Part 20

Don Pedro Antonio de Alacón belonged, like Valera, to an old family of Andalusia, but not in the elder novelist's fortunate circumstances; one of ten sons, he had more or less to place himself in life. He was born in Gaudix in 1833; studied law at the University of Granada; and naturally gravitated toward Madrid, the center of political and literary interests. He flung himself headlong into the republican anti-clerical ideas of that troubled time, but in later life his theories toned down so that he ended as a believer and a liberal conservative. Throughout a long political career Alacón kept his honor unstained; although often with friends in power, it was only after twenty-one years of politics that he accepted a post, on the advent of Alfonso XII, whose return he had advocated long before it came about. He had begun writing when very young, thus "El Clavo," a powerful sketch, was done when barely twenty. Like many of Spain's authors, he turned soldier when the call came, and served in the 1860 campaign in Africa of which he has left a vivid chronicle, "Diario de un Testigo de la Guerra en Africa." "El Sombrero" was followed by "El Escándalo," a novel widely discussed in Spain. The story opens strongly, but it scatters toward the end; Alacón is better in the tale than in sustained work. He can snap his fingers at our criticism, his Corregidor and his Molinera have made him one of the immortals.

To another modern novelist, to Pérez Galdós, I feel I am not fair, but I find so much of his work antipathetic that, as he has not a good style and often offends good taste, I cannot force a liking. Brunetière speaks of the intolerance of the naturalist school of novelists, the intolerance of the free-thinker. Those who advocate the extreme republican, anti-clerical theories in Spain have this intolerance to a marked degree. Pérez Galdós is so biassed that he distorts his characters from their natural evolution by making them voice his own ideas. The "roman à thèse" may win a greater fame for the first hour, but it is sure to pass with the changing questions of the time. The much-praised "Doña Perfecta" struck me as absurdly untrue to human nature. The heroine is presented as a not uncommon type of religious development, naturally where there is intense religious feeling there is a bigot here and there, but this Lady Perfection is not a consistent human being, but a monster. While anxious for her nephew to leave she yet urges him to stay, no reason why; she could easily have rid herself of him yet she brings about his death. Her character of the beginning does not match with her character of the end (the novelist offends several times in this way). The thin-visaged, oily priest-villain gives an aside over the footlights: "I have tried tricks, but there is no sin in tricks. My conscience is clear": evidently old-fashioned melodramatics are not yet extinct. It is quite impossible for a well-bred Spaniard to have insulted his kind hosts, as does Pepe, by telling them crudely that their Christian belief is a fable as past as paganism, "all the absurdities, falsities, illusions, dreams, are over," to-day there is no more multiplication of bread and fishes, but the rule of industry and machines. I think most people will feel that the characters of this book can intrigue and murder and throw in realistic asides as much as they will, we do not hate them because they fail to convince us that they ever really existed. They are just mouthpieces for their author's theories. In another novel, "Gloria," a beautiful passionate girl of sixteen is incapable of being the pedantic prig Galdós makes her in the opening chapters. Happily for the romance and for the weary reader, once the novelist warms to his story, religious discussions go to the wall and he presents a moving tragedy. Would that he could have kept up to the level of parts of this novel, that which presents Gloria's uncles, for instance, but he is very unequal. After scenes so true to life that they are a joy, he will indulge in the pseudo-giantesque of some of Hugo's purple patches, and only high genius can take such liberties. Thus in a tempest a church lamp falls; it breaks the glass of the urn in which lies the Dead Christ, it slaps St. Joseph in the face, it knocks the sword from the hand of St. Michael, and finishes its zig-zag career by crashing into a confessional. Lamps of anti-clerics only seem to act in this all-round, satisfying way; realists, like Pereda and Valera, are incapable of such exaggeration. Some critics hold "Angel Guerra" and "Fortuna y Jacinta" to be the best of Galdós. His "Episodios Nacionales" are a series of novels on the events of the past century in Spain. In spite of vivid scenes, they seemed to me long-winded and confusing; one must be Spanish, they say, to appreciate them.

Benito Pérez Galdós was born in 1845 in the Canary Islands. He has been an artist, a lawyer, a politician, and a journalist; in twenty years he has produced forty-two volumes, a record which makes his inequalities easy to understand. Personally he is a sincere and upright character. Although an avowed free-thinker he sits in reverence at the feet of his fellow novelist, Pereda, an ardent believer, and it was to be near him that he fixed his home in Santander: "Our master," he calls him, "a great poet in prose, the most classic and at the same time the greatest innovator of our writers."

Far below Pérez Galdós, who, if not the first, is a distinguished and talented novelist, is Blasco Ibáñez, of the same school of anti-clerics and extreme republicanism. His stories are vigorous, crude studies of Valencia, that province which the proverb says is "a paradise inhabited by demons," and because so local, the books are valuable; personally I lay down such a tale as "Flor de Mayo" or "Arroz y Tartana" depressed and sick at heart. Ibáñez lacks ideality and elevation of sentiment; he pictures ignoble lives in monotonous detail, all is labored description, for the characters never speak themselves, the author _describes_ their conversation. One sentence of Sancho, one sentence of the Don and you know who speaks! It is to this minor novelist that a recent French book, "Les Maîtres du Roman Espagnol Contemporain," by a Monsieur F. Vézinet, devotes a fourth of its pages, while dismissing Pereda contemptuously, and not even mentioning "Sotileza," his great sea-masterpiece. Under the guise of literary criticism, the French writer veils a polemic against religion: "For Christians actually do find solace in a belief in a future life," is one of his remarks. On meeting in Spanish fiction a dignified reserve in scenes of passion, this teacher of young men--he is professor in the Lycée of Lyons--supplies the pepper lacking by telling how a French naturalist would have described the same scenes.

Another Spanish writer of the free-thinking school, but of good literary quality, is Leopoldo Alas, author of "La Regenta," and a caustic, intelligent critic who under the name of _Clarín_ did much to prick Spain awake to intellectual interest. Though born in Zamora (1852) he so associated himself with Oviedo, where he studied and later was professor in the University, that he may be called a son of the Asturias. "La Regenta" is a powerful psychological novel, set in Oviedo, somewhat long drawn out, for the minute following of Ana Ozores in her downfall too closely approaches pathology. Ana, who resembles a little her namesake of Russia, (Alas has treated the real issue with the same uncompromising morality as Tolstoi) is a brilliant, lovable woman, capable of the highest, a girl who at sixteen can read St. Augustine with emotion; but she is fatally doomed by the limitations of a woman's life in her station. The acute Alas here puts his finger on a real evil in his country, the lack of wide interests for the women of the upper classes if no family duties are given them. They seem to have forgotten Isabella's day when Doña Lucía de Medrano lectured on the Latin classics in the University of Salamanca, and Doña Francesca de Lebrija filled the chair of rhetoric in the University of Alcalá, when the Queen read her New Testament in Greek, and her youngest daughter, the unfortunate wife of Henry VIII, won the admiration of Erasmus by her solid acquirements. To-day the idleness enforced by fashion leads often to morbid religiosity or to moral disaster. Toward the end, "La Regenta" like "El Escándalo" flags, especially is the canon De Pas a failure. Such a man would have been either a great saint or a great sinner, never could he have steered the mean middle course he did. In this book, unlike the average romance, is much of the trail of the serpent of Zola's school, more the result of a too warm partisanship of the French novelist than innate in Alas.

The talented Padre Coloma, author of "Pequeñeces," may be called, like the professor of Oviedo, a man of one novel. Born in Andalusia (1851), a literary protégé of Fernán Caballero, he led the life of a man of the world till about twenty-five, when a violent change of heart caused him to enter the Jesuit Order. There he has passed uneventful, useful years of study and teaching. His book, which is a harsh satire on the vices of the smart set of Madrid, made an immediate sensation. I cannot say I find the Padre Coloma a great writer by any means, he is too unequal; whole chapters drag heavily. But some of his scenes deserve the highest praise, such as the presentation of the heroine Currita Albornoz, or that truly noble description of one of Spain's proud usages, the twelve grandees of the first rank presenting themselves before their new monarch, the young Alfonso XII, on his return in 1875, a picture that rings with the heroic spirit of the past.

We turn next to a novelist with so long a list of books to her credit that it is impossible to enumerate them, the Señora Emilia Pardo Bazán who has been called the most notable woman of letters in Europe. Her salon in Madrid is one of the best known in the capital, but she has so deeply associated herself with her native province (born in Coruña in 1851) that she is the boast of every Gallego. Mountain lands are noted for the loyalty they rouse in their sons, but few such enthusiasms equal that of Doña Emilia. She has told of the lonely hills, the chestnut forests, the never-failing streams of the Norway of Spain, and made alive the ancient usages, and the crabbed originality of the peasantry. "Los Pazos de Ulloa" (_pazos_ is dialect for palace) and its sequel, "La Madre Naturaleza," have in them the very breath of outdoor life,--the last is an idyll in prose. She describes the untrained young _cura_ leaving Santiago to step into the unhappy coil of events in the ruined manor house, his vain efforts to help the pathetic young wife and her brutalized husband. The tragedy is carried on to the second generation, and we see the two children growing up in solitude and desertion, roaming the countryside day and night, Perucho, blue-eyed, handsome as a Greek statue, the girl Manolita slender and dark; then the heart-breaking misery of the end. Work such as this is exquisite and sure to last. Madam Pardo Bazán edits one of the best reviews in Madrid, and she has written many stories that treat of life in the capital, but, like the novels of Valdés, they might have been written elsewhere, in Paris or St. Petersburg. It is in the novels of her loved _paisanos_ she will live.

English-speaking people probably know Palacio Valdés better than any other Spanish writer, for his novels, of the regulation Parisian type, have been repeatedly translated. I care not at all for the Madrid novels, but sometimes in a dashing local romance he carries all before him: such is "La Hermana de San Sulpicio," _sal salada_, that untranslatable phrase of Andalusia where sparkle and verve are considered as highly as beauty in women. The story is facile, witty, light both in manner and matter, full of laughter following swift on tears, like its sprightly chatterbox of a heroine, an alluring creature who is sincere underneath the sparkle. Seville and the brilliant summer life of its patios, the sky raining stars, lovers talking all night at the _reja_ in the scented air,--no one would tell on an _enamorado_, the very men drinking in a tavern send out a glass to the patient lover to wish him good luck. The friendly equality of the different classes is shown again here, and other traits not so praiseworthy, such as the intensity of local antipathies, the Andalusian's contempt for the Gallego, the Catalan's for the Andalusian. A Barcelona business man grumbles all day in Seville: "A glass of cognac 30 c. one day and 35 c. the next in the same café. Is that business?" Two men from the northern mountains meet: "You too are from Asturias?" asks one. "No, from Galicia." "Then you are not _mi paisano_," and the first turns away in disdain.

While the mundain, easy stories of Palacio Valdés are translated and widely read, one of the first of Spanish novelists is scarcely known outside his own country. Don José María de Pereda was born in 1835 and died in 1906, the year following Don Juan Valera's death. He is a true son of the _Montaña_, the coast country round Santander, whose Picos de Europa rise to a height of 9000 feet, and he has described his home with beautiful realism in some robust and primitive tales: "Escenas Montañesas; "El Sabor de la Tierruca"; "Sotileza," called his best, a very strong picture of fisher folk; "De tal Palo tal Astillo," which, like Galdós' "Gloria," is greatly spoiled by being a "roman à thèse"; "Peñas Arriba," and many others. Pereda is a champion against skepticism and the weakening luxury of cities: he is so partial to his _patria chica_ that he often abuses the patience of readers by his too free use of its dialect. With him, plot and action are of slight account, for his interest lies in the eternal human characters and in the countryside that molded them. A realist more exact than Flaubert, he yet fulfills the prophecy of Huysmans as to the best type of novel for the future: "The truth of the document, the precision of detail, the condensed, nervous language of realism must be kept, but it must be clarified with soul, and mystery must no longer be explained by _maladies of the senses_. The romance should divide itself into two parts, welded or interbound as they are in life, that of the soul and that of body, and it should treat of their reaction, of their conflicts, of their mutual understandings." M. René Bazin has described a visit to Pereda at Polanco, his beautiful estate near Santander, where he led a life of cultured retirement, proving the theory which his books preach, that one's native home is the best paradise. To the French visitor, with his nation's swiftness to discern high distinction, it seemed as if it were Quixote himself, the man who came forward to meet him, of the pure hidalgo type, long face and aquiline nose, with that noble gesture of the hand that said, "My house is yours."

Of Pereda's books, my favorite is "Peñas Arriba," which does for the mountain folk what "Sotileza" does for the coast life of the _Montaña_. It was while writing this that there fell on him the heart-rending blow of his young son's suicide, and a cross and date long stood in the rough draft of the novel to mark the separation of the past from his saddened later life: only by force of will could he continue. Much of himself shows in the tale, which would entice a Parisian himself to live contentedly on a mountain side. There is a scene, the death of the squire of Tablanca, which indeed proclaims a master hand. Spain's best critic, Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (himself from Santander, born 1856) writes of Pereda: "For me and all born _de peñas al mar_, these books are felt before judged, they are something of our mountain land like the breezes of the coast, one loves the author as one does one's family."

Perhaps it is not fair to speak of a writer who is not a romancist, when good minor talents among the novelists have to be passed over, but I cannot resist ending with the name of this famous scholar, Menéndez y Pelayo,[34] who may be said to be discovering Spain to herself after her long discouragement. His books are on the history of philosophy and literature: "Historía de las Ideas Estéticas en España"; "Horacio en España," being graphic pages on the lyric poets; "Crítica Literaria"; "Ciencia Española," "Calderón y su Teatro," and others. Faithful to the best traditions of his race, he is boldly asserting her past, her poets, her scientists, her mystics,--they have been ignored too long; he holds that the peoples of the _mediodía_ are the civilizing races par excellence. All the warring factions of Spain agree that here is a man of stupendous talent. "Every time I meet him, I find him with a new language. Never have I met a student of such prodigious erudition," wrote the skeptic Alas. Menéndez y Pelayo may be called a literary phenomenon. Before twenty-five he had ransacked the libraries of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium, and was given a professorship in the University of Madrid. To-day his reputation is European among scholars. His profound knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literatures, helps a swift, unerring sense to perceive the best. His work is not only that of a scholar, for it has in it the life-giving touch of imagination, which is wisdom, and makes a writer a classic.

An anecdote that has the ring of the simplicity of a Cervantes or a Valera, the self-effacing of a Luis de León, is told of the young scholar of twenty-two. When spending an evening with some celebrated men where wit and learning flowed fast and copious, he poured out quotations so erudite and spontaneous that in modest embarrassment he took a paper from his pocket as if quoting from it. At the end of the evening a friend seized on the magic bit of paper, to find it a washerwoman's bill. Praise cannot hurt such a man. When a race can produce in a short fifty years a Pereda, a Valera, a Menéndez y Pelayo, have we the right to call it spent and out of the running?

ESTREMADURA

"I have always felt that the two most precious things in life are faith and love. As I grow older I think so more and more. Ambition and achievement are out of the running; the disappointments are many and the prizes few, and by the time they are attained seem small. The whole thing is vanity and vexation of spirit without faith and love. I have come to see that cleverness, success, attainment, count for little; that goodness, 'character,' is the important factor in life."

GEORGE J. ROMANES.

Literally worn out with the noise of Seville's Holy Week, we took the night train, that chill, rainy Good Friday, and left the Andalusian excitement behind. As carriages are forbidden in the city on both Holy Thursday and Good Friday, we had expected to walk to the station--they told us that the King, the year before, had walked to his train--but the regulation ceased at sunset on Friday and we were able to drive.

As usual we had the _Reservado para Señoras_ compartment to ourselves, and so exhausted were we that we slept heavily with only an occasional waking to look out on the cold hills we were crossing. There was a moon which hurrying black clouds obscured fitfully. Under the somber sky the desolate hills seemed like the fantastic sepia drawing of a Turner: swift unforgettable memories one carries away from night journeys in Spain.

We left the train at Mérida, now a poor place with some few thousand inhabitants, but up to the fourth century a splendid Roman city, the capital of Lusitania. The castle built by Romans, Moors, Knights of Santiago, and bishops; the theater, the aqueduct, the bridge, the triumphal arch, and the baths show what it once was. We could not have visited this solitary province at a happier hour. Field flowers made the countryside as beautiful for the moment as Umbria or Devonshire; the wheat fields, always so articulate and lovely, had their own charm even after the magnificent outburst of roses and orange blossoms a month earlier in Seville.

Mérida is small,--frugal and neat, as are the larger number of Spanish towns. As we explored it, the people greeted us with kindly "_Vayan Ustedes con Dios_"; we had left behind the tourist-infested south with its insolent city loafers. It seemed too good to believe that we had come again among the grave, dignified Spaniards of the north. In order not to miss the Holy Saturday services, I hastened to the Cathedral. There was a cracked old organ and the singing was little better, but devout, heart-moving peasants rose and knelt, up and down, during the long Flectamus Genua! Levate! ceremony of that day, and the bells burst into the riotous clamor they seem to achieve so individually all over Spain. It may have been ungrateful, but it was without the slightest regret that I thought of the display going on at the same hour in Seville.