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

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.