the Escorial, where it now is. No le contentó á su Magestad, says Sigüenza, and he goes on to say, “and this is small wonder, since it pleases but few, though it is said that it shows much art, aunque dizen es de mucho arte.” It is conceivable that the picture as a whole might seem ugly, and repel, especially on a first view, before the eye had embraced its wealth of beautiful details. The real reason, however, of its “not pleasing” was not the exaggerated drawing nor the harsh colouring, the dominant note of yellow and blue, but the realistic portrayal of the group of martyrs in the foreground. “Saints,” proceeded Sigüenza, “should be painted in such a manner that they may not take away the desire to pray, but may rather incite to devotion.”

The Spanish Church would willingly have reduced art to skull and bones. But El Greco saw that his Saints must be human before they could be divine. He had now inaugurated that realism which was to find its highest expression in the art of Velázquez, but which is evident also in the Saints and Madonnas of Murillo.

El Greco has not the immediate attraction and universal appeal of Velázquez; some of his pictures may displease at first and only gradually make their charm felt. What, then, we may ask, is El Greco’s peculiar fascination, the dominating power to attract or to repel in his pictures so great that it is apt to become almost an obsession? Is it the truth to life, or the aloofness from life, the clear expression of character or the spiritual submission to divine will? Does it lie in his fondness for those cold, simple colours, the pale greens and lilacs, grey and the blue of hydrangeas or of the surface of ice, that delight the soul of “primitive” and “decadent” alike; in the pervading life and movement, the slender, lengthened limbs and tapering figures; in the subtle permanence of expressions and attitudes that were “so fugitive”? Is it the passionate sincerity and striving that disdains rest and mere complacency of work accomplished, the noble discontent with effects achieved, the ceaseless longing to reach yet higher levels, till ultimately, as in his “Asunción,” the whole picture is moulded to a perfect realization of the soul’s desire, a harmonious unity of aspiration, “toccando un poco la vita futura”? Or is it the exquisite sadness, the air of acquiescence in suffering and fate unshunnable, or the wonderful peace and serene joy of some of his faces? It is a rare combination of all this that gives the essence of El Greco’s potent charm; it is the richness of contrast so truly Spanish, the marvellous rendering alike of heavenly things and things terrestrial, the wild magic of his imagination, the sober individual alchemy of his style. In these delicate lines, thin faces, long white limbs and restrained colours there is a spiritual intensity that impassions and consumes with a light and fire reaching beyond dim mortal vision. But in the expression there is, moreover, a softness of lingering pity, of linked sweetness and tears for earthly sorrows, that makes his art not cold and distant, appealing merely to the intellect, but lovable and human; “a thing ensky’d and sainted,” yet still bound by gold chains about the feet of man.

The little church of Santo Tomé, with its beautiful old tower, stands but a few hundred yards from El Greco’s house at Toledo, and for this church he painted perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most important of all his works—“El Entierro del Conde Orgaz.” For an artist the “Entierro” has almost as much interest and instruction as “Las Meninas” of Velázquez. The subject is a local legend. Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen come down to carry to burial the corpse of the charitable Conde de Orgaz—of whom we read that he “employed his life in holy works and so came to a holy death”—and the chief citizens of Toledo mourn him. In this long line of faces El Greco shows his full mastery as a portrait-painter. And we may see in them all the race of Castille—Castilian dignity, frankness, nobility, sadness, resignation, pride, haughtiness, intensity, ascetic mysticism. We seem, as we look, to hear the solemn rhythm of Jorge Manrique’s verses—[118]