“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.