But it is not Lope who says that the King is the image of God. These lines are interpolated by Trigueros, who felt no particular loyalty to anybody, and overdid his part when he endeavoured to put himself in Lope’s position. What was an occasional motive in Lope’s work reappears frequently and in a more emphatic form in Calderón’s work. The sentiment of loyalty is expressed with something like fanaticism in La Banda y la flor and in Guárdate del agua mansa; and with something unpleasantly like profanity in the auto sacramental entitled El Indulto general where the lamentable Charles II. seems to be placed almost on the same level as the Saviour.
Rojas Zorrilla’s glorification of the King in García del Castañar is inspired by Calderón’s example, and he follows the chief in other ways less defensible. Splendid as Calderón’s diction often is, it lapses into gongorism too easily. Rojas Zorrilla’s natural mode of expression is direct and energetic; his dialogue is both natural and brilliant in Don Diego de Noche and Lo que son mugeres; he knew the difference between a good style and a bad one, and he pauses now and then to satirise Góngora and the cultos. But he must be in the fashion, and as Calderón has dabbled in culteranismo, he will do the same. And he bursts into gongorism with all the crude exaggeration of one who is deliberately sinning against the light. His little flings at the Gongorists are few and feeble as in Sin honra no hay amistad, where he describes the darkened sky:—
But a few pages later, in the second volume of his collected plays, he rivals the most extravagant of Góngora’s imitators when he describes the composition and dissolution of the horse in Los Encantos de Medea:—
This is what Ben Jonson would call ‘clotted nonsense,’ and you find the same bombast in another play of Rojas Zorrilla’s—and an excellent play it is—entitled No hay ser padre, siendo Rey, upon which Rotrou’s Venceslas is based. In such faults of taste Rojas Zorrilla leaves Calderón far behind. You have seen him at his strongest in García del Castañar: you will find him at his weakest—and it is execrably bad—if you turn to the thirty-second volume of the Comedias Escogidas, and read La Vida en el atahud. Here St. Boniface goes to Tarsus and is decapitated: in the ordinary course, you expect the curtain to fall at this point. But Rojas Zorrilla prepares a surprise for you. The trunk of the saint is presented on the stage, the martyr holding his head in his hand; and the head addresses Milene and Aglaes in such a startling way that both become Christians. It seems very likely that, if Ludovico Enio had not been converted by the sight of the skeleton in Calderón’s Purgatorio de San Patricio, Milene and Aglaes would not have been confronted with the severed head, talking, in La Vida en el atahud.
Like Calderón, though in a lesser degree, Rojas Zorrilla is not above utilising the material provided by his predecessors: even in García del Castañar there are reminiscences of Lope de Vega’s Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, of Lope’s El Villano en su rincón, of Vélez de Guevara’s La Luna de la Sierra, and of Tirso de Molina’s El Celoso prudente. But, if he has all Calderón’s defects, he has many of his great qualities. Few cloak-and-sword plays are better worth reading than Donde hay agravios, no hay celos, or than Sin honra no hay amistad, or than No hay amigo para amigo (the source of Lesage’s Le Point d’honneur). Rojas Zorrilla has perhaps less verbal wit than Calderón, but he has much more humour, and he shows it in such pieces as Entre bobos anda el juego, from which the younger Corneille took his Don Bertrand de Cigarral, and Scarron his Dom Japhet d’Arménie. Scarron, indeed, picked up a frugal living on the crumbs which fell from Rojas Zorrilla’s table. He took his Jodelet ou le Maître valet from Donde hay agravios no hay celos, and his Écolier de Salamanque from Obligados y ofendidos, a piece which also supplied the younger Corneille and Boisrobert respectively with Les Illustres Ennemis and Les Généreux Ennemis. But observe that, in Rojas Zorrilla’s case as in Calderón’s, the foreign adapters use only the light comedies. The rapturous monarchical sentiment of García del Castañar no doubt seemed too hysterical for the court of Louis XIV., and hence the author’s most striking play remained unknown in Northern Europe. You may say that he forced the note, as Spaniards often do, and that he has no one but himself to thank. Perhaps: Rojas Zorrilla adopts a convention, and every convention tends to become more and more unreal. Possibly the first man who signed himself somebody else’s obedient servant meant what he wrote: you and I mean nothing by it. But conventions are convenient, and, though nobody can have had much respect for Philip IV. towards the end of his reign, the monarchical sentiment was latent in the people. Moreover, the scene of García del Castañar is laid in the early part of the fourteenth century. When all is said, García del Castañar has an air of—what we may call—local truth, a nobility of conception, and a concentrated eloquence which go to make it a play in a thousand.
Nothing is easier to forget than a play which has little more than cleverness to recommend it, and many of the pieces written by Calderón’s followers are clever to the last degree of tiresomeness. There is cleverness of a kind in El Conde de Sex ó Dar la vida por su dama, and, if there were any solid basis for the ascription of it to Philip IV., we should have to say that it was a very creditable performance for a king. But then kings in modern times have not greatly distinguished themselves in literature. You remember Boileau’s remark to Louis XIV.:—‘Votre Majesté peut tout ce qu’Elle veut faire: Elle a voulu faire de mauvais vers; Elle y a réussi.’ However, if El Conde de Sex would do credit to a royal amateur, it would be a rather mediocre performance for a professional playwright like Antonio Coello, to whom also it is attributed. Coello was already known as a promising dramatist when Pérez de Montalbán wrote Para todos in 1632, but we can scarcely say that his early promise was fulfilled. The air of courts does not encourage independence, and Coello, apparently distrustful of his powers, collaborated in several pieces with fellow-courtiers like Calderón, Vélez de Guevara and Rojas Zorrilla—notably with the two latter in También la afrenta es veneno, which dramatises the malodorous story of Leonor Telles (wife of Fernando I. of Portugal) and her first husband, João Lourenço da Cunha, el de los cuernos de oro.
Shortly before he died in 1652 Coello had his reward by being made a member of the royal household, but he would now be forgotten were it not that he is said to be the real author of Los Empeños de seis horas (Lo que pasa en una noche), which is printed in the eighth volume of the Escogidas as a play of Calderón’s. Assuming that the ascription of it to Coello is correct, he becomes of some interest to us in England, for the play was adapted by Samuel Tuke under the title of The Adventures of Five Hours. This piece of Tuke’s made a great hit in London when it was printed in 1662; four years later Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that ‘when all is done, it is the best play that ever I read in all my life,’ and when he saw it acted a few days afterwards, he effusively declared that Othello seemed ‘a mean thing’ beside it. There is a tendency to make the Spanish author—for Tuke adds little of his own—pay for Pepys’s extravagance. Los Empeños de seis horas is nothing like a masterpiece, but it is a capital light comedy—neatly constructed, witty, brisk and entertaining. It is, indeed, so much better than anything else which bears Coello’s name that there is some hesitation to believe he wrote it. However, he has the combined authority of Barrera and Schaeffer in his favour, though neither of these oracles gives any reason to support the ascription.
As a writer of high comedy Coello had many rivals in Spain—men slightly his seniors, like Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, who became known in England through Fanshawe’s translations, and who must also have been known in France, since his play El Marido hace mujer was laid under contribution by Molière in L’École des maris; men like his contemporary Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón, whose El Señor de Buenas Noches was turned to account by the younger Corneille in La Comtesse d’Orgueil; men like his junior, Fernando de Zárate y Castronovo, the author of La Presumida y la hermosa, in which Molière found a hint for Les Femmes savantes. But the most successful writer in this vein was Agustín Moreto y Cavaña, who was born in 1618, just as Calderón was leaving Salamanca University to seek his fortune as a dramatist at Madrid. To judge by his more characteristic plays we should guess Moreto to have been the happiest of men, and the gayest; but late in life he gave an opening to writers of ‘hypothetical biography,’ and they took it. For instance, when he was over forty he became devout, took orders, and made a will directing that he should be buried in the Pradillo del Carmen at Toledo—a place which has been identified as the burial-ground of criminals who had been executed. This identification gave rise to the theory that he must have had some ghastly crime upon his conscience, and, as particulars are generally forthcoming in such cases, some charitable persons leapt to the conclusion that Moreto was the undetected assassin of Lope’s friend, Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla.
One is always reluctant to spoil a good story, but luck is against me this afternoon. A few moments ago I mentioned the ‘Calderona,’ and stated that she returned to the stage after her rupture with Philip IV.: that destroys the usual picturesque story of her throwing herself in an agony of abjection at Philip’s feet, and going straightway into a convent to do penance for the rest of her life. I am afraid that I must also destroy this agreeable legend about Moreto’s being a murderer. It is unfortunate for Moreto, for many who have no strong taste for literature are often induced to take interest in a man of letters if he can be proved guilty of some crime: they will spell out a little Old French because they have heard that Villon was a cracksman. Well, we must tell the truth, and take the consequences. The identification of the Pradillo del Carmen turns out to be wrong. The Pradillo del Carmen was the cemetery used for those who died in the hospital to which Moreto was chaplain, and to which he bequeathed his fortune: the Pradillo del Carmen has nothing to do with the burial-place for criminals, though it lies close by. Moreto evidently wished not to be separated in death from the poor people amongst whom he had laboured; but, as it happens, his directions were not carried out, for when he died on December 28, 1669, he was buried in the church of St. John the Baptist at Toledo. And this is not the only weak point in the story. Medinilla was killed in 1620 when Moreto was two years old, and few assassins, however precocious, begin operations at that tender age. Lastly, it would seem that Medinilla was perhaps not murdered at all, but was killed in fair fight by Jerónimo de Andrade y Rivadeneyra. These prosaic facts compel me to present Moreto to you—not as an interesting cut-throat, not as a morose and sinister murderer, crushed by his dreadful secret, but—as a man of the most genial disposition, noble character, and singularly virtuous life.
He was all this, and he was also one of the cleverest craftsmen who ever worked for the Spanish stage. But nature does not shower all her gifts on any one man, and she was niggardly to Moreto in the matter of invention. He made no secret of the fact that he took whatever he wanted from his predecessors. His friend Jerónimo de Cáncer represents him as saying:—
He did, indeed, find a brava mina in the old plays, and especially in Lope de Vega’s. From Lope’s El Gran Duque de Moscovia he takes El Príncipe perseguido; from Lope’s El Prodigio de Etiopia he takes La Adúltera penitente; from Lope’s El Testimonio vengado he takes Como se vengan los nobles; from Lope’s Las Pobrezas de Rinaldo he takes El Mejor Par de los doce; from Lope’s De cuando acá nos vino ... he takes De fuera vendrá quien de casa nos echará; from Lope’s delightful play El Mayor imposible he constructs the still more delightful No puede ser, from which John Crowne, at the suggestion of Charles II., took his Sir Courtly Nice, or, It cannot be, and from which Ludvig Holberg, the celebrated Danish dramatist, took his Jean de France. Moreto was scarcely less indebted to Lope’s contemporaries than to Lope himself. From Vélez de Guevara’s El Capitán prodigioso y Príncipe de Transilvania he took El Príncipe prodigioso; from Guillén de Castro’s Las Maravillas de Babilonia he took El bruto de Babilonia, and from Castro’s Los hermanos enemigos he took Hasta el fin nadie es dichoso; from Tirso de Molina’s La Villana de Vallecas he took La ocasion hace al ladrón; and from a novel of Castillo Solórzano’s he took the entire plot of La Confusion de un jardín. This is a fairly long list, but it does not include all Moreto’s debts.
He has his failures, of course. El ricohombre de Alcalá looks anæmic beside its original. El Infanzón de Illescas, which is ascribed to both Lope and Tirso; and Caer para levantar is a wooden arrangement of Mira de Amescua’s striking play, El Esclavo del demonio. If you can filch to no better purpose than this, then decidedly honesty is the best policy. Perhaps Moreto came to this conclusion himself in some passing mood, and it must have been at some such hour that he wrote El Parecido en la Corte and Trampa adelante, both abounding in individual humour. But such moods are not frequent with him. If you choose to say that Moreto was a systematic plagiarist, it is hard for me to deny it. Every playwright of this period plagiarised and pilfered, more or less, from Calderón downwards: we must accept this as a fact—a fact as to which there was seldom any concealment. Just as Moreto was drawing towards the end of his career as dramatist, a most intrepid plagiarist arose in the person of Matos Fragoso, of whom I shall have a word to say presently. But Matos Fragoso was sly, and a bungler: Moreto was frank, and a master of the gentle art of conveyance. He pilfers in all directions; but he manipulates the stolen goods almost out of recognition, usually adding much to their value. And this implies the possession of remarkable talent. In literature, as in politics, if he can only contrive to succeed, a man is pardoned for proceedings which in other callings might lead to jail: and Moreto’s success is triumphant. The germ of his play, El lindo Don Diego, is found in Guillén de Castro’s El Narciso de su opinión; but for Castro’s rough sketch Moreto substitutes a finished, final portrait of the insufferable, the fatuous snob who pays court to a countess, is as elated as a brewer when he marries her and fancies himself an aristocrat, but wakes up with a start to the reality of things on discovering that the supposed countess is the sharp little servant Beatriz who has seen through him all along, and has exhibited him in his true character as a born fool. Don Diego is always with us—in England now, as in Spain three centuries ago—and El lindo Don Diego might have been written yesterday.
Still better is El desdén con el desdén, a piece which shows to perfection Moreto’s unparalleled tact in making a mosaic a beautiful thing. Diana, the young girl who knows no more of the world than of the moon, but who imagines men to be odious wretches from what she had read of them—Diana is taken from Lope’s La Vengadora de las mugeres; the behaviour of her various suitors is suggested by Lope’s De corsario á corsario; the quick-witted maid is from Lope’s Los Milagros del desprecio; the trick by which the Conde de Urgel traps Diana is borrowed from Lope’s La Hermosa fea. Not one of the chief traits in El desdén con el desdén is original; but out of these fragments a play has been constructed far superior to the plays from which the component parts are derived. The plot never flags and is always plausible, the characters are full of life and interest, and the dialogue sparkles with mischievous gaiety. All this is Moreto’s, and it is a victory of intellectual address. It clearly impressed Molière, who set out to do by Moreto what Moreto had done by others: the result is La Princesse d’Élide, one of Molière’s worst failures. Gozzi renewed the attempt, and failed likewise in La Principessa filosofa. El desdén con el desdén outlives these imitations as well as others from skilful hands in England and in Sweden, and surely it deserves to live as an example of what marvellous deftness can do in contriving from scattered materials a charming and essentially original work of art.
Compared with Moreto, Juan Matos Fragoso is, as I have said, a bungler. In A lo que obliga un agravio, which is from Lope’s Los dos bandoleros, he fails, though he has the collaboration of Sebastián de Villaviciosa. He fails by himself in La Venganza en el despeño, which is taken from Lope’s El Príncipe despeñado. There is some reason to think that he tried to pass himself off as the author of Lope’s El Desprecio agradecido. This play is given in the thirty-ninth volume of the Escogidas with Matos Fragoso’s name attached to it, and, as Matos Fragoso edited this particular volume, it seems to follow that he lent himself to a mean form of fraud. However, there is no gainsaying his popularity, and he may be read with real pleasure—as in El Sabio en el rincón, which is from Lope’s El Villano en su rincón—when he hits on a good original, and gives us next to nothing of his own. A better dramatist, and a far more reputable man, was Antonio de Solís, who was born ten years after Calderón; but Solís’s reputation really depends on his Historia de la conquista de Méjico, which appeared in 1684, two years before his death. He was naturally a prose-writer who took to the drama because it was the fashion. And that play-writing was a fashionable craze may be gathered from the fact that Spain produced over five hundred dramatists during the reigns of Philip IV. and Charles II. So the historians of dramatic literature tell us, but perhaps even they have not thought it necessary to read all this mass of plays with minute attention. Here and there a name floats down to us, not always flatteringly; Juan de Zabaleta, for instance, is remembered chiefly through Cáncer’s epigram on his ugliness and on his failure:—
This is not the kind of immortality that any one desires, but this—or something not much better—is the only kind of immortality that most of the five hundred are likely to attain. The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth its poppy on the crowd, and the long line closes with Bancés Candamo, who died in 1704. He was the favourite court-dramatist as Calderón had been before him. To say that Bancés Candamo occupied the place once filled by Calderón is to show how greatly the Spanish theatre had degenerated. No doubt it must have perished in any case, for institutions die as certainly as men. But its end was hastened by two most influential personages—one a man of genius, and the other a fribble—who had the welfare of the stage at heart. By reducing dramatic composition to a formula, Calderón arrested any possible development; by lavish expenditure on decorations, Philip IV. imposed his taste for spectacle upon the public. The public gets what it deserves: when the stage-carpenter comes in, the dramatist goes out. Compelled to write pieces which would suit the elaborate scenery provided at the Buen Retiro, Calderón was the first to suffer. He and Philip,106 between them, dealt the Spanish drama its death-blow. It lingered on in senile decay for fifty years, and with Bancés Candamo it died. It was high time for it to be gone: for nothing is more lamentable than the progressive degradation of what has once been a great and living force.
If asked to indicate the most interesting development in Spanish literature during the last century, I should point—not to the drama and poetry of the Romantic movement, but—to the renaissance of fiction. As the passion for narrative ‘springs eternal in the human breast,’ Cervantes was sure to have a train of successors who would attempt to carry on his great tradition. But, in the history of art, a short, glorious summer is usually followed by a long, blighting winter. The eighteenth century was an age of barrenness in Spain, so far as concerns romance. No doubt Torres Villaroel’s autobiography contains so much fiction that it may fairly be described as a picaresque novel, and you might easily be worse employed than in reading it. Nature intended the author to be a man of letters and a wit; poverty compelled him to become an incapable professor of mathematics, and a diffuse buffoon. With the single exception of Isla, no Spanish novelist of this time finds readers now, and Isla’s main object is utilitarian. The amusement in Fray Gerundio is incidental, and art has a very secondary place. Spain appears to have remained unaffected by the great schools of novelists in England and France: instead of being influenced by these writers, she influenced them. After lending to Lesage, she lent to Marivaux; she lent also to Fielding and Sterne, not to mention Smollett; but she herself was living on her capital. She has no contemporary novelists to place beside Ramón de la Cruz, González del Castillo, and the younger Moratín, all of whom found expression for their talent in the dramatic form. Not till about the middle of the last century does any notable novelist come
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.
One is tempted to dwell upon Pereda’s achievement—first, because his novels are thronged with lifelike personages; and second, because they proved that Spain, though separated from the rest of Europe in sentiment and belief, was not intellectually dead. While Pereda was writing Pedro Sánchez and Sotileza, the world north of the Pyrenees was wrangling over naturalism in romance as though it were a new discovery. The critics of London and Paris were clearly unaware that naturalism had been practised for years past in Spain by novelists who thus revived an ancient national tradition. Pereda is still little read out of Spain, and, though attempts to translate him have been made, he is perhaps too emphatically Spanish to bear the operation. Spaniards themselves need some aids to read him with comfort, and the glossary at the end of Sotileza has been a very present help to many of us in time of trouble. A writer who indulges in dialectical peculiarities or in technical expressions to such an extent may be presumed to have counted the cost: and the cost is that he remains comparatively unknown beyond his own frontier. He cannot be reproached with making an illegitimate bid for popularity, nor accused of defection from the cause of realism. Pereda was not indifferent to fame, but he did not go far to seek it. Like the Shunamite woman, he chose to dwell among his own people, to picture their existence passed in contented industry, to exalt their ideals, and to value their applause more than that of the outside world.