Part 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ESTREMADURA

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

GEORGE J. ROMANES.

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

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

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

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

We had taken the trip into Estremadura to see the Roman remains, the best in the Peninsula. The ruins are more fortunate in their setting here than in many places, for there are none of the bustling cafés nor electric cars of Nîmes or Verona. Paestum is more poetic, Baalbec a hundred times more grandiose, but Mérida on a showery, sunshiny day in spring is an ideal spot for musing and rambling. In the city itself are some ancient remains, such as a temple of Mars, and the fluted columns of a temple of Diana built into a mediæval house, which, by the way, has a lovely Plateresque window, but most of the ruins lie completely outside the present town. The amphitheatre, when we saw it, had a comfortable troop of goats asleep in the warm shelter of its oval, and the remarkable theatre, known as _Las Siete Sillas_, from the seven divisions of its upper seats that crown it like a coronet, was gay with poppies and buttercups,--the national colors gleamed everywhere. Swallows in cool, metallic, blue-black coats, dipped and swept in their swift, graceful way. Looking out on the view which embraced Mérida on one side and a line of rugged hills on the other, we lingered for hours in that Theatre of the Seven Seats. Children, like gentle fawns, one by one crept out from the town suburbs and gathered in a smiling, lovable circle round the strangers. We talked to them tranquilly, our map of their city seemed a fascinating wonder to them. They came and went smiling; now one returned to the town to fetch his mother, now a shy little girl laid an armful of poppies beside us, with no thought of pennies, but just out of primitive human kindliness. The dear Don's age of gold seemed a reality. And a day before we had angrily scattered those diabolical little pests, the street children of Seville! Could these enchanting little people belong to the same race, and live only a hundred and fifty miles away? Journeys in unfrequented parts of Spain give one a truer picture than is possible for the hurried tourist on the beaten track; every time we turned aside into the unspoiled country we met the people and ways which Cervantes has described. Never were gentler human beings than those little girls of Mérida, those young mothers, those big half-awkward lads, whose gazelle eyes would gaze at us inquiringly, then turn to look at the scene we so obviously admired, then back to us with pleasure at our appreciation of what they too held most beautiful. We are told that peasants get no æsthetic pleasure from landscape, but I am sure romantic Roman ruins and perfect spring-time weather had much to do with giving those children faces of such pure outline.

Perhaps later, when the sun scorches the first freshness, Mérida may be a desolate enough spot; we probably knew her best hour, the lovely April of her prime. We were loath to tear ourselves away; we read to our interested audience accounts of their city's past, when Emperors' armies marched along the Roman road that led from Cadiz north, and alert to catch the meaning, they listened with that vividness of the eye that shows the imagination is roused. Then from the daily paper we read to them that in Madrid on Holy Thursday, two days before, the King had washed the feet of a dozen poor men, kissed them in humility, then waited on them at table, assisted by the grandees of Spain; that on Good Friday he had set free some criminals. When the bishop's words rang through the church: "Señor, human laws condemn these men to death," Don Alfonso answered with moved voice: "I pardon them, and may God pardon me!" And somehow, Alfonso XIII is not jarring or theatric among such ancient usages of Spanish Christianity. Very modern with his automobile, his polo, his careless ease, this charming king is one with his people in a radical sympathy with ways that symbolize soul and heart emotions.

Mérida has a bridge built by the Emperor Trajan. And it has ruins of a very stately aqueduct standing in wheat and poppy fields. This is built of stone and brick ranged in regular lines, and though only about a hundred feet high, is truly majestic, the entrancing touch being given by the hundreds of storks who have built nests on the top of the arches. Some of our little friends had accompanied us through the fields to the aqueduct, and when we took a final ramble through the town, many were the smiling greetings, "_Buenas Tardes_." Mérida is too small to have visitors pass a day there without making friends among its courteous people.

We took an evening train on to Cáceres ten miles away, for its hotels sounded inviting; and a second happy day, a holy and tranquil _Domingo de Resurrección_, gave us another memory of Estremadura. Cáceres is an unspoiled mediæval town climbing up a crag, just such a place as Albrecht Dürer loved to paint. It is very individual. From the plaza with its acacia trees we mounted the steep grass-grown streets, past one baronial mansion after another, with old escutcheoned doorways blazoned with plumed helmet and shield. In one of them, the house of the Golfines, _los Reyes Católicos_ stayed on a visit. Nowhere in the world save in Spain could such a bit of the Middle Ages stand untouched and unnoticed, giving one that thrilling sensation of the traveler, the meeting unheralded with a very rare thing. The views caught between the granite mansions were lovely, for Cáceres lies in the most cultivated district of the county. Across the river rose another steep crag, turned into a Way of Calvary, with a picturesque church crowning it.

The town has some excellent hotels, and we were well-fed and slept well for five pesetas a day in one of them. Easter Sunday morning I awoke to the sound of bleating animals, and looking out, there at every doorway was tied a tiny white or black lamb, with a bunch of soft greens to nibble on. It is the custom for each family to have this symbol of peace and innocence on the Christian Passover. All day long the children played with them, and toward evening when the toy-like legs trembled with fatigue, the little boys carried the lambs across their shoulders as shepherds do. In the midst of patriarchal ways, we kept congratulating ourselves that we had escaped the noisy city to the south, whose Easter crowds were pouring in eager excitement to the first bull-fight of the year; it was the thought of the scene being enacted in Seville that made us a little unjust to the city where so happy a winter had been passed.

After Mass in a gray old church on the hill, a procession formed to carry the _pasos_ of Cáceres. Each house was hung with the national colors, and on the balconies tall men of the hidalgo type and proud Spanish ladies (Madrid has not drained the provincial places of their leading families) knelt respectfully as the cortège passed. The statues were simple and poor, they were borne by pious peasants, and the silent crowd dropped to its knees on the pavement with a prayer. Not a tourist was there, save two who felt so in sympathy with old Spain that they disclaimed the title. To think that the gorgeous materialistic _pasos_ of Seville had once begun in this way! Easter afternoon made as pastoral a memory as the hours in Mérida. We walked out with the people to the hill of the Stations of the Cross. Life seemed a happy and normal thing when all, old and young, grandee and peasant, gave courteous greeting to those who passed; also it was a joy to hear pure Castilian after the somewhat slovenly Andalusian dialect.

However, the week in Estremadura was not to end on an idyllic note. We attempted an excursion beyond our strength and got well punished; the moral is, avoid all diligence journeys in Spain, they are only for those who have the nerves of oxen. The real reason why we had come into this little-visited province was because that old emperor born in Italica near Seville, Trajan, the bridge builder, had in the year A.D. 105 put up one of his bridges at Alcántara, a town now on the Portuguese frontier. Such a reason sounds slightly absurd, but many who read certain descriptions of the bridge must feel the same impulse to hunt it up. Richard Ford calls it one of the wonders of Spain, "the work of men when there were giants on the earth," worth going five hundred miles out of one's way to see as it rises in lonely grandeur two hundred feet above the Tagus River. So it no doubt appeared to the English traveler who stumbled on it eighty years ago, for it was then an unrestored, picturesque ruin, probably unused since one of its arches had been blown up by the English in the Peninsula War. At any rate, it was such glowing words that enticed us into the wilderness of Estremadura.