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Title: The Magic of Spain

Author: Aubrey F. G. Bell

Release date: September 7, 2016 [eBook #53001]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Josep Cols Canals, Chuck Greif and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
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Produced by Josep Cols Canals, Chuck Greif and the Online
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file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)











                          THE MAGIC OF SPAIN




                               THE MAGIC
                               OF SPAIN

                         BY AUBREY F. G. BELL

                        Or vous aurez loisir
                        Cheminant en Espagne
                        Bien que maintes montagnes
                        Il vous faudra monter.
                             _Pilgrims’ Song._

                  LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD,
                 NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXII.


         WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.




NOTE


This is rather a collection of stray notes on Spain than a connected
study--of notes from many pleasant hours of Spanish literature and
travel, but perhaps of too individual an interest to appear without some
apology. No reference will be found to those great social and political
problems which disturb Spanish life. To fill the idler moments of a
Spanish holiday, and possibly to help the reader to feel that “parfum du
terroir” which pervades Spain, is the unambitious object of these pages.
Better still, if he turns from them in dissatisfaction to authoritative
writers on Spanish life and letters, and to the magic-land of Spanish
literature itself. For permission to reprint some of these short essays
in slightly altered form the author has to thank the Editors of the
_Morning Post_, the _Outlook_, and the _Queen_.




PREFACE


It is not easy in a few words to account for the strange Oriental spell
that Spain has exercised over many minds nor to explain the potency of
its attraction. For indeed the great Peninsula possesses a special spice
and flavour. It has not the immemorial culture of Italy, nor the
pleasant smiling landscapes of France with her green meadows and crystal
streams. The old Iberia, that _dura tellus_, has a peculiar raciness.
Its colour is often harsh and crude; many of its districts are barren
and discomfortable. The bleak and rocky uplands and the ragged sierra
ridges cut the country into sharp divisions and cause it to be thinly
and variously populated. On those uplands the breath of the wind is
often icy and the sun strikes with a biting force. Great parched and
desolate plains extend treeless and unprotected two thousand feet above
the sea. The villages at distant intervals are of the colour of the
soil, and scarcely to be distinguished from a mass of yellow-brown
rocks. Morning and evening a string of mules may be seen outlined on the
horizon, for the peasants set out in bands to till their distant fields;
or a shepherd with his flock of sheep, or goats, relieves the strange
monotony of this dust-laden windy desert. Nothing could be sadder or
less harmonious than the peasants’ harsh and strident singing, the very
peculiarity of which has, however, a piquancy and charm. Hard too is
their language, with its clean gutturals, far rougher and manlier than
the musical sister-tongue of Italy. All points to a like conclusion,
that this is no country of comfort and soft languorous delight, but of a
quaint and forcible originality, where the most jaded mind may be braced
and inspirited and find a fresher and more stirring life.

In Spain the sharpness of contrasts precludes any feeling of weariness
or satiety. There are regions of luxuriant growth and African sun
bounded by mountains of eternal snow. Through the plain a river glides
among orange groves and grey olives; in the shaded _patios_ of the city
silver fountains keep the air cool and fresh, and on the coldest night
in winter the temperature is still some degrees above the
freezing-point. Yet here, in the most fiery heat of summer, we may lift
up our eyes to the hills and look on the snowy sierra against the deep
blue of the sky; and if a shower, in this region of little rain, falls
upon the low-lying districts, it adds but another coat of whiteness to
the neighbouring range. It is indeed a strange and fascinating land, a
_Land voll Sonnenschein_ and fierce blinding light, yet a land of
shrill, piercing blasts and icy air, a land of many various elements
both of climate and population. It is no wonder that its inhabitants are
of a character strongly individual and preserve the original Iberian
strain. A racy pithiness of speech is theirs. In no country are proverbs
more common, and a string of them can indeed form a peasant’s
conversation, pungent as the rosaries of red _piments_ that hang on the
balconies of farms.

It was in Spain that the rogue-story, the _novela de pícaros_,
originated, and the Spanish novelists of the last thirty years have
given free rein to the local types of various parts of Spain. Nowhere
has provincialism continued to be so clearly marked. In other countries
better communications have corrupted the local manners into a conformity
of excellence. In Spain the nature of the country, with its rough
mountain barriers and turbulent unnavigable rivers, still protects
originality and keeps the character of the provinces distinct, and the
native of Andalucía continues to despise the native of Galicia and to be
ridiculed by the native of Castille. This does not make for material
prosperity, but it constitutes a country of the picturesque and
unexpected, a country where imagination is not dead, and where the
artist and poet find their true home. Not the least attraction to them
perhaps is the Spanish improvidence and absence of method, and the gay
living from hand to mouth. An unwary traveller in the wilder districts
may easily find himself half-perishing from scarcity of food, and lost
in an intricate labyrinth of ways between far-distant villages. “A bad
thing, sirs, it is to have a lack of bread,” sang the poet of the
twelfth-century _Poema del Cid_. The hardy peasant of the poorer
regions lives scantily from day to day on the product of the niggard
soil, won by patient labour. The peasant in more fertile parts does not
necessarily fare better, but he labours magnificently less. The
deliberate method of prosperity and success is held in small esteem. The
mighty Empire of Spain was in fact the affair of a generation only. From
the time of Philip II. onwards the Spanish Empire might aptly be
compared with the Cid’s corpse, for, though by its prestige and the
favour of heaven it might continue to reap fresh victories, it was
nevertheless irrevocably dead and awaiting dissolution. And it is the
improvidence of Spain that has charmed the foreigner. For, eager as he
is to admire its poetic aspects, in his inmost soul he often regards
himself as incomparably superior, and hurries home to civilization with
a sheaf of curious details negligently gleaned.

The courteous Spaniard conceals his contempt for the foreigner, but were
he privileged to read the numerous sketches, scenes, and saunterings
published yearly of Spain, he would have some scope for legitimate
amusement. A faint remonstrance has indeed been heard in the Peninsula
against the idea of Spanish grandees lying in wait at dark corners to
rob a French journalist of his fortune. But mostly they are content to
let the foreigner continue in his ignorance. For stern and melancholy
Spain retains her secret, and is not to be won from her Oriental
impenetrable mystery by any wiles. Unchanging and impassive, her cities
seem to mock the stranger, and the roughness of the intervening
wildernesses discourages him. But he returns again and again to this
remote and mediæval country, that in his practical eyes should be so
rich and is so poor. The repulses he receives whet his curiosity and
increase his ardour. Yet Spain is not, in spite of its many tourists, a
country of foreign colonies. To the Englishman this fact brings a
striking novelty, for he may visit Switzerland and Italy and France and
scarcely leave the atmosphere of England, but in Spain he will find no
difficulty in following Bacon’s advice to the traveller in foreign
countries to “sequester himself from the company of his countrymen.”




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

NOTE                                                                   v

PREFACE                                                              vii

I. SPANISH CHARACTER--
      i. Some Stray Opinions                                          17
      ii. Vain Generalities                                           25

II. TRAVELLING IN SPAIN                                               47

III. ON THE SPANISH FRONTIER                                          57

IV. ESKUAL-ERRIA--
      i. Basque Country                                               66
      ii. Basque Customs                                              72

V. IN REMOTE NAVARRE                                                  80

VI. SPANISH CITIES                                                    85

VII. IN OLD CASTILLE                                                  92

VIII. THE DESERT AND THE SOWN                                         97

IX. THE COAST OF CATALONIA IN AUTUMN                                 104

X. AN EASTERN VILLAGE                                                108

XI. OFF THE EAST COAST OF SPAIN                                      112

XII. THE JUDGING OF THE WATERS                                       120

XIII. SEVILLE IN WINTER                                              125

XIV. FROM A SEVILLE HOUSETOP                                         129

XV. FEBRUARY IN ANDALUCÍA                                            134

XVI. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH LITERATURE                      142

XVII. THE POEM OF THE CID--
      i. A Primitive Masterpiece                                     153
      ii. Valencia del Cid                                           157

XVIII. A PRISONER OF THE SPANISH INQUISITION--
      i. Novedades                                                   163
      ii. Salamanca University                                       165
      iii. In a Valladolid Dungeon                                   169
      iv. Ex forti dulcedo                                           178

XIX. THE MODERN SPANISH NOVEL--
      i. Revival. Fernán Caballero                                   185
      ii. 1870-1900                                                  191
      iii. In the Twentieth Century                                  201

XX. NOVELS OF GALICIA                                                214

XXI. NOVELS OF THE MOUNTAIN--
      i. “Savour of the Soil”                                        222
      ii. “On the Heights”                                           231

XXII. CASTILIAN PROSE                                                239

XXIII. TOLEDO AND EL GRECO                                           244

INDEX                                                                259




THE MAGIC OF SPAIN




I

SPANISH CHARACTER


I.--STRAY OPINIONS

To collect a mass of isolated and contradictory opinions concerning the
Spanish is a comparatively simple task, although it is difficult or
impossible to derive from them a consistent picture of Spanish
character. To Wellington they are “this extraordinary and perverse
people,” to whom to boast of Spain’s strength was a natural weakness.
“Procrastination and improvidence are their besetting sins,” says
Napier, and of their conduct in the Peninsular War: “Of proverbially
vivid imagination and quick resentments, the Spaniards act individually
rather than nationally, and, during this war, what appeared constancy of
purpose was but a repetition of momentary fury generated like electric
sparks by constant collision with the French.” “The Spaniards are
perfect masters of saying everything and doing nothing.” They have
dignified sentiments and lofty expressions, but taken with their deeds
these are “but a strong wind blowing shrivelled leaves.” “In the
arrangement of warlike affairs difficulties are always overlooked by the
Spaniards, who are carried on from one phantasy to another so swiftly
that the first conception of an enterprise is immediately followed by a
confident anticipation of complete success.” Though they are “hasty in
revenge and feeble in battle,” they are “patient to the last degree in
suffering.” To the peasants he allows “a susceptibility of grand
sentiments.” They “endure calamity, men and women alike, with a singular
and unostentatious courage. But their virtues are passive, their faults
active, and, instigated by a peculiar arrogance, they are perpetually
projecting enterprises which they have not sufficient vigour to
execute.” “To neglect real resources and fasten upon imaginary projects
is peculiarly Spanish.” A French writer of the same period, General
Marbot, contents himself with observing that the Spanish “ont beaucoup
conservé du caractère des Arabes et sont fatalistes; aussi
répétaient-ils sans cesse ‘Lo que ha de ser no puede faltar,’” but adds
that “ils ont un mérite immense, c’est que, bien que battus, ils ne se
découragent jamais.” Turning to earlier centuries we find that in Livy
and Strabo the Spaniards are obstinate, unsociable, silent, dressed in
black, despisers of death, very sober. In the centuries of Spain’s
greatness the comments naturally thicken, although they are often not
easily reconcilable. To an Italian, Paolo Cortese, at the beginning of
the sixteenth century the Spanish are, in a shower of epithets,
“ambitious, good-natured, curious, greedy, contentious, tenacious,
magnificent, suspicious, sly.” Another Italian, Paolo Tiepolo, later
draws a distinction[1] between those who have travelled and those who
have not left Spain, those former being “per la maggior parte avvisati,
diligenti, tolleranti.” In Pepys we read of the “ceremoniousness of the
Spaniards,” and that “the Spaniards are the best disciplined foot in the
world; will refuse no extraordinary service if commanded, but scorn to
be paid for it as in other countries,” and of “the plain habit of the
Spaniards, how the King and Lords themselves wear but a cloak of
Colchester bayze, and the ladies mantles in cold weather of white
flannell.” To a learned Spaniard, Masdeu, they are, to quote but a few
of his judgments, “lively, swift in conception, slow and thoughtful in
coming to a resolution, active and effectual in carrying it into
execution. They are the stoutest defenders of religion, and masters in
asceticism.” “Their disinterestedness and honesty in commerce is known
to all. They are frugal at table, especially averse from any excess in
drinking. In conversation they are serious and taciturn, not giving to
biting speech, courteous, affable, and pleasant; they hate flattery, but
they respect others and look to be respected themselves. They speak with
majesty, but without affectation. They are generous, serviceable,
kindly, and have a pleasure in conferring benefits, and they exalt
things foreign more than their own. They have envy, pride, and a love of
glory, but with noble, redeeming qualities. In their attire they are
neat and moderate; when they go abroad they are dressed well and
smartly, but with a befitting gravity.” “They spend with magnificence
and extravagance.” A French traveller, Mme. d’Aulnoy,[2] in the
seventeenth century, says of the Spanish that “Nature has been kinder to
them than they are to themselves; they are born with more wit than
others; they have a great quickness of mind join’d with great solidity;
they speak and deliver their words with ease; they have a great memory;
their style is neat and concise, and they are quick of apprehension; it
is easie to teach them whatever they have a mind to; they are perfect
masters in Politicks, and when there is a necessity for it they are
temperate and laborious.”... “They are patient to excess, obstinate,
idle, singular philosophers; and, as to the rest, men of honour, keeping
their words tho’ it cost them their lives.” She considers their greatest
defect to be a “passion for revenge,” and speaks of “their fantastick
grandeur.” A short account by an Englishman in 1701, has little good to
say of the Spanish, except that they “have an incomparable Zeal to plant
the Catholick Religion.” He notes their sluggishness, their immorality,
and it is, moreover, impossible to distinguish a Spanish Cavalier from a
Cobler, while most of their houses are “of earth and like Mole-hills,
but one storey high.” They have an “esprit orgueilleux,” and treat
strangers “de turc à maure,” says a Frenchman of the same period,[3] so
that the Englishman may have had some slight, some _turc à maure_
experience in Spain. Another Englishman,[4] half a century later, writes
that the Spanish are “generous, liberal, magnificent, and charitable;
religious without dispute, but devout to the greatest excess of
superstition.”... “If they have any predominant fault it is perhaps
that of being rather too high-minded; hence they have entertained, at
different times, the most extravagant conceits.”... “Their cloaths are
usually of a very dark colour, and their cloaks almost black. This shows
the natural gravity of the people.”... “There are no soldiers in the
whole world braver than the Spanish.” Reclus, in his estimate of the
Spanish, has boldly allowed the contrasts and contradictions of Spanish
character to stand side by side. They are “apathetic in daily life, but
of a quick resolution, persistent courage and unwearying tenacity. They
are vain, but if any one has a right to be so, they have. In spite of
their pride they are simple and pleasant in their manners. They esteem
themselves highly, but they are equally ready to recognize the merit of
others. They are very swift and keen to lay a finger on the weak side or
the vices of other people, but never bemean themselves by despising
them. They have a great store of seriousness, a rare firmness of
character. They are contented with their lot and are fatalists. A
mixture of superstition and ignorance, common-sense, and subtle irony;
they are at times ferocious, though naturally of a magnanimous
generosity, fond of revenge, yet forgetting injuries, fond of equality,
yet guilty of oppression.” The verdicts of modern Spanish thinkers have
been mostly pessimistic.[5] Spaniards in the twentieth century have been
busily occupied with analytical introspection, the result of their
national misfortunes and injured pride. They prefer to speak atrociously
of themselves than that foreigners should speak of them only moderately
well. Señor Mallada holds[6] his countrymen to be “idle, unpractical
dreamers.” In Spain, says Ángel Ganivet,[7] “there are many who have no
will, _hay muchos enfermos de la voluntad_”--there is a lack of
concentration, that is of persistent concentration, and a lack of
proportion, of the power to consider more than one idea, more than one
aspect of a question. So _Azorín_ complains that “there is plenty of
insight and rapid vision, but no co-ordination of ideas or steady
fulfilment or will.”[8] In a book by Ricardo León[9] we read that the
Spanish are hostile to their rulers, whoever they may be, and of the
evils of _el Caciquismo_. But the author sees little hope of change in a
country where men live between two extremes, “two fires, two
fanaticisms,” either reactionaries or demagogues; where the currents of
activity and passion are unregulated, where thought is either stagnant
or enmeshed in a gossamer woof of subtle distinctions, and the golden
mean of common-sense is not attained. The inhabitants of Alcalá are
“strong, hard, brave, and stubborn, rigorous in their virtues and their
vices, violent in their loves and hates, tenacious alike of good and of
evil.” To counterbalance their clear intelligence, greatheartedness,
quick imagination and eloquence they have serious defects, “and
especially a certain unrestfulness of spirit, a nervous irritability
which prevents them from living in peace or comfort with themselves or
with others, a true Spanish failing, peculiarly attached both of old and
at the present day to that harsh, turbulent, strongly original character
of the race which has never allowed us rest, but kept us perpetually at
strife, taking umbrage at our very shadows.”... “While there were
infidels to fight, strongholds to defend, vows to fulfil, or even when
there were civil wars and vigorous smuggling and bands of brigands,”
there was scope for the virtues and vices of a people “born and bred
for action and passionate deeds,” “fashioned in battle”; but “on the
advent of the moderate customs of modern times” they find themselves
“out of their natural atmosphere, idle, poor, disconcerted, cramped.”
And this is the tragedy of Spain to-day--a great-hearted people in the
toils of civilization. In Pérez Galdós’ “El Caballero Encantado,” the
spirit of Spain thus addresses one of her sons: “The capital defect of
the Spaniards of your time is that you live exclusively the life of
words, and the language is so beautiful that the delight in the sweet
sound of it woos you to sleep. You speak too much; you lavish without
stint a wealth of phrases to conceal the poverty of your actions.”[10]
In an earlier book[11] Señor León deplores the fashion prevailing in
Spain “to depreciate all that is Spanish, and to bestow great praise on
all that is foreign. A wave of moral cowardice and utilitarian baseness
is passing over Spain.” But Spanish character is not permanently
weakened nor shorn of its dignity and independence, the eclipse is but
temporary and, indeed, partial, not affecting the humbler classes. The
spirit of Spain will revive, as in “El Caballero Encantado,” when it is
being carried from the death-bed to the grave,[12] and may be aptly
likened, as by Don Rafael Altamira, to the waters of the Guadiana which,
after flowing for a space underground, return once more to the surface.


II.--VAIN GENERALITIES.

“And indeed,” wrote Pepys, “we do all naturally love the Spanish and
hate the French,” and if, since his day, we have learned to love the
French, the character of the Spanish has not ceased to attract and
interest Englishmen. Yet any attempt to generalize concerning Spanish
character would seem a vain and foolish task, since Spain is the country
of Europe which has most stringently preserved its local differences of
race and language, and it is still true, as in Ford’s time, that “the
rude agricultural Gallician, the industrious manufacturing artisan of
Barcelona, the gay and voluptuous Andalucian, the sly vindictive
Valencian are as essentially different from each other as so many
distinct characters at the same masquerade,” and the Basque[13] and
_andaluz_, for instance, are as far apart as Frenchman and Spaniard. It
is possible to take the various ingredients, Castilian pride,[14]
Catalan thrift,[15] Andalusian imagination, Gallegan dullness,[16] the
grimness of Navarre, the stubbornness of Aragon,[17] Valencian or
Murcian cunning, and, tying them into a convenient bundle, to speak of
the Spanish as proud, thrifty, etc., or, in a more pessimistic key, as
haughty, avaricious, untruthful, stolid, cruel, obstinate, malicious.
But, though such a judgment is notoriously false, a few qualities may
perhaps be attributed to the whole of Spain as in some measure common to
her various peoples. Foremost among these qualities are independence and
personal dignity. The Spaniards are a nation of individualists, each a
law unto himself, and they are thus as a nation frequently misunderstood
and their pride has not suffered them to correct errors concerning them,
while at the same time it would perhaps be difficult to find in any
other nation so great a number of individuals whom one may admire and
respect. The dramatist Don Jacinto Benavente has said[18] that in Spain
“each of us would like to be the only great man in a nation of fools,
the only honest man in a tribe of knaves,” and speaks of “our unbridled
individualism.” No one is a more thorough individualist than Don Pío
Baroja, and the principal character of his novel, _César ó Nada_,
declares that the Spanish, “as individualists require, more than a
democratic, federal organization, an iron military discipline.”
“Democracy, Republicanism, Socialism have in reality little root in our
country.... Moreover we admit no superiorities and do not willingly
accept king or president, priest or prophet.” It is this refractoriness
which has made the Spanish so hard a people to govern, and wrought
permanent mischief to their prosperity as a nation. They would seem to
have still to learn the true dignity of loyalty and service. Every
Spaniard, of however humble a position, considers that he is well
qualified to criticize the measures of his rulers, and still more the
fancied measures that he chooses to attribute to them. Thus in a
Republic every citizen would believe himself to be capable of conducting
the affairs of the nation better than the President, as Sancho was
convinced that he could govern his island as well or better than any;
nevertheless Spaniards are inclined to acquiesce in a firm unquestioned
authority with a kind of heroical submission, accepting its decisions as
they accept the inevitable decrees of fate, and for this reason an
old-established system of government, such as the Monarchy, is
infinitely the best suited to the Spanish temperament. No doubt they
would prefer to have no system of government, if that were possible,
being restive and tumultuous under restraint. On one occasion a Spanish
_chauffeur_ while driving his mistress considered that he had been
insulted by a passer in the street and, leaving mistress and motor,
proceeded to punish the offender till the police interfered.[19] And if
the Spanish find it difficult to work harmoniously under the orders of
others, it is no easier for them to maintain a joint authority; they can
never co-operate for long, their political parties and commercial unions
rapidly fall asunder like the seeds of a pomegranate. Similarly one may
see at a glance of any Spanish crowd that it is not a fused mass but a
collection of units remaining aloof and separate; if the individual
gains, the State suffers, and Spanish politics sometimes have an air of
cramping angularities and crude ambitions. But this individualism and
independence has its nobler and more pleasant side, for even in extreme
poverty and distress, dignity and an accompanying courtesy, honesty, and
sobriety,[20] rarely desert the Spaniard. Each is king in his own
house, be it miserable attic or merely the space of sun that his shadow
covers; _mientras en mi casa me estoy rey me soy_. The following
dialogue bears intrinsic evidence of its nationality, it could not
belong to any country but Spain: “Is your worship a thief?”--“Yes, to
serve God and all good people.”[21] Thus personal dignity and individual
pride may be said to be the dominant notes of Spain. So the beggars in
the street address one another as Sir, _señor_, lord, and if you cannot
give them an alms for the good of your soul you must at least give
excuses--_perdone Vd. por Dios_. While we admire this independence we
cannot help seeing that it is a false dignity, which prefers to starve,
like one of the characters in Pérez Galdós’ _Fortunata y Jacinta_,
because “_mi dinidá y sinificancia no me permiten_--my dignity and
importance do not allow me,” to accept employment. The fair outward show
given to garret poverty is pathetic, but it is liable to deceive and to
create distrust. Mme. d’Aulnoy remarked that the Spanish “bear up under
this Indigency with such an air of gravity as would cheat one.”

In _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ Don Adriano de Armado says to Moth that he is
“ill at reckoning; it fitteth the spirit of a tapster,” but to Moth’s
observation, “You are a gentleman and a gamester, Sir,” he answers
well-pleased, “I confess both; they are both the varnish of a complete
man” (_todo un hombre_). The Spanish have ever shown themselves to be
ill at reckoning, they are careless of details and have indeed an
Oriental incuriousness of facts and figures; in no country is it more
difficult to obtain accurate returns or consecutive statistics. Against
all drudgery the Spanish temperament rebels[22]; they act by impulse, in
disconnected moments without persistency; their concentration is of
instants,[23] without consequence; and it has been observed that “Spain
has developed her life and art by means of spiritual convulsions.” What
is said in one of Pérez Galdós’ novels[24] of Narváez might with truth
be applied to many Spaniards: “He has a great heart and a great
intelligence, but they manifest themselves only by fits and starts, by
impulses, _por arranques_.” There is plenty of intelligence among
Spaniards but little continuity of judgment; no perseverance. They are
enthusiastic for a project and, their thoughts outrunning action, they
see the matter begun, in progress, finished, so that their very keenness
prevents accomplishment, and finally nothing is done. Don Quixote, we
remember, thought little of the winning of a kingdom and cutting off a
giant’s head: “all that I consider already done, _que todo esto doy ya
for hecho._” Or sometimes their intelligence mars their labour and, not
content with doing a simple thing simply, they spoil it by being a
little too clever, or decide a matter too readily by a swift judgment
that may happen to be false. The Spanish are a people of immense and
abiding energy,[25] but their energy is often dormant or misdirected.
Two Spaniards in the twentieth century have been seen to converse with
so fierce an intensity that it seemed over and over again in the course
of a protracted and loud discussion that they must come from words to
blows; and the matter in dispute, conducted with a heat that would have
exhausted less energetic natures, was whether it was right or wrong to
expel the Moriscos from Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth
century. Yet it is not certain that the Spanish can be called
unpractical; they are often idle, indifferent, aloof from the events of
daily life, but when a matter truly interests them, they would seem to
be sufficiently shrewd and practical. King James I. of Aragon aimed an
accusation at the Castilians which has often been applied to all
Spaniards: “You do nothing without extravagance.[26]” But a fundamental
ingredient of Spanish character is realism and clear vision; it is
their birthright of transparent subtle air and unclouded skies. They are
keen to detect all falseness and hypocrisy, and display a shrewd insight
into character; but their study has been ever of persons rather than of
books and things,[27] so that they may act extravagantly themselves even
while they are the first to see another’s extravagance, keenly
practical, it may be said, in the affairs of others, strangely abstract
and improvident in their own. Their realism, if it drives them by
reaction into a barren love of words and visions of impossible ideals,
expresses itself in a directness which is very characteristic of all
classes of Spaniards, in the pregnant brevity of countless proverbs, in
concentrated intensity at a given moment, in humour and satire and a
strong love of ridicule. Their proverbs show a thriftiness and practical
good sense very different from the prudence that enriches, but equally
far removed from the romantic view of Spaniards sometimes held by
foreigners. In noble lines Calderón has said of life that it is “a
shadow, a fantasy, and the greatest good is of small worth, since all
life is a dream and dreams themselves a dream”:--

    ¿qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
    ¿qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
    una sombra, una ficción,
    y el mayor bien es pequeño,
    que toda la vida es sueño
    y los sueños sueño son;

but we may doubt whether the following lines of Lope de Vega are not as
truly Spanish in spirit:--

    Nada me parece bien,
    Todos me son importunos.--
    ¿Teneis dineros?--Ningunos.--
    Pues procurad que os los den.

“I see no good in anything; all men weary me.--Have you
money?--None--Then see that you get some given you.”[28] An almost harsh
flavour of originality is found in Spanish humour, a sly and malicious
irony, a biting wit, full of gaiety and good-humour, but of great force
and directness. Their courtesy is proverbial, and it is not simply a
superficial politeness, brittle as glass, but goes to the very core of
the man. A knowledge of Spain would seem to show that the mere forms of
politeness have no little effect in maintaining the dignity of a nation.
The Spaniard, writing from his own house, speaks of it as _esta su
casa_, this your house, and to a tradesman he will sign himself, “Your
sure servant, who kisses your hands” (S.S.S., Q.B.S.M. which is shorter
than the corresponding English, “Yours faithfully”); mere forms, it will
be said, but forms that show the spirit and betray the lordly and
generous magnificence of the men who once ruled the world, and of whom
Bacon wrote: “I have marvelled sometimes at Spain, how they clasp and
contain so large dominions with so few natural Spaniards.” As a kind of
magnificent disregard of human life has earned for Spaniards the charge
of cruelty, so their attitude towards time has led many to look upon
them as lazy and utterly unbusinesslike.[29] “The Spartans and Spaniards
have been noted to be of small dispatch,” says Bacon, and this
procrastination and delay was as prominent in the spacious times of
Spain’s greatness as at the present day. We need but think of the
endless trailing procedure of Inquisition trials, or of books waiting on
the frontier for inspection with a man hired to dust them once a month.
In ordinary life it is due perhaps rather to indifference and disdain
than to an innate sluggishness; in official transactions formalism, and
the inability to co-operate with others often bring matters to an
intricate pass of papers, from which there is no issue but by a patient
and slow unravelling. Even to-day a rigid centralization carries the
pettiest affair to Madrid for settlement, and lays upon the Prime
Minister a crushing load of work. Etiquette is carried to excess, and
there are in Spain many “formal natures,” men who would perish upon a
ceremony rather than come to a quick and common-sense conclusion. But
the true defect of Spanish politics is that they have a tendency to
become abstract, with many excellent formulas and catchwords, but
divorced from reality, a kind of up-to-date scholasticism. Sometimes
they appear to be a game of dialectics, carried on by a few skilful
players, sometimes a “rushing splendour of rhetoric,” carrying away
many. Spaniards are fond of what Butler calls “that idle and not very
innocent employment of forming imaginary models of the world and schemes
of governing it.” Spanish politicians, says Señor Pérez Galdós, “live in
a world of rituals and formulas, recipes and expedients. The language
has filled with aphorisms and mottos and emblems. Ideas become
stereotyped, and contemplated actions go seeking to embody themselves in
words and cannot make their choice of them.”[30] It would seem indeed
that reality has shown itself so angular and hard-featured to the
Spanish that they gladly make efforts to escape from it. While no nation
shows so great a courage, endurance and patient endeavour in misfortune
and defeat, they are not equally successful in success, they are often
spoilt by prosperity and become weak, dissolute and frivolous; they must
have something to fight, and fall when they no longer press against
opposition. This may account for the fact that the poorer classes are
still, as in Ford’s time, “by no means the worst portion of the
population.” The peasants are courteous, intelligent, patient, energetic
and persevering: their praises have been sung by many writers.[31] But a
pathetic fatalism and apathy prevail, and a great bitterness against
those in authority. _Pobreza nunca alza cabeza_, poverty never raises
its head, they say, _la cárcel y la cuaresma para los pobres es hecha_,
prison and Lent are for the poor; they look for no bettering of their
lot, but for _pan y paciencia y muerte con penitencia_--bread and
patience and death with repentance. But it must be said that the fault
is not only of those “on top,” but of those also who, brooking no
superiorities of any kind,[32] thus reduce differences between man and
man to the brutal divisions of wealth and poverty and make life a race
for riches. It remains true, however, that the peasants of Spain are
ground down by taxes,[33] and work incessantly only to hover on the
fringes of starvation; _todo sea por Dios_, they say, and content
themselves with the observation that honesty and riches do not fit into
one sack--_honra y provecho no caben en un saco_. There is a certain
elemental hardness in the Spanish which helps them to support hardships
stoically and, indeed, to be scornful of modern comforts and luxury.
Their indifference towards disquiet and discomfort and noisy uproar[34]
often dismays the foreigner, but it is not that they are inconsiderate
of the feelings of others, they have a deep sensitiveness and
refinement, but they have not been enervated and rendered over-sensitive
by a luxurious civilization. Their climate, with its harsh extremes of
cold and heat,[35] produces a people like that of León’s _Alcalá de los
Zegríes_, “rigorous in their virtues and their vices, violent in their
loves and hates.” They go easily to extremes; Spanish intellects are apt
to be either totally undeveloped, or else over-subtle in nice
distinctions, and action in the same way, when it comes, comes with
violence and excess, like the rivers of Spain which, parched all summer,
pour down after rain in rushing torrents. The charges of cruelty and
fanaticism, the bull-fight and the _auto-de-fé_, have fixed themselves
upon the Spanish. They are by nature inflexible and uncompromising, and
like to carry out their principles without looking to the many delicate
shades of grey between white and black. But they are not by nature
cruel; they support bodily sufferings with courage and inflict them upon
others as the lesser of two evils, burning the heretics to prevent the
spread of their heresy; and indeed to men convinced that these
“pertinacious schismaticks” were to burn for ever and ever in another
place, a touch of fire in this life could hardly seem an excessive
punishment.[36] Cruelty to animals on the roads of Spain is extremely
rare, and at the bull-fights[37] it is only fair to observe that, while
the foreigner’s attention is directed to the sufferings of the horses,
the whole mind of the Spaniard is bent on intricacies of the conflict
between man and bull, and nice passes which escape the foreigner.[38]
The _autos-de-fé_ and the Inquisition have cast over Spain a reputation
for fanaticism and obscurantist bigotry. But the Spanish, while eager
supporters of their faith, are too independent to bow down for long to a
Clerical predominance; they cannot be called a priest-ridden nation.[39]
_Ni buen fraile por amigo, ni malo por enemigo_, says one of their
proverbs--make no friend of a good monk, nor enemy of a bad; and again,
_Haz lo que dice el fraile no lo que hace_--follow the monk’s precept,
not his example. They believe uncompromisingly in the Roman Catholic
religion, but have a ready eye for the faults of its ministers; they
love and reverence the Church as a refuge from reality, but continue to
be realists in their mysticism. The Church in Spain has done noble work,
but it has been a retreat more than a morality, encouraging hollow shows
rather than love of truth,[40] patience and submission rather than
enterprise and a persistent search for remedies. The anti-Clericals
complain that the influence of the priest in the family is excessive,
but when the women are kept in a semi-Oriental seclusion, while the men
chatter together in street and casino and café, as still happens in many
parts of Spain,[41] it is but natural for the women to turn from the
discomfort and isolation of their homes to the magnificent ceremonies of
the Church.[42] The Spaniards are naturally inclined to generosity and a
love of magnificence, but, their poverty preventing, this too often
degenerates to shams and hollowness. To poverty and the proud
concealment of poverty, much of the feeling of suspicion which prevails
in Spain may be attributed. A large number of Spaniards may be said to
be well-to-do in the street, poverty-stricken in the home. The family
in Pereda’s _Bocetos al temple_ which chooses without a moment’s
hesitation to live on potatoes in order to be able to dress luxuriously,
is no solitary instance, and in Madrid many live in bare rooms who drive
abroad in carriages. The Spanish are more careful of outward show than
any other nation. The universal neatness and soldierly smartness of
their dress must excite admiration. But watch a poor man fold and refold
the brilliantly lined outer edge of his _capa_ that the more worn
portions of the velvet may not appear--the _capa_ which may itself cover
a multitude of sins (_la capa todo lo tapa_) that recalls the passage in
Shakespeare:--

     “_Armado_: The naked truth of it is I have no shirt. I go woolward
     for penance.

     _Boyet_: True, and it was enjoined him in Rome for want of linen.”

Or follow a smart officer through the streets to his house. The position
and entrance of the house will not prepare you for its decreasing
splendour as you climb stair after stair to the bare rooms where he
lives. There is much that is _postizo_, false and artificial, in the
exterior view, as Spaniards will themselves bitterly confess.
Appearances must be maintained. So Bacon says that “It hath been an
opinion that the Frenchmen are wiser than they seem and the Spaniards
seem wiser than they are,” and many of their houses are built not to
live in but to look on. Hence, partly, a disquieting element of
mistrust, of “suspicions that ever fly by twilight” foreign to the
frank and open nature of true Spaniards. “Of every Spanish undertaking,”
writes Señor Benavente in 1909, “it may be said as of the famous
_Cortes_ that it is ‘dishonoured while yet unborn.’ The result is that
he who is jealous of his good name shuns contact with all business
affairs like pitch, and the affairs fall into the hands of men who are
untroubled by scruples.... All these suspicions and distrusts are a sign
rather of our poverty than of our morality. There is so great a scarcity
of money that it becomes unintelligible that any one who has the
handling of it should fail to keep a part for himself.... We are,
moreover, so firmly attached to old-fashioned ideas of
nobility--_rancias hidalguías_--that, in spite of our pressing need of
money, we still consider its acquisition contemptible; so we prefer to
seek it by subterranean channels as if it were a crime to seek it in the
light of day.”

Suspicion of new things has ever been at once the strength and the
weakness of Spain.[43] In the nineteenth century this suspicion
expressed itself in patriotism carried to its extreme logical
conclusion. Were Napoleon’s reforms of a nature to benefit Spain in an
inestimable degree? To the Spaniard they were the tyrannical and
insidious measures of a usurper. Was his brother Joseph intelligent,
well-intentioned, conciliatory? To the Spaniard he was ever the
squint-eyed drinker, _Pepe Botellas_, and it was idle to insist that he
did not squint, and did not drink. Was King Amadeo an enlightened,
courageous, and self-effacing ruler? To the Spaniard he was an intruder,
to be treated with neglect, insolence or disdain. This distrust may have
been foolish and harmful to the interests of Spain, but it was in many
respects noble and admirable. To-day, however, we have rather the
reverse side of the picture, a pessimism about all things Spanish, and a
foolish tendency to imitate things foreign. Beneath his outer _capa_ of
haughty pride the Spaniard is keenly aware of his limitations; he has no
confidence in his own actions or in his country, or, rather, his
confidence is merely momentary and is never sustained. It is, no doubt,
a sign not of progress but degeneracy to exchange the Spanish _capa_,
peculiarly suited to a climate of hot sun and cold air, for English
overcoats or the becoming mantilla for the newest fashion in Parisian
hats. It is not necessarily a sign of progress to exchange old-fashioned
Spanish piety for the latest shades of scepticism, or to leave the
simple life of an _hidalgo_ in the provinces for the idler, dissipated
life in the only capital and court. The desire to be very modern is at
present a good thing in Spain, yet it need not consist in casting aside
old traditions and diffidently rejecting Spanish customs that are
excellent. This exalting of foreign customs and depreciation of their
own which has been frequently observed of Spaniards, is due rather to
an inverted pride than to humility; at the beginning of the nineteenth
century it was considered a mark of culture in Spain to despise things
Spanish and to worship things French, but all the time the Spanish
believe at heart in themselves,[44] they praise foreign countries with
their lips, but continue to place Spain first, and if they imitate, they
cast a peculiarly Iberian flavour over their imitations. The late Bishop
Creighton, looking at Spain historically, remarked that it “leaves the
curious impression of a country which never did anything original--now
the Moors, now France, now Italy, have influenced it.” If this is so,
certainly the Moors, and France, and Italy have wrought some of their
most original works in Spain; and it can hardly be said that the great
Spanish discoverers and conquerors, painters, philosophers, and poets of
the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries were not original,
whether they were influenced by Moors, Frenchmen, or Italians.[45] But,
indeed, the Spaniard more readily repels than assimilates, it is his
virtue and his defect; he remains isolated and alone, difficult to
convince, impossible to govern. New political and social theories from
France are spread in Spain, but they there serve progress less than
disquiet and the rancour of those who have not towards those who have.
The reforms needed by Spain will not be furthered by riots and disorder,
and the demagogues who encourage them are perhaps less patriotic than
they profess to be. For Spain needs peace, long periods of tranquillity
in which to develop her resources and to learn the more difficult task
of maintaining in prosperity that strength and independent nobility of
character which have shone out so clearly in misfortune. The conclusion
then, if so desultory a study warrants a conclusion, is that the Spanish
are a fundamentally noble, courteous, and independent people, energetic
and brave, with a natural tendency to grandeur and generosity, whom
poverty often leads to hollow display and the consequent suspicion and
distrust. They will be at immense pains to “bear up under their
indigency,” but have a greater consideration for the semblance than for
the reality and substance of well-being, for artificial show, supported
by infinite care and ingenuity, than for a more solid prosperity, based
on serious effort. Their realism, throwing into relief the apparent
pettiness of daily life, causes them to dream dreams and weave fragile
abstract palaces of fair-sounding phrases; they have not that useful
quality of accuracy, an understanding of the value and importance of
details and gradual effort, of pennies and minutes: they will smite a
stone in twain at a great blow, but the idea that it might be pierced by
drops of water _saepe cadendo_ is foreign to them, and often they aim
at a million and miss a unit. They are a nation of strongly original
characters, acting on impulses and intermittently, and thinking in
extremes; often failing in the face of prosperity, but proud, resolute,
and patient in misfortune; often magnificently imprudent, but never
despicable, except to those whose worship is of riches and success; an
admirable but discomfortable people, not adapting itself readily to
modern conditions, but ever to be reckoned with as an energetic, vital
force, not bowing permanently before defeat.




II

TRAVELLING IN SPAIN


It was, of course, Samuel Johnson who said, “There is a good deal of
Spain that has not been perambulated,” and the remark still holds good
for those who, like Don Quixote, wish to “go seeking adventures.” The
brigand stories, “got up,” as Ford would say, “for the home market,” are
now slightly exploded, and few travellers expect to find at every turn--

    “Cent coupe-jarrets à faces renégates
     Coiffés de montéras et chaussés d’alpargates.”

Yet even to-day few foreigners realize that they may cross and recross
the Peninsula from north to south and from east to west in perfect
security. They will meet with no cloak-and-sword episodes; their
adventures must be of another order. It is true that the Spaniard can
use his knife, but the knife comes into play in quarrels of cards and
love and jealousy, in which the passing traveller can have no part.
Those, however, who measure culture by comfort, and wish to journey as
consistent first-class passengers through life, should certainly narrow
their Spanish travels to the round of a few cities--

    “Erret et extremos scrutetur alter Iberos,”

and, however rapid and conventional, a journey that includes the
Alhambra, the Mosque of Córdoba, the Cathedrals of Seville, Toledo, and
Burgos,[46] and the picture-galleries of Seville and Madrid, can
scarcely be said to have been in vain. But to know Spain and the
Spaniards it is necessary to go further afield, to the small towns and
villages of Andalucía and Castille, for here, rather than in the larger
towns, is to be found the true spirit of the race. Some five thousand
villages are still to be reached only by bridle-paths, and in these
there has been little change since Cervantes went his rounds collecting
taxes; so that for those who care to leave the beaten track there still
remain many unexplored districts, and much first-hand knowledge to glean
of the country and its inhabitants. To many, no doubt, Spain is the
country of dance and song and sun-burnt mirth, of the flutter of fans
and the flash of dark eyes; the country of the bull-fight and the white
mantilla and carnations in the hair; of Roman ruins and Moorish palaces
set in groves of myrtle and orange; of--

    “Cloaked shapes, the twanging of guitars,
     A rush of feet and rapiers clashing,
     Then silence deep with breathless stars,
     And overhead a white hand flashing.”

and if any shadows fall across the picture they are those of the
brigand and the priest-inquisitor. Then comes the inevitable reaction.
Those who visit Spain find that it is for them indeed _un pays de
l’imprévu_. The former image in their mind soon perishes, and they cry
out upon this “ciel insalubre,” this--

                            “pays endiablé;
    Nous y mangions, au lieu de farine de blé,
    Des rats et des souris et pour toutes ribotes
    Nous avons dévoré beaucoup de vieilles bottes.”

But, to judge from many books published about Spain, most European
countries would seem to have entered into a league to look upon the
Peninsula solely as a land of a poetical unreality, its inhabitants
divided into inquisitors, monks, brigands, and conspirators, lending--

          “the colour of romance
    To every trivial circumstance.”

A well-balanced and accurate account of the country is singularly rare.
It is true that in some respects Spain has changed little since the
sixteenth century, but, on the other hand, during the twentieth century,
while she has been making laborious progress, foreign ideas of Spain
have remained stationary, with the prejudices and fixed opinions of
fifty years ago. No error or exaggeration concerning Spain is too
ridiculous to be affirmed and readily believed, and those who take no
thought to study the Peninsula in quiet days save as a land of vague
romance, when trouble occurs are officious with wise criticisms and
stern common-sense, based on ignorance. Quite recently the hysterical
visions of prisoners tortured in Spanish dungeons, and of priestly
cruelty and greed, might persuade one that Mr. Kipling’s “Little Foxes”
was written not before, but after, the events of 1909 in Spain. One
forgets that it is of Ethiopia, not Spain, that Mr. Lethabie Groombride,
M.P., exclaims, “What callous oppression! The dark places of the earth
are full of cruelty!” Like the natives of Ethiopia, the courteous
Spaniards are “much pleased at your condescensions;” but they too have a
sense of humour, and note with amusement the ignorance of nations which
declare that Spain’s chief need is more education and culture.

For the traveller who wishes to explore the remote parts of Spain, and
to escape from Spanish trains, the simplest method is to proceed on
horseback. Walking and bicycling and motoring are possible in the North,
and especially in the Basque Provinces, where the inns are good and the
roads excellent. But in most parts of Spain they are practically
impossible; the roads are too stony or too dusty even for walking, and,
moreover, in fifty kilometres you may find hardly one inn. There remains
the _diligencia_--_coche_, _tartana_, _diabla_, call it what you
will--but a single experience of it will probably be sufficient. It
rolls and lurches heavily to the loud, continuous shouting of the driver
to his horses: _Caballo-allo-allo-allo_, _Mula-ula-ula-ula_. The
traveller, if he has the misfortune to be in the interior, is beaten
against the wooden sides, the windows rattle, the bells jingle, the
vehicle sways slowly on its way, groaning and complaining of the
breadth, as well as the length, of the road[47]--_nosotros tambien
llegaremos, si Dios quiere_, as a driver said when passed by more rapid
travellers, “if it is the will of Heaven.” Occasionally at a country
railway station may be seen a boy who is a pillar of dust or mud. He is
the _zagal_ of the _diligencia_, who runs by its side through dirt and
mire, urging on the horses, or stands to rest on the step at the back.
Sometimes the _diligencia_ descends into river-beds, usually dry; and
after much rain it is apt to stay there, and darkness falls and the
frogs croak mockingly, while more mules are fetched to help in the work
of extrication. Often it proceeds by night, throwing strange, fantastic
shadows in the narrow streets of sleeping villages. The driver must
undergo not only extremes of heat and cold, but is often in danger of
snowdrifts and swollen torrents and rocks from the hill-sides. A
Navarrese innkeeper, an old soldier of Santa Cruz, introduced a driver
of a _diligencia_ as “the bravest man of my acquaintance.” Spanish
travellers accept all these discomforts with a marvellous, fatalistic
resignation and equanimity; but even a pedestrian will go further and
fare better in an afternoon than a traveller in _diligencia_ during a
whole day. Still, as a unique experience, a _diligencia_ drive must be
undertaken; and the driver is good company, sparing time from the loud
praise and blame meted out to his mules to bestow pithy comments on the
living and the dead--

    “The crosses in the mountain pass,
     Mules gay with tassels, the loud din
     Of muleteers, the tethered ass
     That crops the dusty wayside grass,
     And cavaliers with spurs of brass
     Alighting at the inn.”

The inns, _mesones_, _ventorrillos_, _ventas_, _posadas_, _paradores_,
are still much the same as in the times of Cervantes, moderately clean,
immoderately uncomfortable, bare alike of furniture and food.[48] Still
to your first inquiry the answer is, “_Hay de todo_, we have
everything,” still to your further inquiry the abstract _todo_ shrinks
to _nada_. But for an understanding of the Spanish people, nothing is
more interesting and one may add, more pleasant than to listen to their
talk as they sit round some great inn fire of crackling scented twigs
burning on the stone floor of the court and kitchen. The discomfort and
hardships of travel in remote parts of Spain are repaid in flowing
measure. Here a solitary peasant is seen ploughing land so precipitous
and steep that the stones rattle down as he advances; there the mules
stand hour by hour at the plough while the peasants--in this case
servants on some great estate--play cards, the large earthenware
_botijos_ of water standing ready to their hand; or a group of workers
in the fields stand shivering in early morning round a great common
_puchero_, dipping their spoons in turn, and in turn raising the _bota_
high above their heads to drink; or one has a glimpse of some peasant’s
dress[49] of brilliant colouring, of some ancient vanishing costume of
leather or velvet, silk embroidery or silver buttons--at every turn some
quaint custom, some curious picturesque scene and colour appears, and
the talk of the peasants is a delight. The two most successful English
travellers in Spain were beyond doubt, Ford and Borrow. They won the
respect of all classes of Spaniards, and saw practically the whole of
Spanish life three-quarters of a century ago. Borrow describes himself
on one occasion as “dressed in the fashion of the peasants of the
neighbourhood of Segovia in Old Castile, namely, I had on my head a
species of leather helmet or _montera_, with a jacket and trousers of
the same material.” And Ford says: “In all out-of-the-way districts the
traveller may adopt the national costume of the road, to wit, the
peaked hat (_sombrero gacho_), the jacket of fur (_zamarra_).” But
without the peaked hat, now almost extinct, or Borrow’s leathern helmet,
a few changes of dress and especially what Ford calls “a graceful and
sleeveless Castilian _manta_” or rather _capa_, excellently suited to
the climate, will bring many advantages. For to the ordinary traveller,
with red book and camera, the Spaniard will hardly disclose his true
nature, and remains an impenetrable mystery; not that the foreigner
often realizes the existence of the unsolved riddle, the Spaniard
presenting a sufficient number of striking aspects to make a swift
superficial impression. The best guides to Spain are still Ford’s
“Gatherings,” and a thorough acquaintance with “Don Quixote,” a fluent
knowledge of Spanish, and, lastly, the advice of Spaniards, since as
Sancho sagely observed, “más sabe el necio en su casa que el cuerdo en
casa ajena.” The traveller in Spain may in the heat of summer listen to
the silver plashing of fountains in marble _patios_, and feel the
coolness of snowy Sierras; he may in early morning gather frozen oranges
to be eaten later beneath a burning sun; but it is this sun which with
the cold winds tends to limit his wanderings to a brief period of spring
or autumn. Martial indeed says--

    “Aestus serenos aureo franges Tago
     Obscurus umbris arborum.”

but under the fierce Castilian sun--and there are said to be 3600 hours
of sunshine in the year--the imagination produces no golden tints in the
Tagus, and trees are few. Comfort the traveller will scarcely find, but
serviceableness and courtesy on all sides. If he is wise, he will,
however, imitate the Spaniards not only a little in their dress, but
greatly in their manners. He will arm himself with an inalienable fund
of patience. He will be courteous even while chafing at delay. His
courtesy will never go unanswered. “_La cortesía tenerla con quien la
tenga_, Courtesy to him who has it,” as one of Calderón’s characters
says. Money often obtains much, but the offer of a cigarette or a cigar
is often not less effective. Without a courteous manner the money will
be treated as an insult and the cigar refused. Calderón says again: “_El
sombrero y el dinero son los que hacen amigos_, Raising the hat and
money make most friends.” Few peoples respect themselves more than the
Spanish, and they look for respect from others. “The sensitive Spaniard
bristles up like a porcupine against the suspicion of a disdain.” They
do not forget that they were once the greatest people in Europe, and
they regard it as an accident that the march of modern civilization has
left them behind, being, indeed, too mechanical for their pride to
adopt. And still the golden rule for the traveller in Spain is never to
be in a hurry or never to show that he is in a hurry, for by doing so he
will increase delays and defeat his object. He must learn the Spanish
proverb thoroughly--_Paciencia y barajar_, “Patience, and shuffle the
cards.” Patience and courtesy he will find to be above rubies. The
Spaniard, so sensitive and excitable, remains unmoved by delays and
petty official tyrannies which drive an Englishman into a kind of
despair and fury of impatience.[50] But the lower officials in Spain are
apt to be ignorant and self-important, very official, and curt inquiries
only remind them that they represent the whole majesty of the Law and
the State; they multiply their shrugs and inscrutable _No se puede_’s.
On the other hand, a polite speech, though it occupy several of the few
minutes that the traveller may have to spare, is in Spain time well
spent and performs miracles;--if, that is, he still persists in
considering the value of time, and has not found it simpler to accept
the less accurate methods of the Spaniard. For he may ask in a
cathedral, “When is Mass going to be celebrated?” and the answer is,
“_No sé, Señor_; _Cuando vengan los canónigos_”--when it is the good
pleasure of the Canons to appear; or he may ask in a station, “When does
the train start?” and must not be surprised if the answer is again, “_No
sé, Señor_.” He had best content himself once and for all to breakfast
at five-o’clock tea, and will find consolation in the thought that here
at least there is no unseemly rush and strain, in this original and
exquisite land of To-morrow--_Mañana por la mañana_.




III

ON THE SPANISH FRONTIER


The Bidasoa, in the last part of its course, divides Spain from France.
It further divides Basque from Basque. It has thus a local and an
historic interest. It is the scene of smuggling between French and
Spanish Basques and, as a frontier river, it has seen many a quaint and
solemn episode in the past--the passage of Wellington’s troops, for
instance, in 1813, or the exchange in boats of Francis I. against two
hostages (his sons) in 1526, the King showing an eager haste to win
across the river and reach the friendly inhabitants of St. Jean de
Luz[51] and the sheltering walls of Bayonne. But it is the passing
beauty of the whole Bidasoa valley that attracts the visitor, the
loveliness of the river and the hills and the villages by the river. The
Bidasoa is beautiful during its whole course from where it rises near
the village of Maya, a little mountain stream running swiftly through
woods of oak and chestnut. At times the hills break abruptly down, the
water lies deep and dark-green beneath, and there is a look of Ullswater
about both hills and river. A little above Endarlaza the road leaves the
river, and from here may be had a glimpse of the Bidasoa of unrivalled
beauty. For it runs in a long, irregular stretch, irregular for the
rough backbones of hill covered with boulders and bushes of box. At each
hill-ridge one might expect the river to bend and vanish, but still it
appears beyond. Nearer the village of Vera it contracts to a narrower
flow, and the water lashes over rocks, magnificently white and green.
The river is known to fishermen as well as to smugglers and Carlists and
lovers of Nature. Certainly the wisest travellers, before passing on to
the bleak uplands of Castille, will stay to explore this little strip of
green country, with its fresh woods and valleys and villages full of
state and ancientry. Vera, in a sunny hollow, has an especial
fascination. The vine-covered balconies and projecting roofs keep the
houses in shade, and on two sides is the rustle and flow of water. The
houses stand on different levels, several storeys of them mounting roof
above roof from the river to the church. They are curious in their
sculptured stone, their quaint carved buttresses, their nail-studded
doors or rounded arches leading to the outer court, their crazy wooden
balconies, their coats-of-arms, their inscriptions. At the very
entrance of the Bidasoa stands Fuenterrabía, beneath gently sloping
Jaizquibel. It is a little town of marvellous, narrow streets, steep and
crooked, and overjutting houses carved in wood and stone. In front is a
little bay, black with fishing-boats, and seen from across the water,
Fuenterrabía’s clustered group of houses, yellow and brown and grey,
crowned by the ancient church and tenth-century castle, is of a rare and
enchanting beauty. Not only a narrow strip of river, but several
centuries separate it from Hendaye opposite, with its shore on the
Bidasoa and its shore on the sea, and its woods above the river, crowded
in spring with daffodils. The sudden change from everything that is
French to everything that is Spanish cannot but be surprising. It is
due, no doubt, to the fact that beneath the French and the Spanish
civilization and language, the people have an older language and
civilization common to either side. The Basque spoken varies but little,
being merely a little broader in Spain than in France. Mme. d’Aulnoy
noticed the abrupt change wrought by a few yards of travel. “It’s
certain, as soon as I past the little river of Bidassoa, I was not
understood unless I spake Castilian; and not above a quarter of an Hour
before I should not have been understood had I not spoke French.”[52]
Obstacles and delays begin: “Here are Toll-gatherers who make you pay
for everything you carry with you, not excepting your Cloaths. This Tax
is demanded at their Pleasure and is excessive on Strangers.” Letters
are no longer received in a well-ordered service: “There is in this
country a very ill order touching commerce, and when the French carrier
arrives at St. Sebastian, all the letters he brings are deliver’d to
others who are good footmen and ease one another. They put their packets
into a sack tied with rotten cords to their shoulder, by which means it
oft happens that the secrets of your heart and family are open to the
first curious body who makes drunk the Footpost.” Mme. d’Aulnoy is
irritated by the unintelligibility of Basque: “This country called
Biscaye is full of high mountains where are several iron mines.[53] The
Biscays climb up the rocks as easily and with as great swiftness as
stags. Their language (if one may call such jargon language) is very
poor, seeing one word signifies abundance of things. There are none but
those born in the country that can understand it; and I am told that to
the end it may be more particularly theirs they make no use of it in
writing: they make their children learn to read and write French and
Spanish according to which King’s subjects they are.” “They are said to
understand one another,” said Scaliger of the Basques, “but, for my
part, I doubt it.” The most famous scene of peace witnessed by the
Bidasoa was the meeting held in the _Île des Faisans_, or _de la
Conférence_, a narrow island, now worn to a mere strip by the flow of
the tide, between Philip IV. of Spain and Louis XIV. of France in 1660.
It was a scene of lavish splendour and magnificence, and Velázquez, then
in the last year of his life, superintended the decorations and
assisted at the interview.[54] But most often we hear of the Bidasoa as
a scene of strife and anxiety, escape and pursuit. The very river was an
object of dispute between the Governments of France and Spain, until it
was decided that the one half of it belonged to France, the other to
Spain; in the centre of the bridge of Béhobie is the dividing line,
marked in blue for France and red for Spain. Many a time has the sight
of its waters, flowing swiftly to the sea, been welcomed by men in
danger of life and liberty. Colonel Péroz[55] has graphically described
his escape by swimming the river during the last Carlist war. On May 5,
1808, Marbot reached the Bidasoa, after riding day and night through
hostile country to bring the Emperor (then at the Château de Marrac,
near Bayonne) news of the _Dos de Mayo_ rising at Madrid. At the
beginning of November Napoleon himself crossed the frontier, and as he
rode rapidly along the _route d’Espagne_ and beneath the Church of
Urrugne, with its ancient, sad inscription,[56] little thought that the
enterprise upon which he was now engaged was to be a main cause in
bringing him swiftly to the last hour that kills.

In the Middle Ages the pilgrims to the shrine of Santiago went through
the Basque country and across the frontier in fear of their lives. The
Basques were fierce and brave, and fond of plunder. In 1120 a Bishop was
obliged to lay aside his episcopal robes, and taking with him only two
servants and a guide who understood the “barbarous tongue of the
Basques,” so passed through to Compostella. In later times the pilgrims
would sing, as they left Irun,--

    “Adieu la France jolie
     Et les nobles fleurs de lys
     Car je m’en vais en Espagne,
     C’est un étrange pays,”

and would look back with sighs to the good cheer of France:

    “Quand nous fûmes á Saint Jean de Luz[57]
     Les biens de Dieu en abondance,
     Car ce sont gens de Dieu élus,
     Des charités ont souvenance.”

The older way into Spain was the Roman road from Dax to S. Jean Pied de
Port and Roncesvalles--where, indeed, and not “by Fontarabia,”
Charlemagne was attacked by the Basques;[58] but often this road was
rendered impassable by war. In the middle of the 12th century the French
Basque country passed, with the rest of Aquitaine, into the possession
of the English Crown, and henceforth many were the battles and frontier
raids between the Basques on either side. In 1296 we read of a truce in
the quarrels between San Sebastian and “Fuent Arrabia,” and of an
agreement made between them not to “send or take bread, or wine, or
meat, or arms or horses, or other merchandise to Bayonne, or England, or
Flanders while the war lasts between the King of France and the King of
England.” On July 19, 1311, a peace is made between Bayonne and Biarritz
(Beiarritz) on the one hand, and Laredo, Castro-Urdiales, and Santander
on the other. A few years later we find the King of Castille writing to
the King of England to complain of the seizure of the goods of his
vassals of Biscay by the Seneschal of Aquitaine, “against all right and
reason.” As often before and after “en ce temps avoit grand rancune
entre le roy d’Angleterre et les Espagnols.” In 1352 a treaty is formed
between “England and the people of the coast of Cantabria,” who were
famous for their prowess in catching whales, as well as in frontier
warfare, and came into rivalry with English fishermen. In 1482 “amicable
intelligences” are concluded at Westminster between “Edward, by the
Grace of God King of England and France and Lord of Ireland” and “the
inhabitants of the noble and loyal Province of Guipúzcoa.”[59] During
the 17th century the frontier raids continued, and in 1636 (as before in
1558) the town of St. Jean de Luz was taken and pillaged by the
Spaniards. Up in the hills, near the little village of Sare, the
Spaniards of Vera were defeated, and Sare still displays on the walls of
its _mairie_ the coat-of-arms given by Louis XIV. after the victory won
by the bravery of its inhabitants, with the following inscription in
Basque:--“Reward of courage and loyalty, given to Sare by Louis XIV. in
1693.”[60] In the Peninsular War, Sare and its mountain, La Rhune,
played a prominent part, and many a vivid description, such as the
following, occurs in Napier:--“Day had broken with great splendour, and
three guns were fired as signal of attack from Atchuria. The French were
driven from La Rhune, Sare was carried, and the enemy brushed away from
Ainhoa and Urdax: “It was now eight o’clock, and from the smaller
Rhune[61] a splendid spectacle of war opened upon the view. On the left
the ships of war, slowly sailing to and fro, were exchanging shots with
the fort of Socoa, and Hope, menacing all the French lines on the low
ground, sent the sound of a hundred pieces of artillery bellowing up the
rocks, to be answered by nearly as many from the tops of the mountains.
On the right the summit of the great Atchuria[62] was just lighted by
the rising sun, and fifty thousand men rushing down its enormous slopes
with ringing shouts seemed to chase the receding shadows into the deep
valley.” The description of the passage of the Bidasoa in October, 1813,
is equally graphic: “From San Marcial seven columns could now be seen at
once, moving on a line of five miles, those above bridge plunging at
once into the fiery contest, those below appearing in the distance like
huge, sullen snakes winding over the heavy sands.” The mountainous
character of the frontier, causing Spain to be entered by one or two
narrow passages, has indeed concentrated upon a few points a picturesque
variety of traffic through the centuries--a historical pageant of
soldiers, pilgrims, smugglers, Kings and Queens dethroned or released
from imprisonment, wily agents, gorgeous ambassadors, fugitive
politicians, exiled Jesuits, heretic missionaries, Carlist conspirators,
with a large sprinkling of visitors and adventurers from many lands.




IV

ESKUAL-ERRIA


I.--BASQUE COUNTRY

There are few peoples more deserving of study than the Basques, and few
countries more pleasant to visit and to live in than the Basque
Provinces. After the treeless, unsheltered mountains and plains, and the
compact villages of Castille or Navarre, the villages of the Basque
country, set in green, and, to quote the phrase of a Spanish novelist,
“all in the peace of prayer,” are a delightful contrast. The sky has no
longer the harsh intensity of the Castilian, and everywhere is a
softness of outlines; everywhere, too, is green--the green of chestnut
and oak, of maize and trefoil, meadow and cider-orchard. The maize is
the principal crop of the year, providing the heavy, yellow bread,
_artoa_, as well as food for the oxen and material for mats, mattresses,
and even cigarette-papers. The fields are divided by slabs of stone, and
in the mists of the early mornings the Angelus rings from hidden towers;
and the only other sound is that of scythes cutting the drenched grass
or trefoil. Every true Basque is of noble, ancient family, and the
Basque farmhouse, with its wooden façade and carved projecting
buttresses, its wide balcony and deep ornamented eaves, is handed down
from father to son without change. It stands surrounded by orchards and
fields of maize, and often overshadowed by an immense fig-tree or a
group of splendid walnut-trees. The roof slopes down on one side till it
nearly reaches the ground. The lower part of the front is hollowed into
a court, and on one side of this a door leads straight into the spacious
kitchen, with its huge fireplace and many vessels of scoured bronze and
copper, which forms the principal room of the house. A dark, narrow
staircase leads to the bedrooms; through the cracks of the floors may
often be seen the oxen in their stalls beneath. Large chests of oak,
some of them beautifully carved, are to be found in most Basque farms.
In Vizcaya a large vine-trellis, running forward on posts from the inner
court beneath the balcony, further deepens the dark velvet spaces in the
whitewashed front of the farm; in Guipúzcoa many houses have no balcony
or trellis, but are overgrown with heavy vines, that often entirely
cover all the windows. From the windows hang long strings of red piments
or white onions; above the door there is frequently an ancient stone
coat-of-arms or an inscription with the name of the founders and the
date, and above this a cross or the letters I. H. S. The house is thus
half sacred. After the father’s death, the eldest son becomes “Lord of
the house, etcheco-jauna,” while the younger sons often emigrate.

It was from their farms, so dear to them, that the Basques formerly took
their names, so that they are called not Smith or Collier, but
At-the-head-of-the-hill (Mendiburu) or Under-the-new-road (Bideberripe).
Even now a Basque in the country is never called by his surname, but
either by his Christian name or a nickname, or the name of his house or
property. Etche (“house”) is perhaps the commonest compound. Etcheberri
(“newhouse”) has numerous variants--Echeverri, Echevarri, Echavarri (in
Vizcaya and Alava, where the Basque spoken is broader than in Guipúzcoa,
new is “barri”), Chavarri, Echarri, Echave, Xavier, Javer, etc. The
number of Basque-speaking people can now but little exceed half a
million, and only very rarely is a Basque found who is unable to speak
Spanish or French.[63] Of the three Spanish-Basque provinces, Guipúzcoa
(capital San Sebastián) alone is entirely Basque. At Bilbao, the capital
of Vizcaya, no Basque is spoken; and long before reaching Vitoria, the
capital of Alava, the language spoken is Castilian. Nor is Basque spoken
at Pamplona, the capital of Navarre, though it reaches almost to its
walls, and till quite recently had a wider extension in Navarre, names
of places such as Mendigorria (“red mountain”) surviving. The difficulty
of the language has been somewhat exaggerated; there is a well-known
story that the Devil spent three years in the Basque country, and only
succeeded in learning two words: _Bai_, “yes;” and _Es_, “no.” But it
remains true that the immense and complicated system of Basque
conjugations is for a foreigner almost impossible to master; and at the
same time the Basque literature to reward the learner is of the
scantiest. Interesting indeed are the proverbs, some of the songs, and
the pastorales, which have been compared in more than one particular
with the Greek drama, but which are now acted only in the province of
Soule. The stage, in the open air, is formed of plain planks, supported
most often on barrels. A curtain cuts off a part for the actors to
change their costumes, the same person often taking several parts in a
play. The curtain has two doors, one for the good and one for the
wicked. The good and the wicked are kept strictly separate. The
pastorale is always in honour of Christianity and the Roman Catholic
religion, and the wicked are the heathen, the Turks, the English, etc.
Red is the colour of the wicked, that of the good is blue; in this
respect no change is ever made. The good always walk slowly and
solemnly, but when the wicked come on the stage the music is immediately
changed to a lively air, and they never remain long quiet, their
movements continuing quick and agitated. The acting is very simple; a
journey, for instance, is represented by walking up and down the stage
several times. The characters are usually taken exclusively by men and
boys, but there are a few pastorales acted by women only; the sexes are
never mingled. Strange and amusing anachronisms abound. In the
pastorale entitled _Abraham_, Abraham appears in high boots and felt
hat; Sarah in a modern, bright-coloured dress, with hat, veil, and fan;
Isaac carries one or two sticks on his shoulder for the sacrifice; the
Angel is a little boy in white. Then there are the heathen and the
Christian kings, the former dressed in red, with high crowns arrayed
with plumes and ribbons, the latter in blue with crowns of gold. In the
middle of the play one of the Christian kings leaves the stage, and
presently appears above the curtain and speaks with Abraham. He
represents the “Eternal Father.” The verses are spoken in a loud
monotonous chant, each verse being literally measured out by motion up
and down the stage, the only change being when the music becomes faster
or slower. The music is composed of the two Basque instruments the
_churula_, a shrill pipe, and the _tamboril_, a kind of guitar with six
strings, played by the same person. The strangeness of the scene, the
loud chanting of the actors as the tone rises and falls, the fantastic
costumes, the dances of the “Satans,” the prayers of the Christians, and
especially the slow march and action of the blues, dignified and
majestic, and the turbulent, restless movements of the reds, are not
soon forgotten.

The Basque language, _Eskuara_, was described by the Spanish historian,
Mariana, as “coarse and barbarous,” and a traveller among the Basques in
the Middle Ages recorded that to hear them speak one would say they were
dogs barking. In English, the word “jingo” has been said to derive from
the Basque _Jincoa_, “God,” introduced by Wellington’s troops after the
Peninsular War. The Basque word is an abbreviation of _Jaungoicoa_, “the
Lord on high,” _jauna_, “lord,” being the common form of greeting
between peasant and peasant. It becomes more and more rare to hear pure
Basque spoken; foreign words creep in and, with the definite article
“_a_” suffixed, hide under a Basque form: _dembora_ (Lat. _tempus_) thus
ousting the Basque word _eguraldia_ for “weather,” _gorphuntza_ (Lat.
_corpus_) being “body,” and so on.[64] Pure Basque recedes to remote
villages in the mountains, and there the Basque maintains his ancient
customs, as averse from change to-day as when Horace described him as
“Cantabrum indoctum juga ferre nostra.”[65]


II.--BASQUE CUSTOMS

An old Latin account speaks of the Basques as going nowhere--not even to
church--without arms, usually a bow and arrows, and says that they are
“gens affabilis, elegans et hilaris--courteous, graceful, and
light-hearted;”[66] but, in spite of their known hospitality, their
distrust of the foreigner and their hatred of intrusion are shown in
more than one of their proverbs, as “The stranger-guest does not work
himself, and prevents you from working.” The Basques are, indeed, the
most energetic, as they are the most ancient people of the Peninsula.
“Naguia bethi lansu--The idle man is ever busy,” says another of their
proverbs; and, again, “Idle youth brings needy old age.”[67] Their
fields are well and economically cultivated, and if their methods are
antiquated, this is partly due to the mountainous nature of the country
and the smallness of the holdings, making it simpler, _e.g._, to thresh
corn by beating it sheaf by sheaf against a stone. Numerous small
factories--of cloth as at Vergara, of paper at Tolosa, of iron and
steel at Eibar and Elgoibar, of furniture at Azpeitia--and many quarries
and tile-factories prove their industry; and entering a small Basque
town such as Elgoibar, one may hear in tiny shops on all sides the sound
of sandal-makers and workers in wood and leather. They know how to work,
and they know how to enjoy themselves with thoroughness at the village
fêtes. From dawn to dusk the ball is to be heard against the wall of the
pelota court on Sundays, with intervals of dancing to the shrill pipe
and drum of the _chunchunero_. Voltaire, thinking of their love of
dancing, described them as “un petit peuple qui danse sur les Pyrénées,”
and certain dances still survive. The sword-dance, _ezpata danza_, is
one of the most remarkable, and has been described by Pierre Loti in
“Figures et choses qui passaient;” and other dances are those
representing the primitive methods of agriculture, the vintage, weaving,
etc. The Basque pelota has, unfortunately, become, of recent years, a
game of professionals, and as played, _e.g._, at Madrid, the interest is
rather in the betting than in the play. The enthusiasm formerly excited
among the Basques by the game is illustrated by the story that several
Basque soldiers left the Army of the Rhine, returned to their country to
play a game of ball, and, having played and won it, rejoined the army in
time to take part in the battle of Austerlitz.[68] A game played in the
immense court of a small Basque village is still a splendid sight,
though it has lost much of its splendour, and the old Rebot is fast
dying out. Pierre Loti has described a game of Blaid, as seen in a
French-Basque village, in his novel of the Basque country, “Ramuntcho”;
and this form of the game has been played in Paris and London. But old
peasants will shake their heads and say it is no longer “as of old.” The
expression “of old” is common on the lips of both French and Spanish
Basques;[69] they willingly praise the past, and are intensely
conservative of all their customs, their immemorial language, their
games, privileges, religion. The ox-carts, with wheels of solid wood, to
be seen under the vine-trellises of Basque farms, seem as old as the
withered trunk of the oak of Guernica, and similarly many ancient
customs have been retained. In some parts, at funerals, the men wear
long cloaks reaching to the feet, the women also wearing long, full
cloaks with hoods, that completely hide the face. The men go first, and
then all the women--men and women in single file--the chief mourners
coming last. Both at weddings and funerals, feasts were formerly given
on such an extensive scale that the family was often nearly ruined, and
a law (_fuero_) was passed forbidding to invite any but relations to the
third degree. But the wedding-feast is still sufficiently imposing; it
continues for many hours, and immediately afterwards the young begin
dancing, while the old play cards. As to the offerings at funerals,
“none but an eye-witness,” says Larramendi, in the eighteenth century,
“could believe the quantity of bread and wax that is offered. Moreover,
at these big funerals, in some places a live ox, and in others a sheep,
is brought as an offering to the church door, and when the service is
over it is taken away, and a fixed sum of money is given to the
priest.”[70] This curious custom, a survival of the offerings to the
dead and a trace of ancestor-worship, has not yet wholly died out. In
one village at least (Arriba, on the borders of Navarre and Guipúzcoa)
it is customary at funerals to offer bread and wax, and to bring to the
church either a quarter of veal or a live sheep, which is afterwards
given to the priest. The Basques are intensely religious, and it is
characteristic of them that before they were converted to Christianity
they were the terror of the Christians--indeed, the pilgrims to Santiago
de Compostella at all times feared the passage through the Basque
Provinces, the strange language adding to their difficulties (“La
Biscaye,” they said, “où il y a d’étrange monde, où l’on n’entend pas
les gens”). The Basques troop in to early Mass every Sunday, often by
rough mountain paths, from farms lying a league away. Yet it must not be
thought that the Basques are priest-ridden; the priests are respected,
and often take part in their games or walk many miles across the hills
to visit the sick. But though the Basques are often narrow and
fanatical, they have far too much dignity and independence to be the
blind followers of the priests. In the Carlist wars they fought chiefly
for their old privileges, or _fueros_, and the result of the wars was
that nearly all their _fueros_ were lost, in 1839 and 1876. “Nothing is
so fair as liberty,” says one of their songs, and their national song,
“Guernikako Arbola,”[71] with its stirring air, celebrates “the holy
tree of Guernica, loved by all the Basques.” In the little green-set
town of Guernica a fine new oak, some forty years old, has taken the
place of the old tree, now a mere trunk protected by glass, while in the
little pillared temple are still to be seen the seven marble seats on
which assembled--

    “Peasant and lord in their appointed seat,
     Guardians of Biscay’s ancient liberty.”

These are the two last lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet to the

    “Oak of Guernica! Tree of holier power
     Than that which in Dodona did enshrine,
     So faith too fondly deemed, a voice divine.”

Noble, handsome, graceful in all their movements, hardy and shrewd, the
Basques are active and untiring whether as farmers, smugglers, soldiers,
or _pelotaris_. They live aloof in scattered farms, a healthy open-air
life (their word for rich is _aberatz_, from _abere_, head of cattle),
and, indeed, in a town they tend to lose some of their good qualities.
Their dress has always an air of careful neatness and distinction, with
the _béret_, white shirt (without a tie), dark blue or black coat thrown
over shoulder (or long blouse), silent sandals and the peculiar
_makhila_, a stout iron-pointed stick of medlar. They are shrinking into
their mountains, a race doomed to perish, “un peuple qui s’en va.” They
have watched during thousands of years new races spring up and prosper
around them, and in the twentieth century they see trains and motors
penetrate to the inaccessible places where the Roman legions were
checked, or Charlemagne with all his peerage fell. An inscription here
and there shows them bowing to destiny and the relentless march of time
in saddened resignation, or betaking themselves to the consolation of
their religion--the following inscriptions, for instance, along the
frontier: “Man is beaten by every hour, and the last leads him to the
grave.”[72] “Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.”[73] “Ici fait l’home cequi
pevt et fortune ce que elle vevt.”[74] “Post fata resurgo.”[75] “Deum
time, Mariam invoca.”[76] “Orhoit hilcea.”[77] The privileges that
remain to the Basques are few, consisting in a slightly less acute
centralization than obtains in other provinces of Spain.[78] They have
no _fueros_ left to make it worth their while to take up arms afresh,
and they still have vivid memories of their wasted fields and desolate
farms in the last Carlist war. But were their ancient religion to be
really attacked, or were an attempt made to expel the monks from the
Basque provinces, the peasants could be counted upon to make a desperate
resistance, more in defence of their independence than on behalf of the
monks themselves. Foreigners have often misunderstood the Basques,[79]
for they are reserved and silent towards the new-comer (“Gizonciki
arabotz andi,” they say--“Little man, much noise”; “the empty barrel
makes the most noise,” and so on). But there is no suspicion of
commercialism about their love of liberty such as has often been
attributed to the Catalans: they love their beautiful land, the
Eskual-erria, for its own sake and the religion and customs of their
forefathers, and the strangers who visit their country soon learn to
love and admire its broad healing power and spirit of ancient peace. It
is a country of civilization without great cities, where exists an
intimate and ennobling relation between the soil and the inhabitants.




V

IN REMOTE NAVARRE


Navarre is held to be one of the chief bulwarks of Clericalism in Spain,
and so remote and isolated are its villages, so primitive its life and
agriculture, so few its means of communication, that it might seem that
no breath of modern times could have penetrated to this province. Lying
on the frontier of France, it is defended from the inroads of
civilization by its mountains and wide wastes of desert land. In those
lonely groups of houses of massive yellow-brown stone, clustered around
their church, and crowning rocky hills of the same colour, there is no
room for differences of opinion, and he who does not attend Mass at
least once in the year is forced to go and live elsewhere. Should you
ask how he can be forced to go, the answer you will receive is, “By the
law, by public opinion.” Quite recently a traveller, arriving famished
at one of these villages of Navarre, with no smaller change than a
French napoleon, went from door to door in vain. No one would accept
this _doblón de oro_ (gold doubloon). Finally, a woman who had lived
for a time at Salies de Béarn consented to receive it, and sent it later
to be changed at the capital, Pamplona. Yet even here in Navarre there
is an appreciable body of liberal opinion, and even in the heart of the
Carlist country, at Estella, the Club Carlista is faced by the ensign of
the Círculo Liberal; even here in all but the smaller villages opinion
is divided, and the policy of Clericals and anti-Clericals discussed
with animation. Those who served in the second Carlist war recognize
that the times have altered, and that leaders, or _cabecillas_, are no
longer forthcoming to lead them in swift night marches across the hills,
willing though they might be to follow. At Estella a fort taken by the
Carlists is now a peaceful covered market-place, and the palace where
Don Carlos held his court is a pleasant _fonda_ with a cool _patio_ of
flowers. Those who enter Navarre by the Convent of Roncesvalles and the
Pass where Roland was slain, and which Byng a thousand years later, in
1813, was forced to evacuate with ten thousand troops, may be easily
deceived into imagining that Navarre is a land of meadows and green
woods and pleasant streams. The swift river Urrobi runs through passes
of rugged hills, but overgrown with box and beech trees and pines. Steep
walls of rock are in summer covered with foxgloves and bramble and
broom, scabious, St. John’s wort, mallow, bell heather, and many other
flowers and ferns, and in places the hills are red with wild
strawberries. The Urrobi forces its way through barriers of grey rock
and over ledges in green pools and white rushing torrents. But this is
not the true Navarre. There no trees are to be seen, and one is
perpetually in a wide circle of bare hills. The country is the most
desolate imaginable, formed by bare, ashen-grey hills (scored and gashed
by dry torrent-beds) and valleys equally barren. The wind hisses, and
crickets chatter loudly in a few stunted elms by the roadside. All is
greyness without colour, and in late summer the stubble-fields far and
near add a new note of desolation, and it seems out of keeping with the
character of the country that these fields should ever be a fresh green
in spring. Indeed, the occasional hollows of olives and plots of
vineyards have an air of unreality in the surrounding wilderness of
crumbling dust and shale. Yet some welcome patches of colour are to be
found, if it is only a line of chicory or of huge purple thistles along
a stubble-field, or a blue-bloused peasant jogging down the dusty road
on a mule with crimson trappings. And on the threshing-floors around the
villages, where work is carried on far into the night, often by
lightning flash, the white shirts and blue blouses of the men, and the
pink and red dresses and long white headkerchiefs of the women form a
picturesque and beautiful scene through the clouds of flying chaff and
ruddy golden grain falling in heavier, more compact masses. For here the
threshing is all done by hand with the help of mules, oxen, and horses,
which are driven round and round, drawing all the children of the
village on little wooden sledges. When the grain has been thus sifted,
the process is completed by throwing it into the air from long wooden
shovels and close-pronged wooden forks. The corn is grown on precipices
and sheer mountain-sides, and is brought down to the threshing-floors on
donkeys, which disappear beneath their rustling load. The men who live
in this grim country are also stern and grim, harsh featured, hard, and
strong; and, though hospitable and not unkindly, they are fierce and
obstinate upon occasion, and sometimes cruel to their animals. Their
food is rough, but not unplentiful; of wheat there is no lack, and with
some vines and olives they are content to have the three necessities of
a Spanish peasant’s life. The villages would often pass unnoticed on
their rocky hills were it not for the outstanding feature of their grim,
massive churches; the church of Gallipienzo dominates a mountain, and is
so solid and fine that it seems to dwarf it. These churches are to be
seen for very many miles across the completely bare country, and at
night the lights of the village streets form, from long distances,
strange, irregular letters on a mountain-side, making the village far
more conspicuous than it would be by day. Sansol, a little village not
far from Logroño, looks from some distance like a great fortress of
brown stone with tiny black loop-holes (the glassless windows); behind
is a long backbone of grey, rocky hill, and beyond the purple-black
Monte Jura with a glimpse of white road. Bitter and fierce are the
winters in Navarre, and pitiless the sun in summer; but for all its
forbidding aspects it repays the discomforts of a visit to its remote
districts. Lumbier is like a miniature Toledo, on its bare hill above
the winding river, and Sanguesa, of brown yellow stone, on the Aragón,
of the same colour, has its magnificently sculptured church of Santa
María, and other beautiful carvings on private houses. And after a few
weeks’ acquaintance with the harsh country and the proud inhabitants,
the traveller will realize the possibility of those relentless Carlist
wars which still send a thrill through those who recall them, and the
difficulty of hunting down _cabecillas_ who knew the country and of
bringing the war to an end.




VI

SPANISH CITIES


Spain is pre-eminently a land of cities. Often they stand conspicuous in
an arid and treeless tract of country, glancing like jewels in a
sunburnt land. The pleasant and fertile strip of country, on the French
frontier is not properly Spanish, but Basque. On the other hand, nothing
could be more Spanish than the little quaint old town of Fuenterrabía.
The original name was Basque--Ondarrabia, “The two banks of sand.” The
Romans, hearing the name, but ignorant of its meaning and seeing,
moreover, the swift flow of the tide beneath the walls of the town,
called it Unda Rapida.[80] From the Latin Unda Rapida or Fons Rapidus
came the Spanish Fuenterrabía,[81] and the French in their turn,
connecting it with the Arabs, called it Fontarabie. The Basque name is,
however, still in use, and one of the streets of Irun where, as in many
other towns and villages, the street names are written up both in
Spanish and Basque, has the full-sounding name Ondarrabiko Karreka--the
street of Ondarrabia. If one may compare small things with great, the
cities of Northern Spain are like castles built by children in the sand,
and left high and dry by the receding tide. City after city stood walled
and bulwarked on the extreme fringe of the Christian territory, for a
time the court and capital of Spain, till a fresh conquest drove back
the Moors a lap further south. This in part accounts for the grim and
wonderful Spanish cities, with their magnificent buildings and
fortifications, that still exist, but exist with no longer the stir of a
great destiny within their walls, but merely as it were the mighty
shells of an extinct life. So Burgos, León, Toledo, were capital cities
for a space, thronged with the busy traffic of courtiers and warriors,
and Avila, the city of saints, has the great fortifications of a
frontier town. It is difficult to believe that Toledo has at all changed
since the Cid’s horse miraculously stayed before the burning light
hidden in the wall of one of its streets, and the water-carriers to-day
go leisurely down to the river, their donkeys’ panniers laden with
earthen jars, as when Cervantes wrote “La Ilustre Fregona.” And, indeed,
Spanish cities are little liable to change. The steep uneven ways of
Toledo and Salamanca and Segovia scorn modern traffic. The passing of a
carriage is possible in the main streets, but is a rare event that
rattles and reverberates along the walls. More suitable are the stately
processions, their banners showing brightly against the brown-yellow
buildings. Segovia has been called the queen of Castilian cities, as
Toledo is the king. And Segovia must ever remain mediæval, a city of a
hundred levels, sinking by terraces of half-ruinous walls, tufted with
grass and flowers, from the Cathedral down to the foot of its mighty
Roman aqueduct. A Latin author three hundred years ago wrote that “in
Segovia nemo otiosus, nemo mendicus”--there were no beggars at Segovia.
It would be unsafe to assert this of any Spanish town to-day. Spain is
no country of “neat cities and populous towns full of most industrious
artificers.” Such towns--Barcelona,[82] Bilbao--there are, but mostly
the cities are, in the words of Burton, “cities decayed,” which contain
many “Spanish loiterers,” though they are not “base and poor towns,” nor
are the people “squalid, ugly, uncivil.” The southern cities show a
softer influence. The surrounding country is less abrupt and harsh, and
the stern features of the north are forgotten. Cadiz lies out into the
sea, a Spanish Venice, cut in straight white streets, like the slices of
an iced cake. Seville is wonderful at all times, a _maravilla_ to
foreigners and Spaniards. The Spanish novelist Palacio Valdés, in “La
Hermana San Sulpicio,” has described it during nights of midsummer, when
to go through the city was to visit the interior of the houses, for from
the _patios_, where the families were assembled, great rays of light
shot through the iron screen-doors into the dark and stifled streets,
and guitar and song broke the stillness: “Seville at such an hour had a
magical look, a charm that disturbed the mind.” But of all the cities of
the south Granada has a peculiar fascination. This is largely due to its
many contrasts. It is a city of orange groves and fountains, yet it
lies over two thousand feet above sea-level, and is a summer rather than
a winter city; the fiercest heat is relieved by cool air from the
eternal snows of the Sierra Nevada, and the gardens of the Alhambra and
the Generalife, with their myrtles, cypresses and cedars, give a
delicious shade. In winter icy cold strikes through the marble halls of
the Alhambra; yet it is never more beautiful than seen in February from
San Cristobal, or from the cactus-covered hill beneath San Miguel, or
from where the Darro flows rapidly far below. For it rises above the
slender branches of elms and poplars, grey and in parts purple from
their swelling buds--the red and yellow-brown towers, the crumbling
walls of red earth and brick and large smooth rounded stones of white,
or black, or red, the trailing ivy, the open white-pillared galleries. A
few almond-trees are in flower, and above to the left stand the long
lines of cypresses of the grey-white Generalife, where flower celandines
and daffodils. Many of these Spanish cities are visited chiefly for
their great ancient buildings and Cathedrals; yet the most part of them
deserve a more patient study for their own sake, for their memories of
old, and for the life of their narrow winding streets. The Spanish
writer _Azorín_ (Martínez Ruiz), in a book of few pages,[83] conveys
some wonderfully clear-cut impressions of Spain. He turns with
preference to details of the centuries of Spain’s greatness, when
Murcia, Valencia, and Seville were famous for their silks, Talavera for
its earthenware, Toledo for its swords, when the gloves of Ocaña or the
spurs of Ajofrín were unrivalled; or to the survival of old Spain in a
picture, or a building, or a city. Thus he loves to wander through León
with its spirit of ancient Spain and its classical street-names--here a
cobbled grass-grown _plaza_ with pale acacias and ancient walls, the
slow flight of doves and the wind rustling torn pieces of paper; there a
quiet convent _patio_ with bays and rigid cypresses. For him the narrow
streets of Córdoba have a deeper charm than those of any other Spanish
city. He wanders through the labyrinth of intricate winding ways, with
glimpses of small pillared _patios_ of flowers and fountains, and finds
everywhere silence and a deep serene melancholy, restfulness, oblivion,
and a harmony of soft shades, nowhere the light-hearted frivolity
conventionally attributed to Andalucía. _Azorín’s_ originality consists
in forcing a few apparently insignificant details to yield the whole
spirit of a city, a country, a people. If he mentions the Mosque of
Córdoba, it is but to note the beggars taking the sun in the _Patio de
los Naranjos_, the sparrows twittering in the orange-trees, the sound of
pitchers filling at the fountain. He gives us poignant descriptions of
dead provincial cities and ruined ancestral houses. The decadence of
Spain brought flourishing cities to low estate: Spain’s revival menaces
them with a fresh ruin. Old narrow passages and intricate courts and
sculptured houses make place for the introduction of tramways and broad
asphalt streets. The old Santander described by Pereda survives only in
his books, the old parts of Barcelona and Valencia are fast
disappearing, and happy is the city such as Toledo whose position on
abrupt rocks with no level spaces seems to promise an eternity of
mediævalism and individuality.




VII

IN OLD CASTILLE


It is with astonishment and a kind of fear that the traveller passes
through the high-lying plains of Old Castille, journeying swiftly from
city to city, to

    “Old towns whose history lies hid
     In monkish chronicle or rhyme,
     Burgos, the birthplace of the Cid,
     Zamora and Valladolid....”

for in these intervening tracts, sun-parched and windswept, it seems
scarcely possible that men should live. The villages are closely huddled
together, little compact masses of low, unwhitewashed houses, without a
tree or garden, so colourless, and clinging to the soil as sometimes to
pass unnoticed. Rivers flow between low, bare banks without bush or
tree, like streaks of mother-of-pearl inlaid in earthenware. And there
are wide tracts of land without a house or boundary, a continuous
desolation with no signs of life, except here and there a flock of sheep
or herd of goats, or a line of peasants returning at sunset from their
work. Surely life here can have but few attractions; there can be no
joy of the soil, little temptation for Berceo’s “_mal labrador_” of the
thirteenth century, who “loved the earth more than he loved the
Creator,” and “would alter landmarks to enlarge his estate”--_cambiaba
los mojones por ganar eredat_. Yet the slower trains are invaded by a
merry throng of pleasant, courteous, good-looking peasants, oval-faced,
with splendid teeth and eyelashes, who speed the journey with gay
conversation and shrill singing, and pass constantly from one carriage
to another to greet friends or to avoid the officials who inquire
awkwardly after tickets. They have plenty of life and cheerfulness, and
it is with renewed wonder that one looks at the dead, crumbling villages
where they live, and remembers the piercing force of the Castilian sun
in summer and the icy, penetrating winter winds. All day they must work
without the shelter of a single hedge or tree in the searching wind[84]
that sifts the soil, or under a sun that parches and shrivels it into
dust. But a nearer acquaintance reveals a certain charm[85] about these
villages of hard, clear names: Campillo, Cantalapedra, Pedroso,
Madrigal--a charm of clean-swept spaces, and clear, luminous air and
silent intensity; and the country ceases to be uniformly colourless.
Here a woman in a dress of light-blue linen, with long flowing
headkerchief of white, passes on a donkey through fields of golden ripe
corn; there, from narrow windows in a street of yellow-brown houses,
hang bright patches of geraniums and carnations in flower. And the
doorways of square or round or pointed arches give entrance to cool,
silent courts. _Azorín_ has described the old Castilian hidalgo, who
has never left his ancestral house, with its large rooms, many of them
unfurnished, and old portraits consigned to an attic and covered with
the dust of centuries: “His lands have disappeared, his furniture has
disappeared; he does nothing; he has a sad intensity of expression,” and
when further misfortune befalls him he says, “There is no help for
it--_qué le vamos á hacer_!” Everywhere is decay, and the trace of
vanished splendour. So these old ruined hidalgos live out their grey,
monotonous lives in some ancient town or village of Castille, amid the
immense plains with “distances of radiant sky and faint blue lines of
mountains.” The blue smoke rises from scented fires of rosemary, and, as
the bells ring to Matins, the doves swerve and circle, the grey doves
sweep slowly across the sky perpetually blue. And night and day the
doors of the houses are kept continually closed, with a deserted air
beneath the broad coats-of-arms carved in stone. _Azorín_ describes
minutely a Castilian town, standing among cornfields and olives--one of
those towns that the foreigner rarely has the courage to visit. Its
streets are narrow and tortuous. It contains three ancient inns, four
churches, three hermitages, two convents. It has no industries save a
few ruined cloth manufactures, and only the usurer flourishes. It
contains fourteen students (who have not taken their degree), four
doctors, twelve lawyers (only six of whom earn a living, and this by
slandering one another, and from time to time bringing a blackmail suit
against some poor-spirited inhabitant). There is a Guild of the Christ
of the Dying, and when a member dies a messenger goes through the
streets ringing a bell and crying: “At such an hour the funeral of Don
Fulano.” The summers are fiery, the winters are long and cruel. No
visits are paid; doors and windows remain closed; few persons go through
the streets, but in the _plazas_, on clear days of winter, dense groups
of men may be seen taking the sun, wrapped in their brown plaids and
_capas_. Nothing happens; the deep silence is broken by the clang of a
forge-hammer or by the crowing of a cock. In time of Carnival a few
“masks” pass, dressed up with mats and carrying old brooms. The
labourers are poverty-stricken, and meat is the luxury of a few “rich”
inhabitants. _Azorín_ notes the Castilian’s “fundamental energy,
aloofness, indifference, and lofty disdain, with sudden inspirations of
heroism”; and we may count it no small heroism to live on, proudly
uncomplaining, in surroundings so harsh and discomfortable.




VIII

THE DESERT AND THE SOWN


The French soldiers, looking at the trifling Manzanares and its mighty
bridges, may have exclaimed, “So even the Spanish rivers ran away.” But
those who, at sight of tiny threads of water in immense river-beds, are
inclined to ask, with Don Pedro in _Much Ado about Nothing_, “What need
the bridge much broader than the flood?” find their answer after a few
days of heavy rain. Marks six feet and more high on houses many hundreds
of yards from the banks of the Ebro record the rising of the waters.
Thus, in many districts, crops which have survived the summer drought
are swept away by the autumn deluge, and those who have cried for rain
are mocked with ruin when the waters “prevail exceedingly upon the
earth.” Spain’s agriculture perishes for lack of water, yet water
abounds, whether subterranean, as in parts of Castille, or in the
copious snows of the high-lying regions, where the snow is sometimes
preserved in snow-pits, _pozos de nieve_, or in these periodical
floods; and it would seem that the philologist had Spain in his mind
who connected the Basque adjective _idorra_, meaning “dry,” with ὓδωρ,
the Greek for water. To utilize, extend, and regulate the water
supply is a problem of vital importance to Spain--a problem which has
long occupied the thoughts of Spanish statesmen. Alfonso the Learned, in
his “Crónica General,” says, “This Spain, then, of which we speak is as
the paradise of God.... For the most part, it is watered with streams
and fountains, and wells are never lacking in all places that have need
of them;” but Strabo, more impartial, had remarked of Spain that, “For
the most part, it yields but a poor sustenance. For large districts are
composed of mountains and woodland and plains, with thin and, moreover,
not uniformly well-watered soil--οὐδἐ ταὐτην ὁμαλῶς εὔυδρον.” And
since Strabo’s time many have been the alterations for the worse.
Turdetania, for instance, the country between Seville and Huelva, is no
longer marvellously prosperous--θαυμα-στῶς εὐτυχεῖ; in fact
South Estremadura, of old one of Rome’s granaries, is now one of the
most desolate regions in Spain. But the worst decay is that of the
forests. The woods have fallen and fallen, and still the axe rings
avidly in those woods that remain. The very words for a wood, _bosque_
or _selva_, have become rare and poetical. Thus the soil is further
parched and impoverished, while towns and villages stand unsheltered
from wind and sun. The Escorial, which grew up among woods, may now be
seen from afar in its almost sinister magnificence across grey hills
and plains without a tree; and Madrid, though a tree figures prominently
in the city arms, looks out upon plains from which all traces of former
oak and chestnut forests have long since vanished. The absence of trees
in Spain increases both the dryness and the floods, and afforestation is
therefore quite as important as irrigation. The canalization of rivers
may diminish the floods, but while there is no soil on the
hill-sides--or soil so light that it is swept away by heavy
rainfalls--the rain must continue to be a blessing strangely disguised.
It is calculated that in six or eight years the trees would knit the
soil together, and give it sufficient staying power to resist and absorb
the rains, though, of course, there would as yet be no actual profit of
timber. Outlay of toil and money for so distant a remuneration is not
congenial to the Spanish temperament. The great land-owners do nothing.
The State spends a few thousand pesetas every year; but at the present
rate afforestation will need hundreds of years, bearing a resemblance to
that long-desired map of Spain, which is to be issued in some eleven
hundred sections, and of which from two to three sections appear
annually.[86] The advantages of irrigation have been amply proved in
Spain, justifying the juxtaposition of water and gold in Pindar’s ode;
but only about a fiftieth of Spain’s total area--and especially the
plain of Granada and the strip of coast of Málaga and Valencia--can at
present show the immense productiveness due to irrigation, combined with
the swift-maturing sun of Spain. There are, of course, immense
difficulties, and not the least are the ignorance and the poverty of the
peasants. Water added to a poor soil will be of little value if the
peasants are not taught artificial means of enriching the soil, and
modern methods of cultivating it. The extreme poverty of the peasants
would, however, prevent them at present from employing any but the
simplest methods; in many districts they mortgage their land in order to
be able to sow their crops, and Spanish farmers are often in the hands
of the usurers. The usurer has been their only resource in moments of
distress, and finally they are driven to emigrate, leaving their land to
the usurer. A narrow strip of fertile land along the rivers stands out
in contrast to the desolate country beyond. Thus the Ebro flows through
Aragon, among woods of silver birch and poplars, and plantations of
olives and vines and maize; but on either side appears the barren
country of perfectly bare reddish or brown hills of crumbling earth,
like great sand-dunes, without a plant, curiously folded and scored by
rushing water, with intricate, abrupt hollows and catacombs. The
villages are the colour of the soil, and at no great distance are
scarcely distinguishable from a bare hill-side. Or desert plains are
thinly covered with grey thyme, and in the more fertile parts produce
dwarfed vines and corn, so that in autumn one looks across immense,
undivided plains of stubble and yellowing vineyards to the distant
horizon of dim blue hills. The cruel winds[87] of Spain blow straight
from the iced mountain ridges, unstemmed by any barrier of woods. The
first snows fall early round Avila and on the uplands, but in the towns
snow at Christmas is rare. The foreigner sometimes has a capricious wish
to see these wide, tawny plains covered with snow--_après la plaine
blanche une autre plaine blanche_, like the Queen Romayquia, wife of
Abenabet, Moorish King of Seville, who could find no solace in her
longing for the sight of snow. The King ordered almond-trees to be
planted all about the city of Córdoba, that in early spring at least, if
not at Christmas, the Queen might beguile her fancy with the snow-white
almond blossoms.[88] But even in Andalucía, towards the end of December,
one may see several comparatively low mountain ranges thickly coated
with snow. Stores of firing are then brought down to the villages from
the treeless hills. Further north the vines have been pruned, and the
vine-twigs brought in for burning; but here the vines have not yet lost
their leaves, and the firing consists of thyme and whin and rosemary,
mint and lavender and other scented hill-plants. Troops of donkeys
arrive at sunset, with immense, sweet-smelling loads, that entirely hide
the red or purple tassels and fringes of their harness. The oranges now
gleam in myriads along the eastern coast; sometimes the icy winds from
inland freeze them, and fires of smouldering straw are burnt round and
in the orange groves, after the wind has ceased, that a dense smoke may
hang about the trees and warm them. Weeks before Christmas the
_turroneros_ from Jijona, noticeable for their small peaked hats of
black velvet, appear in nearly every city and town of Spain. In porches
or in large bare shops they set out their layers of white wooden boxes,
and samples of the _turrón_, or almond-paste, which is an essential part
of Spanish Christmas fare. For the time, Jijona, the grey town in the
hills, is deserted, though but a few weeks ago every house was a busy
scene of _turrón_ making, and nailing thin white planks into boxes. The
snow will soon lie deep on the Carrasqueta hill-range above the town.
The almond-trees, whose pink flowers in February form a solitary belt of
colour between Jijona and the rocky mountains, are now as bare and grey
as the surrounding country. Some of the inhabitants have gone to the
warmer south, taking the _diligencia_ to Alicante; others have scaled
the steep, winding road past the Barranco de la Batalla, where once the
Cid wrought havoc of the Moors, and now herds of goats feed apparently
on nothing, and have taken train at Alcoy for the cold, high-lying
cities of the north. But not in the northern uplands only are Spanish
winters cruel; the _dehesas_ of Andalucía are equally unprotected, the
silent, icy winds blow subtle and fierce and penetrating over the
undulating hill country round Córdoba, and one may see shepherd boys,
closely muffled in their plaids, standing frozen and motionless, the
sheep pressing around them and against one another for shelter.




IX

THE COAST OF CATALONIA IN AUTUMN


A first view of Catalonia from the sea shows at any rate the stones from
which, according to the proverb, the Catalans make bread. For great
spines of rust-coloured rock, covered here and there by pines of a crude
green, run to the sea and break off in abrupt cliffs. In the valleys of
these ridges towns and villages skirt the shore, Rosas, Palamos, San
Feliú de Guixols with its cork industry, and lace-making Arenys de Mar.
Towards Barcelona both soil and villages become greyer, but Barcelona
itself has colour in plenty. The Spanish and foreign ships in the
harbour, the palm-trees near the quay, above them the tall white and
yellow houses with shutters of green and brown, and above these again a
view of the great Cathedral--all this, bounded by the purple mountains,
makes the sight of Barcelona from the sea very picturesque and
attractive.

The coast to the south of Barcelona is very fertile. There are hedges of
reeds twenty feet high, of cactus and of aloe, aloes of that exquisite
blue-green which is so often the colour of the Mediterranean in
September. Through yellowing orchards of magnificent peaches, of figs
and apples in great abundance, come glimpses of the intense leaden-blue
hill-ranges to the west. The grapes have already for the most part been
gathered for wine, but there are still many vines that, earlier in the
year, are cut back to the ground, and have the look of blighted
potato-plants, and that now, grown to the size of currant-bushes and
unstaked, are laden with large yellow grapes. Occasionally, too, one
sees tall date-palms and orange-trees.

After Casteldefels the hills are covered with pines, and the nights,
which are warm but have heavy dew, bring out their scent so strongly
that it is at times almost oppressive. The nights are silent but for the
continual chirping of crickets and the sound of the unquiet sea. The
stars are strangely bright, Sirius burns large and intense, and Orion
nightly stalks the sky in all his glory till the sun catches him in
mid-heaven. The sea is alive with phosphorus, and far out are seen the
lights of fishing-boats, while on land the glow-worms are almost as many
as the stars. The orange and purple sunrises and sunsets of pink and
amethyst are very lovely, and the sails of the fishing-boats continue
white, and the sea retains its blue for some time after the light of the
after-glow is gone. A little further south the cliffs are covered with
dwarf palms, rosemary in flower, and other shrubs. The road here is
good, but one meets no pedestrians, for a path along the railway is the
accepted thoroughfare between village and village in spite of the
notices that forbid its use. The men for the most part wear a black
peaked cap, a long blouse, and trousers of brown or blue. The sash is
nearly always black and is worn wide, the sandals have a tip and heel
covering only, with fastenings of leather or black cloth from the tip.
The women wear handkerchiefs that entirely cover the head. The
predominant colours are blue and black. A kilomètre or more before
wine-making Sitges the road is bounded by rough terraces of stone with
vines and dark green carob-trees. A succession of terraces on the one
side runs far up the hills, and on the other the rude-walled vineyards
stretch to the edge of the sea. Sitges, a village of less than four
thousand inhabitants, is prettily placed, its octagonal-towered church
rising from a rock in the sea. A few kilomètres further Villanueva y
Geltrú is but a fairly large and rather ordinary provincial town, though
it has its picturesque corners, with its houses washed in various shades
of blue, pink, green, or yellow, and views of vineyard country appearing
at the end of many of its long, straight streets. After Villanueva the
hills recede further inland, and there is a little more flat country,
but it is occupied largely by great marshes, loud with the croaking of
frogs.

It is not till one reaches Roda and Creixell that any villages have a
really Spanish, or rather Castilian, look. Creixell, especially, with
its massive church and great square building of stone standing haughtily
on a hill of wall-terraces sprinkled with carob-trees, and with its
houses the colour of the soil, has all the air of a little Toledo. Early
on an autumn morning it may be seen reflected, with every house and
window, in a blue lagoon hundreds of yards from the village and
separated by sandbanks from the sea. The olives and vineyards now extend
to the shore, and above San Vicente great white country-houses stand
among orchards and olives. After Creixell there are but two villages,
Torredenbarra and Altafulla, before Tarragona, the second coast-town of
Catalonia. Here, indeed, the sun beats with a fiery strength; here,
indeed, the Mediterranean is “crystalline,” and “the lightning of the
noon-tide ocean flashes.” Here is excellent firm sand for bathing and,
swimming far out, the sun is still seen shining through the transparent
water on the waved sand below. At the end of September the season is
over, yet the days are still almost too hot, and the deep blue of the
bay and the long purple line of hills to the north-west are
indescribably beautiful. Tarragona, the favoured city of the Romans, is
the possessor of many noble Roman ruins, and wonderful Cyclopean walls,
and its outline, seen against the sky from the road leading to Tortosa,
is one of the most magnificent in Spain. The town and its neighbourhood,
as well as the whole coast of Catalonia is, perhaps, not as well known
as it deserves. In autumn, if the days and even the nights are hot,
there is always a refreshing coolness in the early mornings; the people
are, as a rule, pleasant and courteous; in some villages many speak
Catalan only, and at times, catching a word here and there, one may
think oneself to be in Italy.




X

AN EASTERN VILLAGE


There is no cloud in the clear March sky, filled with radiant light.
Beyond the dark green of orange-trees and grey olives lies the sea, a
faint line of blue. And, to the west, the mountains of bare rock are
faintly purple, looking frail and brittle in their clear but distant
outlines. A herd of goats passes slowly down a wide river-bed of smooth
white stones, with no shred or vestige of water. Lines of aloes and tall
reeds grow along its banks, and on either side peasants dressed in black
are at work in the fields, ploughing with single mules between the brown
stems of vines recently pruned, or pruning the orange-trees and olives.
Bundles of vine and olive twigs lie ready to be carted to the village
for fuel. Women in dresses of white and pink and scarlet are hoeing the
green corn. The pear- and peach-trees are in flower, and the almond-trees
fully arrayed in freshest green. At intervals, wells or _norias_ explain
the green fresh look of the country, so different from the burnt
desolation of the waterless regions further north. For Oropesa, the
neighbouring village, is but some sixty miles north of Valencia, and is
bordered on the one side by the full fertility of the Valencian plain,
though on the other it is surrounded by barren hills. In each _noria_ a
long crooked branch forms the handle to the iron wheel and to this a
mule is tied, and as the mule turns, the wheel revolves with a slow
clinking sound, and the long earthenware jars (_arcaduces_) attached to
the wheel gush water into a trough and so by small channels of dry earth
into the fields of brown and reddish soil. A path leads through green
fields and clumps of orange-trees to the village. In some fields further
south the last oranges have been gathered, and thousands of pearl-shaped
buds tell that the trees before long will be covered with a glistening
snow of scented blossoms. But in many the oranges still reign
resplendent: on a grey day they stand out with more vivid distinctness
than when the sun blurs them in a luminous haze, leaving them clearly
visible only in the level light of its rising or its setting. The trees
are bowed with fruit, and the laden branches are propped up from the
ground. The thronging oranges glow in myriad spheres of gold, here and
there lie golden mounds of gathered oranges, and below the trees the
ground is a strewn pavement of gold. On every side beneath the trees may
be seen a magic land of myriad golden lamps; single or in trefoils and
clusters of seven and ten and twenty, the oranges hang within a few
inches of the ground. Hundreds of yards away through intervals of trees
appears the same foison of gleaming fruit, and the air is all scented
with oranges. From time to time a light wind blows beneath the trees,
and the twigs with their burdens of crowding oranges sway heavily to and
fro, like slowly swung censers of burning gold. But near Oropesa the
oranges are comparatively few. The village is built on a steep
precipitous hill of grey rock, crowned by the ruinous walls of a great
castle. The houses clamber roof over roof, in ragged disarray up the
rock. They are of yellowish-brown stone with rough cement, and mostly
innocent of glass, but have a touch of whitewash in front, so that they
wear shining morning faces to the rising sun. In the mistless radiant
mornings the village stands out clearly, its sharp rock rising sheer
from the plain. The sea beyond is silver, and on the other side every
wrinkle in the rocks of the grey mountains is distinctly visible. There
is no sound but the occasional voices of children, the clink and clang
of a forge-hammer, the crowing of a cock, or a faint crystal crash of
waves breaking; but from time to time there is a dry rumour of wheels,
and the cry of a man to his mule as he passes down the road in his cart.
Wrapped in their plaids against the keen morning air, the peasants pass
leisurely in carts and on mules to work in the fields until the evening.
At dusk the slow procession returns, with many a greeting and _bona nit_
and smiles of sunburnt wrinkled faces. Thin lines of blue smoke go up
from swiftly flaring fires of vine twigs and rosemary and dry plants
gathered from the hills, and an hour or two hours later Oropesa is
given over to sleep and the silence of the stars, broken only by the
deep rhythmic cry of the _sereno_ calling the hours. To the south a road
goes up through grey rocky hills with thyme and dwarf-palms and cistus.
The bare smooth rocks have a metallic ring, and there is no sign of life
save for a herd of goats far above, the goat-herd with his plaid and
wide felt hat clearly outlined on the sky, and the sound of his flute
distinct in the solitude of the hills, utterly silent save for the
silver tinkling of goat-bells. No water can remain on these rocky hills,
it pours immediately away to the plains beyond, where, by a stream bed
barely a yard wide, a pillar tells of those who perished there in 1850,
in “the _diligencia_ carried away by the waters of the torrent.” Though
Oropesa now has a railway station, the _diligencias_ still ply between
it and Castellón and Torreblanca, and it might be fifty miles from any
railway, so primitive and self-centred is its life. Occasionally comes a
sunless morning with a quiet grey sky, rare on the east coast of Spain
except in the days of early spring. The sea lies motionless and grey,
with pale reflections of light in coils and patches of gold. So still is
the air that the quiet piping of birds among the olives falls like a
stone in hushed waters. As the day advances the mountains, which earlier
were mingled and lost in the grey of the sky, grow more distinct, till
towards sunset every line and crevice in their sharp ranges becomes
marked, and the overhanging mist of cloud melts away into the grey of
evening, sprinkled with the gold-dust of the stars.




XI

OFF THE EAST COAST OF SPAIN


The Mediterranean off the coast of Spain is not always calm. Sometimes
the east wind, the _Llevant_, lashes the waves to fury, and the shores
along the villages and towns are black with lines of fishing-boats that
dare not put out to sea. But for weeks together it is “lulled in the
coil of its crystalline streams,” and the sun rises and sets across a
silken plain of blue. In such weather a journey along the coast has a
wonderful freshness and a fascinating charm. Again and again the
traveller recalls the magic of those lines of the old romance:

    “Quién hubiese tal ventura,
     Sobre las aguas del mar,
     Como hubo el conde Arnaldos,
     La mañana de San Juan!”

    “Oh for a chance as happy,
     Where the deep sea waters swell,
     As on the morn of St. John’s Day,
     Count Arnaldos befel,” etc.

By St. John’s Day, however, the sun flashes its rays too fiercely, and
it is in late spring or early autumn that the voyage is most enjoyable.
A land journey can give no idea of the loveliness of these coasts, and
towns such as Alicante and Almería lose much of their beauty if deprived
of their background of mountains, which can only be seen fully out at
sea. The sea and sky are unfailingly beautiful, and the life of the
ports, full of colour and movement, never loses its interest. Almería,
fallen from its ancient greatness, is yet active in its “purple-shadowed
bay,”[89] and exports every year two million barrels, a hundred million
pounds, of grapes, chiefly to America and England. Torrevieja, further
north, is a small town or village of some seven thousand inhabitants, at
which steamers touch to take in a cargo of salt, but which the tourist,
on his way from Elche to Murcia, rarely turns aside to visit. It has a
thoroughly African look, with its flat-roofed, grey-white houses on a
bare, level strip of sandy coast, with no trees except palms, that stand
conspicuous like trees of the desert; the sand in places is thinly
covered with grass, of lightest, almost yellow, green. To the left, seen
from the sea, is a long line of gleaming salt, drawn from the sea-water
by evaporation under the summer sun, and now ready to be exported.
Beyond the line of salt is a distant range of bare mountains, faintly
purple. The town has one or two small towers, four factory chimneys, and
half a dozen round mills, with arms as slender as the cranes on the
loading steamers in the harbour. A continual rosary of barges, yellow,
white, green, or black, carries the salt across the bay. The heavy load
weighs the barge to the water’s edge, and the glistening white salt
seems to float on the blue surface. In the barge, at either end, go as
many as twenty or even thirty men, some sitting rowing, others facing
them and standing to row, and others punting with their poles of immense
length that taper away at the top to the slight girth of a fishing rod.
The shirts of the men, mauve, pink, white, red, or purple, their light
blue or black coats, red sashes, trousers of velvet or velvet corduroy
of many shades, from bright yellow to dark brown, the long shining
yellow punt poles, and the white pyramids of salt on the sea of
sapphire, combine to form a strange and beautiful sight. The empty
barges return high in the water, with little mounds of salt left along
their ledges. At midday the houses seem to faint and grow indistinct,
the mountains fade to a hardly perceptible outline, only the salt
reflects the sun in every facet of its countless grains, and glitters
whiter than snow. In the sunset the lines resume their sharpness, and
the mountains are grey or blue-grey or intense leaden blue or purple,
according to their distances. The Murcian sky is famous for its clear
serenity, and the sunsets and sunrises are of surpassing fairness.
Alicante, too, which is nearer to Murcia than to Valencia, has a
wonderful sky and a wonderful sea, and here, too, the “sunrise is a
glorious birth.” “Alicante aux clochers mêle les minarets,” says Victor
Hugo in one of the poems of “Les Orientales,” and from the sea Alicante
has an Oriental look, with its lines of palms, stories of flat roofs,
and bare background of hills and mountains. But it is at evening that
Alicante is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The lights
shine softly through the four lines of palm-trees along the Paseo de los
Mártires, and are reflected across the water; in the harbour the last
radiance of evening sets the tracery of masts and cranes and rigging in
clear relief. To the west the sea is already dark, almost wine-coloured,
the οἲνψ of the Greeks, but in the east it is a most
exquisite blue, a blue that seems to be a transparent surface of
turquoise covering a layer of white chalk. The eastern horizon is
faintly purple, and against it the sails of a fleet of fishing-boats are
whiter than at any other time, and gleam long after the sun has set.
Later the sea catches for an instant the faint purple of the sky, the
sky loses its colour, and finally a mistiness of softest grey merges
them together, so that one may no longer distinguish where the sky
ceases or the sea begins. On the rocks of the coast the waves at night
break, filled with phosphorus, in a luminous spray, “like light
dissolved in star showers thrown.” The low line of pale lights along El
Grao, Valencia’s harbour, if approached at night, has a look, from some
distance at sea, of such a phosphorus wave. By day the harbour is seen
to be a forest of masts, and far away the towers of Valencia, round the
tall Miguelete, appear as numerous, and in the distance almost as
slender as the masts of the harbour: “les clochers de ses trois cents
églises.” Along the coast of the Huerta, especially to the south of
Valencia, glisten a number of snow-white pyramids, that seem at first to
be more salt, having the exact look of the mounds that lie along the bay
of Cadiz. They are the whitewashed, triangular fronts of the peasants’
thatched cottages or _barracas_, standing in the fertile plain, “Spain’s
Orchard.”

One of the most lovely and original sights along the whole coast is that
of the high range of bare, treeless mountains south of Cartagena,
falling sheer into the sea, a delicate purple above the light blue
water. There is not the merest rim of coast, in fact the sea flows round
the mountains’ flanks, and they continue far out from the land, their
tops occasionally appearing as small islands.

But especially will the traveller who has the happy chance to find
himself at dawn of a cloudless day in a boat an hour west of
Almería--especially then will he be ready to repeat the lines:

    “Quién hubiese tal ventura
     Sobre las aguas del mar.”

A slight gleam in the east warns the moon that its reign of quiet light
is to finish, and begins the long prelude of day. Above a dark line of
sea a faint orange creeps into the sky, deepening to orange-purple, and
soon fringing off in pale yellow, saffron, and daffodil. Then, later,
above this, widens a space of clearest green, and at last the body of
the sky changes from grey to a light blue. In the west all is still
grey, as with a soft woof of hanging mists. The sails of a boat going
out to sea are white in the first glow of dawn, and the gently swelling
sea eastwards reflects the light in level gleams of gold, like smooth,
burnished meadows of buttercups. Then the sun rises, red-orange, on a
cloudless sea line, the sea becomes light blue, and along the rest of
the horizon lie spaces of pearl and opal, while in the east a dim,
silver moon fades slowly. The scene is of such enchanting loveliness,
like the birth of a new world, that if the Sierra Nevada chances to be
for the most part hidden in a long cloud of mist, the traveller scarcely
notices one or two peaks that seem to be floating snow-white clouds.
Then the mist of cloud melts away, and, one by one, the snow summits
appear, till the whole immense range stands bare, looking incredibly
high in a heaven of clear, faint green. It is a sight to make men hold
their breath. The ship, night’s shadows scarce driven from her deck,
passes slowly, almost noiselessly through the water as if she, too,
understood that here is some enchanted country. The view of the Sierra
Nevada from Granada, lovely as it is, gives no hint of a sight so
incomparable as this. The range is of such vast length, the snow is so
deep and soft. Long, almost level lines, huge, abrupt crags, gently
sloping gullies, smooth, pyramid-shaped peaks, shelves and pinnacles,
crevices and ledges, are all entirely wrapped in deep, much-sunned snow,
without a break. Each look, after turning for a moment to the grey
western horizon or the waving, crystalline surface of blue sea, brings a
new wonder and a fresh surprise; so marvellous is the radiance of white
appearing in the full glow from the east, and such is the infinite
clearness and subtlety of the outlines on a sky varying from blue-grey
to transparent green. The long massive range, seen from some distance
out at sea, gives the impression of a height of twenty thousand feet,
whereas from Granada it is difficult to realize that the highest peak is
over eleven thousand. Below the snow-line, a high range of bare
grey-purple mountains seems to sink into the sea, though there is, in
fact, a line of level coast. Far or near no tree is to be seen; a white
lighthouse stands on the coast, and on the silken blue sea gleams an
occasional white sail or the flash of a seagull’s wing. As the sun rises
higher the softly folding mountains beneath the Sierra Nevada grow more
purple above the sea, and the shadows of their dimpling hollows blacken.
Above, the wide, smooth spaces and the deep ravines present their broad
surplice of glistening white to the sun without a shadow. It is all
unimaginably lovely, with a breathless purity of things primeval--

    “Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke
     Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.”

This and other hours of delight during a coasting voyage in the Spanish
Mediterranean are not soon forgotten, and, though they cannot be
translated into words--

    “They flash upon that inward eye
     Which is the bliss of solitude.”

The voyage may be prolonged on the south coast, and, from the time
when, on his left, Tarifa lies along the sea, like a line of melting
snow under smoothly moulded hills of green, and, on the right, Tangiers
shows its white houses indistinctly beneath the bare, grey mountains of
Africa, to the time when at Port Bou he bids farewell to the Catalan
coast and to Spain, the traveller will not have a dull or unenjoyable
moment; if only the gods send him propitious, cloudless days--

    “Quién hubiese tal ventura
     Sobre las aguas del mar!”




XII

THE JUDGING OF THE WATERS


It was a cloudless day of November. The Cathedral of Valencia stood grey
against a sky of soft blue. In the _Plaza de la Constitución_ the sun
shone on the central fountain and marked in dark lines the shadows of
the houses and the Cathedral. From the great “Door of the Apostles” came
a smell of incense as people went out and in. Surmounted by its large
rose-window, the doorway has a worn and ancient air, and the plants
growing here and there in the wall add to its look of venerable
splendour. Some of the apostles stand there headless, some without arms,
some mere trunks of stone. Above, the tall _Miguelete_ tower rises
conspicuous here, as it is conspicuous far and wide across the Valencian
plain. A few priests passed, a few carts drawn by long strings of mules,
a newspaper-seller cried the _Heraldo de Madrid_, and some peasants in
black or blue-grey groups talked together, leaning on their sticks.
Shortly after eleven a long, green sofa was set up on the pavement
immediately in front of the Cathedral door, and a narrow space round it
was enclosed with an iron railing. Sofa and railing, carried across the
street in sections, bore the inscription _Tribunal de las Aguas_. For it
was Thursday, the meeting-day of the tribunal which judges disputes
arising from the irrigation of the Huerta.

To the peasant of the Valencian Huerta loss of water for his land means
starvation, and the hours at which each is allowed to draw off water
from the narrow channels that cross his land are carefully regulated. If
one takes water out of his turn the fields of another must suffer, and
the case must be brought before the judges sitting in weekly council.
Against their sentence there is no protest or appeal; it is absolutely
final, and though there must be cases of injustice, the peasants are
very proud of their tribunal. There is no writing--the cases are not
even recorded--the matter is decided on the spot and in the open air
between man and man; there are no clerks or advocates; no table, ink, or
papers to confuse the simple;[90] no fees or anxious delays, and the
judges, moreover, chosen by and from the peasants themselves, thoroughly
understand the questions brought before them. It is a strange sight, the
sitting of this all-powerful institution, centuries old, in the _Plaza
de la Constitución_, in the twentieth century. There is a dignified
simplicity about it, a lack of display which is imposing. The peasants
have a conscious pride in being able to arrange their own affairs
without interference of the men of learning, just as they are ready to
settle their more private quarrels without recourse to the law. The man
who has been stabbed in a quarrel will conceal the name of his assailant
from the police, always reserving for himself the pleasure of taking
vengeance later on. The character of the peasants of the Huerta is
indeed a mixture of haughtiness and cunning, of simplicity and
shrewdness, and the word that best describes them is the Spanish
_socarronería_--a certain malicious humour.[91] Living isolated in the
vast open plain, they form a community apart, and resent external
interference. Their tribunal is entirely primitive and rustic; in all
its years of city life it has adopted none of the city’s ways, and has
not even the shelter of a roof.

In the present instance there was but a single question to be settled,
and the proceedings lasted less than five minutes, passing all but
unnoticed. At about a quarter to twelve the judges, five in number, and
dressed in black as ordinary peasants, walked slowly into the enclosure
and occupied their places on the official sofa, taking off their black
felt hats. The full body of the judges is seven, chosen from different
districts to represent the principal canals of irrigation. Another
peasant, officer of the tribunal (on his cap is written _A. de T.
Aguas_, the _alguacil_, that is, of the Tribunal of Waters), standing at
the small gate in the railing, formally declared the tribunal open:
_S’obri el tribunal_ are the consecrated words. He then introduced the
plaintiff and defendant, who stood bareheaded and without their sticks
at half a yard’s distance from the judges. After each had stated his
case--and any interruption is rigorously fined--one of the judges at
once passed sentence. The verdict was against the old man, and he turned
without a word to leave the enclosure. His wife, however, without the
railing, though he put his finger to his lips to silence her, was not to
be overawed, and in a shrill torrent of words reproached the judges as
they filed solemnly into the Plaza. The _Tribunal de las Aguas_ was
closed; the judges dispersed to their silent fields, to meet again in
the rattle and clamour of the crowded city on the following Thursday.
Every Thursday throughout the year the plain green sofa and circular
railing are brought out in sections, and the judges make their
appearance in the Plaza. They do not always enter the enclosure, for
sometimes there is no dispute pending, or the disputants have come to an
agreement in the Plaza without recourse to the tribunal, and when the
clock strikes twelve, railing and sofa are carried back. The judges help
to bring about a settlement, and this perhaps explains that their
official verdicts are given instantaneously, with no pause for thought
or consultation; they have no doubt heard every detail of the case and
come to a decision beforehand.

Readers of Don Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’ gloomy but delightful novel, “La
Barraca,” will remember the scene at the “Door of the Apostles” when
Batiste, unable to check his indignation at the unjust charge brought
against him, is fined for his excited interruptions and fined too for
the misdeed which he had not committed. But as a rule the scene is a
quiet and almost a solemn one. The tribunal has the sanctity of years;
the peasant respects an institution which was the same in his father’s
time and in his grandfather’s, and in that of his ancestors five
centuries ago. The judges who before and after are simple peasants, are,
for the moment invested with the power of settling matters of vital
importance; for disregarding the sentence of the tribunal they may
deprive a man entirely of his right of water, and so render him and his
family penniless. They represent the whole Huerta, embodying alike its
independent spirit and its conservative traditions. A few minutes after
the judges have risen, and sometimes before the Cathedral clock has
struck twelve, sofa and railing have disappeared, and it is hard to
realize that the time-honoured Judging of the Waters, so primitive and
impressive, has actually been held in this city of two hundred thousand
inhabitants, and in this paved square where now there are but few
wayfarers, and the central fountain flows and trickles in silence.




XIII

SEVILLE IN WINTER


It is in spring, from March to May, that Seville is chiefly visited; the
warm air and hot sun, the orange-trees in flower, the great religious
festivals, the famous bull-fights, attract a host of foreigners, and the
city has an animation unwonted even in the gay and lively capital of
Andalucía. In winter Seville has a quieter, but perhaps not less potent
charm. Winter often brings with it a succession of cool clear days, when
the sky is of a serene, almost transparent blue, with golden sunsets.
The white lines of flat-roofed houses seen against the blue of the
evening sky have the soft light and colouring of opals, while the
distant hills of the horizon are faintly purple. On these still days the
motionless river reflects the lines of leafless silver birch and yellow
tamarisks in all the tracery of their slender branches. A few yards
further from the bank on either side thousands of dark orange-trees are
hung with gleaming fruit, circling the city with a fringe of lamps.
Above and through the trees, now bare and grey, of the _Paseo de las
Delicias_ show the various greens of the tall eucalyptus-trees and
palms, the orange-trees and cypresses of the Santelmo gardens. On the
quay lie immense mounds of oranges ready to be packed: the hot sun fills
the air with their scent, children make flying attacks and retire
precipitately with an orange apiece, while an occasional beggar also
receives his dole from the apparently inexhaustible store. In the
ever-crowded _Calle de las Sierpes_ small open stalls display fresh
violets and magnificent carnations and roses, and in some gardens one
may see roses and geraniums in flower. In the lovely gardens of the
Alcázar the sun draws a deliciously mingled scent from the box-hedges,
myrtles and oranges.

Occasionally--still in unclouded weather--the wind is cold and piercing
and all go muffled to the eyes, the men in their _capas_, the women with
long shawls. In the _Patio de los Naranjos_, beneath the trees laden
with oranges, the wind sweeps across the pavement of rough bricks,
intergrown with grass and the duller green of mosses, and rattles the
fallen leaves in lines and circles. Far above, the great Giralda tower
stands pink and creamy grey in the clear winter sky. By the Gate of
Pardon, in a corner of hot sun and sheltered from the wind, a few
beggars sit warming themselves and watching with Oriental patience and
immobility. The streets are mostly too narrow to let in the sun, but in
the _plazas_ and any open space men are seen basking in sunshine,
_tomando el sol_. Along the bridge that leads to the suburb of Triana
the seats on both sides are crowded. Triana, better than Seville,
corresponds to Cervantes’ description of a city where adventures are to
be met at every street corner, and Triana supplies an army of loiterers
whose life’s mission in winter is to “take the sun.”

On the eve of high festivals in winter, such as the Epiphany, it is
already growing dark when services are held, and the vast Cathedral is
faintly lit with hundreds of candles and dim hanging lamps, though the
last daylight still lingers awhile in the deep reds and purples, green,
orange, and every colour of the windows overhead. There is no procession
of the Three Kings through the city; at Alcoy, in the province of
Valencia, the Three Kings come riding, laden with presents, into the
town from beyond the grey mountains that surround it, and half the
population goes out to meet them, but Seville is too “civilized” for
this.

Even in Seville not all the winter days are cloudless and serene. On
some of them the sky is a uniform grey, and the rain falls unceasingly
till the centre of the narrower, unevenly cobbled streets, raised at
either side and without a pavement, becomes a running stream. But when
the Andalusian sun reappears, the houses have an added freshness in
their glowing white, or in their coats of faint green or red, yellow or
purple (though even these usually have a line of white along the roof),
and in the air is a feeling of spring. There is an ancient Andalusian
song that makes March say to January--

    “Con tres días que me quedan
     Y tres que me preste mi compadre Abríl
     He de poner tus ovejas
     Que te acordarás de mí.”

(With the three days that are left me and three lent me by my friend
April, I will put your sheep in such a plight that you will remember
me.) This is the Cumbrian:--

    “March said to Aperill
     ‘I see three haggs [sheep] upon a hill.
     And if you will lend me dayes three
     I’ll find a way to make them dee.’”

But the rigour of the days that follow in Cumberland has no place or
parallel in the low-lying districts of Andalucía:--

    “The first of them was wind and weet,
     The second of them was snaw and sleet,
     The third of them was sic a freeze
     It froze the birds’ nebs to the trees;
     When the three days were past and gane
     The three silly haggs came hirpling hame.”

At Seville a few weeks after the Day of the Kings winter is really over:
in February the sky has an intenser blue, and with the longer sunshine
the warmth increases. The spring days follow in their matchless
splendour, till finally the sun’s fiery heat drives all who can leave
the city to the cooler refuge of the sea or the hills.




XIV

FROM A SEVILLE HOUSETOP


In winter Seville’s sky is sometimes for weeks entirely cloudless. Day
after day opens and dies peacefully away like a perfect flower; or, if a
strong cold wind drives across the day, it still blows in a heaven of
limitless clear blue. But in early spring the sky is often veiled in a
floating canopy of grey, or one may watch the white masses of clouds
thin and melt on the blue. And the blue is no longer fixed, distant, and
serene; even when apparently clear it has a vague movement of dissolving
mists, an intangible white softness interlacing it. It is this quality
of the sky, harmonizing so well with the soft lines and delicate colours
of the city, that gives to Seville in spring its unfailing charm.
Especially is that charm felt in the hour when men’s cigarettes begin to
glow and dot the streets with tiny fire-flies, distinct as the white
flowers worn by the women in their hair. The deep-red carnations and
dark violets of the open flower-stalls fade into shadow; the light
greens, lilacs, yellows, browns, and blues of the houses take a greyer
tinge. The last sunshine throws its thinner radiance along the white
lines of flat roofs that stand out in many levels and angles on the blue
or blue-and-white sky, and the effect is of pearls and opals, not the
flash of polished opals, but, as it were, blue veins of opal in white
chalk. The west is filled with a level radiance of pure gold, and
presently the eastern sky also changes from blue to a faint golden grey.
One by one the hanging street lamps begin to shed their soft glow of
white light, and overhead the first stars shine faintly and vanish and
reappear. The bells of goats and the mellower note of cowbells are heard
as they go their evening round to be milked, driven by a boy astride his
donkey, or by an old man with faded-pink umbrella; or a donkey passes
laden with oranges, the fruit’s gold gleaming through the twilight
afterglow from between the netting of the panniers. A breath of country
air invades the city; the day’s work is ended, and perhaps from some
church or convent you may hear “a distant bell that seems to mourn the
dying of the day”:

                  “Squilla di lontano
    Che paia ’l giorno pianger che si muore.”

The swift Southern twilight soon dies, but this short hour more than any
other embodies the magic of a Seville spring. For Seville at other times
is “a city full of stirs, a tumultuous city, a joyous city.” It wakes to
a discordant music of many street cries. All kinds of wares are hawked
shrilly, with loud shouts, or slow, dirge-like chants. Later in the day
come the more melodious cries of “Oranges! Water! Violets!
Carnations!--_¡Qué buenas naranjas! Agua, quien quiere agua! Violetas!
Claveles!_” But to the flat brick-paved housetops, surrounded with walls
of different height, from three to twenty feet, all whitewashed to their
level tops, these sounds of the street come faintly. The rattle of
wheels over the cobbles is deadened, the bells of slowly driven cows and
goats chime distantly; sometimes one hears the intricate whistle of the
knife-grinder, or a barrel-organ plays an interminable dance to the
clacking of castañets, that fascinates by its ceaseless repetition. But
the sounds are vague and muffled, without harshness or stridency, and
here reigns more uninterrupted quiet than in the cool marble _patios_
below, with the frequent goings out and in through the door’s iron
_reja_. On the walls or in the line of shade beneath them stand rows of
plants--roses, geraniums, heliotrope, and especially carnations. From
here the street sellers fill their open stalls and baskets with the huge
carnations of spring, the smaller early carnations coming chiefly from
Málaga. And the carnations never look more beautiful than seen, dark red
or pink or yellow, against these walls of glistening white; one is fain
to call them by their German or “soft Spanish name”--_Nelken, claveles_.
The sun rising lights up the housetops so that they gleam like snow
between the dark spaces of bronze or green or blue glazed tiles,
slender-springing towers, and infrequent roofs, covered thickly in
spring with grass, like small fields. Or on a night of moon the city has
a phantom look of whited sepulchres, and if no moon looks round her
with delight when the heavens are bare, there is an uninterrupted view
of stars in the whole sky, as from a ship’s deck. At midday, when the
sun is all fire and narrows the lines of shadow to mere rims of black,
one may not look for more than an instant across the glaring radiance of
white. In the morning there is an exquisite freshness. Little smoke
rises from the houses--only an occasional tiny wraith of grey--but,
beyond, a dense line goes up from the Cartuja factory of _azulejos_, and
hangs black-purple on the blue sky--the morning sky streaked with waving
outdrawn wisps of white mist-like cloud. There is a flapping of pigeons’
wings as they flutter from wall to wall, and the twittering of
innumerable sparrows. The hours are marked by the crystal striking of
many clocks that are heard only dim and intermittently from below in the
street traffic. But it is at evening that the housetop has an almost
magical charm, when the sun has set in a sky of delicate gold, and in
the east long thin lines of white and faint purple cloud lie across a
sky of lightest blue. Then the flowers along the wall give out all their
scent. Swallows whirl and swerve far overhead or lightly skim the
hundred levels of whitewashed turret and wall. The _claveles_ fade
slowly in the growing dusk; the wide, uneven plain of glowing walls
gradually becomes indistinct and blurred; finally the sky, too, is
moulded to a perfect symmetry of grey, and perhaps an immense
orange-coloured moon climbs slowly above the city. Seville is lovely in
winter, when the sky is a cold, serene blue, and night by night the
stars glint and glitter; lovely in spring, when everywhere, in roof and
_patio_ and garden, is a triumph of green, when the oranges still hang
on the orange-trees in flower--like yellow crocuses peering from the
snow--and the corn is already high in the olives beyond the river;
lovely in summer, when the greens are parched and shrivelled, and a hot
wind blows heavily across the fainting housetops, or in nights of sultry
stillness the intense glow from many a lighted _patio_ falls across the
velvet darkness of the narrow streets. Lovely at all times, but never
more lovely than in the temperate days of spring, when a hundred bells
are ringing for the Feast of Resurrection, and the flowers from
countless roofs are gathered for the _fête_; when, in scenes of fairy
magic, the slow _pasos_ move with their myriad candles burning through
the twilight, along the crowded streets and _plazas_ to the Cathedral,
while still peacefully above its Court of Oranges the tall Giralda looks
across the city that hems it in, to the wide _dehesas_ of Andalucía, to
the green fields and olive-covered hills beyond the gently flowing
Guadalquivir, and to the distant line of the Sierra Morena.




XV

FEBRUARY IN ANDALUCÍA


Not one perhaps in a hundred of those who visit Seville and Granada sees
more than a glimpse of the beautiful country and curious villages of
Andalucía; yet there is much pleasure and interest to be had from a
journey through all this region. In February an early start with the sun
will enable the traveller on horseback or on foot to accomplish a fair
day’s journey, since the sun has not yet begun to burn and force him to
rest for some six central hours of the day, as later in the year. And
the outlines on every side are exquisitely clear, the sky usually
cloudless, and streams flow where later there will be but dry channels.
In parts the fields and roadside spaces are blue and purple with
dwarf-irises (the peasants call them simply _lirios_, lilies), and the
almond-trees are in flower; and at no time of the year is there a
greater and more delightful contrast between spring in the valley and
winter on the hills. Near Seville the immense plains stretch
interminably to the faint mountains, brown and dull-green pastures of
heather and dwarf-palm, flecked with silver-white streaks of water;
herds of cattle, glossy black with white horns, pigs, horses, and great
flocks of sheep graze there. Or the country is gently undulating like
Sussex downs, but with softlier-moulded outlines and a horizon of faint
blue mountains, in February exquisitely distinct in faintness. A village
often entirely covers one of the small hills, not a house venturing
forward to form an outskirt, but all clustered and compact. Steep,
perfectly straight streets of sharp narrow cobbles, without side
pavements, run up to the church at the top through rows of low,
whitewashed houses, of a single storey and of a dazzling whiteness. At
evening the labourers come in from the far distant fields in a
continuous line, on foot or on mules and donkeys, and children go out to
meet them and are given a ride back into the village. Sometimes their
return is of several kilomètres, over deep earthy or stony paths, and,
with their gleaming mattocks (_pioches_, _azadones_) over their
shoulders, they are now to be seen clearly outlined on the evening sky,
and now are lost from view in one of the many hollows of the hills. Far
and near there is no tree, “neither bush nor shrub to bear off any
weather at all,” and the winds seem to have sifted and moulded the hills
into softly folding mounds and hollows. In February the winds still blow
occasionally with icy breath, and you will meet men on crimson and
magenta-tasselled mules and donkeys, closely wrapped in old-fashioned
_capas_ of brown, only their eyes visible. On the road there are few
travellers--charcoal-burners coming down with troops of laden donkeys
from the hills, or a slow cart drawn by a string of mules, the driver
lazily asleep, and the reins appearing from between the soles of his
sandals,[92] or a troop of gipsies, or orange sellers with the panniers
of their mules brimmed with oranges, now selling at six _reales_, a
little over a shilling, the hundred. Sometimes the country is all
grey-pinched and icy, and but a little further (as near snow-white Arcos
de la Frontera) are great hedges of shrubs and aloes and brambles and
cactus, with a sound of bees, and hovering white and yellow butterflies,
and wide spaces of tall branched flowers of asphodel and grey scented
rosemary. Or in a corner of windswept hills you may find a sheltered
_huerta_ with thick hedge of tall black cypresses; the oranges crowd the
trees with gold, and the almond-trees shed across the dusty road a thick
carpet of broken flowers, pink and white. To Grazalema leads only a
steep and narrow foot-path after one has left the road not far from
Algodonales (pronounced by the peasants in a torrent of vowels Aooae)
and crossed the river Guadalete. In the valley the oranges gleam in
myriads, and the hills immediately above are coloured with a continuous
spray of almond-trees in flower, entirely covering their sides, and
sometimes crowning them in triumph. And far above, over woods of cork
and evergreen oak from which rise frail blue lines of smoke from
charcoal-burners’ fires, appear two or three peaks of snow clear against
a pale blue sky. The path goes up along hedges of brambles through
asphodels and hundreds of trailing periwinkles, with stepping-stones and
flowing streams; here and there a snow-white olive-oil mill with
sentinel cypresses. And, below, the pale snow-fed Guadalete flows
swiftly over white stones through groves of oranges. From a distance
Grazalema gives the fanciful idea of broken shells on a stony shore,
with its houses of white and pink and brown, many of them overhanging
and seeming to grow out of steep rocks. From the village a path leads
through corkwoods, the stripped trunks of the trees a deep maroon
colour, to Ronda on its sheer hill. From Antequera to Málaga by road is
some fifty kilomètres, and here, too, are wonderful contrasts and sudden
change from winter to summer. In the unsheltered plains round Bobadilla
the almond-trees show no sign of flower, and the grey mountains above
the stern frowning towers of Antequera are ice-bound. Turning the pass,
appears a magnificent view of six or seven serrated hill-ranges to the
line of sea beyond hidden Málaga--on the left a fantastically jagged
range, sprinkled in parts with snow; on the right a long line of
snow-mountains that ends in a bare range rising purple from the sea. And
the ice soon grows thin and vanishes, giving place to irises, tiny
jonquils, and periwinkles, and descending half-way down the mountain
side, to Villanueva, the almond-trees have already lost half their
blossoms, grass and white dusty road and dark new-ploughed soil are
thickly strewn with their petals, and the fields of broad beans are in
scented black and white flower. Along the coast full summer reigns, the
balconies are heavy with trailing flowers, the sea is deepest blue, and
the wind blows half-sultrily across the fields of beans and the
faded-green leaves of sugar-cane, with their scent of hay. Sometimes the
road is lined with poplars, and ox-carts go laden with grass and trefoil
and leaves from the sugar-canes. Elsewhere the road winds inland through
grey rocky hills and woods of strong-scented pines, with glimpses of
blue sea; or passes high above cliffs, the sea swelling dull green
immediately below or foaming round dark rocks. From Motril or some other
point one may go up to Granada, the Sierra Nevada appearing and altering
continually; and thoughts of the Alhambra and other names of magic
shorten the road, though it has many a beautiful view and village, such
as Pino to the left on the mountain side, with its white houses and deep
red-brown roofs. But of the many fair districts of Andalucía perhaps the
most delightful in scenery is that lying between the Guadalquivir and La
Mancha, a region of brushwood and mountain. The road from Marmolejo runs
up through hills covered with shrubs of every shade of green, from
grey-blue to shrill yellow, many of them scented, lentiscus, escalonia,
_adelfa_, cistus, rosemary, and a hundred more; even in February the
mid-day sun scents the whole air with them. Near the village of
Cardeña, some thirty miles from Marmolejo, a ruin is supposed to be that
of the inn where many scenes of “Don Quixote” occurred, but only a few
stones remain. Leaving the village in early morning in frost and ice in
order to go down to Montoro on the Guadalquivir, the road at first is
wild, bordered by oak-trees, with flocks of sheep, a few patches of
corn, many magpies, the plaining of birds and the occasional whirr of a
partridge. Yet even here in a few hollows are vines and almond-trees,
and spaces of scented plants and wild yellow jonquils, with white or
brown or yellow butterflies, a humming of bees and rustling of lizards.
The road now cuts through hills of scented shrubs, so various and
ordered with such careful harmony as could be rivalled by no garden
planted by man. On either side are range and range of hills
shrub-covered, dull green, brown and blue, brown where the shrubs have
been cut for firing. To the right is a wide deep gorge with tiny river
far below, and glimpses of blue distances and valleys of more hills. To
the left more hills, and across a blue distance of hill valleys the
Sierra de Jaen with its beautiful pyramid-shaped peak of deepest snow,
and far to the right of it the two more pointed peaks of Granada’s
Sierra Nevada, marvellously clear in distance. Between them and the
Sierra de Jaen runs the snow-sprinkled range above the village of Los
Villares de Jaen. In the transparent might of even a February noon the
more distant and the higher of the near hills are purple, and the great
snow-mountains below the snow-line grow faint and grey. Montoro is a
beautiful quaint town rising above the Guadalquivir in seven or eight
storeys of houses of red stone and whitewash. The tall church-tower,
also of red stone, stands massively above the town, and precipitously
steep and cobbled streets lead up to it. Houses look sheer down from
windows, balconies, and gardens to the river far below, which flows over
a weir above and below the town, so that there is a perpetual sound of
rushing water. From Montoro one may follow the Guadalquivir, now a
majestic river, through its olive groves to the famous bridge of
Alcolea, and the low white line beneath bare hills and wooded mountains
which is Córdoba, seen from the East. Everywhere on the roads and in the
inns of Andalucía the peasants are courteous, pleasant, intelligent,
picturesque; always ready to give any service in their power, often
immensely ignorant. They will ask if “Ingalaterra” is not Spain’s
border-country and confuse it with Gibraltar, or if the Queen was a
Christian before her marriage. For the most part they cannot read or
write;[93] yet they converse willingly on the most various subjects,
especially on politics and religion, the mayor and the priest. Here a
woman complains: “Nine children I had, and the nine are dead; it’s
better so in these times of misery”; there a peasant describes the snowy
Sierra in the month of August, how it glows whiter than lilies across
the plain--_más blanca, que una azucena_; or tells how beautiful is the
country in later spring when the quinces, apples, and pomegranates are
in flower, _que es un paraiso_--a very paradise. As they sit round the
_candela_, in the cold evenings of early spring, talk flows on into the
night, always pleasant and courteous, as of one _gran señor_ to
another.




XVI

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH LITERATURE


There is not a literature in Europe more individual than that of Spain.
It has been influenced greatly at various times by other countries,
especially Italy and France, but in its many masterpieces it has a
flavour of the soil, a local colouring that is all its own. Even when
Spanish authors have borrowed most freely they have usually succeeded in
casting their own individuality over their “honourable kind of
thieving.” Who has a more individual genius than Juan Ruiz, the merry
Archpriest of Hita? Yet it has been shown that his debt to French,
Latin, and other authors is very considerable. In this form of
borrowing--practised by Shakespeare--which is not a direct imitation but
a loan of bricks to make them marble, there is in fact a high
originality. The phrase in which the merits of the Marqués de Santillana
have been summed up might be applied to the whole of Spanish literature:
when it ceases to imitate it is inimitable. Santillana’s mountain
songs--his _serranillas_ are scented as it were with the thyme of the
Castilian hills, whereas his sonnets in the Italian manner are
colourless and artificial.

Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly speaks of “that forcible realistic touch, that
alert vision, that intense impression of the thing seen and accurately
observed which give to Spanish literature its peculiar stamp of
authenticity.” The clear atmosphere of Spain, in which distant mountains
seem to be close at hand, is also the atmosphere of Spanish literature.
The Spaniard may have little subtlety of insight or critical judgment,
but he has a directness of vision that has manifested itself in bigotry,
brutality, and cynical satire, as well as in keen humour,
straight-forwardness, and dignity of character. The realism which has
produced the terrible Christs of the Cathedrals, with their long human
hair and life-like wounds, or the polychrome statues of Spanish carvers,
with a presentation of pain on the human face in all and more than all
its horror--this realism may be due either to a hatred of all that is
false and factitious or to a lack of sensibility, an inability to
sympathize without a harsh shock, a thrill of terrified awe. What would
the Greeks have said to these tortured features, these agonizing brows
and flowing wounds? It is as false art to perpetuate in wood or stone
the agony of a few culminating moments as it is to picture a face
laughing or yawning, from whose perpetually open mouth we will soon turn
with a laugh or a yawn. This realism has found a less harsh expression
in Spanish literature, as in the sane and brilliant art of Velázquez.
The brutality occasionally makes itself felt, as in some of Quevedo’s
bitter writings, but most often the spirit is nobler and more human. In
the twelfth-century “Poema del Cid” all the figures stand out in
wonderful clearness, from the Cid himself to the nine years’ old child
at Burgos, who tells the Cid that they dare not open their doors to him
for fear of the King’s edict. And the events of the poem are brought to
pass before our eyes with a joyful zest and rapidity and a stamp of
truth that are worthy of Homer. We see the Cid ride with a hundred
chosen knights across the Bridge of Alcántara and up Toledo’s narrow
streets. We see him knocking at the gate of San Pedro de Cardeña to bid
farewell to his wife Doña Jimena, and the abbot, who was saying Mass for
the return of dawn, running out with lights and torches to welcome “him
who was born in happy hour.” We see him again in battle as the pennants
rise and fall, we hear “the sword’s griding screech” and the trampling
of the horses at which the earth trembles. In “Celestina,” the long
prose drama of the end of the fifteenth century, we have the same truth
to life, though in very different scenes. Here it is not knights and
battles, but common people of the street--the old hag Celestina, or
Calisto’s servants--that are drawn with a master hand.

“Celestina” gives some inkling of the picaresque novels to come, of
which the flower and cream is “Lazarillo de Tormes” (1554 is the date of
our earliest edition), to be followed by “Guzmán de Alfarache,” “El
Buscón,” and a long posterity in Spain, France, and England. This is no
tale of true love like the “Celestina,” but of gnawing hunger and of the
ingenious efforts of Lazarillo to procure himself bread. His successive
masters, the blind beggar, the miserly priest, the penniless Castilian
gentleman, the rascally seller of Papal bulls, are sketched in the
autobiography of their servant Lazarillo, with the keen eye of famine,
and are unforgettable, as is Lazarillo himself, whose name has become
the common name in Spain for a blind man’s guide, just as Victor Hugo’s
immortal Gavroche gave his name to the Paris _gamin_. It is, in fact, a
masterpiece of seven short chapters, lively in every sentence, of a
direct and biting humour, perhaps the most graphic story ever penned. A
few terse phrases throw a scene or a character into amazingly high
relief, and the picture is as fresh and living to-day as when it first
appeared three and a half centuries ago. No other country and no other
language could have produced a piece of realism so cynically bare, so
completely charming. It has the caustic pithiness of Spanish proverbs,
the bitter flavour of harsh Iberia. It belongs to life rather than to
literature, but life portrayed with the restraint and force of a
consummate art. It was early translated into English as “The Marvelus
Dedes and the Lyf of Lazaro de Tormes.” The authorship of “Lazarillo”
has been ascribed to this man and to that, and there has been great
argument about it and about, without the least degree of certainty. The
name of Hurtado de Mendoza is frequently to be found upon the
title-page. Born in 1503, he was alive when the novel appeared; he was
an author; he could write in trenchant, nay, in scurrilous style, as his
letters concerning the Pope show--he calls him an old rascal, _vellaco_;
but these are hardly conclusive proofs. Whoever the author, the work
still reigns supreme, though many may have thought with Ginés de
Pasamonte in “Don Quixote” that it would be an evil moment for
“Lazarillo” when their memoirs appeared. Half a century after
“Lazarillo” the same faithfulness to picaresque reality, with a broader
outlook and a more universal sympathy, is to be found in the “Novelas
Ejemplares” of Cervantes. Rinconete and Cortadillo, the eponymous heroes
of one of his best-known stories, are closely related to Lazarillo; they
are in fact the Lazarillos of the South of Spain. On the realism of “Don
Quixote” it is unnecessary to lay stress. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly,
referring to its immediate triumph, says: “To contemporary readers the
charm of ‘Don Quixote’ lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and
realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite
sympathy and its persuasive humour. There was no question, then, as to
whether ‘Don Quixote’ was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was
crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his
companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don
Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the
grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich of Quintanar; the goatherds
seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering;
the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight
procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting
dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together
like beads on an iron chain; all these are observed and presented with
masterly precision of detail.”[94]

In spite of Censors and Inquisitors Spanish literature was free and
outspoken, for it portrayed life as it was. If it shows devotion to
Church and King it is because these were deeply-rooted national
convictions. But the priests sometimes meet with less respect. The Cid
threatens to make of the Pope’s vestments trappings for his horse, and
we have seen that Hurtado de Mendoza, the King of Spain’s ambassador in
Rome, speaks of his Holiness in terms that call to mind Benvenuto
Cellini’s passionate outbursts. We have seen, too, the unflattered
portraits of priest and pardon-seller in “Lazarillo de Tormes.”
Cervantes, who “respects and adores the Church as a Catholic and
faithful Christian,” does not fail to thrust fun at the fat _alforjas_,
the well-provisioned saddle-bags of the _señores clérigos_, “who rarely
allow themselves to fare ill,” and he deals more sternly with the
household priests who “govern princes’ houses, and, not being of
princely birth themselves, are unable to guide the conduct of those who
are,” and who “in trying to teach those they govern to be narrow and
limited make them miserable.” He gives us the picture of the false
pilgrims who travel through the length and breadth of Spain, “and there
is not a village in which they do not receive meat and drink and at
least a _real_ in money, and at the end of their journey they leave the
country with a treasure of over a hundred ducats,” and he even allows
himself to wonder why Ginés de Pasamonte’s clever monkey has not been
arraigned before the gentlemen of the Inquisition.

There are in Spanish literature occasional signs of a distorted
imagination, a restless longing to materialize the invisible, which is
not a fanciful dreaming, but rather a kind of super-realism, a strained
and persistent effort to attain a tangible perfection--the spirit which
in some Spanish buildings has added ornament to ornament till the result
is a rich magnificence in an infinity of details but hideousness as a
whole. One form of this we have in such works as Quevedo’s “Sueños,”
another, the Churrigueresque, in the later style of Góngora. On the
other hand, we have the great Spanish mystics in their sincerity,
reflected in the exquisite simplicity of their style, one of the noblest
glories of the literature of their country. Yet they, too, as has often
been pointed out, were pre-eminently practical; Luis de León, for
instance, energetic head of the Augustinian Order; Santa Teresa, the
wise, untiring administrator. Their writings have the fiery transparency
of Pascal, and all the clear and vivid precision of military writers of
many countries, in whose case, as in that of so large a number of
Spaniards, “the lance has not blunted the pen.”[95] The mystics rise to
noble heights of sublimity, but the virtue of their writing is that it
is to the point, with no vague rhetoric; and no advocate could surpass
the lucidity with which Luis de León conducted his own defence before
the Inquisition.

Perhaps the weakest side of Spanish literature is its deficiency in
critical insight. Few, indeed, are the Spanish authors of whom it might
be said, as Ticknor said long ago of Luis de León, that there is
scarcely a line of their poetry that is not exquisite. Espronceda’s
undeniable genius, for instance, shatters itself on that unwieldy
fragment “El Diablo Mundo.” Excessive facility of composition has been
the stumbling-block of the authors as it has been the stumbling-block of
the orators of Spain. Hardly a speaker in the Spanish _Cortes_ is ever
at a loss for words to give expression to his ideas or to conceal the
lack of them. Each, as Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,”
is one

    “That hath a mint of phrases in his brain,
     One whom the music of his own vain tongue
     Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.”

Even so marvellous an orator as Emilio Castelar was at times carried
away by the magnificent eloquence that flowed unfailingly from his lips.
In the same way Lope de Vega could throw off a play in a few days. Over
2000 plays and _autos_ are ascribed to him, and in the 450 that remain
his most ardent admirers confess that there are arid tracts. And,
ordinarily, this copiousness has been a fault, telling against Spanish
literature, and it continues to be a fault: Señor Blasco Ibáñez writes
his brilliant novels in evident haste; Señor Perez Galdós has entered
on the fifth series of ten of his “Episodios Nacionales,” and his other
novels and plays are very numerous. Such wealth of production could not
but be harmful to critical judgment. In the nineteenth century Spain
produced one or two excellent critics, especially Larra and _Clarín_,
the pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, author of “La Regenta,” one of the most
striking psychological novels of the century. Generally, however, if
German literary criticism is circular and, however illuminating the
by-paths of its learning, wanders round the point without ever quite
touching it, Spanish literary criticism is superficial, and either veils
the point in a polite mesh of words, or is prevented by this very
rhetoric from seeing the point at all. Even Valera, who so carefully
limned his own prose, and whose verse, though not inspired, is always
delicate and polished, was far from being a good critic. He praised
effusively works that at best deserved silence, and this insincerity in
literary matters is, it is to be feared, a common weakness in Spain.

The characteristic of Spanish literature that unites it in a special
bond of sympathy with English literature is its large store of humour.
It meets us in the “Poema del Cid,” in the character of the Cid, and in
the quick detection of the ludicrous; the poems of the Archpriest of
Hita are full of merriment and of humorous portrayal of character; the
humour of the Archpriest reappears in “Lazarillo de Tormes,” but without
his jovial gaiety; with Quevedo its vein becomes cruelly satirical.
Humour did not desert Luis de León when ill and solitary in the dark
Valladolid prison of the Inquisition; and it is to be found in a large
majority of Spanish authors, being but another side of their direct,
unclouded observation. In the most humorous of all books, even Don
Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, is constrained to laugh: at
the sight of Sancho, we read, his melancholy was not strong enough to
prevent him from joining in his laughter--and the whole world laughs
with, not at him.

It is because Spanish literature is intensely national that it has so
universal an interest, and in its most recent phase, the novel, it has a
local character that is full of charm. José María de Pereda, for
instance, scarcely ever left his native Cantabrian province. He wrote of
the places and people that he understood and loved. Yet no one who has
read his great novels, “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” or “Sotileza,” or
“Peñas Arriba,” will contend that they are provincial, or that their
interest is merely local.[96] His characters are universal, and Pereda
is another instance of the truth that he who digs a little land deep
reaps a better reward than he who works shallowly over a wide extent. So
Señor Blasco Ibáñez is read with most delight when he cultivates his own
garden--the city and province of Valencia.




XVII

THE POEM OF THE CID


1.--A PRIMITIVE MASTERPIECE

The national hero of Spain has been presented in many guises, but is
nowhere more intensely Spanish than in the “Poema del Cid.” Here are no
marvellous events and miracles, no journeyings out of Spain to Paris and
Rome; everything occurs naturally and simply in Spanish surroundings,
and this the first great masterpiece of Spanish letters has a strong
flavour of the soil. After winning a “victory marvellous and great” over
the Moors in Spain, the Cid says, “I give thanks to God who is Master of
the world; I was in want before, now I am rich, for I have goods and
land and gold and honour.... Moors and Christians live in great fear of
me. There, inland in Morocco, where the Mosques are, they look to have
some night an inroad from me. It is but their fear, for I think not of
it. I shall not go to seek them, in Valencia shall I be.” The Cid is
chivalrous, brave, magnanimous, simple, with a strong sense of humour
and love of fair-play. With simple good faith the poet sees no need to
explain or excuse actions of his hero that may seem blameworthy to a
later age, such as the deceit practised upon the two Jews. Though not
historical, the poem has an air of truth and sincerity deeply
impressive. It was probably composed in the middle of the twelfth
century, not much more than fifty years after the Cid’s death in 1099.
It has been attributed to the beginning of the thirteenth century, but
intrinsic evidence warrants the earlier date. The language is more
archaic than that of thirteenth-century writers. Traces of the Latin
chrysalis appear. “To-morrow morning” is _cras á la mañana_, half Latin
and half Spanish, and “each” in the same way is _quiscadauno_, while the
word _huebos_, which frequently occurs in the sense of _menester_, is
but the Latin _opus_ thinly disguised. The poem, as it has come down to
us incomplete, has nearly four thousand verses. It is written in long
assonant lines of unequal number of syllables. “The poet,” as Tomas
Antonio Sánchez, who first edited the “Poema del Cid” in 1779, remarks,
“thought nothing of giving two or three syllables more to a line as his
sentence might require,” and lines of eleven and lines of eighteen
syllables occur indifferently. From beginning to end the story moves on
without flagging; the style is so rapid and direct that it carries the
reader with it. There is a joy and freshness in the narrative that have
rarely been surpassed.[97] These events may not have happened, or may
have happened differently, but that matters little, since, owing to the
skill of the unknown poet, they stand out with a vividness that imprints
them indelibly on the mind of the reader and proves that nothing is so
real as that which has not happened. Who can forget, for instance, the
arrival of King Alfonso and the Cid at Toledo, when the King passes on
into the town, but the Cid remains on the further side of the Tagus, in
the castle of San Serván (now a beautiful ruin with two Moorish windows
still left, and surrounded by dwarf-asphodels in spring). He says to the
King: “I with mine will rest in San Serván; this evening will my
followers arrive. I will hold vigil in that holy place; to-morrow
morning I will enter the city.” Here he and his followers “said matins
and prime until the dawn,” and next day they enter Toledo, the Cid
splendidly attired and accompanied by a hundred knights, riding across
the bridge of Alcántara and up the steep and narrow street to the Court
or Parliament.[98] Every detail of his dress is given, purple and gold
and silver. But fresh and quaintly vivid details are frequent in the
poem. When the counts of Carrión have outraged and abandoned their
wives the poet pauses to exclaim, “What good fortune were the Cid
Campeador to appear.” Félez Muñoz, on finding the Cid’s daughters almost
at the point of death, brings them water in his hat: “new it was and
fresh, and he had brought it from Valencia.” Mass is said “at half
cock-crow, before the dawn.” The Moor Abengalvon upbraids the treachery
of his guests in planning his murder as follows: “Tell me what have I
done to you, Counts of Carrión? I serving you without guile, and you
took counsel for my death, _Hyo sirviendovos sin art, E vos conseiastes
para mi muert_.” Nothing could be more spontaneous and direct. With
equal directness honest Pero Bermuez calls one of the Counts of Carrión
“a tongue without hands,” “a mouth without truth,” and we read of Asur
González, who “would breakfast before he went to prayer,” that “purple
he came for he had breakfasted, and reckless was his speech.” The
account of the battle is well known: “they clasp their shields before
their breasts, they lower their lances with their banners, they bow
their faces over the saddles, they went to smite them with bold hearts.
With loud voice calls he who was born in happy hour, ‘Strike them,
knights, for the love of charity. I am Ruy Diaz, the Cid Campeador of
Bibar.’ All strike in the group where is Pero Bermuez. Three hundred
lances are there, all with their banners. A Moor apiece they killed at a
single blow, and as they turned about they kill as many more. There
would you see many lances rise and fall, many a shield pierced and
riddled, many a breastplate broken through, many white banners come out
red with blood, many good steeds go without a rider. The Moors call on
Mahomet, the Christians on St. James. In a short space a thousand and
three hundred of the Moors are slain.” No version can give an idea of
the vigour of the original. But it is not only battle scenes that are
treated forcibly and thrown into high relief. We may take the arrival of
the Cid at San Pedro de Cardeña as an example of the amazing vividness
given to more quiet episodes: “The cocks are crowing and the dawn is
trying to break, when the good Campeador arrived at San Pedro. The Abbot
Don Sancho, servant of the Creator, was saying Matins for the return of
dawn. And Doña Jimena, with five noble ladies, was praying St. Peter and
the Creator: ‘O Thou who guidest all, be with my Cid the Campeador.’ He
was calling at the gate and they heard the summons. Heavens! how glad
was the Abbot Don Sancho! With lights and with candles they ran into the
courtyard. With such joy they receive him who was born in happy hour. ‘I
thank God, my Cid,’ said the Abbot Don Sancho, ‘since I see you here,
accept my hospitality.’”


II. VALENCIA DEL CID.

The poem opens abruptly with the exile of the Cid from Castille. He
rides to his house at Burgos but finds all closed against him. Only a
nine-year-old girl is found to tell him that “last night came the King’s
letter. We dare not open or receive you, else would we lose our goods
and houses, and moreover the eyes of our heads.”

To obtain money the Cid fills two chests with sand, and on these
“covered with red leather, and studded with nails well-gilt,” he obtains
six hundred marks from the Jews Rachel and Vidas. They are not to open
the chests for a year. On the wall in the cloister of the Cathedral at
Burgos still hangs an ancient chest known as the _Cofre del Cid_. Thus
furnished, the Cid leaves Castille, and he prays solemnly to God and the
glorious Saint Mary, “for here I leave Castille, since the King is wrath
with me, and I know not if in all my days I shall enter it again.” He
takes leave of his wife and children at the Convent of San Pedro de
Cardeña, and, after early Mass said by the Abbot Don Sancho, departs,
wistfully turning his head to look back. Doña Jimena, his wife, prays
for his safety to the “glorious Lord the Father, who madest Heaven and
Earth, and thirdly, the sea, who madest stars and moon and the sun to
give heat.” Already men were flocking to the Cid’s banner, and his first
exploit is the capture of the town of Castejon. He lies in ambush before
it: “The dawn is breaking, and morning was at hand. The sun went forth,
Heavens! how beautiful it rose. In Castejon all were awaking. They open
the gates, and quickly went forth to see their work in the fields and
their possessions.” When they were all gone forth, the Cid took the
town. The next town, Alcocer, he also captures by a wile. “The news
grieves those of Teca, the men of Teruel it does not please; it pleases
not the men of Calatayud.” A host of Moors besieges the Cid in Alcocer,
and after three weeks, the provisions failing, he goes forth and gains a
great victory. At the sound of the drums of the Moorish host “the earth
was like to crack.” He pursues the enemy to the walls of Calatayud.
_Fata Calatayuth duró el segudar._ He sends Alvar Fáñez to _Castiella la
gentil_ with a present of thirty horses for King Alfonso and money for
Doña Jimena, and for a thousand masses at Santa María de Burgos.
Zaragoza agrees to pay tribute to the Cid. Don Remont Berenger, Count of
Barcelona, goes out against him, and persists in coming to an
engagement, though the Cid sends him a message: “I have nothing of his,
bid him let me go in peace.” The result is a crushing defeat of the
“army of the Franks,” and the Count is taken prisoner. The account of
his captivity is entertaining. The Count refuses all food: “‘I will not
eat a mouthful for all there is in Spain. I will rather die (lit. lose
my body and leave my soul) since such ill-equipped men have beaten me in
battle.’ You will hear what said my Cid Ruy Diaz: ‘Eat, Count, of this
bread and drink this wine; if you do as I say you shall be free, if not
in all your days you shall not see Christian land.’” The Count eats
nothing for three days: “They dividing these great spoils cannot make
him eat a piece of bread.” Then the Cid renews his promise to give him
liberty: “But of what you have lost and I won in the field know that I
will not give you any part, but what you have lost I will not give you,
for I have need of it for me and for my vassals, and will not give it
you.” At length the Count yields. “The Count is eating, Heavens! with
what good will. Over against him sat he who was born in happy hour: ‘If
you eat not well, Count, and I am not satisfied, here we shall remain,
we shall not part.’... The Cid, who is watching him, is satisfied, so
quickly did Count Remont move his hands,” and he escorts him on his way.
The Count takes his leave and “goes turning his head and looking back;
with fear he went that the Cid will repent, that which he would not do
for all that is in the world.” Fresh victories follow. The Cid carries
the war “over against the salt sea” and takes among other towns
Murviedro (the old Saguntum and modern Sagunto). Here he is besieged by
the Valencians, but sallies forth and defeats them. _Fata Valencia duró
el segudar._ For three years he continues to wage war and take towns.
“The fame of my Cid, know well, is noised abroad.” “The inhabitants of
Valencia know not what to do. From no quarter came bread, father and son
are without counsel, friend cannot comfort friend. A bad thing, Sirs, it
is to have a lack of bread.” After a siege of nine months the Cid takes
Valencia. He establishes a Christian bishopric in his new town, and
sends a present of a hundred horses to King Alfonso. Alvar Fáñez on his
return escorts Doña Jimena and her daughters Elvira and Sol to Valencia.
The Cid bids them welcome to the city: “‘You, loved and honoured wife,
and both my daughters, my heart and my soul, enter with me the city of
Valencia, the possession that I have won you.’ Mother and daughters
kissed his hands, with such honour entered they Valencia. My Cid went
with them to the Citadel: he led them up to the highest part. Velvet
eyes glance on all sides. They look at Valencia, how the city lies, and
on the other side they have the sea. They look on the plain, luxuriant,
and large. They raise their hands to pray to God. So glad is my Cid and
his companions for this good and great spoil. The winter is departing,
and March is about to come in....” The Moorish King Jucef, with “fifty
times a thousand” Moors, comes up against the Cid, but is defeated with
great slaughter. “There escaped not more than a hundred and four.” A
fresh present of two hundred horses is sent to King Alfonso. The Counts
of Carrión now determine to ask for the Cid’s daughters in marriage, and
the King proposes an interview with the Cid “above the Tagus, which is a
principal river.” The marriage is arranged, and the Counts return with
the Cid to Valencia, where the wedding festivities last a full
fortnight. The guests depart laden with presents from the Cid. “Rich
return to Castille those who had come to the wedding.” And here there is
a very definite division in the poem. “The verses of this song have here
an ending. May the Creator be with you and all his Saints” (lines, 2286,
7). The remainder of the poem tells of the treachery and punishment of
the Counts of Carrión. It begins with the incident of the lion. A lion
that was kept in the court of the Cid’s house escaped one day as the Cid
lay asleep. His trusty followers drew round him to keep him from harm,
but of the Counts of Carrión one scrambled under the Cid’s bench, the
other ran out by the door crying: “I shall not see Carrión,” and hid
behind the beam of a wine-press, so that his cloak and doublet were all
soiled. The Cid, having cowed the lion, “asked for his sons-in-law, but
found them not. They call aloud for them, but none answers. When they
found them and they came, they came all pale. You have not seen such
jests as went about the Court. My Cid the Campeador ordered that they
should cease.” Further events showed the small spirit and treachery of
the Cid’s sons-in-law, and his daughters are ultimately betrothed to
nobler men, the Infantes of Navarre and Aragon. The poem, as we have it,
ends with a prayer that God may give Paradise to him who wrote (_i.e._
copied) it, and with a request for money or a glass of wine for its
reciters: “Dat nos del vino si non tenedes dineros.”




XVIII

A PRISONER OF THE SPANISH INQUISITION


I.--NOVEDADES

The poetry of Luis de León is not voluminous; he has no great variety of
theme; he sings “the quiet life of him who shuns the world’s uproar;”
but there is, as has been said, scarcely a line of it that is not
exquisite. And if, as a lyric poet, Luis de León stands in the front of
Spanish literature, as a writer of eloquent and well-moulded Castilian
prose he has had few equals. His “Nombres de Cristo” is one of the
masterpieces of the Spanish language. The sentences are perhaps
occasionally too prolix, lengthening out in a rich profusion of words
and images. He had, as Ticknor said, a Hebrew soul, and he delighted in
similes. It is indeed partly this that gives to his style a colour and a
sound which rank him among the greatest prose-writers of any age. But as
a writer Luis de León is too well known to need comment. And to himself
his literary works were of a secondary importance, and held a
subordinate place in his strenuous and energetic life. Born in 1527, of
a well-known family at Belmonte in La Mancha, he was sent by his father
at the age of fourteen to the University of Salamanca with the advice to
“follow the common opinion in letters, _que siguiese la opinión comun en
las letras_.” The precept was not unneeded in that age, for the
Reformation had unhinged men’s beliefs and left them a prey to many
fears. Intolerance on the side of reformers was answered by fresh
intolerance. In Spain one might least expect any dissent from the
accepted religion. Even in Spain, however, the general ferment of the
rest of Europe had found an echo, the spirit of doubt and inquiry had
penetrated to the Spanish Universities, and men’s minds were opening to
new lines of thought. There was indeed ample scope for reform.
Scholasticism had become a dry and stilted system, well qualified to
call down ridicule on all learning. Its professors delighted in
hairsplitting and quibbles. Luis de León speaks with a scathing sarcasm
of the type of professor who said that he was ... “content with a
knowledge of St. Thomas and the Saints ... and had no wish for any new
learning (_novedades_);” of those who “flatter themselves and fancy
that, because they have in their rooms a score of books covered with
dust, and have obtained the degree of master of arts, they have well
earned the name of men of letters, and may for the rest give themselves
up quite securely to sleep and good living ... and they consider that
the mere fact of having the books and dipping into some part of them
once a year bestows on them a knowledge of St. Thomas and the Saints.”
But the new spirit of inquiry and reform led those who belonged to the
old school to fence themselves the more closely with narrow and bigoted
beliefs, to cling to conventionalities of dogma, and to cry out on the
most innocent innovations. Violent attacks on Scholasticism had the
effect of showing more moderate attempts at reform in an odious light.
Suspicions were everywhere rife, and it required no little care to avoid
the accusation of being anxious for “new things.” The highest
ecclesiastics were not exempt from attack. Carranza, the Archbishop of
Toledo, had spent a certain number of years in England. In 1556 he had
visited Oxford and found it Catholic, _la encontró católica_, but in the
following year at Cambridge he burnt many heretical books and English
Bibles. On his return to Spain he was thought to have been contaminated
by contact with so many heretics, though he boasted that he had done
more than any other in discovering them.


II.--SALAMANCA UNIVERSITY

In the Universities especially accusations of every kind hung fire over
men marked out by their position or abilities. The University of
Salamanca had always been eminently conservative. Popes and Kings were
anxious for its welfare. Philip II. saw in the University a stronghold
of religion and loyalty. Pedro Chacon tells how “in the year 1560, on
the return of our sovereign Don Philip to Spain after an absence of
several years spent in reducing and governing the kingdom of England, he
at once confirmed all the privileges which the University had received
from his predecessors.” He intervened personally in the general affairs
and particular disputes of the University, and seems to have considered
no trouble too great to preserve the ancient purity of its opinions.
Luis de León became deeply attached to the University, “the light,” as
he said, “not of Spain only, but of all Europe,” and to Salamanca as
student and professor he devoted his entire life. He entered the
Augustinian order a few months after arriving at Salamanca, and by so
doing renounced a very considerable income which he would otherwise have
inherited as his father’s eldest son. His success was rapid. He obtained
the chair of philosophy, and afterwards that of theology, and this
latter chair he still held when he was arrested in the beginning of 1572
and detained for nearly five years in the prison of the Inquisition at
Valladolid. The most serious charges against him were that he had
translated the Song of Solomon into the vulgar tongue, and that he had
depreciated the authority of the Vulgate. But it was a question
primarily between two schools of thought in the University, between the
rival Greek and Hebrew scholars, between the members of the order of St.
Dominic and the members of the order of St. Augustine, and the case only
came under the authority of the Inquisition through the denunciations of
Luis de León’s enemies, such as León de Castro. León de Castro was a
professor of the old school. He was an excellent Latin and Greek
scholar, and was possessed of great energy and perseverance. By his
learning, and partly by sheer force of character, he had won a position
of high authority in the University, and he guarded his authority with a
jealous care. Intolerant of opposition, he sought to crush all who by
their talents or popularity might throw him into the shade. He wished to
reign supreme. He was easily roused to such a pitch of anger that he
lost all control of himself; “when engaged in a dispute,” says Luis de
León, “he does not know what he is doing or saying.” He was hasty in his
judgment of men and opinions, and supplied deficiencies in his own
knowledge by a fierce positiveness. It is said that if he found an
opinion in the work of a saint or philosopher, he would at once say,
“This is the opinion of all the saints, of all the philosophers.” To him
the Vulgate was the final and irrefragable authority, and he opposed
with the utmost vigour those scholars who went back to the Hebrew
original. Such Hebrew scholars he called “Jews,” a name that smelt of
fire in that age. (Against Luis de León the accusation was actually
brought of being a Jew, and descended from Jews.) If it was shown that
the Hebrew text differed from the Vulgate, Castro answered that the
Hebrew text had been altered by the “Jews” since the translation had
been made. His position was thus impregnable. He would listen to no
arguments, but shouted down his opponents. In a narrow age he might
persuade himself that in thus asserting his opinions he was doing good
service to the Church. His influence was without doubt great, and it
needed no little courage to oppose him. Luis de León, however, was not a
man to lie flat and love Setebos. He was frank and open by nature, even
to rashness and indiscretion, and in his eagerness for reform was not
afraid of making enemies. When he took his degree he attacked certain
abuses in a Latin speech of Ciceronian violence, and on another occasion
he publicly upbraided the Dominicans with the heresies of their order,
and the thrust seems to have gone home, for he himself says that they
felt it keenly, “_sintieronse fieramente_.” Above all, he had no
sympathy with pedantry and intolerance. It was impossible that two men
of characters so different should not come into collision, and in fact
the discussions between professors were often marked by boisterous
disputes and all the venom of ill-feeling and discourtesy that sometimes
strangely enough creeps into the daily life of the learned. On one
occasion Luis de León threatened to have Castro’s book--a commentary on
Isaiah--burnt by the Inquisition. On this book Castro had spent much
trouble and much money, and the threat cut him to the quick, so that he
answered that he would have Luis de León himself burnt. And such threats
were not empty words, or the thoughtless bickering of an idle hour. That
Luis de León had many malignant enemies was amply shown at his trial.


III.--IN A VALLADOLID DUNGEON.

The order of imprisonment was issued on the 26th of February, 1572. His
goods were to be confiscated with the exception of a bed and forty
ducats to provide for his food in prison. He was to be seized, wherever
found, “in church, monastery, or other sacred place,” and he was to
bring with him nothing but clothes and linen. A curious clause adds that
“beasts of burden to carry him and his bed, etc., are to be provided at
the customary price, and the price is not to be raised.” He was thus
arrested and conducted to Valladolid. The following description of the
prison is given in the trial of Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, who had
been confined there some ten years before. “The prison consisted of two
rooms, one for him and one for two servants. They were so remote that
the Archbishop heard nothing of a fire which broke out on the 21st of
September, 1561, and, lasting for a day and a half, consumed more than
four hundred houses, some of them close to the secret prison. The stench
was so intolerable that they were obliged at times to beg that the doors
might be opened, or they would be suffocated. The infection of the place
rendered both master and servants seriously ill, and the doctors of the
Holy Office reported that it was indispensable to bathe the apartment in
pure air morning and evening. In consequence the Inquisitors arranged
that a grating should be made in the door, a device which the Archbishop
scorned as adding insult to injury. The rooms were not swept ... the
shutters of the windows were kept closed, and on some days the
Archbishop had to light a candle at nine in the morning. The food was
brought on broken plates; the sheets served as table-cloth....” In a
letter written to Philip II., after two years of imprisonment, the
Archbishop says, “I fear and expect death daily, and to this end my
treatment seems to have been directed ever since I came here.” The loss
of sun and light, and the actual dirtiness and horror of the place must
have been utterly repulsive to a man of Luis de León’s temperament. In
one of his writings, “La Perfecta Casada,” he says, “Is not cleanliness
the fountain head of beauty--the first and greater part of it?” He loved
the open air, and was wont to regret the loss of liberty which even his
duties as professor at Salamanca entailed. But to the actual and severe
hardships to be undergone there was added, for the devout Catholic, the
more subtle and indefinite torture of the mind. For he could not be
certain that by some involuntary sin he had not incurred degradation in
this life, and punishment unceasing in the next, and in the loneliness
and gloom of the prison these doubts would often recur. Luis de León
acknowledged the full authority of the Inquisition, and his unqualified
submission was not forced or hypocritical, but the fruit of a sincere
conviction. The extreme clearness of his intellect was his safeguard,
and, though he bowed himself in all things to the will of the Church, he
was well assured of his own innocence. Shortly after his arrest he drew
up a profession of faith, declaring that he lived and died “now and in
the future in the faith and belief of the Holy Catholic Church, and
confessing his sins _con entrañable dolor_.” His defence was conducted
throughout in a masterly way. During these five years of suffering he
showed a fine sincerity and a clearness of argument that remind one very
strongly of Pascal. Never was his style more trenchant and lucid, his
reasoning more subtle than in the numerous “Unpublished Documents” that
have come down to us. On no occasion was the patience and humility of
the man more clearly shown. It is a strange reflection that many of
these documents, in accordance with the secrecy of the Inquisition’s
proceedings, were kept hidden from Luis de León himself, and that he
probably never knew, as we know, that he came within a little of being
examined upon the rack. In spite of his ingenious and elaborate defence,
Luis de León’s trial was a long one, and one must shudder to think of
the sufferings and despair of men of weaker metal and less subtle
intellect, such as his intimate friend Grajal, who died in prison. The
Inquisition proceeded as usual in an extremely slow and thorough
fashion. “_Recato y secreto_,” caution and secrecy, were indeed its
watchwords. Witnesses concerning Luis de León’s case were examined in
many parts of Spain, and even at Cuzco, in Peru. It were easy to declaim
against the cruelty and tyranny of the Inquisition, but on closer view
it would seem unjust to lay the blame entirely at its door. The times,
as we have noted, called for the utmost vigilance on the part of the
upholders of the true and Catholic faith. They might hold themselves
bound to investigate with unwearied diligence the most trifling disputes
concerning the doctrine of the Church. Already unorthodox books had been
filtering into Spain. A translation of the Psalms had been received at
Cadiz, and one man alone, a kind of sixteenth-century Borrow, had
brought two bales of heretical books to Seville. The life of the
bookseller was rendered anxious and difficult by such proceedings. In a
letter to the Inquisitors of Valladolid we read: “The booksellers of
this town (Salamanca) have received and continue daily to receive bales
of books from France and other parts. These they dare not open for sale
without permission.” The evil must be stopped before it spread contagion
through the country. It may be argued plausibly that the firmness of the
Inquisition saved Spain from the religious dissensions that raged so
fiercely in France, Germany, and England, nor may it be forgotten that
the centuries of the Inquisition’s most rigorous power were the
centuries of Spain’s greatest literary glory.

Perhaps the harm of the Inquisition was, rather, not that it affected
original thought and research, but that it created in everyday life an
intolerable spirit of suspicion and distrust. It was to the animosity of
their private enemies that the imprisonment of both Archbishop Carranza
and Luis de León was due, and it is difficult to believe in the
sincerity of the witnesses who, “without being cited” and “for the
discharge of their conscience,” laid their accusations before the
Inquisition. In the University of Salamanca there was much prying and
spying, fostered by the rivalries and enmity of the professors. The
professors were elected by the votes of the students after a public
discussion between the candidates on a given theme, and this system
naturally led to considerable ill-feeling and many abuses. During
discussions in the University there would be always some one on the
watch for any specious subject of accusation. Thus, when Luis de León
maintained that “marriage was not in itself an evil but only a less
blessed state than celibacy,” León de Castro had written it down in
order to denounce it to the Inquisition, and in the same way another
professor had gone hastily out during a discussion in order to fetch pen
and ink. On one occasion, when Zuñiga was in Luis de León’s cell at
Salamanca, the latter mentioned a book which his friend, the celebrated
Arias Montano, had sent him. Zuñiga thereupon displayed suspicions of
Montano which Luis de León resented. A few days afterwards, to quote
Luis de León’s own words, “he seemed to me to be still suspicious and,
knowing that he was of a morose spirit and ever inclined to see things
in their worst light, I said to him laughingly: ‘You are indeed a
pessimist; it seems you still think ill of Montano.’ He said, ‘No; of
the man I do not think ill, but I am not certain that it is not my duty
to denounce the book.’” Luis de León goes on to say that more than two
years afterwards he also “had a fit of pessimism, and, considering the
number of heretics who had been discovered and were being discovered
daily in Spain,” determined himself to lay the matter before the
Inquisition--a common way of forestalling an accusation. Again, Medina
examined with most holy zeal (_con santísimo celo_) Luis de León’s
lectures and other papers. The result would be all the more fruitful in
that he would not omit the notes taken by students at the lectures, and,
as Luis de León was well aware, “ignorant students often put a quite
wrong interpretation on what the lecturer said.” Medina did, in fact,
call a meeting of students in his cell and inquired of them if they had
heard or knew of any suspicious or perverted doctrines of Luis de León.
Such methods must multiply means of attack and further spin out a trial.
Of one witness Luis de León, in his defence, said, “This witness is the
Bachelor of Arts Rodríguez, nicknamed ‘Doctor Subtle’ in the University.
I think it is he because he says I left him without an answer, and he
was the only person of that University with whom this happened. For as
he was a man of unsound judgment and sometimes asked impertinent
questions and from what he heard and did not understand collected
nonsensical answers, I grew angry and called him a fool. And at other
times, in order not to become angry and out of humour on his account, I
would give him no answer but flee from him. And he is so witless and
importunate that I remember trying to escape him both indoors and in the
Schools and in the streets, he following and asking absurd questions, I
hurrying on without answering, until at last some of my companions or
other students would push him aside and hold him back by force.” A
little picture of academic life which for vividness it would be hard to
surpass. Luis de León, indeed, was not sparing in his criticism of his
various accusers. Their names, in accordance with the custom of the
Inquisition, were kept from him, but on reading the anonymous
accusations, he referred each one to its true author with unfailing
judgment and was thus enabled to refute them with a sure hand. Of one of
the witnesses who belonged to his own order he said: “He is known among
us as a man who never speaks the truth except by accident.” Of another
he speaks satirically as “most spiritual,” _espiritualísimo_, and says
that the words “kisses,” “embraces,” “bright eyes,” and other words in
the Spanish rendering of the Song of Songs scandalized him; words, that
is, which had not struck him when he read them in Latin, shocked him now
that they were written in the romance. Luis de León was not unaware that
the worst interpretation would be put on his sayings, or reported
sayings, and he was led by this fear himself to lay many trivial details
before the Inquisition. Thus he confessed that at a lecture “the
students furthest from me bade me speak louder, for I was hoarse and
they could not hear me well, and I said: ‘I am hoarse and, you know, it
is better to speak low that the gentlemen of the Inquisition may not
hear.’” He was full of life and humour, and many a chance word spoken in
jest might be twisted by the malicious to an uncatholic implication. He
felt in prison that he was fighting blindfold against many enemies and
asked more than once to be brought face to face with his accusers. “And
thus,” he says, “they speak from afar as men in safety and free, while
I, blind and in prison, cannot see who is attacking me.” Many absurd
charges were brought against him. According to one witness he “always
said low mass, even on a feast day, and no one could hear what he said
as he mumbled ‘tu, tu, tu,’ and made an end very speedily.” Another
accusation seems to have been based on a mere quibble between the words
_vino_, “wine,” and _vinó_, “came.” For at a dinner some one seems to
have asked for wine and Fray Luis to have said that it was doubtful if
it had come; but, according to the witness, all understood his answer to
refer to the coming of Christ! Another witness said that he was “a very
clever theologian, but somewhat bold in his lectures”--a charge less
petty than the preceding, but from its vagueness scarcely less
ridiculous. In the same spirit Castro “had heard say,” “thought that he
had heard”; Medina “thought that he saw in Fray Luis an inclination to
new things.” Such charges coming from enemies made his innocence, as he
said, “clearer than the light of noon.” Minute points were elaborately
dealt with. For instance, the sale of Castro’s book on Isaiah had been
spoilt, he said, by the Jews (Luis de León and his friends); according
to Luis de León, the real reason of its failure was its size and
costliness. As to the accusation of being, in fact, by descent a Jew, it
would appear that Fray Luis’ great-grandmother, or rather the second
wife of his great-grandfather, was of Jewish origin.

The one serious charge was, indeed, that he did not give due authority
to the Vulgate. It is probable that his attitude had been inopportune at
a time when the Vulgate was being attacked on all sides by the heretics,
and that the numerous students who attended his lectures were apt to
exaggerate his doctrine.

And so the trial dragged on. Luis de León began to lose patience. “If
only,” he exclaims, “the sun were divided fairly between me and my
accusers”--a metaphor borrowed from duelling. He complains frequently of
unnecessary delay. He writes to the Inquisitors, “You are delaying the
conclusion of my trial without just cause,” “without cause and to the
one end of lengthening out my imprisonment, and with the wish to put a
term to my life, since you find me without fault.” He begs that there be
no more delay “considering the length of time I have been here, and the
small cause there was for bringing me here, and the enmity and notorious
calumnies that began and occasioned this scandal.” His imprisonment, he
says, is “a long, harsh and cruel torment.” Partly constant
communications between Valladolid and Madrid caused delay. Thus a
request of Fray Luis, made on the 20th of August, did not receive an
answer from the Supreme Tribunal at Madrid till the 20th of September.
Partly, too, it must be admitted that after the scandal and excitement
caused by his imprisonment at Salamanca, where he had a host of friends
and followers, it would seem almost as if the Inquisitors were unwilling
to release him with the confession that the whole matter had been smoke
without a fire; and the longer the trial continued the greater,
naturally, would become their embarrassment.

He was allowed some books and a few other articles. Thus he asks for a
crucifix, a brass candlestick, a knife, “to cut what I eat,” the works
of St. Leon, a Hebrew Bible, a Sophocles in Greek, a Pindar in Greek and
Latin, etc. He complains that he is not properly attended, and “it has
happened that I have fainted with hunger from having no one to give me
food, and I beg that I may be given a monk of my order to serve me if
you do not wish to allow me to die alone between four walls.” He was not
allowed the use of the Sacraments, and in his frequent illness this was
a constant torture. “You persist,” he says, “in keeping me in prison as
if I were a heretic, deprived of the use of the Sacraments, with
manifest danger to my life and to my soul, though you bring no fresh
charge against me.” He therefore begs them, pending the sentence, to
“allow me at least a free death among my monks.” Seeing that the
conclusion of his case was delayed from day to day he implores, in
another petition, to be transported to some monastery in Valladolid that
he may die there as a Christian. “This is the only thing that I solicit
or desire, since the passion of my enemies and my own sins have taken
from me all that one desires in life.”


IV.--EX FORTI DULCEDO.

On the 28th September, 1576, the sentence is at length pronounced. The
majority of the judges “are of opinion that Fray Luis de León be put to
the torture as to his meaning, and as to what has been witnessed against
him, and as to the propositions that have been noted as heretical, in
spite of the fact that the theologians profess finally to be satisfied
with them and to give them the meaning that Fray Luis would have them
bear; and that the torture to be applied to him be moderate, seeing that
the accused is of delicate health; and that the results obtained be then
further examined.” This was the verdict of four out of the seven judges;
one gave no decision; the remaining two were of opinion that the accused
should be reprimanded in the Court of the Holy Office, and that in the
general hall of the greater Schools of Salamanca, in the presence of the
students and other persons of the University, he should declare his
propositions to be suspicious and ambiguous; that he should be forbidden
to lecture in the Schools or elsewhere, and that his translation of the
Song of Solomon should be prohibited and withdrawn from circulation.

The superior and more impartial tribunal of Madrid quashed the sentence,
and Luis de León was not questioned on the rack. It ordered (7th
December, 1576) that Fray Luis de León should be acquitted and
admonished in the Court of the Holy Office to be careful in future how
he treated of matters so dangerous as those implicated in the trial. The
sentence pronounced runs as follows: “We find, in accordance with the
decrees and on the merits of the said suit, that it is our duty to
absolve and we do absolve the said Fray Luis de León from the burden of
this trial.” He requested and obtained a declaration that he had been
acquitted without penance or stain whatsoever, and was free to exercise
all his duties in the University.

Luis de León’s health had never been robust, and the hardships of his
imprisonment broke it completely. That he survived is probably due to
his fortitude and mystic faith. In a dedication to Cardinal Quiroga, he
says: “When I was on trial, owing to the intrigues of certain of my
enemies, and was branded as suspicious in the faith, and was cut off not
only from the conversation but from the intercourse and very sight of
men, and was buried in a prison for five years, in the midst of all this
I felt a peace and joyfulness of spirit which I often miss now that I am
restored to the light of day and to my friends.”

These years spent in prison were not passed in idleness. Besides the
business of his defence, he wrote several of his poems during this time
and his long treatise “Los Nombres de Cristo.” Many know his short poem
beginning, “Here falsehood and wrong kept me imprisoned,” and ending
with the line so often quoted in Spanish literature, “ni envidiado ni
envidioso.” And we may refer to this time of his imprisonment such
passages as “No pinta el prado aquí la primavera”--

    “Here with the spring the meadows are not gay
     Nor the clouds golden in the rising sun;
     No nightingale pours forth its plaintive lay:
     But here the night is sleepless, and the day
     Is full of tears and unconsoling sorrow,
     And the sad present has a sadder morrow....”

Or the beautiful poem beginning “Virgen que el sol más pura”--

    “Virgin purer than the sun,
     Glory of mortals, of the heavens light,
     Whose pity is not less than thy great might,...”

Without the enforced leisure of these years we cannot doubt that his
“Nombres de Cristo” would never have been written, and Spanish prose
would have lacked one of its most luminous and brilliant jewels.

Spanish literature owes him a great gratitude for having written in
Spanish, contrary to the prejudices of the learned, who held that a
writing to be profound must be obscure, and “marvelled that a theologian
of whom they expected some great treatise full of deep questions had
ended by writing a book in romance.” But Luis de León wished, he says,
to open the “new path” of good style, that consists “both in what is
said and in the way of saying it, and in the task of choosing the best
words of those in common use, and considering the sound of them, and
even at times of counting the letters, and weighing and measuring and
mingling them, that the matter be presented not only with clearness but
with softness and harmony.”

Nearly five years after his arrest Luis de León returned to Salamanca.
He returned entirely justified, and the University welcomed him back
with rejoicing. Over the Augustinian Order especially his trial had hung
like a cloud, and the condemnation of so distinguished a professor must
have been felt as a disgrace by the whole University. The legend is well
known. When Luis de León resumed his lectures the entire University
thronged to hear him. He was enjoined by the Inquisition to preserve
complete silence as to its proceedings, but this was an occasion at
least for subtle and indirect allusions, and for the excitement of
general sympathy. Luis de León rose in the crowded room and began his
lecture with the words: “Gentlemen, we were saying yesterday,” and so
continued his course. The intervening five years were obliterated. The
story is so thoroughly in keeping with the character of the man, whose
simplicity and sincere humility produced an effect unattainable by the
most studious artifice, that we would willingly maintain its truth. We
would thrust aside the prosaic facts that Luis de León did not resume
his lectures, the chair having been occupied in his absence, and he
acquiescing in this on his return (_la daba por bien empleada_), and
that, when he was assigned another course of lectures, a long dispute
arose in the University as to the hour at which he should deliver them.
We may say at least that, if the story is not literal in the facts, in
spirit it is essentially true. The quaint kind of pulpit from which the
words were spoken, and the lecture-room with its rough-hewn benches, are
still preserved in the University at Salamanca, and the sublime words,
“_Decíamos ayer_,” form part of the _repertoire_ of the tourist’s
cicerone.

Luis de León, on the recovery of his freedom, might exclaim, in the
words of the Persiles of Cervantes (Cervantes, who professed himself
Luis de León’s “reverent votary and follower,” _á quien yo reverencio,
adoro y sigo_): “I give you thanks, immense and merciful Heavens, that
you have brought me to die where your light may look upon my death, and
not in the shades of the dark prison-house which I now leave.” He
survived for fifteen years, dying on the 23rd of August, 1591, nine days
after being promoted from Vicar-General to Provincial of his Order. His
good humour and natural gaiety, his unselfishness and common-sense, won
for him many and strong friendships--we feel, indeed, that he was a man
not without failings, but entirely lovable. He had been commanded by the
Inquisitor-General to publish his own works, and was entrusted with the
publication of those of Santa Teresa. His second Inquisition trial arose
apparently from a lecture on the vexed question of predestination and
freewill. It was declared that the University of Salamanca was greatly
scandalized at the boldness with which he maintained that the contrary
of his own opinion was heresy. The matter, however, ended by his being
“benevolently and lovingly admonished” at Toledo. Besides these and many
other occupations, he gave ungrudging help to the Carmelite nuns in
asserting their independence, which was threatened by a reform
sanctioned by Philip II. The Pope, indeed, was favourable to the nuns,
but the King opposed the Papal Brief, and Luis de León is reported to
have said: “It is impossible to carry out a single order of His Holiness
in Spain.” The story that Fray Luis died of grief on account of the
King’s anger at this opposition is certainly untrue, although it is
likely enough that the King was annoyed. He is said to have exclaimed:
“Quien le mete á Frai Luis en estas cosas?--What has Fray Luis to do in
this _galère_?” Luis de León’s life was thus not without many turmoils.
But we may like best to think of him, as in the description in his
“Nombres de Cristo,” “in the month of June, after the Feast of St. John
when the Salamanca term breaks up,” retiring from a long year of work to
the country house possessed by his monastery on the banks of the Tormes.
There, in the great garden of trees growing without order, with a stream
“running and pausing as if in laughter,” and with the winding river
Tormes in sight--“a place far better than the professor’s chair”--he
would meditate alone or converse with friends “in the cool of the
morning, on a day most calm and bright;” “for,” he says elsewhere in the
same work, “it may be that in towns there is more refinement of speech,
but fineness of sentiment is of the country and of solitude.”




XIX

THE MODERN SPANISH NOVEL


I.--REVIVAL. FERNÁN CABALLERO

The success of “Don Quixote” might have been expected to fire a host of
imitators, but the seventeenth century in Spain was given rather to the
drama than to the novel, and the eighteenth century “was an age of
barrenness in Spain, so far as concerns romance.”[99] In the first half
of the nineteenth century the Spanish novel was for the most part a pale
imitation of Sir Walter Scott, and these somewhat insipid romances, in
spite of the wealth of subjects afforded by Spanish history, were not
genuinely Spanish; they were due to a taste imported by returning
exiles, and were not a natural growth of the soil. Thus the Condesa
Pardo Bazán could say that in Spain the novel has no yesterday, only an
_anteayer_, a day before yesterday, and the appearance of Fernán
Caballero’s “La Gaviota” was hailed by a Spanish critic as a link
between Cervantes and the nineteenth century. It marked, indeed, the
revival of realistic fiction in Spain. Cecilia Böhl von Faber, daughter
of a distinguished German settled in Spain, was born in Switzerland in
1796, but passed nearly the whole of her life in Spain, and chiefly at
Seville. She combined German depth with the wit and clear vision of
Andalucía. A discerning Madrid critic reviewing “La Gaviota,” the first
published work of the then unknown Fernán Caballero--it had been written
first in French, and now appeared in Spanish in the pages of “El
Heraldo” (1848-49)--said that it displayed a mixture of the German and
Andalusian Schools, the pencil of Dürer, and the colouring of Murillo. A
character in “La Gaviota” observes: “Were I Queen of Spain, I would
command a novel of customs to be written in every province.” It was the
_novela de costumbres_ that Fernán Caballero wrote with such brilliant
success. She wished, she said, to show Spain as it really was, and not
as it was commonly painted by foreigners.

Cecilia Böhl von Faber was thrice married--to Spaniards--and it was as
Marquesa de Arco Hermoso, living on her husband’s estate at Dos
Hermanas, a small village near Seville, that the idea first occurred to
her to collect the fast-disappearing customs and traditions of the
peasants. She came into frequent touch with them owing to her wish to
learn their individual needs, and know how best to administer her
charity. The thirteen years from her second marriage in 1822, to the
death of the Marqués de Arco Hermoso, in 1835, were spent mainly at
Seville, at their house in the _Plaza de San Vicente_, or in the
neighbourhood. The story _La Familia de Albareda_, the scene of which is
Dos Hermanas, was then written, from events that actually occurred in
this village, although it was not published till later. It was when her
third husband was absent in Australia that she thought of publishing her
stories, and took her _nom de plume_ from a small village of La Mancha,
called Fernán Caballero. The appearance of “La Gaviota,” which is,
indeed, one of the best, if not the best, of Fernán’s novels, aroused
considerable surprise and enthusiasm, and many surmises as to who might
be the author. It was a work so unlike the romantic tales and insipid
imitations then in vogue; it showed so fresh and spontaneous an
inspiration. Here were no echoes of older novelists; all was written
from keen personal observation, and the reader was enabled by the
author’s art to realize in words scenes and characters which he had
known and felt, but had been unable to express.

After the tragic death of her third husband, in 1859, Fernán Caballero
was firmly resolved to enter a convent, but her friends did their utmost
to dissuade her, and she believed, moreover, that the only books she
would be allowed to read would be those of devotion. Finally she gave up
this idea, and lived for nearly ten years in one of the houses of the
_Patio de las Banderas_ in the Seville Alcázar, granted to her by Queen
Isabel II. It would be difficult to imagine a more pleasant home for a
writer. On one side the beautiful gardens of the Alcázar, with their
myrtles, palms, and oranges, clipped box-hedges, and white marble
fountains; on the other the _Plaza del Triunfo_, planted with
orange-trees, acacias and palms, and the Cathedral and wonderful Giralda
tower. The Revolution of 1868 came to destroy this peace. The Alcázar
became for the time the property of the nation, and Fernán Caballero was
driven to seek a home elsewhere. She was for other reasons, as a devout
Roman Catholic and Royalist, deeply distressed by the Revolution and its
sacrilegious results in Seville. The pettiness of many revolutionary
measures was shown by the fact that the night-watchmen--the
_serenos_--of Seville were forbidden, in calling out the hours, to use
the traditional preface “Ave María Purísima.” Fernán Caballero obtained
the reversal of this decree. She lived to listen with tears of joy to
the bells of the Giralda, as they rang out the news of the Restoration
and the beginning of Alfonso XII.’s reign. She was then living in the
curving, silent bye-steet that now bears her name. No. 14 is
distinguished from the other houses by having, besides the _patio_, a
garden with a large lemon-tree, and other shrubs. Here she died in the
spring of 1877, in her eighty-first year. The Queen came to visit her
here, and a memorial tablet was placed above the entrance of the house
by her friends the Duke and Duchess of Montpensier.

The quality that gives imperishable value to Fernán’s work is its truth:
the scenes are at once felt to be real, the characters are living. She
reproduces the lively mirth and malicious wit of the _andaluz_ peasant,
the gay laughter-loving nature of the Sevillians, with their keen
perception of the false and the ridiculous. She describes a Seville
_patio_ (in “Elia”), or a bull-fight (in “La Gaviota”), or a country
house, _quinta_ (in “Clemencia”), or a deserted convent (in “La
Gaviota”) with a delicate minuteness of detail that brings them vividly
before us. Writing of simple, everyday events, as in the preface she
characterizes those of “Elia,” she paints them with unsurpassed
clearness and vigour, and much of the piquancy and charm, the _sal y
pimienta_, of the South is in her pages. There are in her works some
scenes that in sobriety and psychological skill are worthy of Stendhal.
Her characters are drawn from life with the sure and penetrating
analysis of genius. Perhaps the best example of all is the character of
Marisalada in “La Gaviota,” but the slighter figures, the conservative
General Santa María and the bull-fighter Pepe Vera, in the same novel,
the vivacious, charitable Asistenta in “Elia” (having much in common
with Fernán’s own character), who is unmoved by the discovery of a Roman
epitaph on one of her farms and refuses to believe that there is a land
where bishops marry, Marcial and Jenaro in “Lágrimas”--all these and
many more are sketched with masterly skill. It is when they treat of
country scenes and peasant life that the novels of Fernán Caballero are
at their best, as the first half of “La Gaviota” in the village of
Villamar, or a part of “Clemencia” (1852) in the village of Villa-María.
The character of Don Martín of Villa-María and the scene of his
interview with the importunate Tía Latrana are thoroughly in the manner
of Pereda. So, too, is the wife of the village mayor in “Lágrimas.”
“Haber gastadu mis cuartus” she exclaims--and the use of dialect, so
freely employed by Pereda, is noticeable--“en facere de esse fillu meu
un hulgazán! Non me lo dejú para esu mi tíu Bartulumé, es verdad.” The
foreigners at Seville are portrayed with less sympathy; so we have Sir
John Burnwood, who has come to Seville in order to ride up the Giralda,
and, finding this impossible, proposes to buy the Alcázar, or Sir George
Percy, who is admitted to have noble qualities, but allowed to show
unmistakably bad taste.

Fernán Caballero is not afraid of interrupting her story by digressions,
whether their object be to inculcate virtue, to exalt the Roman Catholic
religion, or to ridicule the importers of foreign fashions and foreign
phrases into Spain. Sometimes, as in “Lágrimas,” this is carried to
excess and rather spoils the effect of the story, but in most of her
works the digressions are never altogether wearisome; the original and
fascinating character that won for Cecilia Böhl von Faber a host of
friends is not often or for long absent from the novels and _relaciones_
of Fernán Caballero. It has been observed that “La Gaviota,” though it
contains scarcely any action, has not a line too much. “No aspiramos á
causar efecto,” says the preface of “La Familia de Albareda,” and it is
this very absence of thrilling action or melodramatic effect that gives
so permanent a charm to Fernán’s works. For a proper appreciation of
Seville and Andalucía they are invaluable: there is not one of them in
which some trait explanatory of the Sevillian and _andaluz_ characters
does not appear. A recent Spanish writer quite unjustly denies that
Fernán Caballero shows any of the _sal andaluza_, and is of opinion that
her work has not left a deep trace in Spanish literature, but must be
considered rather as a preparation for the higher flights of the
novelists who followed. It is difficult to agree with this view. Fernán
Caballero not only hoisted the flag of true Spanish realism, and pointed
to a land of promise, but carved for herself a very real and abiding
empire in this land of her rediscovery.


II.--1870-1900.

In 1864 Pereda published his first work, “Escenas montañesas,” and ten
years later, and three before the death of Fernán Caballero, appeared
Valera’s first novel, “Pepita Jiménez,” and Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de
tres picos.” Since 1874 scarcely a year has passed without producing a
Spanish novel that deserves a high rank in literature. Yet Pereda[100]
did not at once impose himself, and early in 1874 Pérez Galdós could put
the following words into the mouth of one of the characters in _Napoleón
en Chamartín_: “In the matter of novels we are so far astray that, after
producing the source of all the novels of the world, and the most
entertaining book ever written by man, Spain is now unable to compose a
novel of more worth than a grain of mustard seed, and translates these
sentimental French stories.”

Similarly, Señor Menéndez y Pelayo remarks that “about the year 1870,
the date of Pérez Galdós’ first book, the Spanish novel was slumbering
in the arms of insipid or monstrous productions, _entre ñoñerías y
monstruosidades_.” There is little insipidity or sentimentalism in the
more modern Spanish novel. Realism is the dominant note of Spanish
literature. The very atmosphere of Spain makes for clear vision. Its
artists are realistic, even brutally realistic, as Goya occasionally is;
even its mystics have not been wrapped wholly from the world: they do
not live in a cloud, insensible to the real facts of life. And in the
same way the great Spanish novelists are realistic. There is, however, a
true Castilian dignity about their realism. They do not, in George
Meredith’s phrase, mistake the “muddy shallows” for the depths of
Nature. They may treat of the vulgar and the base, but they do not treat
of them in a way that is vulgar and base. They may be as outspoken as
Martial, but their realism is eminently sane and clean.

The modern fashion, strongly in favour of realism, should do justice to
the merits of Spanish novels. It is no doubt guided by the love of
contrast that caused Stendhal, a romantic and an enthusiast at heart, to
read pages of the “Code Civil” before writing his novels, and to adopt a
style mathematically cold and thin, and Flaubert, a poet, to analyse a
subject so vulgar as that of _Madame Bovary_. A simpler age may delight
in works of a fantastic imagination, but a more complex and perhaps
hypocritical age must have truth and away with vagueness and pretence.

Minds so complicated and many-sided as to be rarely themselves, admire
the simple and concrete, and the Spanish genius, which is essentially
objective, answers to this taste both in its literature and in its art.
Yet it is characteristic that in many Spanish novels realism and
mysticism go hand in hand. That peculiarly Spanish mysticism which shows
its false side in Clarín’s “La Regenta,” its practical spirit in Palacio
Valdés’ “Marta y María,” its sadness in Azorín’s “La Voluntad,” is by no
writer more sympathetically treated than by Juan Valera, in “Pepita
Jiménez” and other novels. Valera was too great an artist to belong to
any school. He repeated in many prefaces that his aim was not to
instruct or to edify, but rather to give pleasure. The old heresy that
works of art should edify has had great influence in Spain, and it makes
its presence felt in modern novels with a set purpose, _romans à thèse_.
It cast its shadow over the work of Fernán Caballero and Pereda, and,
passing to the enemy, reappears at intervals in Pérez Galdós and Blasco
Ibáñez. But Valera would have none of it. A novel, he said, “should be
poetry, not history, that is, it should paint things not as they are but
fairer than they are, illuminating them with a light that may cast over
them a certain charm.” The magic of his style, which he caught by his
own confession from the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, supplied this charm, and is sufficient to make
his work imperishable. It is a charm that is exquisite and escapes
analysis, reminding of that metallic lustre in ancient Spanish
_azulejos_, or glazed tiles, of which modern manufacturers in vain seek
to recapture the secret. Valera was not, in a strict sense, a great
novelist. The construction of his stories is often weak, and the
characters all speak the language of Don Juan Valera. “In Valera,” it
has been said, “there are no Sanchos, all are Valeras.” He was himself
aware of these limitations. He would sometimes say in a preface that he
was not certain if his book were or were not a novel, and as to the
invariably polished speech of his characters, the conversation of the
nurse Antoñona with Luis de Vargas, in “Pepita Jiménez,” is accounted
for by the fact that she had prayed that it might be given her to speak
on this occasion, not in grotesque language, as was her wont, but in
elegant and cultured style. Similarly, Juana la Larga says to her
discreet daughter Juanita, “All that you have said seems to be taken
from the books that Don Pascual gives you to read.”

But Valera could delineate characters skilfully. In his longest novel,
“Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino,” the hero, Señor Don Faustino López
y Mendoza, is in some degree a typical figure of modern Spain. Living in
his half ruinous ancestral house in the village of Villabermeja, he
feels himself to be capable of great deeds, but achieves nothing. He
laments not being of humble birth to become a brigand like the great
José María, he laments not having been born in the eleventh or twelfth
century to carve out for himself a kingdom with his sword, and he ends
by obtaining a modest post at Madrid, which brings him little over £100
a year. Valera’s creations have only seemed unreal because, through the
alchemy of his style, he is a King Midas, turning all to gold, and the
excellence of his art raises his figures to the level of statues in
Parian marble. They are not, therefore, less lifelike; because he has an
“exquisite adjustment of word to thought,”[101] it does not follow that
he is “without life and passion”[102]--rather the passion is raised to a
white heat, with the flames no longer visible. And in his descriptions
he is a true realist, giving us the light and laughter of Andalucía. His
“Juanita la Larga” is a charming sketch of life in an Andalusian village
that may recall Alarcón’s “El Sombrero de tres picos.” Some of the most
laughter-rousing scenes of “El Sombrero de tres picos” pass in the
little stone-paved court in front of a flour mill, a quarter of a league
from a certain cathedral town in Andalucía. The court is shaded by a
huge vine-trellis, sufficiently thick and solid for the miller to
sleep--or pretend to sleep--unnoticed among its leaves. It is a brief,
delightful sketch, coloured and malicious, of Andalusian life in the
first years of the nineteenth century. To Andalucía also belong two
novels by Palacio Valdés, “La Hermana San Sulpicio” and “Los Majos de
Cádiz.” But it is Andalucía described not by a native but by a
stranger, for Palacio Valdés is of the North. He has a sense of humour
rather English than Spanish, and he is, indeed, almost as well known out
of Spain as within the Peninsula. It is a humour less bitter and
aggressive than that of another Asturian, Leopoldo Alas, with whom
Valdés collaborated in a volume of critical essays. As a sketcher of
character, Valdés is admirable. Gloria, the typically Andalusian girl,
and the Gallegan Sanjurjo are both excellently drawn in “La Hermana San
Sulpicio.” The scene of his “Marta y María” is laid in an old town of
Astúrias--the author is now in his native country--surrounded by a wide
level of meadows and gently sloping hills to the _ría_, bordered by
immense pine woods and the sea. It is a novel even more delightful than
“La Hermana San Sulpicio.” The scene of “La Aldea perdida” is also
Astúrias. It is a pastoral symphony, an Asturian counterpart to Pereda’s
“El Sabor de la Tierruca,” a charming story--in spite of its theatrical
ending--of village rivalries and reconciliations in a land wooded with
chestnuts and oaks and cider-apples, a land of maize and cool green
fields of trefoil, and mountain paths hedged with honeysuckle. But in
other works Palacio Veldés has not maintained this Spanish inspiration.
In “La Espuma,” “Maximina,” “La Fe,” the influence is that of the French
naturalistic School. _Clarín_ (Leopoldo Alas), though born at Zamora
also an Asturian, was likewise deeply influenced by France in his long
work “La Regenta.” In one of his critical essays _Clarín_ wrote that
“Spanish realism is very Spanish; it is in the race. But it has its
defects, _no todo en él es flores_; it is deficient in psychology and
the poetry of passion.” In “La Regenta” we have passion and
psychological analysis and epigrammatic wit. The scene is the old
cathedral city of Vetusta (or rather Oviedo). The treatment is not
characteristically Spanish. Vetusta is here a typical provincial town,
such as Flaubert might have described and hated, and its inhabitants are
almost all represented as ignorant, vulgar, or vicious. Their stupidity
and vulgarity are lashed with an ingenious subtlety that is unsparing,
and the motives guiding their actions are laid bare with an amazing
skill. _Clarín’s_ humour is often a little cruel, and the novel is
crowded with terse and biting phrases. One of the readers of the Vetusta
_casino_--the worthiest of them, _Clarín_ is careful to assure us--is
thus pilloried in a few lines: “He arrived at nine o’clock every evening
without fail, took _Le Figaro_ and _The Times_, which he placed over _Le
Figaro_, put on his gold spectacles, and, lulled by the sound of the
gas, fell gently asleep over the foremost paper of the world, a
privilege which no one sought to dispute. Shortly after his death of
apoplexy, over _The Times_, it was discovered that he knew no English.”

The most prominent figure among living Spanish novelists is undoubtedly
Don Benito Pérez Galdós. In his “Episodios Nacionales,” the troubled
history of Spain in the nineteenth century, from the wars against
Napoleon to the death of Prim, passes before us in a Spanish human
comedy. We see the noble death of Churruca in the battle of Trafalgar,
we witness the brief, feverish defence of Madrid before Napoleon, the
heroic sieges of Zaragoza and Gerona, the stubborn resistance of Bilbao
to the troops of Zumalacárregui in the first Carlist war; later we see
Isabel II. silently crossing the French frontier at Irun, the effect of
Castelar’s eloquence in the Cortes, Prim landing at Cadiz--these and a
hundred more principal actors and events are marshalled in a succession
of novels now numbering over forty. Pérez Galdós continues to write with
undiminished vigour. The forty-second episode, “España Trágica” (1909),
pictures Madrid opinion in street and _café_ during the year 1870, when
Spain was “in high fever,” choosing a king. The book ends with a vivid
account of the assassination of Prim. His long and difficult task was
crowned with success, but his presence was needed now more than ever to
check the hostility of the federalists on the one hand, of the
aristocracy on the other. It was the 27th December, 1870, and on the
following day he was to travel to Cartagena in order to receive the Duke
of Aosta. He had just left the Congreso. The night was bitterly cold and
the carriage rolled silently through the snow in almost deserted
streets. It was noticed that first one man and then a second stopped in
the street to light a cigar. This was apparently a signal. A little
further on, in the _Calle del Turco_, a carriage blocked the way, and
almost immediately the windows of Prim’s carriage crashed in on both
sides and he fell back, wounded by more than one bullet. The
forty-third Episode, “Amadeo I.” (1910), describes the reign of the
Italian prince which began thus tragically with the murder of Prim,
continued for two years in a tragi-comedy, and ended with the dignified
withdrawal of the loyal and disinterested “rey caballero,” who had been
wilfully and persistently misunderstood and slighted by the subjects who
had invited him to reign over them. With the Queen and their three
children, including the infant Duke of the Abruzzi, he descended the
steps of the _Palacio del Oriente_ for the last time “entre alabarderos
rígidos, sin música ni voces que turbaran el fúnebre silencio. Sólo el
rumor de las pisadas marcaba el lento caminar de una época” (February,
1873). With this and a volume on the first Spanish Republic,[103] the
fifth and final series of the Episodes marches rapidly towards
completion. For forty years novels and plays from Pérez Galdós’ pen have
appeared at the rate of two or more a year, and some of the novels are
of considerable length--“Fortunata y Jacinta” has something like two
thousand pages. Well-drawn characters and skilfully reconstructed scenes
abound, but a weariness sometimes overcomes the reader. For these novels
scarcely seem to have an end or a beginning; there is no plot or
concentration of interest. Perhaps for this very reason they are an
extremely faithful presentation of life. No one would dispute Pérez
Galdós’ great talent as a writer, but his admirers may regret that he
does not pause to draw more complete pictures with finished art. In his
anti-clerical novel, “Doña Perfecta,” Don Inocencio represents the
influence of the priest in the family. Doña Perfecta, in league with the
priest, secretly sets the whole force of her wealth and power in
mediæval Orbajosa in the scale against her nephew, Pepe, who wishes to
marry her only child, Rosario. Pepe is looked upon in Orbajosa as an
atheist and _hors la loi_, although he is merely a modern man of
science. There is no acknowledged opposition: Doña Perfecta meets him
invariably with a pleasant smile; but his letters are opened and
confiscated, he finds a spirit of steady though veiled hostility in Doña
Perfecta’s house and in Orbajosa, he is assured that Rosario does not
love him, and he cannot convince or overcome insidious enemies who never
come into the open. Finally, Doña Perfecta becomes the murderess of her
nephew, though in such a way that her conscience is entirely free from
sense of guilt. The end justifies the means. The character of Doña
Perfecta is developed with consummate skill; Palacio Valdés thirteen
years later drew a slighter sketch on the same lines--Doña Tula,
Gloria’s mother (in “La Hermana San Sulpicio,” 1889). No doubt there are
towns in Spain such as Orbajosa, where the spirit of the Church is
bigoted and Jesuitical, opposed to all progress; or such as Nieva, in
“Marta y María,” where the people consider María to be a saint who can
work miracles, and bring children for her to cure them with a look, and
her confessor encourages the belief; or such as Vetusta, in “La
Regenta,” where Don Fermín combines a high position in the Chapter of
the Cathedral with a steady traffic in Church furniture and ornaments.
Yet one may sometimes wonder whether the anti-Clericals are not too
inclined to attribute all the ills of Spain to the influence of the
priests. “Valgame Dios y qué vida nos hemos de dar, Sancho amigo,” they
seem to say, as if the dissolution of the religious orders and the
separation of Church and State would at once spell prosperity in Spain.
The religious communities are numerous and rich; beggars, as at
Orbajosa, are also numerous (and occasionally rich), but it would be
unfair to lay the blame of poverty and backwardness entirely on the
Church. There are many other causes, one of them the dissipated,
careless life of society in the large towns, sketched by el padre Luis
Coloma in his novel “Pequeñeces,” and by Pérez Galdós himself in “El
Caballero Encantado.”


III.--IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

The novel continues to hold the field in Spanish literature. The early
years of the twentieth century saw the death of two splendid writers,
Valera (1824-1905), and Pereda (1833-1906), and Leopoldo Alas died in
1901. Of the older novelists, Pérez Galdós, the Condesa Pardo
Bazán,[104] Palacio Valdés, and Jacinto Octavio Picón[105] still remain,
and a brilliant group of younger writers is ready to pass on the torch
undimmed. Pérez Galdós’ “El Caballero Encantado” is dated July-December,
1909. Writing immediately after the Barcelona riots, it was natural that
the condition and future of Spain should be in his thoughts, and an
allegorical figure representing Spain or the spirit of the race plays a
prominent part in the book. The novel has, indeed, a little too much of
the marvellous and the symbolical, and when the hero by a last
transformation becomes a fish in the river Tagus, we are uncomfortably
reminded of the spurious and fantastical continuation of _Lazarillo de
Tormes_, in which Lázaro is transformed into a tunny-fish. The reason
given by Señor Pérez Galdós is, however, excellent: “To this sad
dwelling (the silent depths of the Tagus) come those who by their
loquacity have drowned the will and thought of Spanish life in an ocean
of words. Nearly all those here present are orators. They spoke much,
and did nothing. Some of them are masters of high-sounding phrases,
conjurers who, by the magic of their art and the vanity of their
rhetoric, transformed the tower of eloquence into a tower of Babel.” The
theme of the book is that Don Carlos de Tarsis, the young Marqués de
Mudarra, deputy for a district of the geographical existence of which he
has but a vague idea, who lives at Madrid, and spends with both hands
the money drained from his estates, is magically changed into a
farm-labourer on his land, or rather, on the land that was his, and now
belongs in part to his agent, in part to his usurer. For to meet the
expenses of his idle and dissipated life he must have money at any cost;
but when the rents of his tenants are raised they emigrate, and his
agent, who attributes the backwardness of agriculture in Spain to the
fact that “the great land-owners live far from their estates as though
they were ashamed of them,” supplies him with ever-diminishing sums,
till he is reduced to penury and usurers. Tarsis recognizes that he is a
most unworthy acolyte of Idleness, and that his only merit is “the
brutal sincerity of his pessimism,” but he “would rather die than work.”
So far the character is drawn from life, and it is only in the
vagueness of the subsequent enchantments that the effect of the novel
becomes veiled and uncertain. From a farm-labourer he successively
becomes shepherd, quarryman, tramp, and criminal--all with much needless
magic--till, by the final ordeal of silence in the golden Tagus, he is
restored to his original being as Marqués de Mudarra, a chastened and a
wiser marquis. Stress is laid on the miserable state of the poor,
compared with the immunity of the rich. Famishing men are dragged off to
prison for rooting up onions on a rich man’s estate, and shot down by
the Guardia Civil when they try to escape--the official report runs:
“the prisoners attempted to escape, and were overtaken by an accident
from which a natural death ensued.” There is perhaps a greater air of
reality about the account of the rich _Caciques_, owners of vast estates
or _latifundios_, who pay to the Treasury but a tenth part of the proper
land-tax, who falsify returns at elections, protect criminals, and
assault honest folk, while the judges are their creatures. This
_Caciquismo_ is part of the deplorable administration of Spain. Señor
Pérez Galdós who, as a native of the Canary Islands, has the double
advantage of looking at Spain as it were from within and from without,
returns to the question of words and deeds, the wealth of words and the
scantiness of action, with an insistence which must be excessively
annoying to a Spanish reader. Yet he does not despair of Spain’s future.
He sees hope in the proved vitality of the race, in its quick recoveries
after misfortune, its heroism even under self-inflicted sufferings:
“The ineffable follies of my sons have plunged me (_i.e._ Spain) in
despair, and in the darkness of despair my death has seemed certain and
inevitable. And then in some terrible crisis that appeared to ensure my
destruction, I have revived when they were carrying me from the
death-bed to the grave.”

The best work of Pereda was of the Mountain, Valera and Fernán Caballero
write of Andalucía, Palacio Valdés of Astúrias, and similarly the
Gallegans, Valle-Inclán and Señora Pardo Bazán have found their best
inspiration in Galicia, and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in his native
Valencia. Valencia is a fertile land of fierce heat and dazzling
light--the light so wonderfully reflected in the work of the Valencian
painter Joaquín Sorolla. Blasco Ibánez has written some striking novels
that have no connection with Valencia, but his best and most delightful
work is steeped in the life of the immense Valencian plain (in “La
Barraca,” an intense story of a boycott of the Huerta); of the city of
Valencia (in “Arroz y Tartana”); of the rice-growing, fever-stricken
marshes of the Albufera, famous for its fishing and shooting, near
Valencia (“Cañas y Barro”); of the fishermen and smugglers of El Grao
and the Valencian coastline (“Flor de Mayo”); of love among the oranges
in the orchard of Spain (“Entre Naranjos”). Blasco Ibáñez excels in
portraying the lives and thoughts and struggles of the simple fisherman
and peasant--hardworking as Batiste, or magnificently idle as Pimentó;
and in describing popular customs and traditions,--a simple procession
in floodtime (as in “Entre Naranjos”) or the dances and _festeigs_,
courtings, of the _atlóts_ and _atlotas_ of Ibiza (in “Los Muertos
mandan”). The hero of “Los Muertos mandan” (1909), Don Jaime or Chaume,
is not a peasant, but a member of an ancient family of Mallorcan nobles,
hemmed in by tradition and inherited instincts. The background, however,
of descriptions of Mallorca and lawless peasant life in Ibiza, with its
woods and orchards and white farms girt by a green transparent sea,
contribute more powerfully to the charm of the book than the wrestling
of Don Jaime against the clinging influence of the innumerable dead, who
still prevail. But, indeed, Blasco Ibáñez’ presentation of any strenuous
life-struggle is forcible and imposing. It reflects his own personality.
His creed is one of restless striving and discontent with the apathy too
frequent in Spain. His activity is immense: though little over forty
years of age, his novels are already many in number, short stories and
articles are continually appearing from his pen, he lectures, travels,
translates, publishes, controls a Valencian paper, _El Pueblo_, and till
the autumn of 1908 represented Valencia in Parliament as a Republican;
now his energies are occupied in founding two towns--to be called New
Valencia and Cervantes--for colonies of Valencians in the Argentine.

Blasco Ibáñez once wrote a long novel of the French Revolution, “Viva la
República!” and in his ideas and in his art the influence of France has,
no doubt, been very strong. His ideas sometimes trespass on his art, as
in “La Catedral,” where, in the person of Gabriel Luna, he declaims
tediously and without mercy. His novels, as a rule, show an admirable
unity. In each of his heroes we see Blasco Ibáñez: but Blasco Ibáñez
entirely identified with the peasant Batiste (in “La Barraca”), or the
painter Renovales (in “La Maja Desnuda”), or the Socialist Luna (in “La
Catedral”), or the bull-fighter Gallardo (in “Sangre y Arena”). His very
manner catches the atmosphere and colour of the surroundings he
describes. He becomes vulgar in the descriptions of commercial, crowded
Valencia, wearisome in details of the feasts of its _bourgeois_ and the
various foods of its market-place (in “Arroz y Tartana”); he can be
magnificently simple, with the soul of a peasant or a fisherman (in “La
Barraca” and “Flor de Mayo”), and the fertile Huerta gives free scope to
his luxuriant art, his overflow of poetry and imagination. This power of
concentration, which Blasco Ibáñez possesses in so high a degree, is
rare in Spanish literature. The heroes of Blasco Ibáñez’ novels are men
strong to labour, persistent before defeat. They are almost always
defeated and die, Gallardo in the arena, Luna assassinated in Toledo
Cathedral, the Pascuals, fishermen of three generations, drowned in
storms off the Valencian coast. But the dominant note of his novels is
still “E pur si muove,” and in spirit his heroes are as unconquerable as
Don Quixote. He has Zola’s power of describing crowds; in “La Horda”
appears the multitude of hucksters and street-sellers that haunt the
Madrid _Rastro_; and similarly the background of “Luna Benamor” (1909)
is formed by a vivid description of Gibraltar, with its motley crowd of
Spaniards and Jews and Moors and Englishmen. His prose is suited to
these descriptions; it is living, coloured, tumultuous, sometimes
hurried and careless--a Spanish critic speaks of his _barbarismos
gramaticales_. From so voluminous and passionate a writer we should
expect nothing of the polished or the exquisite, his work is in the
rough; in a sense its incorrect ardour is Spanish, but its persistent
energy is a refreshing note in Spain, and may well cover an occasional
fault of taste or an ungrammatical sentence here and there. His works
are nearly always striking and original, however hurried may have been
their composition.

It has been remarked that the younger Spanish novelists are rather
thinkers than artists, and Pío Baroja, Martínez Ruiz (_Azorín_) and
Valle-Inclán have introduced an almost alien note into Spanish
literature. It is significant that two at least of these writers,
_Azorín_ and Pío Baroja, are keen admirers of the essentially
intellectual art of El Greco: Theotocopuli has cast over them the spell
of his ascetically thin figures and cold attenuated tints. Pío Baroja is
almost Russian in his pitilessly accurate descriptions, in his rebellion
against the facts of life and his championship of the
persecuted--outcasts, criminals, and vagabonds. In “La Ciudad de la
Niebla” (1909), “The City of Fog,” he brings his clear, almost
photographic, vision to bear on London, and chiefly on the dingier
districts, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, the squalid labyrinth of streets
off Shaftesbury Avenue, the Docks, the Embankment. Similarly in “César
ó Nada” (1910) he continues to write in a spirit of mocking reckless
individualism. The narrative is but a slender thread to string together
his observations of men and places.[106] _Azorín_, again, is not
concerned with the form of his novels. He is a thinker, a psychological
analyst, who deliberately disregards construction. Yuste, in “La
Voluntad,” voices the author’s opinions; “Particularly,” he says, “the
novel must have no plot; life itself has no plot: it is varied,
many-sided, floating, contradictory--everything except symmetrical,
geometrical, rigid, as it appears in novels.” The novel must give
fragments, separate sensations. In “Las Confesiones de un pequeño
filósofo” _Azorín_ gives us his original impressions, his fragmentary
sensations of “figures et choses qui passaient” in a style full of
poetry and charm. His “La Voluntad” is a book very modern in its
restless thought and individualistic philosophy. It has that originality
of which Yuste, the philosopher of the book, speaks as consisting in
“something undefinable, a secret fascination of thought, a mysterious
suggestiveness of ideas.” The rare charm of _Azorín’s_ style and his
skill in descriptions, _emoción del paisaje, imaginatio locorum_, clothe
with serenity his “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,”
and with peace his purely intellectual spirit and disquieting irony.
With Ramón del Valle-Inclán, again, construction and plot are secondary.
The action is slightly sketched in his novels, but incidents and persons
are thrown into high relief by the delicate and original character of
his style. It is a style built up of all that is rare and exquisite,
with a sobriety that chisels a finished picture in a single phrase. In
“El Resplandor de la Hoguera,” for instance, a green path leading from a
small Basque village to its cemetery is simply described as “todo en paz
de oratión,” and such lonely word pictures abound in his writings. His
latest work, a trilogy, is “La Guerra Carlista,” and the action of the
first part, “Los Cruzados de la Causa” (1908), passes in a village of
Galicia. The haughty, great-hearted Gallegan _hidalgo_ Don Juan Manuel,
perhaps the best of Valle-Inclán’s vivid character-sketches, appears in
this as in many others of his novels. The second part, “El Resplandor de
la Hoguera” (1909), follows the broken movements of the guerilla
fighting in the intricate Basque country; and the third part (each part
forming, however, a separate novel), “Gerifaltes de Antaño” (1909),
describes the furtive but daring tactics of that sinister Carlist
_cabecilla_, Manuel Santa Cruz, priest of Hernialde, leading his men at
night, “swift and silent as a wolf,” by labyrinthine mountain paths,
past maize-fields and chestnut-trees and vineyards, and scented meadows
under the stars, or ordering execution after execution of men and women
“with a mystical coldness and internal peace.” His cruelty was that of
the peasant who lights a fire to destroy the plagues of his vineyard. He
watched the smoke go up as an evening sacrifice--

“Lo que á unos encendía en amor, á los otros los encendía en odio, y el
cabecilla pasaba entre el incendio y el saqueo, anhelando el amanecer de
paz para aquellas aldeas húmedas y verdes, que regulaban su vida por la
voz de las campanas, al ir al campo, al yantar, al cubrir el fuego de
ceniza y llevar á los pesebres el recado de yerba. Era su crueldad como
la del viñador que enciende hogueras contra las plagas de su viña.
Miraba subir el humo como en un sacrificio, con la serena esperanza de
hacer la vendimia en un día del Señor, bajo el oro del sol y la voz de
aquellas campanas de cobre antiguo, bien tañidas.”

It is difficult to analyse the fascination of these novels. Their
incidents seem trivial enough and the characters speak in thin, broken
sentences; but the effect is a marvellously vivid picture of the
flickering scenes of the last Carlist war and the hill tactics of the
_cabecillas_. The thin lines are due not to any poverty of inspiration
but to the restraint of a consummate artist. The most recent Spanish
novelist of note is Ricardo León, a young writer from Málaga, whose
first novel, “Casta de Hidalgos,” was published in the autumn of 1908,
followed by “Comedia Sentimental” in 1909, and “Alcalá de los Zegríes,”
“La Escuela de los Sofistas” (a volume of dialogues), and “El Amor de
los Amores” in 1910. These books are the work of a writer who has read
and assimilated the best of Spanish literature from its earliest
beginnings, chronicles, legends, _serranillas_, fervent religious
treatises. His style is, indeed, not unworthy of the Spanish mystics. It
has at once richness and sobriety, it is steeped in archaic humanism,
but tinged with modern sadness and disillusion; it is, as the author
might himself call it, “un castellano de clásico sabor.” It has in it
nothing strained or artificial, being, rather, the flowing expression of
a mystical intensity. He gives admirable pictures of the thoughts and
lives of old-fashioned proud _hidalgos_, “after the pattern of the
ancient _hidalgos_ of Castille,” such as Don Juan Manuel, who lives in
ruinous Santillana with its sadness of centuries, _tristeza milenaria_,
in “Casta de Hidalgos;” or of serious, reserved philosophers, such as
Don Juan Antonio in “Comedia Sentimental.” “Alcalá de los Zegríes”
contains many passages of noble Spanish prose, and others of
psychological interest; but it is for the most part concerned with
politics and party strife. The Spaniards, as a rule, are more interested
in politics than in literature. Valera’s celebrated “Pepita Jiménez”
brought him no more than eight thousand _reales_, or under £80, and
Señor Unamuno, the Rector of Salamanca University, a prominent Spanish
thinker and writer, has declared that literary opinion in Spain is
formed by some five hundred persons, “quinientas personas mal
contadas.” The novelists may protest, but the novel gains. There is no
temptation to write in order to please the taste of a public which does
not exist. If there is something commercial in the methodical output of
Pérez Galdós’ or Blasco Ibáñez’ novels, commercialism has certainly,
hitherto, had but little part in Spanish literature. Limited, unliterary
Spain has had this advantage. The world’s debate has not vulgarized it;
a half-culture has not dragged down the novel to flamboyant,
self-advertising methods. The novel in Spain is at its best when it
rejects, or has not come into contact with, foreign influences. It can
be realistic without thought of this or that school. It fascinates by
its original flavour and scent of the soil.




XX

NOVELS OF GALICIA


The inhabitants of Galicia have been held to be the Boeotians of Spain,
yet the fact that in the political world many eminent persons are
Gallegans seems to show that Galicia has been maligned. To Galicia, too,
belong two gifted modern writers, the Condesa Emilia Pardo Bazán and Don
Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Señora Pardo Bazán belongs to the older group of
Spanish novelists; born in 1851,[107] she published her two well-known
novels of Galicia, “Los Pazos de Ulloa,” and “La Madre Naturaleza,” in
1886 and 1887, and “De mi tierra,” a book of scenes and essays of
Galicia, in 1888. It is as a regional novelist that Señora Pardo Bazán
has won her most glorious laurels. “Galicienne ella adore les choses de
la Galice,” says M. Vézinet,[108] and he adds that she develops the same
subjects as French naturalists, but avoids the licentiousness of which
they are so fond. The multitude of her tasks and interests has
necessarily hampered her art as a novelist. “She has unfortunately
diffused her energies in all directions,” says Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly.
“No one can succeed in everything--as a poet, a romancer, an essayist, a
critic, a lecturer, and a politician. Yet the Condesa Pardo Bazán is all
this, and more. We would gladly exchange all her miscellaneous writings
for another novel like ‘Los Pazos de Ulloa.’”[109]

“Los Pazos de Ulloa” is a novel impregnated with the atmosphere of
Galicia. Los Pazos is a large country-house in a remote valley of maize
and vines and chestnuts, reached on horseback through a desolate
wolf-country, _país de lobos_. Its furniture is rickety, its
window-frames have no glass, though it is not so ruinous as Los Pazos de
Limioso some leagues away, which lacks even window-frames. The village
priest of Ulloa has but two devotions, those of the _jarro_ and the
_escopeta_, the wine-jar and the gun; the drinking of water and the use
of soap he holds alike to be effeminate. The Marqués de Ulloa, too,
frank, noble at heart, but cynical, often brutal, spends much of his
time at village fairs, and shooting partridges in the maize or among
pines and scented hill-plants. He is totally in the power of his servant
Primitivo, who manages his estates. Primitivo, too, holds the peasants,
as he says, in the palm of his hand. They are patient workers who,
however, in the opinion of the Marqués de Ulloa, need a strong hand to
control them--some one like Primitivo _que les dé ciento de ventaja en
picardía_, that is, who will know two tricks to their one. When the
Marqués disburdens himself to the new chaplain, Don Julián, in the wild
neglected garden, on the subject of Primitivo, he becomes aware by a
rustling in the undergrowth that Primitivo has been listening to the
outburst. When, as a first step to freedom, he determines to leave Los
Pazos on a visit to his uncle at Santiago de Compostella, Primitivo
makes no open opposition, but the mare is unshod, the donkey has been
mysteriously wounded. The Marqués and Julián determine to go on foot to
Cebre, where they will take the diligence. The path grows wilder, the
woods close in more thickly, a cross shows where a man has been killed,
there is no sound but that of the woodcutters among the chestnuts. The
Marqués, keenly alert, sees the glint of a gun’s barrel in the brushwood
pointing at the chaplain, who is held to be the instigator of this
rebellion. It is Primitivo “out shooting.” The book is a gloomy picture
of a rich country ruined by mismanagement, underhand dealing, and
ignorance. The Marqués de Ulloa’s agent has the peasants so completely
in his power that he is able to turn the scale of an election. He began
by methodically robbing his master in the administration of his estate,
and the money so obtained he lends to the peasants, who are driven to
borrow that they may be able to continue to work their land. Primitivo
charges an interest of eight per cent. (per month), and in years of
famine he raises the interest. The country and its inhabitants are
described with a master-hand. Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán is one of the
new school of Spanish novelists, and properly belongs to the twentieth
century. He is above all things a stylist. In his _sutiles prosas_ there
is an exquisite restraint, with here and there a tinge of archaism and a
haunting music of soft languid cadences. He loves the rare, the
delicate, the costly, and his art is to write of luxury in sober
phrases, instinct with sadness and the magic of regret. It is a style of
silk and cut crystal, as of silver-work or polished ivory handled by
thin ascetic fingers. In his four “Sonatas” (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and
Winter) we have the memoirs of the Marqués de Bradomín, the
recollections of his former loves. The scene of “Sonata de Primavera” is
an Italian palazzo with the lilacs in flower along its terraces and
roses filling the garden between the cypresses, while the scene of
“Sonata de Estío” is Mexico in all the luxurious growth of its summer
vegetation. In the “Sonata de Invierno” the scene is the Carlist Court
at Estella and the setting is more gloomy. The Marquis loses an arm in
the service of King Charles VII., and from the window of his sick-room
at Villareal de Navarra looks out on a road lined with leafless poplars
and mountains flecked with snow. But these novels do not equal “Sonata
de Otoño,” the scene of which is in Señor Valle-Inclán’s native Galicia.
Two lines of Verlaine in some way describe the novel:--

    “Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
     Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.”

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


I.--“SAVOUR OF THE SOIL”

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:--

    “A las Indias van los hombres
     A las Indias por ganar,
     Las Indias aquí las tienen
     Si quisieran trabajar;”

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--

                            “they must know!
    Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know,
    They, with their Latin? so I swallow my rage,
    Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
    To please them.”

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.”

    “‘Ay, but you don’t so instigate to prayer,’
     Strikes in the Prior! ‘when your meaning’s plain
     It does not say to folks--remember matins--
     Or, mind you fast next Friday.’”

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]

    “Este mundo es el camino
     Para el otro, que es morada
     Sin pesar;
     Mas cumple tener buen tino
     Para andar esta jornada
     Sin errar.
     Partimos cuando nacemos,
     Andamos mientras vivimos,
     Y llegamos
     Al tiempo que fenecemos;
     Así que cuando morimos
     Descansamos.”

The light of the torches burning in long thin flame and the upward look
of the priest in plain surplice draw the eye up to the second part of
the picture, the _Gloria_, where the Conde de Orgaz appears before
Christ and the Virgin in a heaven thronged with apostles and saints and
supported by angels. The beauty of the lower part is as easily
recognizable as that of a picture of Velázquez, but the _Gloria_ takes
longer to appreciate, having a fuller measure of El Greco’s mannerism.
Partly for this reason the picture may displease at first, permanently
displease if seen once only in a cursory glance, but on a more leisured
study it assumes its right place as one of the wonderful and most
beautiful pictures of the world. It requires time, too, to realize the
infinite beauty of detail, the figures on St. Augustine’s robe, the
scene of St. Stephen’s stoning on that of St. Stephen, and the skill
with which all monotony is avoided in the mourners, in spite of their
being nearly all of the same height, and nearly all wearing white ruffs
and pointed beards.

In his later pictures El Greco increased the mannerism of his style; the
figures are longer, more angular, the intensity of expression becomes
an obsession, a paroxysm: he paints as one for whom the whole world has
ceased to exist. Sometimes, as in the “Baptism” at Toledo, these
exaggerations seriously spoil the beauty of his work; but the “Asunción”
of the church of San Vicente, at Toledo, also belongs to his later
style, and is not the least beautiful of his pictures: in no other work
of art has the sense of motion been so marvellously expressed--the
Virgin, saints, and angels seem actually floating upwards before our
eyes. El Greco’s mannerism, _jene unglaubliche Manier_, Herr Carl Justi
calls it, is more evident in some of his pictures, in others less; but
there is not a sufficiently wide gulf between them to justify the saying
that “they are so different that they appear not to be painted by the
same hand,”[119] nor to countenance Palomino’s statement that “What he
did well no one did better, and what he did badly no one did worse.”

It was not carelessly nor ignorantly that El Greco drew his figures out
of proportion, making them preternaturally long and thin. He did so
deliberately, just as Bacon said deliberately that “In all beauty there
is some strangeness of proportion,” and the effect in El Greco’s
pictures often, indeed as a rule, justifies his boldness. We see him

    “Pouring his soul ...
     Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him,
     Above and through his art--for it gives way;
     That arm is wrongly put--and there again--
     A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
     Its body, so to speak! its soul is right.”

Naturally the peculiarity of his style has at once struck all observers.
So the French have spoken of his “maladresses enfantines, audaces
troublantes,” his “attitudes strapassées,” his “draperies cassées et
chiffonnées á plaisir,” his “dessin fantastique.” So Sir Edmund Head
wrote of some of El Greco’s pictures as “extravagant in length, of an
ashen-grey tone, most singular in so fine a colourist.” If only glanced
at once, this is perhaps the impression that the majority of his
pictures would leave, and he thus remains a sphinx to many. “He will
always remain caviare to the multitude,” wrote Sir J. C. Robinson in
1868; “the uninitiated observer passes over [his pictures] with wonder
and bewilderment, the grim angular figures and draperies and the
flickering unrest of all the details affecting him as would a harsh
tumult of discordant sounds.”

Palomino said of El Greco that “he ended by making his painting
despicable and ridiculous alike by extravagance of drawing and harshness
of colour.” His contemporaries explained the singularity of his work
either as due to madness or to craving for effect, _por valentía, para
salir del día_, or to a wish to prevent them from being confused with
those of Titian!

Not less than his drawing, El Greco’s colouring has been a
stumbling-block and an offence. We read of his “teintes presque
cadavériques,” “coloris grisâtre, pâle blafard,” “symphonies en bleu
mineur;” and Ford characteristically wrote that his pictures were often
“as leaden as cholera morbus.” After the rich reds and golds of Italian
painting, the subtler tints of El Greco, evolved by him partly under
Tintoretto’s influence, partly under the influence of Toledo, could not
please his contemporaries, but we feel now that they are no slight
ingredient of his charm. In colouring El Greco largely influenced
Velázquez, and through Velázquez all subsequent painting. Velázquez
learnt from him, in the words of Señor Cossío, “his harmony of silver
greys and the use of certain carmines.” But it was not only El Greco’s
colouring that affected him. Señor Cossío sees in the construction of
“The Surrender of Breda” vague reminiscences of the “San Mauricio,” and
one may also see in it reminiscences of the “Expolio.” Palomino, in his
Life of Velázquez, says that “in his portraits he imitated Domenico
Greco, for he considered that his heads could not be sufficiently
praised.” Velázquez rejected El Greco’s mystic intellectuality, but
possibly without El Greco’s influence the realism of Velázquez might
have been excessively exact and less inspired.

Toledo, in the words of a modern Spanish poet, stands “dark, ruinous,
forgotten and alone;” but Domenico[120] Theotocopuli, who lay there
unremembered for three centuries, now rises to spread his fame through
the world--

    “Tout passe. L’art robuste
     Seul a l’éternité,
     Le buste
     Survit à la cité.”

Foreigners from many lands climb up and down the cobbled lanes and
passages, in search of hidden churches here and there with pictures by
El Greco--Santo Tomé, San José, San Vicente, Santa Leocadia, San
Nicolás, and many more:

    “The sanctuary’s gloom no longer wards
     Vain tongues from where his pictures stand apart.”

He loved to paint the city, and, besides his famous view of it, we find
it in the background of his pictures. The Cathedral and the Bridge of
Alcántara and the Castle of San Servando are perfectly distinct in the
“Asunción” of the Church of San Vicente. The city figures again, though
less clearly, in the magnificent picture of St. Martin (of Tours)
dividing his cloak, an act of charity that certainly receives a new
significance in this bleak, unsheltered Toledo country. And Toledo, not
Troy, appears in the “Laocoon,” the only picture by El Greco that has a
classical subject. El Greco, the Cretan, lived at Toledo for some forty
years, and the charm of Toledo seems to have entered into his soul. His
house was not in one of the smothered streets, but in an open space high
above the Tagus, opposite the Synagogue of the Jews.[121] It has a cool
_patio_ with a floor of red bricks and glazed tiles, and four white
pillars, with a tiny well near the entrance, and a grey wooden gallery
above, resting on the pillars, and open on one side, so that in spring
swallows occasionally enter and whirl round the court. To the right a
door leads to a quaint, old-fashioned kitchen, with its immense open
fireplace and seats on either side beneath the chimney. That El Greco, a
foreigner, should have become the most Spanish of Spanish painters, was
due no doubt to the influence exercised over him by this stern yet
luring city of Castille. It is impossible to dissociate his colouring
from the many greens and greys and browns of the city and surrounding
country, the rust-coloured soil of the Cigarrales thinly covered with
many greens that are not green, grey hill-plants, dull tints of thyme
and olive, the shriller green of pomegranate and other fruit-trees, the
grass sun-parched to patches of yellow. And perhaps it is not altogether
fanciful to connect the metallic gleams visible in certain lights on the
surface of the Tagus with the glazed effects so frequent in El Greco’s
pictures, or even the ragged, wind-tormented elms by the river with some
of his more extravagant figures. The city points upward like a grey
sword; and whether seen in shafts and foils of orange light against a
stormy sunset, or fainting and crumbling greyly beneath a relentless sun
and sky of cloudless blue, it has the austere intensity that we find in
El Greco’s work. Yet, as in the greyest pictures of El Greco occurs some
relieving touch of colour, so Toledo is not merely a monotonous symmetry
of brown or grey. A procession, white and gold and red and purple,
passes through the narrow streets under a shower of roses from the
balconies of houses gaily hung in white and red, red and yellow; or the
bright colours of peasants’ dresses are to be seen against the ancient
Alcántara bridge as they come in to market; or in some street of
stifling, windowless walls that lead up to a line of blue sky by day,
and at night to a ribbon of stars, comes a glimpse, through doors of
massive ancient stone, of a _patio_ of bright flowers--carnations,
nasturtiums, geraniums--as one may find a picture of El Greco in some
old forgotten Church; and beneath the yellow-brown walls and grey rocks
of the city are gardens of fruit-trees, where in spring nightingales
sing from pomegranates in scarlet flower. It is a city of continual
surprises, not to be understood or appreciated in a single day or a
single visit; it gives, like El Greco’s pictures, a strong original
impression at a first glance, but its inner being, its softer moments,
its true significance and charm it reveals only to a patient study. Its
attitude is indeed that of reserve; it seems to be holding judgment on
modern civilization. It represents all that is noblest, most individual,
and unbendingly austere in the spirit of Spain.




INDEX


A

Abenabet, _King of Seville_, 101

_Afforestation_, 99

_Agriculture_, 97, 203

Ajofrín, 90

Alarcón (Pedro Antonio de), 195

Alas (Leopoldo) _Clarín_, 150, 193, 196, 197

Alfonso, _el Sabio_, quoted, 98

_Alhambra, The_, 89

Alicante, 113, 114, 115

Almería, 57, 113

Altabiscar, Poem of, 62

Altamira (Rafael), quoted, 22, 25

Amadeo I., _King of Spain_, 43, 198-199

Andalucía, 103, 128, 134-141, 186, 195

_Andalusians_, 25, 26, 90, 140, 188, 190

André (E. L.), 39

Antequera, 137

_Anti-Clericals_, 39, 40, 81, 199, 200

Aragon, 26, 100

Arenys de Mar, 104

Arriba, 75

Asturians, 26, 196

Asturias, 196

Atchuria, 64, 65

Avila, 87

Augustinians, 166, 181

Aulnoy, Mme. d’, quoted, 20, 29, 52, 59, 60, 62, 239, 240

Azorín. _See_ Martínez Ruiz.

_Azulejos_, 132, 194


B

Bacon (Francis), quoted, xi, 33, 34, 41, 252

Barcelona, 88, 91, 104

Baroja (Pío), 27, 93, 208, 209

Basque Provinces, 50, 63, 66-79, 210-211

_Basques_, 25, 28, 61, 62, 66-79, 209, 225

Bayonne, 63

_Beggars_, 29, 87, 126

Béhobie, bridge of, 61

Benavente (Jacinto), 27, 41

Berceo (Gonzalo de), 39, 93

Berenger (Remont), _Count of Barcelona_, 159-160

_Betting_, 73, 74

Biarritz, 63

Bidasoa, 57-61, 65

Bilbao, 60, 88

Blasco Ibáñez (Vicente), 38, 123, 149, 152, 193, 205-208

Böhl von Faber (Cecilia). _See_ Fernán Caballero.

_Booksellers_, 172

Borrow (George), 53

_Brigands_, 47, 194

Browning (Robert), quoted, 248, 249, 253, 256

_Bullfights_, 38

Burgos, 87, 158, 240

Burton’s _Anatomy_, quoted, 88

Butler, _Bishop_, quoted, 35

C

_Caciquismo_, 23, 204

Cadiz, 88

Calderón de la Barca (Pedro), 32, 55, 227

Cambridge, 165

Camões (Luiz), quoted, 25, 26, 251

Cantabria, 63, 223-238

Cardeña, 139

_Carlists_, 76, 78, 81, 84, 210, 211, 223, 230

Carranza, _Archbishop_, 165, 169, 170

Cartagena, 116

Castejon, 158

Castelar (Emilio), 149, 198

_Castilian language_, viii, 24, 163, 181, 193, 202,
     212, 221, 222, 237, 239-243, 245

_Castilians_, 26, 93, 94, 95, 96, 212 251

Castille, 48, 54, 66, 92-96, 232, 246

Castro (León de), 166, 167, 168, 173

_Catalan language_, 241

_Catalans_, 26, 34, 79

Catalonia, 104-107

_Celestina, La_, 144

Cervantes, 48, 146, 147, 182, 227, 237, 241, 242, 246
  “Don Quixote,” 28, 88, 139, 146, 185, 240, 242, 245
  Don Quixote, 30, 151, 207
  Sancho, 27, 33, 40, 54, 242

Charlemagne, 62

_Church in Spain, the_, 39, 40, 200, 201, 245-246, 249

_Cid, Poema del_, 144, 150, 153-162

Cid, the, 87, 102, 144, 153-162

Clarín. _See_ Alas (L.)

Clarke (Edward), quoted, 21, 239

Clarke (Henry Butler), 79

Claudian, quoted, 48

_Climate_, viii, 37, 54, 93, 100

Clovio (Julio), 245

Coloma (Luis), 201

Córdoba, 90, 101, 103, 140

Cortese (Paolo), quoted, 18

Creighton (Mandell), _Bishop of London_, quoted, 44

Creixell, 106-107


D

_Dances, Basque_, 73

Dante, quoted, 26, 130, 241, 250

_Deshoja, A_, 230-231

Díaz de Bivar (Rodrigo). _See_ Cid.

_Diligencias_, 50, 51, 52

Dominicans, 166, 168

_Dress_, 53, 54, 77, 106, 135


E

Ebro, the, 100

_Education_, 140

Edward II., _King of England_, 63

Eibar, 73

Elgoibar, 73

Emigration, 100, 203, 225

England and Spain, 25, 63, 166

_Escorial, the_, 98

_Eskuara_, 59, 60, 62, 64, 68, 70-71, 76, 85-86

Espronceda (José de), 149

Estella, 81, 217

Estremadura, 98


F

Fernán Caballero, 185-191, 193

Fitzmaurice-Kelly (James), quoted, 142, 143, 146-147, 185, 195, 215, 227

Flaubert (Gustave), 192, 197

Ford (Richard), 25, 36, 47, 51, 53, 253

France (Anatole), quoted, 30

Francis of Assisi, Saint, 241

Francis I., King of France, 57

Fuenterrabía, 58, 62, 63, 85-86

_Fueros_, 76, 78, 79

_Funeral offerings_, 75


G

Galicia, 214-221

_Gallegos_, 25, 26, 214, 216, 220

Ganivet (Ángel), 22

Gallipienzo, 83

Gasset (Rafael), 99

Gautier (Théophile), quoted, 254, 256

_Generalife, the_, 89

Gibraltar, 207

_Giralda, the_, 126, 133, 188

Gómez de Baquero (E.), 201

Góngoray Argote (Luis), 148

Goya [Francisco Goya y Lucientes], 192

Granada, 88-89

_Grao, El_, 115, 205

Grazalema, 136, 137

Greco, El, 208, 243, 244-258

Guadalete, the, 137

Guadalquivir, the, 133, 140

Guernica, 76

_Guernicaco Arbola_, 76, 77

Guipúzcoa, 64, 67, 68, 78


H

Hendaye, 59

_Heresy_, 38, 172, 173

Horace, quoted, 71

_Houses_, 21

_Huerta, the Valencian_, 115-116, 121, 122, 124, 161, 205

Hugo (Victor), quoted, 47, 49, 57, 114, 115

Hurtado de Mendoza (Diego), 145


I

Ibiza, 205, 206

_Idearium Español_, 22

Île des Faisans, 60

_Inns_, 52, 140-141

_Inquisition, the_, 34, 38, 39, 147, 148, 168-184, 246

_Inscriptions_, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67, 77-78

_Irrigation_, 98, 99, 121-124

Irun, 62, 73, 198

Isabel II., _Queen of Spain_, 187, 188, 198


J

James I., _King of Aragon_, quoted, 26, 31

_Jews_, 167, 176

Jijona, 102

Jimena, wife of El Cid, 157, 158, 160

Johnson (Samuel), quoted, 47

Joseph, _King of Spain_, 42

Juan Manuel, _Infante_, quoted, 101


K

Kipling (Rudyard), quoted, 50


L

La Rhune, 64

Larramendi (Manuel de), 72, 74

_Lazarillo de Tormes_, 144, 145, 150, 202

León, 48, 87, 90

---- (Luis de), 148, 149, 151, 163-184

---- (Ricardo), 23, 24, 94, 211, 212, 242-243

Longfellow (H. W.), quoted, 52, 92

Loti (Pierre) [Julien Viaud], 73, 74

_Louis XIV._, _King of France_, 60, 64

Lumbier, 83


M

Madrid, 99, 198, 202, 203, 207, 228, 231, 232

Maeztu (Ramiro de), quoted, 36

_Makhilas_, 77

Málaga, 137, 138

Mallada (Lucas), quoted, 22

Manrique (Jorge), 251

Marbot, _General_, 61

----, quoted, 18

Mariana (Juan de), 37, 70

Martial, quoted, 26, 54, 100

Martínez Ruiz (J.), _Azorín_, 22, 89-90, 94-96, 193, 208, 209

Masdeu, quoted, 19

Menéndez y Pelayo (Marcelino), 151, 192

_Montaña, La_, 26, 223, 226, 228-238

Montano (Arias), 173

Montoro, 140

_Moors in Spain, the_, 26, 31, 86, 101, 161, 246

Murcia, 90, 114

Murillo (Bartolomé Esteban), 249

_Mystics_, 148, 149, 192, 193, 194, 242


N

Napier (Sir W.), _Lieut.-General_, quoted, 17, 18, 26, 64

Napoleon, 42, 61

Narváez (Ramón María), _General_, 30

Navarre, 80-84

_Navarrese_, 26, 83

_Norias_, 108-109

_Novels_, ix, 144, 151, 185-238, 241


O

Ocaña, 90

Ondarrabia, 85, 86

_Oranges, Court of_, 90, 126

Oropesa, 108-111

Oviedo, 197

_Ox-carts_, 74

Oxford, 165


P

Pacheco (Francisco), 245

Palacio Valdés (Armando), 88, 193, 195-196, 200

_Papal authority in Spain_, 146, 147, 183

Pardo Bazán (Emilia), 185, 205, 214-217, 222

_Parish Priests_, 76, 215, 233, 236

Pascal (Blaise), 148, 171

_Pastorales, Basque_, 69-70

_Patios_, viii, 54, 88, 90, 131, 133, 189, 256

_Peasants_, 71, 82, 83, 94, 100, 110, 120-124, 135,
      140, 141, 205, 215-216, 226-227, 229-230, 240

_Pelota, Basque_, 73, 74

_Peninsular War, the_, 17, 64, 65, 81

Pepys (Samuel), quoted, 19, 25, 39, 44

Pereda (José María de), 40, 91, 151, 152, 189, 190, 191, 193, 222-238, 242

Pérez Galdós (Benito), 24, 29, 30, 35, 37, 150, 191,
      192, 193, 197, 204, 223, 242

Péroz, _Colonel_, 61

Philip II., _King of Spain_, 165, 246, 248

Philip IV., _King of Spain_, 60

Picón (Jacinto Octavio), 201-202

_Pilgrims_, 61, 62, 76, 147

Pino, 138

Place-names, 64, 65, 68, 78, 85, 86

_Politics_, 28, 35, 212

Pomponius Mela, quoted, 86

_Post_, 56, 59

Prim (Juan), _General_, _Conde de Reus_, 198

_Processions_, 87, 127, 133

_Proverbs_, ix, 26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39,
      40, 63, 69, 72, 79, 93, 121, 145


Q

Quevedo [Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas], 29, 39, 144, 148, 150, 242


R

Reclus (Elisée), quoted, 21

_Religion_, 38, 39, 40, 44, 76, 80, 147, 200

_Roads_, 50, 51, 52

Romayquia, _Queen_, 101

Roncesvalles, 62

Ruiz (Juan), 39, 142, 150


S

Sagunto, 160

Saint-Jean-de-Luz, 57, 60, 62, 64, 78

Saint-Pée, 78

Salamanca, 87, 164-168, 173-175, 181-183

Sánchez (Tomás Antonio), 154

San Feliú de Guixols, 104

Sanguesa, 84

San Sebastian, 63

Sansol, 83

Santa Cruz (Manuel), 210, 211

Santander, 91, 224, 232-233

Santiago de Compostella, 61, 62

Santillana, _Marqués de_ [Iñigo López de Mendoza], 142, 143

San Vicente, 107

Sare, 64, 78

Scaliger, quoted, 60

Scott (_Sir_ Walter), 185

Segovia, 87

_Serenos_, 111, 188

Seville, 88, 90, 125-133, 187, 188

Shakespeare, quoted, 29, 41, 149, 246

Sierra de Jaen, 139

Sierra Nevada, 117, 118, 138, 139, 141

Sitges, 106

_Smuggling_, 57, 58, 77, 205

_Socialism_, 27

Socoa, 65

_Song of Solomon, the_, 166, 175

Sorolla (Joaquín), 205

Stendhal [Henri Beyle], 189, 192

Strabo, quoted, 98


T

Tagus, the, 54, 161, 202-203

Talavera, 90

Tannenberg (Boris de), 151, 223, 237

Tarifa, 118

Tarragona, 107

Teresa, Santa, 25, 148, 183

Theotocopuli (Dominico). _See_ Greco.

_Threshing_, 72, 82

Ticknor (George), quoted, 52 149, 163

Tiepolo (Paolo), quoted, 19

Tintoretto, 255

Titian, 245, 254

Toledo, 87, 90, 91, 155, 240, 244-258

Torrevieja, 113-114

Townsend (Joseph), quoted, 31

_Translations_, 241-242

_Travelling_, 47-56

_Turroneros_, 102


U

Unamuno (Miguel de), 212

Urrobi, 81

Urrugne, 61

_Usury_, 95, 100, 203, 217


V

Valencia, 90, 91, 115, 120, 160, 161, 205, 206

Valencia Island, 86

_Valencians_, 25, 26, 122

Valera (Juan), 150, 191, 193-195, 212, 242

Valle-Inclán (Ramón del), 205, 208, 210, 211, 217-221, 242-243

Vega (Lope Félix de), 33, 149

Velázquez [Diego Velázquez de Silva], 60, 144, 248, 253, 254

Vera, 58, 64, 78

Vézinet (F.), 214

_Villages_, 48, 80, 83, 92, 94, 100, 107, 135, 138, 229

Villanueva y Geltrú, 106

Vinson (Julien), 71

Vizcaya, 60, 63, 68, 76, 78

Voltaire, quoted, 73

_Vulgate, the_, 166, 167, 176-177


W

Webster (Wentworth), 71

Wellington, _the Duke of_, 17, 78

_Whale-fishing_, 63, 225

_Witches_, 231

_Women, influence of_, 40

Wordsworth (William), quoted, 76, 77

Wynn (Sir R.), quoted, 30, 60


Z

_Zagal, the_, 51

Zola (Émile), 207, 222, 238

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FOOTNOTES:

 [1] The distinction still holds good, and those Spaniards who have
 travelled, _e.g._ to Buenos Aires, differ by a certain practical
 energy and optimism from those who have never left the Peninsula.

 [2] “The Ingenious and Diverting Letters of the Lady----. Travels into
 Spain.” English translation. Second edition. London. 1692.

 [3] Villefranche. “État présent d’Espagne.” 1717.

 [4] Edward Clarke. “Letters concerning the Spanish Nation.” London.
 1763.

 [5] This pessimism “is based on our recent disasters; on the fact that
 we are fallen, a terrible fact in the implacable merciless logic of
 international life; on the momentary lack of will from which we are
 suffering; and on the anachronism of certain vices and ideals which,
 since they can no longer, as in past ages, be excused on the ground
 that other nations share them, seem to show that we are incorrigible.”
 Rafael Altamira, “Psicología del Pueblo Español” (Madrid. 1902), in
 which will be found several of the opinions quoted above.

 [6] “Los Males de la Patria.”

 [7] “Idearium Español.”

 [8] “La Voluntad.” Barcelona. 1902: “La intuición de las cosas, la
 visión rápida no falta, pero falta, en cambio, la co-ordinación
 reflexiva, el laboreo paciente, la voluntad.”

 [9] “Alcalá de los Zegríes.” Madrid. 1910.

 [10] Saints in other countries have carried their heads in their
 hands, but there is a legend of a saint in Spain who, not content
 to walk a league with his head under his arm, continued to talk the
 while without ceasing. He was, no doubt “concealing the poverty of
 his action,” like Bertram dal Bornio, carrying his head “a guisa di
 lanterna” in the Inferno.

 [11] “Comedia Sentimental.” 1909.

 [12] One may apply to it the words of Santa Teresa--

    “Tiene tan divinas mañas
     Que en un tan acerbo trance
     Sale triunfando del lance
     Obrando grandes hazañas.”


 [13] Ford considered the Basque to be as “proud as Lucifer and as
 combustible as his matches,” and there is a proverb, “En nave y en
 castillo no más que un vizcaino.” Cf. Camões. Os Lusiadas:

    A gente biscainha que carece
    De polidas razões e que as injurias
    Muito mal dos estranhos compadece.


 [14] The Castilians, said King James I. of Aragon, are very haughty
 and proud: _de gran ufania e erguylhosos_. In the Lusiads the
 Castilian is “grande e raro.”

 [15] The line of Dante is well known: “l’avara povertà di Catalogna.”
 Napier speaks of “the Catalans, a fierce and constant race.”

 [16] The Gallegan, “o Gallego cauto” and “sordidos Gallegos duro
 bando,” in Camões, ever remains the butt of Spanish wit. The
 inhabitants of the _Montaña_ are considered almost equally dense:
 “El montañés para defender una necedad dice tres” and again “From
 Burgos to the sea all is stupidity.” The Asturian, of the region
 between Galicia and the _Montaña_ has, rather, the reputation of a
 business-like shrewdness, he is the _Astur avarus_ of Martial and
 Silius Italicus; in return for his boast that he has never had any
 infecting contact with the Moors, a proverb says: “El asturiano, loco
 y vano, poco fiel y mal cristiano.”

 [17] “Para cantar los navarros, para llorar los franceses, para pegar
 cuatro tiros los mozos aragoneses.”

 [18] In “El Imparcial.”

 [19] It is true that he was a Spanish Basque and was merely
 reproducing in modern dress the scene in “Don Quixote,” in which the
 Biscayan leaves his mistresses unprotected in their carriage and
 fights in order to show that he is by birth a _caballero_.

 [20] Drunkenness is especially rare in Spain. Their sobriety has been
 made a reproach, as being based on laziness and lack of initiative.
 The second half of their proverb: “Goza de tu poco mientras busca más
 el loco--Enjoy the little you have, and let the fool seek more” is,
 indeed, as foolish as the first half is wise.

 [21] Cf. the “altos pensamientos,” of Quevedo’s famous Pablos of
 Segovia and his father, the barber-thief, and the latter’s remark:
 “Esto de ser ladron no es arte mecánica sino liberal”--the thief’s is
 no base mechanical trade, but a liberal profession.

 [22] “Drudgery they will do none at all.” Sir R. Wynn, “A brief
 relation of what was observed by the Prince’s servants in their
 journey into Spain.” 1623.

 [23] They have that momentary isolated intensity which M. Anatole
 France ascribes to men of action: “Ils sont tout entiers dans le
 moment qu’ils vivent et leur génie se ramasse sur un point. Ils se
 renouvellent sans cesse et ne se prolongent pas.”

 [24] Episodios Nacionales. Narváez. 1902.

 [25] Cf. Joseph Townsend. “A journey through Spain in the years
 1786 and 1787,” 3 vols. London. 1792: “We must not imagine that the
 Spaniards are naturally indolent; they are remarkable for activity,
 capable of strenuous exertions and patient of fatigue.” Another
 noteworthy judgment of the same author concerning the Spaniards is
 that “Their ambition aims in everything at perfection, and by seeking
 too much they often obtain too little.”

 [26] “Non hi ha res al mon que vosaltres non faessetz exir de mesura.”

 [27] “La letra con sangre entra,” is a sad proverb of the Spanish and
 in the modern education of the printed page they are deficient.

 [28] Cf. the sayings, _Poderoso caballero es don Dinero; Dadivas
 quebrantan peñas; Dineros son calidad, etc._ Sancho goes to govern
 the island of Barataria “with a very great desire to make money.” The
 tendency is still to hoard, rather than invest, as did Don Bernard de
 Castil Blazo in _Gil Blas_, keeping 50,000 ducats in a chest in his
 house.

 [29] Spaniards prefer to enjoy time as a gift sent by the gods,
 than to waste it in trying to spend it too nicely. _El tiempo lo da
 Dios; Dios mejora las horas; Con el tiempo maduran las uvas._ To a
 peasant two o’clock on a day of March is “four more hours of sun.”
 Time is not parcelled out mechanically into tiny divisions by clocks.
 Distances are given by hours--an hour to a league. The Catalans are
 less lavish of the minutes; to a stranger asking the distance to a
 village near Tarragona, a peasant answered cannily in Catalan, “un
 cuart y mitj”--that is, the village was a quarter of an hour and half
 a quarter of an hour distant. Curiously the Catalans give the hour as
 in German, _e.g._ half-past eight is _dos cuarts de nou--halb Neun_.

 [30] “El Caballero encantado,” 1909: “Viven en un mundo de
 ritualidades, de fórmulas, de trámites y recetas. El lenguaje se ha
 llenado de aforismos, de lemas y emblemas; las ideas salen plagadas
 de motes, y cuando las acciones quieren producirse andan buscando
 la palabra en que han de encarnarse y no acaban de elegir.” The
 Spaniards speak with conviction of the great gulf fixed between word
 and deed:--_del dicho al hecho hay gran trecho; Los dichos en nos, los
 hechos en Dios_.

 [31] Cf. a speaker in the _Cortes_ in June, 1910: “Aquí no hay nada
 tan alto como las clases bajas.”

 [32] Don Ramiro de Maeztu has written of the aggressive assertion of
 personality--_innecesária afirmación de las personas_--in Spain.

 [33] _Lo que no lleva Cristo lo llera el fisco_--“What the Church
 leaves, the Treasury receives,” says an old proverb.

 [34] An author in Pérez Galdós’ _Fortunata y Jacinta_ says that the
 Spaniards, that _pícara raza_, are unaware of the value of time and of
 the value of silence. “You cannot make them understand that to take
 possession of other people’s silence is like stealing a coin.” “It is
 a lack of civilization.” By such un-Spanish criticisms Señor Pérez
 Galdós betrays the fact that he was not born in Spain.

 [35] The historian, Mariana, displayed more patriotism than accuracy
 when he wrote that Spain “is not like Africa, which is burnt by the
 violence of the sun nor is it assailed, as is France, by winds and
 frosts and humidity of air and earth.”

 [36] So Fr. Alonso de Espina wrote that, were an Inquisition
 established, “serían innumerables los entregados al fuego, los cuales
 si no fuesen aquí ... cruelmente castigados ... habrán de ser quemados
 en el fuego eterno.” La Fortaleza de la Fe. 1459.

 [37] “This spectacle,” says an admiring Englishman in 1760, “is
 certainly one of the finest in the world, whether it is considered
 merely as a _coup-d’œil_ or as an exertion of the bravery and infinite
 agility of the performer.”

 [38] Yet certainly no Englishman should attend a bull-fight while the
 modern custom prevails of leading out a cruelly gored horse, sewing
 it up, and bringing it in again for fresh sufferings. This is done to
 save the contractors of the _plaza_ a few shillings and is a disgrace
 to Spain. Those who have not seen a bull-fight and can scarcely
 believe that so sordid and outrageous a practice is possible may, if
 they have the courage, read all the details in Señor Blasco Ibáñez’
 novel _Sangre y Arena_ (1908).

 [39] The Inquisition was a tyranny universally feared, though in
 principle supported by the people. In Pepys we read of “the English
 and Dutch who have been sent for to work (in the manufacture of
 certain stuffs) being taken with a Psalm-book or Testament and so
 clapped up and the house pulled down; and the greatest Lord in Spayne
 dare not say a word against it if the word Inquisition be mentioned.”
 Cf. the groundless terror of the old woman in Quevedo’s _El Buscón_,
 or the story of the man who, when asked for a few pears by an
 Inquisitor, pulled up and presented him with the whole tree. Attacks
 on and ridicule of priests in Spain are not exclusively modern; the
 following verse of Juan Ruiz (14th century) is but one of countless
 instances throughout Spanish literature:

    “Como quier que los frayles et clerigos disen que aman a Dios servir
     Si barruntan que el rico está para morir
     Quando oyen sus dineros que comienzan a retenir
     Qual de ellos lo levará comienzan luego a rennir.”

 But recently the number of those believing in religion has diminished,
 and the anti-Clericals have been driven by certain abuses of the
 Church to a more or less crude parade of atheism. It is felt that
 the Church has crushed life rather than sought its fuller, nobler
 expression. Thus a writer, E. L. André (“Ética Española,” 1910), says:
 “We conceive life solely as a preparation for death,” and speaks of
 the slight _espíritu territorial_ possessed by Spaniards. Cf. Berceo,
 in the 13th century: “Quanto aquí vivimos en ageno moramos”--our life
 on earth is a sojourn in a strange land.

 [40] Honesty is a common attribute of Spaniards, but they have perhaps
 no very accurate regard for the value of truthfulness or honesty in
 words.

 [41] _La mujer y el fraile mal parecen en la calle._ In the South,
 as at Seville, the percentage of women to be seen in the streets is
 noticeably small.

 [42] “El consejo de la mujer es poco,” said Sancho, “y el que no lo
 toma es loco.” The women maintain their influence, but it is thus not
 properly their own, but rather that of the Church.

 [43] The phrase _Seguir sin novedad_ is still used to imply that
 everything is going on well. But an ever-increasing number of
 politicians are now advocating “new things” with a somewhat crude
 violence. It is a reaction against the apathy that waited with crossed
 hands--

    “Vuolsi così colà dove si puote
     Ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare.”


 [44] Cf. the characteristic trait mentioned by Samuel Pepys: “They
 will cry out against their King, and Commanders, and Generals, none
 like them in the world, and yet will not hear a stranger say a word of
 them but will cut his throat.”

 [45] It is true, however, that the mass of the Spanish nation has
 still to develop on really Spanish lines: hence its present weakness
 and its potential strength in the future, when a civilization of a
 truly national character shall have imposed itself upon the artificial
 civilization of culture imported from France, and religion imported
 from Rome.

 [46] The ethereally lovely Cathedral of León is more remote.

 [47] Some of the secondary roads of Andalucía are excellent, and
 motorable, though narrow. But between the roads of most provinces
 there is little to choose. No wonder that there is in Spain a saint
 invoked as the protector of “way-farers and the dying.” Ford remarked
 that while the rest of Spain calls the Milky Way “the road to
 Santiago,” the Gallegans themselves know better, and call it “the road
 to Jerusalem.” The roads from small towns to their stations, at charge
 of the _municipios_, are notably bad, and amaze the newly arrived
 foreigner. But, indeed, the roads in the immediate neighbourhood of
 such important industrial cities as Valencia and Barcelona are often
 in a deplorable state, and it is no infrequent sight to see carts of
 fruit or vegetables stuck fast in deep ruts of mud.

 [48] Ticknor, in 1818, speaks of Spain as “a country such as this
 where all comfortable or decent modes of travelling fail,” of the
 “abominable roads,” and of the inns as “miserable hovels,” destitute
 of provisions. A century and a half earlier Mme. d’ Aulnoy said: “You
 enter not any inn to dine but carry your provisions with you.” But the
 centuries pass not for Spanish inns.

 [49] A peasant woman near Almería wore a long yellow and pink
 kerchief, a bright red shawl, light blue bodice, skirt of white and
 mauve, dark blue apron with a white line, red stockings, yellow
 sandals, and carried a second shawl of brilliant orange colour, yet
 all blent harmoniously under the glaring sunlight.

 [50] Especially in the matter of letters, the ignorance, indifference,
 errors, and delays of the officials are, to an Englishman, past
 belief, and not least so at Madrid, where a letter has been kept for
 two months and handed over, after repeated inquiries, with the date of
 the Madrid post-mark, _seventy_ days earlier, clearly visible. Reforms
 are, however, in contemplation. Foreign letters as a rule fare better
 than others. A card posted at Granada on May 15, and a letter posted
 in France on May 26, both arrived at Barcelona on May 27 (1911).

 [51] The former importance of St. Jean de Luz (in Basque Donibane
 Lohitzune) is shown by the lines--

    “Saint Jean de Luz, petit Paris
     Bayonne, son écurie.”

 Similar is the proud boast of Almería:

    “Cuando Almería era Almería
     Granada era su alquería.”

 Victor Hugo quaintly describes St. Jean de Luz in 1843 as “un village
 cahoté dans les anfractuosités de la montagne.”

 [52] English translation of 1692.

 [53] In 1623 Sir R. Wynn describes the country near “Bilbo” as “all
 infinite Rocky, cover’d onely with Furrs and a few Juniper Trees.”

 [54] At St. Jean de Luz, where Louis XIV. was married to the Infanta,
 a house still hears the inscription--

    “L’Infante je reçus l’an mil six cent soixante
     On m’appelle depuis le Chasteau de l’Infante.”


 [55] “Par Vocation.” Paris. 1905.

 [56] “_Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat._--All hours wound, the last
 kills.”

 [57] Cf. Mme. d’Aulnoy: “We were here very well entertain’d so that
 our Tables were covered with all sorts of Wild Fowls.”

 [58] The Basque poem, “_Altabiscarraco Kantua_,” singing of victory,
 was considered magnificent when it was thought to be centuries old,
 and though it has been proved beyond all doubt to be modern, we may
 still venture to consider it to be magnificent: “A cry is heard among
 the Basque mountains, and the Etchecojauna, standing before his door,
 listens and says: ‘What is it? who is there?’ and the dog asleep at
 his master’s feet, rises and fills the region of Altabiscar with his
 barking.” One line is, “_Cer nahi zuten gure menditarik Norteko gizon
 horiek?_--What do these men of the North want in our mountains?” and
 another, “Why have they come to disturb our peace?” The Basques must
 often have asked a like question as they have seen the foreigners of
 younger races crowd around their mountains; but in spite of these
 inroads, the Basques have succeeded in keeping a part of their
 language and customs, like the waters of their proverb which, after a
 thousand years, still run in their old course: “_Mila urthe igaro eta
 ura bere bidean--Después de años mil, vuelve el rio á su cubil_.”

 [59] Rymer, “Foedera.”

 [60]

    SARARI
    BALHOREA
    RENETALE
    YALTASSUN
    AREN SARIA
    EMANA LUIS
    XIV. 1693.

 The words _balhorea_ (valour) and _leyaltassuna_ (loyalty) are typical
 of the absence of truly Basque abstract words.

 [61] The mountain La Rhune or Larrhun, is half in France, half in
 Spain. Its name is Basque, derived from _larre_, pasture, and _on_,
 good (in Navarre there is a river Larron and a village Larraona); but
 the first syllable has become the French article, and a lower flank of
 the mountain is known as “La petite Rhune.”

 [62] Napier, who had no gift of spelling, writes Atchuria, or
 Atchubia. The word means White Rock (_aitz_, rock, and _churi_, white)
 and its Spanish name is Peña Plata, Silver Mountain.

 [63] The badness of their French has been ridiculed in the proverb,
 “Parler français comme une vache (_i.e._ Basque) espagnole.”

 [64] Yet in a codex of the twelfth century occur eighteen Basque
 words, all of which, except four, are still used, if in slightly
 altered forms. The Basque language gives many proofs of the extreme
 antiquity of the Basques. The words for “knife,” “axe,” etc.,
 are derived from _aitz_, meaning “stone.” The words for “Monday”
 (_astelehena_, “first day of the week”), “Tuesday” (_asteartea_,
 “middle of the week”), “Wednesday” (_asteazkena_, “last of the week”)
 point to a week of three days. The counting is vigesimal: “forty” is
 _berrogoi_ (twice twenty); “sixty,” _hirogoi_ (thrice twenty). The
 word for “twenty,” _hogoi_, has a curious similarity with the Greek
 εἲκοτι and the sheepscoring _gigget_. There are no general terms--no
 word for “tree” (for which _arbola_ is used), but for different kinds
 of trees; no word for “sister,” but for “brother’s sister,” “sister’s
 sister;” and no abstract terms (_karitatea_, _prudentzia_, _etc._,
 being used).

 [65] The best account of the Basques is to be found in the late Mr.
 Wentworth Webster’s “Loisirs d’un Étranger au Pays Basque,” and in
 his “The Basques, the Oldest People of Western Europe;” in M. Julien
 Vinson’s “Les Basques et le Pays Basque” and Francisque Michel’s “Les
 Basques.”

 [66] A French writer, Le Pays, speaks thus of the Basque country in
 the seventeenth century: “La joye y commence avec la vie et n’y finit
 qu’avec la mort. Elle paroist en toutes leurs actions. Les prestres en
 ont leur part aussi bien que les autres. J’ai remarqué qu’aux nopces
 c’est toûjours le curé qui mene le branle.” Another Frenchman of the
 same period says that the Basques of Labourd are “des gens toujours
 fols et souvent yvres.” Similarly, Larramendi says that the Basques
 are “muy inclinados á ver fiestas.”

 [67] Cf. their proverbs, “Lan lasterra, lan alferra--Rapid work, idle
 work;” and “Geroa, alferraren leloa--To-morrow is the refrain of the
 idle.”

 [68] The great game at Irun, between French and Spanish Basques, about
 the year 1840, has become a legend, and is still spoken of by the
 peasants. Gascoña, the chief French player, was offered 10,000 francs
 “pour faire trahison,” but refused, were it ten times the sum. Oxen,
 crops, fields and houses were freely betted. The ball, we are told,
 was slily wetted for service, tintacks were scattered in the court,
 and Gascoña, accustomed to play barefoot, called for a pair of heavy
 wooden _sabots_, and continued the game. The French won, and were
 obliged to escape across the frontier without changing, and _chistera_
 on arm. Those were the times when the peasants left their farms
 to play for the love of the game. To-day the game is in the hands
 of a few professionals, for the benefit of foreigners, the result
 often arranged beforehand. “Aujourd’hui,” said an aged player of the
 frontier, “les joueurs rient quelquefois: nous ne riions pas, nous.”

 [69] Antaño, en los antaños, dans le temps.

 [70] Corografía de Guipúzcoa: “No es creible si no se ve el mucho pan
 y cera que se ofrece.... Además en tales grandes funerales por modo de
 ofrenda se trae á la puerta de la iglesia un buey vivo en unos lugares
 y en otros un carnero también vivo que, acabado el oficio, se vuelve
 á la casería ó carnicería, y por esto se paga al cura una cantidad
 determinada en dinero.” He estimates the house expenses at 500 duros
 (or dollars), and the Church expenses at another 500, truly an immense
 sum for those days. When the burials took place in the church, the
 offerings of bread and wax would be made on the tomb.

 [71] The music and words are by Iparraguirre.

 [72] Sare.

 [73] Urrugne, above the sun-dial on the church.

 [74] Saint Jean de Luz.

 [75] Saint Pée, formerly Stus. Petrus de Ivarren. “There is a little
 village called St. Pé, where I was stopped a day or two by very bad
 weather. I was lodged at the Curé’s, a good old man, from whose
 conversation about the state of France I received light which had
 important results. He was very clever and very well-informed, and took
 not only right, but large views of things.”--_The Duke of Wellington
 to J. W. Croker._

 [76] Near Louhossoa.

 [77] “Remember death.”--Ossès.

 [78] Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa are, with Barcelona and Pontevedra,
 the most densely populated provinces in Spain. The Basques have a
 genius for administration which is not to be found in other parts
 of the Peninsula. Their excellent roads and cleanly kept towns form
 a striking contrast. They have a true love of local independence,
 and in the eighteenth century we find two Basque frontier villages,
 Vera and Sare, styling themselves in a treaty the “two Republics.”
 The treaty concerned Yerbas y Aguas y Bellotas; grass, water and
 acorns. Similarly, to-day, in the Basque provinces groups of small
 villages and houses are joined in free “hermandades,” “universidades,”
 “anteiglesias,” “valles.” The few privileges that remain are jealously
 guarded. The Navarrese will tell you with pride that theirs is the
 only province where a man is allowed to find a substitute in the
 conscriptions.

 [79] The Spanish Premier himself has said in the Senate (October,
 1910), that if the Basque Provinces are more advanced than other parts
 of Spain this is due not to their merits, but to the favouritism of
 governments. A knowledge of the Basques, however, hardly warrants this
 statement. Since the abolition of the _fueros_, says the late Mr.
 Butler Clarke, in “Modern Spain,” “their efforts are restricted to
 making the administration of their provinces a model for the rest of
 Spain.”

 [80] The Basques took their revenge by the hand of M. l’Abbé d’Iharce
 de Bidassouet. In his “Histoire des Cantabres,” tom. I. Paris, 1825
 (vol. ii. was not published), he derives all names of places from
 Basque, as the original language of the world. “Je ne serai pas assez
 hardi,” he says, “pour soutenir que le Père Éternel parlât basque,”
 but he is really convinced that it is so. L’Andalousie, with the help
 of the article, he derives from two Basque words, “landa lusia,” long
 land. Versailles is a Basque word, so is Athens, so is Helicon. Norway
 puzzles him for a moment, but soon with the remark that “Norvège
 est un mot altéré et corrompu,” he tosses it aside and proceeds on
 his reckless etymological course. Certainly to the irresponsible
 philologist Basque offers a delightful field. For instance, the name
 of the desolate salt lake of Kevir in Persia has been derived from a
 word “gavr” or “gav” (“hollow,” “depression”). In Basque “gabe” means
 without, and the word for night is also “gabe” (no doubt as being a
 hollow without light). Then we have the Gaves, de Pau, d’Oloron, etc.;
 the Spanish “gaveta” (a pigeonhole), “gavia” (pit dug for planting a
 tree); “cavus,” “cave” and so forth. But to draw inferences as to the
 origin of the Iberians, as to whether the same or different peoples
 inhabited the Caucasus and the Pyrenees, or even as to whether “le
 Père Éternel parlât Basque,” is a very different matter, beset with
 pitfalls innumerable.

 [81] See Wentworth Webster, “Les Loisirs d’un Étranger au Pays
 Basque.” 1901. This was a common practice of the Romans who, meeting
 words so rough and horrid to their Latin pronunciation in the land of
 the Basques, “quorum nomina,” according to Pomponius Mela, “nostro
 ore concipi nequeunt,” would smooth and round these names and give
 them a Latin derivation. The Spaniards may have done the same in the
 case of Valencia Island, Co. Kerry. The form in old maps is Ballinish
 (_Innish_, “island,” and _ball_, “home” or perhaps “mouth”--the
 harbour the mouth of the island), and the peasants still pronounce the
 name Valinch.

 [82] Yet those who connect Barcelona with the smoke and gloom of an
 industrial city, having heard it spoken of as the Manchester of Spain,
 are mistaken. Barcelona is still worthy of the praise of the Venetian
 ambassador in the sixteenth century, who called it a “bellissima
 città,” with “copia di giardini bellisimi,” and of the praises of
 Cervantes in “Don Quixote,” and in “Las Dos Doncellas,” where it is
 the “flower of the beautiful cities of the world and an honour to
 Spain.”

 [83] “España: Hombres y paisajes.” 1909.

 [84] A Spanish proverb says: “When it rains, it rains; when it snows,
 it snows; but ’tis bad weather when it blows.” Agriculture in many
 parts of Spain is literally “ἀπάνευθεν ἐπ’ ἀγροῦ πήυατα πάσχειν--to
 suffer woes apart upon the land.”

 [85] Cf. Pío Baroja, “César ó Nada.” Madrid, 1910: “Hay una hora
 en estos pueblos castellanos, adustos y viejos, de paz y serenidad
 ideales. Es el comenzar de la mañana. Todavía los gallos cantan, las
 campanadas de la iglesia se derraman por el aire y el sol comienza
 á penetrar en las calles en ráfagas de luz. La mañana es un diluvio
 de claridad que se precipita sobre el pueblo amarillento. El cielo
 está azul, el aire limpio, puro y diáfano; la atmósfera transparente
 no da casi efectos de perspectiva, y su masa etérea hace vibrar
 los contornos de las casas, de los campanarios y de los remates de
 los tejados. El viento frío y sutil juega en las encrucijadas y se
 entretiene en torcer los tallos de los geranios y de los claveles
 que llamean en los balcones. Hay por todas partes un olor de jara y
 de retama quemada que viene de los hornos donde se cuece el pan, y
 un olor de alhucema que viene de los zaguanes.” Castille has been a
 little neglected by the novelists in comparison with other regions.
 But recently Ricardo León (in “El Amor de los Amores,” 1910), has
 sung the praises of the _ancha, heróica tierra de Castilla_, its
 austere simplicity and strength, its serene atmosphere, its golden
 crops, its flocks of sheep, clear streams, thyme-scented solitudes,
 and far horizons. And _Azorín_, in a short study, “En la Meseta” (_La
 Vanguardia_ of Barcelona, January 4, 1911), as in his books “España,”
 “El Alma Castellana,” “Los Pueblos,” skilfully portrays the inner
 spirit of Castille: “Por la ventana se columbra un paisaje llano,
 seco, desmantelado; á lo lejos se divisan unas montañas con las cimas
 blanqueadas por la nieve.... Todo el silencio, toda la rigidez, toda
 la adustez de esta inmoble vida castellana está concentrada en los
 rebaños que cruzan la llanura lentamente y se recogen en los oteros
 y los valles de las montañas. Mirad ese rabadán, envuelto en su capa
 récia y parda, contemplando un cielo azul sin nubes, ante el paisaje
 abrupto y grandioso de la montaña, y tendréis explicado el tipo del
 campesino castellano castizo, histórico: noble, austero, grave y
 elegante en el ademán, corto, sentencioso y agudo on sus razones.”

 [86] Señor Gasset, Minister of Public Works, now proposes (in a scheme
 explained to the Congress on March 9, 1911) to spend twenty-seven
 million _pesetas_ on afforestation in ten years.

 [87] Martial, referring to the frequency of winds of Spain, says--

    “Debes non aliter timere risum
     Quam ventum Spanius.”


 [88] El Conde Lucanor, “Enxemplo 30:” “...el rey Abenabet de Sevilla
 era casada con Romayquia et amábala muy mas que á cosa del mundo, et
 ella era muy buena mujer, et los moros han della muy buenos enxemplos:
 pero una manera habia que non era muy buena, esto era, que á las
 vegadas tomaba algunos antojos á su voluntad. Et acaesció que un dia,
 estando en Córdoba en el mes de febrero, cayó una nieve, et cuando
 Romayquia esto vió comenzó á llorar, et el rey preguntóle porque
 lloraba, et ella dijó que porque nunca la dejaba estar en tierra que
 hubiese nieve. Et el rey, por le facer placer, fize poner almendrales
 por toda la tierra de Córdoba, porque pues Córdoba es tan caliente
 tierra et non nieva y cada año, que en el febrero paresciesen los
 almendrales floridos et le semejasen nieve, por le facer perder aquel
 deseo de la nieve.”

 [89] George Eliot, “The Spanish Gypsy.” The purple shadows are the
 effect of dark patches of rock seen through the transparent blue water.

 [90] “_Papel y tinta y poca justicia_, paper, ink, and little
 justice,” say the people, in one of their proverbs. They feel that,
 in Spain, if revenge is a kind of wild justice, so too frequently is
 justice.

 [91] Barretti’s Dictionary (edition of 1778) quaintly renders
 _socarrón_ as “a crafty, subtle fellow; an arch wag.”

 [92] On the road from Tortosa to Valencia there is a stone cross with
 the pathetic, ill-spelt inscription: “Aqui murió instantáneamente al
 tirarse del carro por habersele desembocado el mulo Domin^{co} Cugat
 Jardi el 30 agosto de 1894. R.I.P. Carrateros ya veis lo que paso este
 infelis.” “Carters, you see what happened to this unhappy man.” But
 the carters throughout Spain continue to sleep away the long hours of
 the road.

 [93] The latest statistics available show that, while 90 and 80 per
 cent. of the electors in some northern provinces of Spain can read and
 write, in Andalucía the highest averages are 51 and 50 (provinces of
 Cadiz and Seville), that of the province of Córdoba being but 41, of
 Almería 38, of Granada and Jaen 35, of Málaga 34.

 [94] “Chapters on Spanish Literature.” 1908.

 [95] “N’uma mão a penna e n’outra a lança.”

 [96] M. Boris de Tannenberg, speaking of “Sotileza,” has said
 excellently: “C’est que plus une œuvre a un caractère local marqué,
 plus elle a de chance de devenir universelle, à condition que
 l’écrivain, sous la particularité des mœurs et du langage, ait pénétre
 jusqu’au fond commun d’humanité.” And Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo,
 who represented King Alfonso on January 23, 1911, in the ceremony of
 unveiling at Santander the statue of Pereda by Señor Collaut Valera
 (nephew of the novelist, Juan Valera), said in his speech: “His
 books, so local that even the inhabitants of the mountain require a
 glossary, and as Spanish as the most Spanish writings since Cervantes
 and Quevedo, are profoundly human owing to the intensity of life which
 they contain, and the quiet majesty with which it is developed.”

 [97] We are apt to forget that men in the Middle Ages, if they dwelt
 insistently on the sinister “Dance of Death,” also felt to the full
 the joys of living. The “Poema del Cid” sings no variations on the
 theme “How good is man’s life, the mere living,” but the feeling
 itself appears in every line.

 [98] The King had sent “letters to León and Sanctiague, to Portuguese
 and Galicians, to those of Carrión and the Men of Castille,” to
 announce a _Cort dentro en Tolledo_, in order to judge between the Cid
 and the Counts of Carrión. “Since I was King,” he says, “I have held
 but two _Cortes_, one in Burgos, the other in Carrión, this third in
 Tolledo have I come to hold to-day.”

 [99] James Fitzmaurice-Kelly. “Chapters on Spanish Literature,” p. 231.

 [100] See pp. 151, 222-238. Pereda is, perhaps, the least read outside
 Spain of all Spanish novelists; yet it is scarcely too much to say
 that he who cannot appreciate Pereda cannot understand the spirit or
 feel the true savour of Spain.

 [101] “Chapters on Spanish Literature,” p. 246.

 [102] Andrés González-Blanco, “Historia de la novela en España desde
 el romanticismo hasta nuestros días.” Madrid. 1909.

 [103] La Primera República. Madrid. 1911.

 [104] See page 214.

 [105] Señor Picón, whose writings are rather exquisite than
 voluminous, is the author of “Dulce y Sabrosa,” and several short
 stories. A Spanish critic, Señor Gómez de Baquero, has said of him
 that while “his thoughts look to the future, his style listens to the
 golden music of the past.” His latest work is “Juanita Tenorio,” a
 long novel (published as vol. 3 of his Complete Works in the autumn
 of 1910), in which his art, skilful and delicate as it is, has not
 been entirely successful in eclipsing the sordidness of the subject
 by the magic of the style. The following quotation--a description of
 Madrid seen from an attic-window at night--will give some idea of his
 restrained and clear-cut style: “Era noche cerrada. En primer término
 no percibía la vista más que las grandes masas angulosas y obscuras de
 muros, parodones y tejados: descollando por encima de ellos surgían
 los contornos de torres y campanarios, cuyos puntiagudos chapiteles,
 cubiertos de pizarra, recogían el escaso claror de las estrellas; acà
 y allà rompían la superficie negra de las fachadas los rectángulos de
 luz amarillenta que forman los balcones alumbrados interiormente, y al
 través de algun vidrio brillaba el resplandor solitario de una lámpara
 con su pantalla de color; de las chimeneas salían nubecillas de humo,
 que, flotando como manchas fugaces en la lobreguez del ambiente, se
 desvanecían en la altura; por entre las manzanas de casas, á lo largo
 de las calles rectas, divisabanse las hileras de los faroles, cuyas
 llamas reverberaban en cristales y vidrieras, ó á trechos algún arco
 voltáico irradiaba intenso fulgor blanquecino; y de aquel conjunto de
 sombras esmaltadas de toques luminosos so alzaba el rumor confuso de
 mil ruidos diversos; rodar de vehículos, vocear de vendedores, gritar
 de chicos y cantar de criadas; ya el tecleo de un piano, ya el lento
 sonar de las campanadas de un reloj.”

 [106] “César ó Nada” is the first of a trilogy entitled “Las
 Ciudades”; another trilogy, “El Mar,” is begun with “Las Inquietudes
 de Shanti Andía” (1911), a vivid disconnected narrative concerning
 the lives of adventurous sailors of the Basque coast in the little
 fishing-harbour of Luzaro and in their distant voyages. The style,
 or absence of style, is clear, transparent, as it were brittle with
 the shock of abrupt short sentences, interspersed with sonorous
 Basque names and rough snatches of Basque song. In Basque, too, are
 the indications of the site in which lie buried the coffers of gold
 coins hoarded by a miserly slave trader. But the book ends with the
 sad reflection: “No one now in Luzaro is willing to be a sailor. Los
 vascos se retiran del mar.”

 [107] Six years after Galdós, sixteen before Blasco Ibáñez, one before
 Alas and Picón, and two before Palacio Valdés.

 [108] F. Vézinet, “Les Maîtres du Roman Espagnol Contemporain,” Paris,
 1907.

 [109] Indeed, in reading the more recent novels by Señora Pardo Bazán,
 “La Quimera,” or “La Sirena Negra,” or “Dulce Dueño” (1911), striking
 and original as they are, one cannot help looking back from them
 somewhat regretfully to her Galician novels of the eighties.

 [110] “Le trait essentiel du réalisme de Pereda c’est la sympathie
 avec laquelle il décrit les mœurs populaires, sans optimisme outré,
 mais avec une divination profonde de leur poésie intime. Pereda
 aime le peuple par tempérament d’artiste, pour ce que celui-ci a de
 pittoresque et d’original; il l’aime aussi en homme et en chrétien,
 comme une humanité plus simple, aux sentiments spontanés et naïfs.
 Il ne nous dissimule pas sa grossièreté et ses misères mais il nous
 ouvre les yeux sur ses vertus ignorées; jusque chez les êtres dégradés
 par le vice, il nous montre quelque noble instinct qui survit et se
 réveille à l’occasion. Et ce réalisme, qu’illumine toujours un rayon
 d’idéal, respecte l’homme en le peignant même dans ses vulgarités ou
 ses laideurs.” Boris de Tannenberg. L’Espagne littéraire. Paris, 1903.

 [111] The country between Burgos and the Atlantic, known as the
 “_Montaña_” with Santander for its capital, is a district of
 continuous mountains and hills and steep meadows and maize-fields,
 with scarcely an inch of level ground. The hills far up are covered
 with chestnut and oak, beech, walnut and sycamore; rushing streams are
 hidden in deep wooded clefts, and rough walls of stones divide field
 from field, where the reapers, with difficulty wielding their scythes,
 have but a precipitous foothold. The villages and scattered farms
 are of massive yellow stone, with roofs of deep-brown tiles and wide
 balconies suspended by grey wooden posts from the projecting eaves.

 [112] Even so, however, the clear splendour of the sky of Castille
 must have cast a charm over the place. The dominant impression at
 Madrid to-day is, indeed, that of light and of open spaces, the
 Puerta del Sol in a radiance of sunshine, the Carrera de San Jeronymo
 going off apparently into space, the surrounding country far-seen and
 treeless, the clear blue mountains, and the sky from verge to zenith
 clothed with a brilliance of dazzling light so that “ogni parte ad
 ogni parte splende.”

 [113] “La Montálvez” (1888) and “Nubes de Estío” (1891) are perhaps
 his weakest works. “Nubes de Estío” is rather wearisome till the Duque
 de Cañaveral arrives, “falling like a Jupiter among little gods.” “Al
 Primer Vuelo” (1890) is a novel of the Cantabrian coast, but without
 the full salt and vigour of “Sotileza.”

 [114] M. Boris de Tannenberg speaks of “l’âpre saveur de sa langue, un
 peu rude et fruste, mais solide, musclée et haute en couleur.”

 [115] The difference between these artists in prose may be best
 illustrated by quotation: “El Cura abrió la ventana y miró al cielo.
 Apenas brillaban las estrellas. Estúvose quieto y meditando, con los
 ojos fijos en la sombra de los montes. Bajo la bóveda de la noche,
 todos los rumores parecían llenos de prestigio. El ladrido de los
 perros, el paso de las patrullas, el agua del río en las presas,
 eran voces religiosas y misteriosas, como esos anhelos ignotos que
 estremecen á las almas en su noche oscura.” (Valle-Inclán, “Gerifaltes
 de Antaño.”) Here we have the clear thin outlines, the studied
 restraint of the admirer of El Greco. In the following passage, from
 León’s “Alcalá de los Zegríes,” we find the more sensuous glowing
 imagination of the Andalusian novelist: “Fué Alfonso hacia la ventana
 y apoyó la ardorosa frente en los cristales. Todo era silencio y
 soledad. Las estrellas oscilaban en el cielo; la ancha bóveda, oscura,
 estaba acribillada de lucecillas trémulas. Una fogata brillaba á lo
 lejos en el campo. Y en el silencio grave, en la callada sombra, las
 puertas de bronce del misterio se abrían de par en par.” In the hands
 of both writers Castilian yields a full measure of its magic.

 [116] Señor Cossío published his well-known work, “El Greco,” 2
 tom. Madrid, in 1908. The second volume consists of illustrations
 of El Greco’s pictures; most of the reproductions are, however,
 unfortunately somewhat indistinct. The reproductions from photographs
 in a little book, “El Greco,” by A. F. Calvert and C. Gasquoine
 Hartley. London: John Lane, 1909, are much clearer. The illustrations
 are excellent in “Le Greco.” Par Maurice Barrès et Paul Lafond.
 Paris: Floury, as also those of pictures by El Greco in Herr Meier
 Graefe’s “Spanische Reise,” Berlin, 1910. In October, 1910, appeared
 a short scholarly study, “El Greco en Toledo.” Por Francisco de Borja
 de San Román y Fernández. Madrid: Suárez. It contains eighty-eight
 original documents of great interest, especially the inventory of El
 Greco’s possessions (_vienes_), drawn up by his son, Jorge Manuel, on
 April 12, 1614, five days after El Greco’s death, the discovery and
 publication of which will, as the author says, give intense pleasure
 to all lovers of El Greco. This contains over 100 pictures by El
 Greco (some unfinished), 200 prints, 150 drawings, 15 sketches, 20
 plaster models, 30 models in clay and wax, etc. Among the Greek books
 are Josephus, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Homer, Aristotle’s
 Politics and Physics, the Old and New Testaments, Lucian, Plutarch
 (bite di Plutarco), Æsop, Euripides. The Italian include Petrarca and
 Ariosto, but fifty more Italian books, with seventeen in romance and
 nineteen on architecture, are uncatalogued. The commonest articles
 receive a quaint dignity in the old ringing Castilian, as “quatro
 pares de escarpines” (four pair of socks), “un cajón grande de pino
 con cinco gabetas” (a large chest of pine with five drawers), “una
 alacena de madera grande” (a large wooden cupboard), “una espada y una
 daga con tiros y pretina” (a sword and dagger with their belts).

 [117] Cf. his dispute with the Church of Santo Tomé as to the price of
 “El Entierro,” of which dispute a most interesting account is to be
 found in the documents of Señor San Román’s book.

 [118] The temptation is great to quote the _Coplas_ from beginning to
 end. They have been excellently translated by Longfellow, but all who
 read them in the original will be ready to say with the shepherd of
 Camões: “Quam bem que sôa o verso castelhano.”

 [119] “Son tan disonantes unas de otras que no parecen ser de la misma
 mano” (Jusepe Martínez).

 [120] Or Dominico. Sometimes he signed Domy^{co} or Dom^{co} at
 the end of documents. The fourth letter of the signature (in Greek
 characters) on the “Baptism” in the Prado Gallery has all the air of a
 Greek _eta_.

 [121] Even though the house now known and shown as “la Casa del
 Greco” is not that in which El Greco lived, it occupies very much the
 same open situation; for by the disappearance of the block of houses
 belonging to the Marqués de Villena, El Greco’s landlord, it steps
 into the first place above the river.










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