James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

“ MODERN SPANISH NOVELISTS If asked to indicate the most interesting development in Spanish literature during the last century, I should point—not to the drama and poetry of the Romantic movement, but—to the renaissance of fiction. As the passion for narrative ‘springs eternal in the human breast,’ Cervantes was sure to have a train of successors who would attempt to carry on his great tradition. But, in the history of art, a short, glorious summer is usually followed by a long, blighting winter. The eighteenth century was an age of barrenness in Spain, so far as concerns romance. ”

“ There is no attempt to scare the wicked by means of awful examples, the moral lesson is contemptuously thrown aside; the veil of romance is rent in twain, and the picaro-the nephew of the public executioner-is revealed as he is, gloating in cruelty and revelling in the conscious enjoyment of crime. But though Quevedo detests mankind, his morose vision of existence rarely degenerates into caricature. In his repugnant, misanthropic masterpiece the sordid genius of the Spanish picaroon finds absolute expression. ”

“ Spanish prose sheds much of its uncouthness, and takes its definitive form in such a passage as that upon the Joys of Spain: "More than all, Spain is subtle,—ay! and terrible, right skilled in conflict, mirthful in labour, stanch to her lord, in letters studious, in speech courtly, fulfilled of gifts; never a land the earth overlong to match her excellence, to rival her bravery; few in the world as mighty as she." ”

“ Luis de Leon is not a candidate for canonization. He was no icicle of perfection. He was something vastly more interesting than a chill intellectual: a man ardent, austere, conscious of resplendent intellectual faculties, perhaps a little arrogant when off his guard, incautious but wary, individualistic but self-sacrificing, emotional, sensitive, reticent: a mass of conflicting qualities blended, unified and held in subjection by sheer strength of will, fortified by a professional discipline, deliberately embraced and rigorously followed. ”

“ Speak no evil of women; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves our respect; for of women do we not all come? Quarrel with no one but with good cause.... I trust in God to live to see thee home again with honour and advancement on thy back."
Had Calderón always maintained this level, he would be classed with the first masters of all ages and all countries. His blood, his faith, his environment were limitations which prevented his becoming a world-poet; his majesty, his devout lyrism, his decorative fantasy suffice to place him in the foremost file of national poets. ”

“ Cervantes was no bloodless ascetic, no incarnation of dreary righteousness: we do him wrong, if we present him in that crude, intolerable light. With some defects of character and with some lapses of conduct, he is a more interesting and more attractive personality than if he were—what perhaps no one has ever been—a bundle of almost impossible perfections. He was even as we are, but far nobler—braver, more resigned to disappointment, more patient with the folly which springs eternal in each of us. ”

“ García has lied all his life, lies to his father, his friends, his betrothed, lies to himself, and defeats his own purpose by his ingenuity. He would speak the truth if he could, but he has no talent that way. Why trouble with truth when lying comes easier? His father, Beltrán, perceives that the miser enjoys money, that murder slakes vengeance, that the drunkard grows glorious with wine; but his son's failing is beyond him. The noble Philistine has not the artist's soul, and cannot understand why García should lie for lying's sake, against his own interest. ”

“ Just so Ben Jonson lamented that Shakespeare ‘wanted art’—that is, he paid no heed to the pseudo-Aristotelian precepts concerning dramatic composition. Nor did Lope: and it is precisely by neglecting to follow blind leaders of the blind, and by giving free play to their individual genius that Shakespeare and Lope de Vega have become immortal. Rules may serve for men of simple talent; but an original mind attains independence by intelligently breaking them, and thus arrives at inventing a new and living form of art. It is in this sense that we call Lope the founder of the Spanish theatre. ”

“ The world, leaving scholars and professional critics to estimate the writer’s indebtedness to Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, has steadily refused to be interested in Persiles y Sigismunda; and in the long run the world delivers a just judgment. It is often led astray by gossip, by influence, by publishers’ tricks, by authors who press their own wares on you with all the effrontery of a cheap-jack at a fair; but the world finds out the truth at last. An author’s genius may be manifest in most or all of his works ”

“ That he was an imitative artist was his highest glory: by imitating foreign models he attained his measure of originality, enriching Spain, with not merely a number of technical forms but a new poetic language. Without him Boscán must have failed in his emprise, as Santillana failed before him. Besides his technical perfection, Garcilaso owned the poetic temperament—a temperament too effeminately delicate for the vulgarities of life. As he tells us in his third eclogue, he lived, "now using the sword, now the pen:"—
"Tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma." ”

“ Splendid as Calderón’s diction often is, it lapses into gongorism too easily. Rojas Zorrilla’s natural mode of expression is direct and energetic; his dialogue is both natural and brilliant in Don Diego de Noche and Lo que son mugeres; he knew the difference between a good style and a bad one, and he pauses now and then to satirise Góngora and the cultos. But he must be in the fashion, and as Calderón has dabbled in culteranismo, he will do the same. And he bursts into gongorism with all the crude exaggeration of one who is deliberately sinning against the light. ”

“ He had it in him to be a poet, or a theologian, or a stoic philosopher, or a critic, or a satirist, or a statesman: he insisted on being all of these together, and he has paid the penalty. Though he never fails ignominiously, he rarely achieves a genuine success, and the bulk of his writing is now neglected because of its local and ephemeral interest. Yet he deserves honour as the most widely-gifted Spaniard of his time, as a strong and honest man in a corrupt age, and as a brilliant writer whose hatred of the commonplace beguiled him into adopting a dull innovation. ”

“ The Moor of fiction is so much more attractive than the Moor of history that he has imposed himself upon the world. Most of us still see him, with the light of other days around him, as we first met him in Scott’s Talisman, or in Chateaubriand’s Aventures du dernier Abencérage. Still the fact remains that he is a conventional lay-figure, and that a Spanish poem in which he appears transfigured and glorified is neither ancient nor popular, but is necessarily the work of some late Spanish writer who knows no more of Moors than he can gather from Pérez de Hita’s gorgeously imaginative pages. ”

“ But it is not as a master of artistic detail that Lope's countrymen place him beside Cervantes. First, and last, and always, he is a great creative genius. He incarnates the national spirit, adapts popular poetry to dramatic effects, substitutes characters for abstractions, and, in a word, expresses the genius of a people. It is true that he rarely finds a perfect form for his utterance, that he constantly approaches perfection without quite attaining unto it, that his dramatic instinct exceeds his literary execution. Yet he survives as the creator of an original form. ”

“ A perfect contrast in every way was Juan Valera, whose ductile talent had concerned itself with many matters before it found an outlet in fiction. Pereda was stubbornly regional and fanatically orthodox: Valera was a cosmopolitan strayed out of Andalusia, a careless Gallio, observing with serene amusement the fussiness of mankind over to be, or not to be. Pereda tends to tragic or melodramatic pessimism: Valera is a bland and disinterested spectator, to whom life is a brilliant, diverting comedy. ”

“ Thus, where Gautier needs 1350 lines to tell the legend of St. Ildefonsus, or 2090 to give the miracle of Theophilus, Berceo confines himself to 108 and to 657 lines. Gautier will spare you no detail; he will have you know the why, the when, the how, the paltriest circumstance of his pious story. Beside him Berceo shines by his power of selection, by his finer instinct for the essential, by his relative sobriety of tone, by his realistic eye, by his variety of resource in pure Castilian expression, by his richer melody, and by the fleeter movement of his action. ”

“ As man fashions his idols in his own image, we are in a fair way to understand him, if we know what he admires: and, as it is with individual units, so is it with races. National heroes symbolise the ambitions, the foibles, the general temper and radical qualities of those who have set them up as exemplars. But there are two sides to every character, and Spain has two national heroes known all the world over: the practical Cid and the idealistic Don Quixote, one of them an historical figure, and the other the child of a great man’s fancy. ”

“ Valera, like the rest of the world, is entitled to be judged at his best, and his best will be read as long as Spanish literature endures; for he is [389] not simply a dexterous craftsman using one of the noblest of languages with an exquisite delicacy and illimitable variety of means, nor a clever novelist exercising a superficial talent, nor even (though he is that in a very special sense) the leader of a national revival. He is something far rarer and more potent than an accomplished man of letters: a great creative artist, and the embodiment of a people's genius. ”

“ Continuous production, as Chorley puts it, is a vital requisite to ‘the existence of the drama in its true form, as acted poetry.’ This, however, is beyond the power of a few normal men of genius. Schiller and Goethe combined failed to create a national theatre at Weimar: no one but Lope could have succeeded in creating a national theatre at Madrid. At precisely the right moment Spain happily produced a most abnormal writer who could throw off admirable plays—many of them imperfect, but many of them masterpieces—in such profusion as twenty ordinary men of genius could not equal. ”

“ The poet is whisked by the dragons in Bellona's chariot to Fortune's palace, and there begins the inevitable imitation of Dante, with its machinery of seven planetary circles, and its grandiose vision of past, present, and future. The work of a learned poet taking himself too seriously and straining after effects beyond his reach, the Laberinto is tedious as a whole; yet, though Mena's imagination fails to realise his abstractions, though he be riddled with purposeless conceits, he touches a high level in isolated episodes. ”

“ If Cervantes be a ‘great’ poet, what adjective is left to describe Garcilaso, Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Góngora and Calderón?
A sense of measure, of relative values, is the soul of criticism, and we may be appreciative without condescending to idolatry, or even to flattery. Cervantes was a rapid, facile versifier, and at rare intervals his verses are touched with poetry; but, for the most part, they are imitative, and no imitation, however brilliant, is a title to lasting fame. Imitation in itself is no bad sign in a beginner ”

“ He makes no claim whatever, he seeks for no applause—the shy, taciturn experimentalist who published never a line of verse, and piped for his own delight. Equipped with the ambition, though not with the accomplishment, of the artist, Boscán has a prouder place than he ever dreamed of, since he is confessedly the earliest representative of a new poetic dynasty, the victorious leader of a desperately forlorn hope. ”

“ One vaguely feels that Palacio Valdés is losing his way, but he finds it again in the Spanish atmosphere of Los Majos de Cádiz where we see Andalusia once more through Asturian spectacles. As to the Condesa Pardo Bazán, she has unfortunately diffused her energies in all directions. No one can succeed in everything—as a poet, a romancer, an essayist, a critic, a lecturer, and a politician. ”

“ His dialogue is swift and strong and appropriate, whether he personifies the blind [263] passion of the King, the incorruptibility of Busto, the feudal ideal of Sancho Ortiz, or the strength and sweetness of Estrella. Of dialogue he is the first and best master on the Spanish stage: more choice, if less powerful, than Tirso; more natural, if less altisonant, than Calderón. The dramatic use of certain metrical forms persisted as he sanctioned it: the décimas for laments, the romance for exposition, the lira for heroic declamation, the sonnet to mark time, the redondilla for love-passages. ”

“ Like most Spaniards, Calderón is too copious; but in lyrical splendour he is unsurpassed by any Spanish poet, and is surpassed by few poets in any language. Had he added more frequent touches of nature to his idealised presentations, he would rank with the greatest dramatists in the world.
As it is, he ranks only just below the greatest, and in one dramatic form peculiar to Spain, he is, by common consent, supreme. Everybody quotes Shelley’s phrase about ‘the light and odour of the starry autos’; but scarcely anybody reads the autos, and I rather doubt if Shelley read them. ”

“ It took Spain a hundred years to rid her veins of the Gongoristic poison, and Gongorism has now become, in Spain itself, a synonym for all that is bad in literature. Undoubtedly Góngora did an infinite deal of mischief: his tricks of transposition were too easily learned by those hordes of imitators who see nothing but the obvious, and his verbal audacities were reproduced by men without a tithe of his taste and execution. And yet, though it be an unpopular thing to confess, one has a secret sympathy with him in his campaign. Lope de Vega and Cervantes are as unlike as two men may be ”

“ No man of letters has ever received such visible proofs of his own celebrity, and none has retained it so long. For something like half a century Lope had contrived to fascinate his countrymen, but even he began to grow old at last. Yet the change was not so much in him as in the rising generation.
The swelling tide of culteranismo was invading the stage; the fatal protection of Philip IV. was beginning to undermine the national theatre. Lope had always opposed the new fashion of preciosity, and he could not, or would not, supply the demand at court for a spectacular drama. ”