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. No doubt Torres Villaroel’s autobiography contains so much fiction that it may fairly be described as a picaresque novel, and you might easily be worse employed than in reading it. Nature intended the author to be a man of letters and a wit; poverty compelled him to become an incapable professor of mathematics, and a diffuse buffoon. With the single exception of Isla, no Spanish novelist of this time finds readers now, and Isla’s main object is utilitarian. The amusement in Fray Gerundio is incidental, and art has a very secondary place. Spain appears to have remained unaffected by the great schools of novelists in England and France: instead of being influenced by these writers, she influenced them. After lending to Lesage, she lent to Marivaux; she lent also to Fielding and Sterne, not to mention Smollett; but she herself was living on her capital. She has no contemporary novelists to place beside RamÓn de la Cruz, GonzÁlez del Castillo, and the younger MoratÍn, all of whom found expression for their talent in the dramatic form. Not till about the middle of the last century does any notable novelist come

While the War of Independence was in progress men were otherwise engaged than in novel-reading, and in Ferdinand VII.’s reign literature was apt to be a perilous trade. The banishment or flight of almost every Spaniard of liberal opinions or intellectual distinction had one result which might have been foreseen, if there had been a clear-sighted man in the reactionary party. It brought to an end the period of cut-and-dry classical domination. The exiles returned with new ideals in literature as well as in politics. There was a restless ferment of the libertarian, romantic spirit. Interest revived in the old national romantic drama which had fallen out of fashion, and had been known chiefly in recasts of a few stock pieces. Quaint signs of change are discernible in unexpected quarters. When the termagant Carlota, the Queen’s sister, snatched a state-paper out of Calomarde’s hands and boxed his ears soundly, the crafty minister put the affront aside by wittily quoting the title of one of CalderÓn’s plays: ‘Las manos blancas no ofenden.’ Fifteen years earlier he would probably have quoted from some wretched playwright like Comella. French books were still eagerly read, but they were not ‘classical’ works. Chateaubriand and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre became available in translations. JoaquÍn Telesforo de Trueba y CosÍo, a montaÑÉs residing in London, came under the spell of Walter Scott, and had the courage to write two historical romances in English: I have read many worse novels than Gomez Arias and The Castilians, and every day I see novels written in much worse English. The shadow of Scott was projected far and wide over Spain, and those who read The Bride of Lammermoor usually went on to read Notre-Dame de Paris. If Scott had never written historical novels, and if Ferdinand VII. had not made many excellent Spaniards feel that they were safer anywhere than in Spain, we should not have had Espronceda’s Sancho SaldaÑa Ó El Castellano de CuÉllar, nor MartÍnez de la Rosa’s DoÑa Isabel de SolÍs, nor perhaps even Enrique Gil’s much more engaging story, El SeÑor de Bembibre, which appeared in 1844. The first two are unsuccessful imitations of Scott, and El SeÑor de Bembibre is charged with reminiscences of The Bride of Lammermoor.

It is one of life’s little ironies that the first writer of this period to give us a genuinely Spanish story was not a writer of pure Spanish origin. FernÁn Caballero, as she chose to call herself,—and as it is most convenient to call her, for she was married thrice, and therefore used four different legal signatures, apart from her pseudonym,—was the daughter of Johann Nikolas BÖhl von Faber, who settled in Spain and did useful journeyman’s work in literature. Born and partly educated abroad, with a German father and a Spanish mother, it is not surprising that she had the gift of tongues, and that one or two of her early stories should have been originally written in French or in German. Yet nothing could be less French or German than La Gaviota, which appeared four years after El SeÑor de Bembibre in a Spanish version said (apparently on good authority) to be by JoaquÍn de Mora. But, though Mora may be responsible for the style, nobody has ever supposed that he was responsible for the matter, and any such theory would be absurd, considering that FernÁn Caballero wrote many similar tales long after Mora’s death. In La Gaviota, in La Familia de Albareda, in the Cuadros de costumbres, and the rest—transcriptions of the simplest provincial customs, long since extirpated from the soil in which they seemed to be irradicably implanted—there is for us nowadays an historical interest; but there is nothing historical about them: they are records of personal observation. Fortunately for herself FernÁn Caballero, who had no elaborate learning, did not attempt any reconstruction of the past, and was mostly content to note what she saw around her. In this sense she may be considered as a pioneer in realism. The title would probably not have pleased her, owing to the connotation of the word ‘realism’; but nevertheless she belongs to the realistic school, and she expressly admits that she describes instead of inventing. To prevent any possible misapprehension, it should be said at once that her realism is gentle, peaceful and demure. She had some small pretensions of her own, felt a mistaken vocation to do good works among the heathen, and to be a trumpeter of orthodoxy. Each of us is convinced, of course, that orthodoxy is his doxy, and that heterodoxy is other people’s doxy; but FernÁn Caballero’s insistence has a self-righteous note which may easily grow tiresome. There are some who find pleasure in her exhortations—especially amongst those who regard them as expositions of obsolete doctrine; but very few of us have reached this stage of cynicism.

These moralisings are the unessential and disfiguring element in FernÁn Caballero’s unconscious art. It is something to be able to tell a story with intelligence and point, and this she does constantly. And, besides the power of narration, she has the characteristic Spanish faculty of undimmed sight. When she limits herself to what she has actually seen (and, to be just, her expeditions afield are rare), she is always alert, always attractive by virtue of her delicate, feminine perception. Many phases of life are unknown to her; from other phases she deliberately turns away; hence her picture is necessarily incomplete. But she sympathises with what she knows, and the figures on her narrow stage are rendered with dainty adroitness. There is no great variety in her tableau of that mild Human Comedy which, with its frugal joys and meek sorrows, it was her office to describe; but it has the note of sincerity. Her methods are as realistic as those used in later romances professing to be based on ‘human documents’—a phrase now worn threadbare, but not yet invented when she began to write. She reverted by instinct to realism of the national type,—realism which was fully developed centuries before the French variety was dreamed of,—and it was in the realistic field that her successors won triumphs greater than her own.

Some ten or twelve years after the appearance of La Gaviota, Antonio de Trueba leapt into popularity with a succession of stories all of which might have been called—as one volume was called—Cuentos de color de rosa. In the past my inability to appreciate Trueba as he is appreciated in his native province of Vizcaya has brought me into trouble. Each of us has his limitations, and, fresh from reading Trueba once more, I stand before you impenitent, persuaded that, if he flickers up into infantile prettiness, he sputters out in insipid optimism. We cannot all be Biscayans, and must take the consequences. In the circumstances I do not propose to deal with Trueba,—who, like the rest of us, appears to have had a tolerably good conceit of himself,—nor to spend much time in discussing the more brilliant Pedro Antonio de AlarcÓn. AlarcÓn seems likely to be remembered better by El Sombrero de tres picos—a lively expansion in prose of a well-known romance—than by any of his later books. All literatures have their disappointing personalities: men who at the outset seemed capable of doing anything, who insist on doing everything, and who end by doing next to nothing. Nobody who knows the meaning of words would say that the author of El Sombrero de tres picos did next to nothing, but much more was expected of him. Whether there was, or was not, any reasonable ground for these high hopes is another question. The ‘Might-Have-Been’ is always vanity. Save in such rare cases as that of Cervantes, who published the First Part of Don Quixote when he was fifty-eight (the age at which AlarcÓn died in 1891), imaginative writers have generally done their best work earlier in their careers. But, however this may be, our expectations were not fulfilled in AlarcÓn’s case. A few short stories represent him to posterity: like M. Bourget, he ‘found salvation,’ lost much of his art, and, in his more elaborate novels, became tedious. Fortunately, about ten years before the publication of El Sombrero de tres picos, a new talent had revealed itself to those who had eyes to see; and, as always happens everywhere, these were not many.

While Trueba was writing the rose-coloured tales which endeared him to the general public, JosÉ MarÍa de Pereda was growing up to manhood in the north of Spain.107 Though the verdict of the capital still counts for much, it would not be true nowadays to say that the rest of Spain accepts without question the dictation of Madrid in matters of literary taste and fashion; but it was true enough of all the provinces—with the possible exception of CataluÑa—in the late fifties and early sixties, when Pereda began to write for a Santander newspaper, La Abeja montaÑesa. Though he was over thirty, he had then no wide experience of life; he had been reared in a simple, old-fashioned circle where everybody stood fast in the ancient ways, and where there was no literary chatter. He seems to have had the usual traditional stock of knowledge flogged into him in the old familiar way by the irascible pedagogue whose portrait he has drawn not too kindly. From Santander Pereda went to Madrid, studied there a short while, joyfully returned home, and, till his health failed, scarcely ever left Polanco again, except during the short period when he was sent as a deputy to the Cortes. He hated the life of the capital, and remained till the end of his days an incorrigibly faithful montaÑesuco.

It is necessary to bear these circumstances in mind, for they help us to understand Pereda’s attitude. Hostile critics never tired of charging him with provincialism, but ‘provincialism’ is not the right word. The man was a born aristocrat, with no enthusiasm for novelties in abstract speculation, no liking for political and social theories which involved a rupture with the past; but his mind was not irreceptive, and, if his outlook is circumscribed, what he does see is conveyed with a pitiless lucidity. This power of imparting a concentrated impression is noticeable in the Escenas montaÑesas which appeared in 1864 with an introductory notice by Trueba, then in the flush of success. It is an amusing spectacle, this of the lamb standing as sponsor to the lion; and, with a timorous bleat, the lamb disengages its responsibility as far as decency allows. The book was praised by Mesonero Romanos—to whom Pereda subsequently dedicated Don Gonzalo GonzÁlez de la Gonzalera; but with few exceptions outside Santander, where local partiality rather than Æsthetic taste led to a more favourable judgment, all Spain agreed with Trueba’s implied view that Pereda’s temperate realism was a morose caricature. The hastiest commonplaces of criticism are the most readily accepted, and Pereda was henceforth provided with a reputation which it took him about a dozen years to live down. He lived it down, but not by compromising with his censors. He remained unchanged in all but the mastery of his art which gradually increased till Bocetos al temple was recognised as a work of something like genius.

It is a striking volume, but the distinguishing traits of Bocetos al temple are precisely those which characterise Escenas montaÑesas. Pereda has developed in the sense that his touch is more confident, but his point of view is the same as before. Take, for example, La Mujer del CÉsar, the first story in the book: the moral simply is that it is not enough to be beyond reproach, but that one must also seem to be so. You may call this trite or old-fashioned in its simplicity, but it is not ‘provincial.’ What is true is that the atmosphere of Bocetos al temple is ‘regional.’ The writer is not so childish as to suppose that Madrid is peopled with demons, and the country hill-side with angels. Pereda had no larger an acquaintance with angels than you or I have, and his personages are pleasingly human in their blended strength and weakness; but he had convinced himself that the constant virtues of the antique world are hard to cultivate in overgrown centres of population, and that the best of men is likely to suffer from the contagion of city life. To this thesis he returned again and again: in Pedro SÁnchez, in El Sabor de la Tierruca, in PeÑas arriba, he argues his point with the pertinacity of conviction. There is nothing provincial in the thesis, and it is good for those of us who are condemned to live in fussy cities to know that we, too, seem as narrow-minded as any fisherman or agricultural labourer. Can anything be more laughably provincial than the Cockney, or the boulevardier, who conceives that London, or New York, or Paris is the centre of the universe, that the inhabitants of these places are foremost in the files of time? Nobody is more provincial than an ordinary dweller in one of these large, straggling, squalid villages. Pereda is not afflicted with megalomania; he is not impressed by numbers; he does not ‘think in continents.’ He believes all this to be the bounce of degenerate vulgarians, and leaves us with a disquieting feeling that he may not be very far wrong.

He is not one of those who look forward to a new heaven and a new earth next week. If you expect to find in him the qualities which you find in Rousseau, or in any other wonder-child of the earthquake and the tempest, you will assuredly be disappointed. But, if we take him for what he is—a satirical observer of character, an artist whose instantaneous presentation of character and of the visible world has a singular relief and saliency—we shall be compelled to assign him a very high place among the realists of Spain. No one who has once met with the frivolous and vindictive Marquesa de Azulejo, with the foppish Vizconde del Cierzo, with the futile Condesa de la Rocaverde, or with Lucas GÓmez, the purveyor of patchouli literature, can ever forget them. In this particular of making his secondary figures memorable, Pereda somewhat resembles Dickens, and both use—perhaps abuse—caricature as a weapon. But the element of caricature is more riotous in Dickens than in Pereda, and the acumen in Pereda is more contemptuous than in Dickens. Pereda is in Spanish literature what NarvÁez was in Spanish politics: he ‘uses the stick, and hits hard.’ Cervantes sees through and through you, notes every silly foible, and yet loves you as though you were the most perfect of mortals, and he the dullest fellow in the world. Pereda has something of Cervantes’s seriousness without his constant amenity. He is nearer to Quevedo’s intolerant spirit. Exasperated by absurdity and pretence, he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly, he gladly makes fools suffer. The collection entitled Tipos trashumantes contains admirable examples of his dexterity in malicious portraiture—the political quack in El ExcelentÍsimo SeÑor who, like the rest of us Spaniards (says Pereda dryly), is able to do anything and everything; the scrofulous barber in Un Artista, whose father was killed in the opÉra-comique revolution of ’54, who condescends to visit Santander professionally in the summer, and familiarly refers to PÉrez GaldÓs by his Christian name; the hopeless booby in Un Sabio, who has addled his poor brain by drinking German philosophy badly corked by Sanz del RÍo, and who abandons the belief in which he was brought up for spiritualistic antics which enable him to commune with the departed souls of Confucius and Sancho Panza. These performances are models of cruel irony.

Bocetos al temple was the first of Pereda’s books to attract the public, and it may be recommended to any one who wishes to judge the writer’s talent in its first phase. Pereda did greater things afterwards, but nothing more characteristic. It was always a source of weakness to his art that he had a didactic intention—an itch to prove that he is right, and that his opponents are wrong, often criminally wrong—and this tendency became more pronounced in some of his later books. Such novels as El Buey suelto, and the still more admirable De tal palo, tal astilla, have an individual interest of their own, but we are never allowed the privilege of forgetting that the one is a refutation of Balzac’s Petites misÈres de la vie conjugale, and the other a refutation of PÉrez GaldÓs’s DoÑa Perfecta. To Pereda the problem seems perfectly simple. You have been discouraged from matrimony by Balzac, who has told you that the life of a married man is a canker of trials and disappointments—small, but so numerous that at last they amount to a tragedy, and so cumulative that the doomed creature feels himself a complete failure both as a husband and a father. Pereda seeks to encourage you by exhibiting the other side of the medal. GedeÓn is a bachelor, a buey suelto: he has freedom, but it is the desolate freedom of the stray steer—or rather of the wild ass. He is worried to death by the nagging and quarrelling of his maid-servants; he gets rid of them, and is plundered by men-servants; he is miserable in a boarding-house, he is neglected in an hÔtel; he has no family ties, is profoundly uncomfortable, goes from bad to worse, and finally expiates by marrying his mistress shortly before his death. The picture of well-to-do discomfort is powerful, but, as a refutation of Balzac, it is not convincing. So, again, in De tal palo, tal astilla. Fernando encounters the pious Águeda; his suit fails, he commits suicide, and she finds rest in religion, the only consoling agent. This is all far too simple. Are we to believe that every bachelor is a selfish dolt, or that only atheists commit suicide? Pereda, no doubt, lived to learn differently, but meanwhile his insistence on his own views had spoiled two works of art.

Something of this polemical strain runs through all his romances, and, after the fall of the republic and the restoration of the Bourbons, his conservatism may have contributed to make him popular in the late seventies and the early eighties. But we are twenty or thirty years removed from the passions of that period, and Pereda’s work stands the crucial test of time. He is not specially skilful in construction, and digresses into irrelevant episodes; but he can usually tell his tale forcibly, and, when he warms to it, with grim conciseness; he is seldom declamatory, is a master of diction untainted by gallicisms, and records with caustic humour every relevant detail in whatever passes before his eyes. He is the chronicler of a Spain, reactionary and picturesque, which is fast disappearing, and will soon have vanished altogether. If the generations of the future feel any curiosity as to a social system which has passed away, they will turn to Pereda for a description of it just before its dissolution. He paints it with the desperate force of one who feels that he is on the losing side. His interpretation may be—it very often is—imperfect and savagely unjust; but its vigour is imposing, and, if his world contains rather too many degraded types, it is also rich in noble figures like Don RomÁn PÉrez de la LlosÍa in Don Gonzalo GonzÁlez de la Gonzalera, and in profiles of humble illiterates who, in the eyes of their artistic creator, did more real service to their country than many far better known to fame.

One is tempted to dwell upon Pereda’s achievement—first, because his novels are thronged with lifelike personages; and second, because they proved that Spain, though separated from the rest of Europe in sentiment and belief, was not intellectually dead. While Pereda was writing Pedro SÁnchez and Sotileza, the world north of the Pyrenees was wrangling over naturalism in romance as though it were a new discovery. The critics of London and Paris were clearly unaware that naturalism had been practised for years past in Spain by novelists who thus revived an ancient national tradition. Pereda is still little read out of Spain, and, though attempts to translate him have been made, he is perhaps too emphatically Spanish to bear the operation. Spaniards themselves need some aids to read him with comfort, and the glossary at the end of Sotileza has been a very present help to many of us in time of trouble. A writer who indulges in dialectical peculiarities or in technical expressions to such an extent may be presumed to have counted the cost: and the cost is that he remains comparatively unknown beyond his own frontier. He cannot be reproached with making an illegitimate bid for popularity, nor accused of defection from the cause of realism. Pereda was not indifferent to fame, but he did not go far to seek it. Like the Shunamite woman, he chose to dwell among his own people, to picture their existence passed in contented industry, to exalt their ideals, and to value their applause more than that of the outside world.

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. He had lived much, reflected long, and seen through most people and most things before committing himself to the delineation of character. To the end of his life he never learned the trick of construction, but he was a born master of style and had an unsurpassed power of ingratiation. He had scarcely come up from CÓrdoba when he became ‘Juanito’ to all his acquaintances in Madrid, and his personal charm accompanied him into literature. Macaulay says somewhere that if Southey wrote nonsense, he would still be read with pleasure. This is true also of Valera, who, unlike Southey, never borders on nonsense. Though he has no prejudices to embarrass him, he has a rare dramatic sympathy with every mental attitude, and this keen, intelligent comprehension lends to all his creative work a savour of universality which makes him—of all modern Spanish novelists—the most acceptable abroad. Yet, despite his sceptical cosmopolitanism, which is by no means Spanish, Valera is an authentic Spaniard of the best age in his fusion of urbanity and authoritative insight. This politely incredulous man of the world is profoundly interested in mysticism, and still more in its practical manifestations. Nothing human is alien to him, and nothing is too transcendental to escape criticism.

In this frame of mind, habitual with him, he sat down to write Pepita JimÉnez. The story is the simplest imaginable. Pepita, a young widow, is on the point of marrying Don Pedro de Vargas, when she meets his son Luis, a young seminarist with exaggerated ideas of his own spiritual gifts. Luis is a complete clerical prig, who disdains such everyday work as preaching the gospel in his own country, and vapours about being martyred by pagans. As he has not a vestige of religious vocation, the end is easily foretold. At some cost to her own character Pepita pricks the bubble, and all the young man’s aspirations melt into the air; he is made to perceive that his pretensions to sanctity are silly, marries the heroine who was to have been his stepmother, and subsides into a worthy, commonplace husband. In his Religio Poetae Patmore praises Pepita JimÉnez as an example of ‘that complete synthesis of gravity of matter and gaiety of manner which is the glittering crown of art, and which, out of Spanish literature, is to be found only in Shakespeare, and even in him in a far less obvious degree.’ Patmore has almost always something striking to say, and even his critical paradoxes are interesting. We have no means of knowing how far his Spanish studies went, but we may guess that his acquaintance with Spanish literature was perhaps not very wide, and not very deep. As regards Pepita JimÉnez his verdict is conspicuously right: it is conspicuously wrong with respect to Spanish literature as a whole. The perfect blending of which he speaks is as rare in Spain as elsewhere. In Valera it is the result of deliberate artistic method; his gravity is a necessity of the situation; his gaiety is rooted in his sceptical politeness. In his critical work his politeness is decidedly overdone; he praises and lauds in terms which would seem excessive if applied to Dante or Milton. He knows the stuff of which most authors are made, presumes on their proverbial vanity, and flatters so violently that he oversteps the limits of good-breeding. Some of you may remember the dignified rebuke of these tactics by Sr. Cuervo. But in his novels Valera strikes no attitude of impertinent or sublime condescension. He analyses his characters with a subtle and admirably patient delicacy.

A hostile critic might perhaps urge that Valera’s novels are too much alike; that DoÑa Luz is cast in the same mould as Pepita JimÉnez, that Enrique is a double of Luis, and so forth. There is some truth in this. Valera does repeat the situations which interest him most, but so does every novelist; his treatment differs in each case, and is logically consistent with each character. There is more force in the objection that he overcharges his books with episodical arabesques which, though masterly tours de force, retard the development of the story. Now that we have them, we should be sorry to lose the brilliant passages in which the quintessence of the great Spanish mystics is distilled; but it is plainly an error of judgment to assign them to Pepita. However, this objection applies less to DoÑa Luz than to Pepita JimÉnez, and it applies not at all to El Comendador Mendoza—doubtless a transfigured piece of autobiography, both poignant and gracious in its evocation of a far-off passion. And in his shorter stories Valera often attains a magical effect of disquieting irony. Most authors write far too much, either from necessity or from vanity, and Valera, who was too acute to be vain, wasted his energies in too many directions and on too many subjects. Still he has improvised comparatively little in the shape of fiction, and, even in extreme old age, when the calamity of blindness had overtaken him, he surprised and enchanted his admirers with more than one arresting volume. Speaking broadly, the characteristics of the best Spanish art are force and truth, and in these respects Valera holds his own. Yet he is more complicated and elaborate than Spaniards are wont to be. His work is penetrated with subtleties and reticences; his force is scrupulously measured, and his truth is conveyed by implication and innuendo, never by emphasis nor crude insistency. Compared with his exquisite adjustment of word to thought, the methods of other writers seem coarse and brutal. You may refuse to recognise him as a great novelist, if you choose; but it is impossible to deny that he was a consummate literary artist.

At this point I should prefer to bring my review to a close. The authors of whom we have been speaking belong to history. So, too, does Leopoldo Alas, the author of La Regenta, an analytical novel which will be read long after his pungent criticisms are forgotten, though as a critic he did excellent work. It is a more delicate matter to judge contemporaries. You will not expect me to compile a list of names as arid and interminable as an auctioneer’s catalogue. How many important novelists are there in France, or England, or Russia? Not more than two or three in each, and we shall be putting it fairly high if we assume that Spain has as many notable novelists as these three countries put together. Passing by a crowd of illustrious obscurities, we meet with Benito PÉrez GaldÓs, and with innumerable examples of his diffuse talent. Copiousness has always been more highly esteemed in Spain than elsewhere, and in this particular PÉrez GaldÓs should satisfy the exacting standard of his countrymen. But to some of us copiousness is no great recommendation. There are forty volumes in the series of Episodios Nacionales, and who knows how many more in the series of Novelas EspaÑolas ContemporÁneas? Frankly there is a distasteful air of commercialism in this huge and punctual production. It would seem as though in Spain, as in England, literature is in danger of becoming a business, and of ceasing to be an art. This is not the way in which masterpieces have been written hitherto; but masterpieces are rare, and there is no recipe for producing them.

If there had been, we may feel sure that PÉrez GaldÓs would have hit upon it, for his acumen and perseverance are undoubted. Not one of the Episodios Nacionales is a great book, but also not one is wanting in great literary qualities—the faculty of historical reconstruction, the evaluation of the personal factor in great events, and the gift of picturesque detail. If the power of concentration were added to his profuse equipment, PÉrez GaldÓs would be an admirable master. Even as it is, to any one who wishes to obtain—and in the most agreeable way—a just idea of the political and social evolution of Spain from the time of Charles IV. to the time of the Republic, the Episodios Nacionales may be heartily commended. And, in these crowded pages, some figures stand out with remarkable saliency—as, for instance, the guerrilla priest in Carlos VI. en la RÁpita, a volume which shows the author to be unwearied as he draws near the end of his long task, and as vivid as ever in historical narrative. He is, moreover, an astute observer of the present, far-seeing in Fortunata y Jacinta and humoristic in El Doctor Centeno. You perhaps remember the description of the cigar which Felipe smoked, the account of the banquet presided over by the solemn and amiable Don Florencio—Don Florencio with alarming eyebrows, so thick and dark that they looked like strips of black velvet. These peculiarities are hit off in Dickens’s best manner, and yet with a certain neutral touch. Not that PÉrez GaldÓs is habitually neutral: he is an old-fashioned Liberal with a thesis to prove—the admirable thesis that liberty is the best thing in the world. But this is not an obviously Spanish idea. The modernity of PÉrez GaldÓs is exotic in Spain. He gives us an interesting view of Spanish society in all its aspects. Still,—let us never forget it,—the picture is painted not by a native, but by a colonial, hand. Born in the Canary Islands, PÉrez GaldÓs lives in Spain, but is not of it; he dwells a little apart from the high road of its secular life. And this lends a peculiar value to his presentation; for what it loses in force, it gains in objectivity.

A foreign influence is unquestionably visible in the novels of both Armando Palacio ValdÉs and the Condesa Pardo BazÁn—perhaps the most gifted authoress now before the public. The existence of this foreign element is denied by partisans, but it would not be disputed by the writers themselves. Was not the Condesa Pardo BazÁn the standard-bearer of French naturalism in Spain during the early nineties? We are apt to forget it, for what she then called ‘the palpitating question’ palpitates no more. Who can read the Condesa Pardo BazÁn’s Madre Naturaleza without being reminded of Zola, or Palacio ValdÉs’s La Hermana San Sulpicio without being reminded of the Goncourts? Yet in La Hermana San Sulpicio, where Gloria is the very type of the sparkling Andalusian, and in the still more charming Marta y MarÍa which appeared some years earlier, there is a genuine original talent which fades out in La Espuma and La Fe. In these last two books Palacio ValdÉs does moderately well what half a dozen French novelists had done better. 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. 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, where the peasant is displayed in a light which must have pained Pereda. Is Galicia so different from the Mountain? But extremes meet at last. Dr. MÁximo Juncal in La Madre Naturaleza thinks with Pereda that townsfolk are beyond salvation: only—and the difference is capital—he would leave nature to work her will without the restraints of traditional ethics. Clearly all women are not hampered by timidity and conservative instincts! But Palacio ValdÉs may be read for the constant, acrid keenness of his appreciation of character, and the Condesa Pardo BazÁn for her vigorous portraiture of the Galician peasantry, and her art as a landscape painter.We have the measure of what they can do, and they are at least as well known out of Spain as they deserve. A more enigmatic personality is Vicente Blasco IbÁÑez. It is the charm of most modern Spanish novelists that they are intensely local. PÉrez GaldÓs is an exception; but Valera is at his best in Andalusia, Pereda in Cantabria, Palacio ValdÉs in Asturias, and the Condesa Pardo BazÁn in Galicia. Blasco IbÁÑez is a Valencian; he knows the orchard of Spain as Mr. Hardy knows Dorsetshire, and he is most himself in the Valencian surroundings of Flor de Mayo, La Barraca, and CaÑas y barro. But his allegiance is divided between literature and politics. Not content with propagating his ideas in the columns of his newspaper, El Pueblo, he propagates them under cover of fiction. He is the novelist of the social revolution, and the revolution is needed everywhere. The scene of La Catedral is laid in Toledo, the scene of El Intruso in Bilbao, and in La Horda we have the proletariate of Madrid in squalid truthfulness. Each of these is a roman À thÈse, or, if you prefer it, an incitement to rebellion. Blasco IbÁÑez is the apostle of combat, he knows the strength of the established system, and his revolutionary heroes die defeated by the organised forces of social and ecclesiastical conservatism. But he is fundamentally optimistic, convinced that the final victory of the revolution is assured if the struggle be maintained. We may not sympathise with his views, and may doubt whether they will prevail; but the gospel of constancy in labour needs preaching in Spain, and Blasco IbÁÑez preaches it with impressive (and sometimes rather incorrect) eloquence. His latest story, La Maja desnuda, is more in the French manner, but it is no mere imitation; it is original in treatment, a record of gradual disillusion, a painful, cruel, true account of the intense wretchedness of a pair who once were lovers. Blasco IbÁÑez has given us three or four admirable novels, and he is still young enough to reconsider his theories, and to grow in strength and sanity.

He is not alone. In Paradox, Rey, and in Los Últimos romÁnticos PÍo Baroja introduces a fresh and reckless note of social satire, while novelty of thought and style characterise MartÍnez Ruiz in Las confesiones de un pequeÑo filÓsofo and Valle-InclÁn in Flor de Santidad and Sonata de otoÑo. These are the immediate hopes of the future. But prophecy is a vain thing: the future lies on the knees of the gods.