IN the midst of the warm Seville winter the thought of sea breezes tempted us to Cadiz for a week. The hundred miles' run down there was through a charming corner of Andalusia, with orange groves, olive plantations, woods of stone pines, hedges of cactus, in the meadows herds of most royal bulls. It was the eighteenth of January, yet the fruit trees were in blossom, and over the streams floated a lovely white-flowering verdure. We passed Jerez, source of English sherry, where on our return to Seville we stopped some hours to see the bodegas and sample the native wine. As we neared the coast big pyramids of salt covered the marshes, telling of another industry; in fact, every part of Andalusia which I saw was well cultivated, despite the guide book laments over its backwardness.
Soon came whiffs of the sea air. The first view of Cadiz, set right out to sea, is very striking. Only a narrow strip of sand, eight miles long, connects it with the mainland, and as we skirted the coast, past San Fernando,—where there is a naval station and an astronomical observatory,—the compact, sturdy little city out in the Atlantic made a stunning picture; the sea so very blue, the town so dazzlingly white.
And inside the treble line of walls and moats that defend its one land-entrance, the "silver dish," as its citizens love to call it, has as individual a character as its distant prospect. It is miraculously clean, its streets seem swept and scrubbed like a Dutch village. Down these narrow lanes you catch the gleam of the sea to east, to north, to west. When it rains, Seville turns into a muddy distress, but well-drained Cadiz grows more proper still in wet weather. The patio of the rest of Andalusia is not found here, for being confined to its ledge of shells, the town could not spread itself about, but had to build itself up in the air. On top of the high houses, whose vivid green balconies add to the general air of trig neatness, are miradores, small towers formerly built by the merchants as look-outs from which they could spy their returning galleons. The view of Cadiz from a mirador is like nothing else ever seen: the clean whiteness of hundreds of roof terraces, the church towers of colored tiles and a host of other miradores, made it seem like a second city in itself, suggestive of the Orient; a strange city set in the blinding blue circle of the ocean.
The town is almost surrounded by high sea walls, four miles of them, and on the Atlantic side the surf breaks in thundering eternity, throwing up spray twenty feet high. There is something splendidly plucky about Cadiz. One of the few spots in Europe forced to battle for her existence, with a devouring enemy at her door, she thrives and continues century after century. She is the oldest town in Spain, founded by Phœnician mariners more than a thousand years before the Christian Era.
Spain has influenced them all, all the strangers, the heterogeneous throng, that have gone to the making of the Spanish race. Phœnician, Roman, Iberian, Goth, Jew, and Moor, she has imprinted on them all her own distinguishing mark, has breathed into them her own intense soul. For this psychological reason it is true to say that Seneca was a Spaniard, that the wonderful Jew Maimonides and the Moor Averroës, and the Gothic bishop, Isidoro, Doctor of the Church were all of them Spaniards. The Catalan, Ramón Lull rang out the national note with no uncertain sound, mystic hermit and active missionary. And with the centuries "christened in blood and schooled in sacrifice," the spirit grew more convincingly apparent: Domingo de Guzmán, Francisco Ximenez, Gonsalvo de Córdova, Luis de León, Iñigo de Loyola are very brothers with a like high fealty that tells what majestic mother nurtured them on her battlefield of ages.
Cadiz, the oldest spot in Spain, has known each of the conquering races in turn. She was four hundred years old when Rome was founded. She has had tremendous ups and downs of fortune; at her height during the age of the Cæsars, who saw her importance as key to Andalusia, then with the fall of Rome dropped into insignificance, her name almost forgotten. She rose again with the discovery of the New World, whose ships of treasure anchored off her ramparts. A strange outlook on the passing of power lies in the statement that in 1770 this town was a wealthier place than London. With the loss of the Colonies, Cadiz has sunk back to be a mediocre city in the world, but she is contented and self-respecting.
Though so remotely ancient, there is nothing of old architecture here. The ramparts have been turned into esplanades, where it is a joy to walk, for the views are beautiful past description; now across the bay to the mainland and the mountains of Ronda, and down on the quay of the town itself with its bay full of fishing boats; then to the north the eye seeks farther along the coast toward Palos whence three caravels, the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa María turned westward on a memorable third of August, 1492. On the other side of Cadiz is the ocean itself and I hope the enterprising town will some day carry the park along this western wall, where the rollers break so magnificently. Just past the public gardens, a narrow causeway leads to the lighthouse of San Sebastián, set well out to sea, a favorite walk for us at sunset time to watch the fishing boats with their high prows come sailing back to the harbor each evening. The sunsets we saw in Cadiz were flaming pink and gold and red like those of the world on the other side of the Atlantic; also we saw a sunrise exquisite as a dream. It was here the ancients first met the suggestive wonder of the open ocean, and their philosophers pondered over the phenomenon of the tides. They thought that subterranean animals or winds sucked them in; and the sun, they said, when it had sunk in the western ocean, returned to the east by subterranean passages,—guesses about as wise as some that we are making to-day on phenomena of the soul.
I do not know if it was just chance good fortune, but Cadiz will always be an exhilarating memory. Its air was so bracing, balmy yet full of vitality. The moral atmosphere seemed joyous and contented; a hurdy-gurdy would strike up below in the street with the bang of a tambourine, and from all the windows near, pennies would gayly rattle down. The people were courteous without second thought. A working man walked out of his way for ten minutes to direct us through the complicated streets, and then ran off with a laugh to avoid the fee; a shopman straightened eye-glasses and genuinely refused to be paid for so small a service; wonder of wonders when our luggage got carried in the wrong hotel diligence, the landlord refused to let us pay. Three such episodes of disinterestedness in one morning give one a pleasant impression of a place; and this town has presented itself to other travelers as happily. Byron, to whom this "renowned romantic land" as he called her, was eminently sympathetic, wrote to his mother, in 1809, "Cadiz, sweet Cadiz! it is the first spot in the creation. The beauty of its streets and mansions are only excelled by the loveliness of its inhabitants, the finest women in Spain."
Cadiz is enough of a place, with a bishopric and a garrison, to have the air of a capital; we noticed many men of the best hidalgo type, like those who stand behind Spínola in the "Surrender of Breda." In the park was an outdoor theater; children played diavolo; and nice little Spanish girls walked up and down with their English governesses. One could write or sew outdoors without exciting a glance of surprise. We used to spend hours under the palm trees of the Alameda sewing and reading and watching the groups about us, for in spite of its being mid-winter, the air was warm enough for spending the day out-of-doors. Cleanliness and godliness: Cadiz can boast of excellent public institutions. The new hospital that faces the Atlantic breezes, and where only a fraction of a franc is paid daily, could well be envied by the rich of new world cities. Its poor house is noted, and it has a host of minor charities; a Casa de Viudas for widows, a Casa de Hermanos, a Casa de Locos for the insane, tended, as are the others, by alert, willing nuns. It is a public-spirited little city, with a school of music and art, an Instituto whose physical laboratory is the best in Spain, two Public Libraries, for that of the Bishop is also open free to the people.
The tourist sights here are soon seen; the Capuchin church where Murillo painted his last picture, and where he fell from the scaffold, soon after dying in Seville from the accident. There are two Cathedrals, one so sacked by English bucaneers that there is little to be seen, and the other a quite dreadful eighteenth century affair. The dull Museo has some good modern works, a bishop's head in profile by García y Ramos that is first rate art; and there is a triptych by a very early painter, Gallegos, the Spanish Primitive, which to my mind is more religious than the Murillos and the Zurbarans. It is a Pietà, and the eyes of the mourners are naïvely red from weeping, like Francia's Pietàs in Parma.
Almost impregnable walls and moats shut off the isthmus that leads to the mainland, and their strength explains how Cadiz could have defied the French for two years during the War of Liberation, without suffering the horrors of the Gerona siege. The blockade began in 1808, soon after the heroic Dos de Mayo in Madrid. Quintana's poem rang like a trumpet call over the land: "¡Antes la muerte que consentir jamás ningún tirano!" No idle boast! Spain was celebrating the centenary of the second of May during our visit, and the scenes were moving and patriotic. You realized Lord Peterborough's remark, that this was an unconquerable land if her people resisted the invader. Statues and tablets for the war heroes were unveiled, and songs and marches composed for the anniversary. The artillery officers organized a splendid parade of children that marched under the arch of Montleón, where Ruiz, and Velarde, and Daoiz fought, and there the King, holding the baby Prince of Asturias in his arms, showed him how to kiss his country's flag. Memorial Mass was said in the street outside the house where Velarde died, and toward evening one of the Madrid parishes marched out, its priests leading, to the cemetery where the Dos de Mayo victims were buried, and deposited wreaths in patriotic reverence.
Cadiz' old church, St. Philip Neri, is where the permanent endurance of the first outburst of patriotism in 1808 was made possible. Here the Cortes met again after three hundred years' suppression under the Hapsburgs and Bourbons, here they abolished the Inquisition, and here they drew up the Constitution of 1812, which was to be tossed backward and forward during the next half century of disorders, to emerge finally with victory.
An eloquent priest was the first speaker to open the historic meeting, and as he laid down the program, the sovereignty of the nation to lie in the Cortes, and the King to exist for the people, not the people for the King as heretofore, Spain again had her foot on the ladder of progress. No wonder that the national military air of Spain is the Marcha de Cádiz. The clean, smokeless, plucky little city has right to a proud stand out in the Atlantic. Her age-long enemy, the ocean, had trained her well to strike a first blow for freedom.
"Don Quixote is not, as Montesquieu pretended, the only good Spanish book, which in reaction against the national spirit, ridiculed the others. It is rather the epitome of our national spirit, war-like and religious, full of sane realism and none the less enthusiastic for all that is great and beautiful."—Don Juan Valera.
IT was the German philosopher Hegel who called the "Romancero del Cid" the most nobly beautiful poem, ideal and real at the same time, that the Epic Muse had inspired since Homer. Ideal and real at the same time, herein lies the first characteristic of Spanish literature, of to-day as well as of the past. No keener realistic pictures of a nation were ever drawn than in "Quixote," yet no book was ever more idealistic; and the path plowed so deeply by Cervantes, has been followed by the modern novelists of Spain. Their feet are well planted on the ground, but they do not think it necessary to prove they walk the earth by wallowing in its mud. These modern Spanish romances tell of the passions and sorrows of virile men and women, and at the same time they can boast that they are free from the moral evil so rampart in French novels. "Quixote" is not exactly a prude's book, yet the "jeune fille" can read it unharmed and Cervantes has served in this point as a standard.[32]
St. Francis of Assisi A wood-carving by Carmona, Museum of León
St. Francis of Assisi
A wood-carving by Carmona, Museum of León
Few realize the delightful field of modern fiction that lies ready to be explored once enough Spanish has been mastered for reading. After three months' study only we found we could take up and enjoy "Don Quixote," for contrary to the popular idea, its language is no more archaic than is the English of Hamlet or Henry IV; a great genius fixes the tongue in which he writes.
The best of the novelists of this last half century, when the revival came about, are Valera and Pereda. Some would make a triology by placing Pérez Galdós side by side with them. For instance the historian Altamira, being in sympathy with the frankly revolutionary theories which Galdós advocates, calls him the first, the Balzac of Spain, but the Balzac of a people is never against the traditions of his race as Galdós often is. "Toda comparación es odiosa" the dear Don warns us. Personally I give the first place to Valera and Pereda, in whose work is found the note of literature; Pereda the strength of the northern mountains, Valera the allurement of the south. Happily for their permanence and their value as human documents, the Spanish writers are local. Each describes his own province, his own paisanos. Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán paints her Galicia; Alacón his Andalusia; Valdés and Pérez Galdós are more cosmopolitan and I should say lose by it; Blasco Ibáñez writes of Valencia, Leopoldo Alas has vivified the Asturias.
The revival of the novela de costumbres, which suits the Spanish temperament, just as the romantic or fantastic tale suits the German, may be said to have been started by that talented Sevillian authoress who wrote under the name of Fernán Caballero. She had not the gift of a good style, and most of her books are already of the past, but in "La Gaviota," published in 1849, her passionate love for Spain and its ways has made a novel that is likely to endure. The tale tells of many old customs: how on the night of November 2d, the Brotherhood of the Rosary of the Dawn rises to pray for the souls in Purgatory, how one of the sodality goes from house to house to rouse the others, striking a bell and singing:
And each member rises and follows the fraternity. A land does not lose that has such customs among its peasantry, that weaves in its religious belief with the inextricable souvenirs of home and childhood. A Spanish child is brought up on songs of the Passion and the Virgin as naturally as we on Mother Goose. When he sees a chimney-sweep he exclaims "El Rey Melchor!" for the visit of the Three Kings of the East is real to him. He knows the owl was present at the Crucifixion, whence his terror-stricken cry of "Crux! Crux!" that the kindly swallows relieved the Saviour of the thorns, and the gold-finches of the three agonizing nails:
| "En el monte Calvario | En el monte Calvario |
| Las golondrinas | Los jilgueritos |
| Le quitaron á Cristo | Le quitaron á Cristo |
| Las cinco espinas. | Los tres clavitos." |
The serpent according to Spanish lore, went proudly erect after his success with Eve, until down in Egypt one day, he tried to bite the little Infant Jesus, whereupon St. Joseph indignantly rebuked him and ordered him never to rise again. The rosemary is loved and given away as presents because when formerly a common plant, once the Blessed Virgin hung out on it to dry the clothes of her divine Infant, and it became forever green and fragrant. The children at play sing these legends and folk-songs; on Christmas eve they dance their "Alegría! Alegría! Alegría!" A suggestive young writer of Granada, Angel Ganivet, says that in Spain Christian philosophy did not remain hidden in books, but worked its way into the very life of the people, where it is found in the popular songs and customs: "Nuestra 'Summa' teológica y filosófica está en nuestro 'Romancero.'"
Fernán Caballero started the revival of the novel and its flowering soon followed. Don Juan Valera, though always interested in literature, had been prevented by his active life from himself writing till middle age. When in 1874 "Pepita Jiménez" appeared, it took his countrymen by storm, and this first novel, written by chance, was soon followed by others; a true creative artist had tardily discovered his genius. I cannot speak of Don Juan Valera without an admiration which to those who do not know his works may seem extreme. From his books his personality stands out as clearly as that of Cervantes, equable, high-minded, with that mellow wisdom which has gleaned the best from a life full of opportunities. In his "Discursos Academicos," two volumes that make enchanting reading—enchanting and academical do not often go together—he disclaims the title of thinker, yet he was a profound observer. His satire is of that kindly quality that leaves no sting. He has charm, that salt of the writer; he is never exaggerated nor embittered. This quality of amenity he shares too with his master, whom he can write of with an absolute comprehension just as Cervantes himself could make a Quixote because he was akin. It was a happy chance that the last words of the modern novelist (over eighty and blind, yet alert in mental interests) should have been the unfinished paper for the Royal Academy, to celebrate in 1904 the three hundredth anniversary of "Don Quixote." His Spanish blood let Valera understand the heights of mysticism, skeptic though he was by force of circumstances; he could write with enthusiasm of St. Teresa. On woman he held advanced ideas, he advocated her highest education, especially the cultivation of letters, for he said that if man alone wrote half the knowledge of the human soul would be lost; civilizations where women are not given education and knowledge never arrive at their full flowering; it is as if the collective soul of the nation had clipped one of its wings. His own culture was an all-round one. He had the intimate knowledge that residence in foreign lands gives: English thought, German, Italian, Austrian, American north and south, the Orient and its religions, in every country his literary interests had been alert. Thus he had a curiously minute knowledge of the North American poets. Of his own race essentially, he yet was cosmopolitan in the higher meaning of the word. All that went to make up dislike and division between nations he deplored as ignorance of man's higher destiny of brotherhood. It is not hard to read between the lines sometimes of his sensitive shrinking in his travels under the uncomprehending criticism of his native land; the world, especially the English-speaking world, has but a veiled contempt for things Spanish. He has righted his country in his books without a touch of aggressive impatience, by simply describing things as they are.
Valera has set his romances in the Andalusia he knew best. He was born at Cabra in the province of Cordova in 1824, the son of a naval officer and the Marquesa de Paniega. He received the best of educations and when twenty-two accompanied the Spanish ambassador, the poet-duke de Rivas to Naples. Then followed half a life-time of diplomatic posts: Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Dresden, St. Petersburg, as Minister Plenipotentiary to Washington in 1883 and later to Brussels, finally as Ambassador to Vienna. He was also a member of the Cortes, a Councilor of State, and was one of the embassy sent to Florence to offer the Crown to Amadeus I. During the two years of the Republic he retired, but returned to active life on the advent of Alfonso XII. Although a man of the world Valera was a born artist. Only in his first romance did he show the hand of the novice. His literary style is a simple and limpid medium that leaves behind unfading pictures of country and town; he has done what Balzac calls adding new beings à l'état civil.
"Pepita Jiménez" came out in 1874, "Doña Luz" in 1879, two vignettes of Andalusian women immortalizing two very different types; Pepita of grace, passion, charm, compact, of the very heart of femininity, adorable despite her failings, achieving her own happiness against all odds; Doña Luz, idealistic, dignified in mind and manner, of the type of a Vittoria Colonna, proudly bearing the heart-outrage fate sent her, since her soul, for her the essential, had found its mystic way out. I do not think that in any fiction there is a more subtly given relationship than that of this noble creature Luz and the Dominican missionary from the Philippines, Padre Enrique, scholar and dumb poet. What with a Zola had been revolting, with Valera is humanly heart-breaking and spiritually ennobling, it could shock no piety; only a man of elevated character and the most sensitive discernment could so touch on undefined emotions. The friendship of Doña Luz and the doctor's captivating daughter is a warm-hearted relationship of two young and pretty women declared impossible by many novelists. This tale of beautiful and tragic sincerity had been preceded by another, also set in one of the smaller Andalusian towns, and written with the lightness of manner and seriousness of matter that show the master hand: "El Comendador Mendoza," I cannot help feeling veils much of the author's own self. These stories show the soundness of the simple people. Swift marriages are looked on with disapproval; how, they ask, can esteem or true knowledge of character be gained in a few months.[33] So in Spain the opportunities allowed the novios, the young people who choose each other from mutual attraction, are unheard of in France or Italy. High-born or lowly, a Spanish girl can savor the romance of life, without disrepute, by talking at the reja during the midnight hours; before marriage she is allowed a freedom of speech, a sal, a self-development, denied her sisters in other Latin countries.
It is not possible to touch on all of Valera's stories, for his vein once discovered, proved a rich one. His longest novel has a poorly-chosen name, "Las Ilusiones del Doctor Faustino" and is not very well constructed, not enough is eliminated for art; but always there is the charm of the south, the midnight talking at the reja—those happy novios of Spain!—the drowsiness of the noontime siesta, the vivacity of the evening tertulia, that innocent way of diverting themselves every night from nine to twelve, the same group of friends meeting year after year. Constantly, as I read Spanish novels, I say a people that get so much out of so little are a lovable people, wholesome and of vigorous promise.
It was indeed with very different eyes that I looked out on the distant towns as we passed in the train, they were peopled now with living people, a Pepita, a high-minded Luz, a philosophic Don Fresco, a kindly Doña Araceli, I felt that I was not quite a stranger here, now that Don Juan Valera had lifted from me the curtain of ignorance and prejudice that hides the everyday life of Spain.
The same year that saw the appearance of "Pepita Jiménez" brought to light another tale that will last as long, it does not seem too much to say, as the "Quixote" itself. In "El Sombrero de Tres Picos," Alacón has achieved a masterpiece. It is a slight tale of a few hundred pages, in the genre style, a picture of the old régime before the French invasion of 1808 broke down the Chinese wall of the Pyrenees. No description can do justice to its crisp, sparkling charm, to Frasquita, beautiful as a goddess, Eve herself, with a laugh like the repique de Sábado de Gloria; to her ugly, ironical, adorably malicious and sympathetic husband Lucas, the vibrant note of whose voice won all hearts, to whom his Frasquita was más bueno que el pan. Lucas and his wife are Shakespearean creations. Then there is that pompous vanity, the Corregidor, Don Eugenio de Zúñigo y Ponce de León, in his red cape, gold shoe buckles, and hat of three peaks. What a scene is that of the Bishop's visit to the miller's garden! And in what country but democratic Spain would a bishop stroll out with canons and grandees to while away a friendly hour with a miller? Inimitable tale, Spanish to the core, it is this that make a nation's glory, a "Don Quixote," a "Sotileza," a "Doña Luz," a "Sombrero de Tres Picos."
Don Pedro Antonio de Alacón belonged, like Valera, to an old family of Andalusia, but not in the elder novelist's fortunate circumstances; one of ten sons, he had more or less to place himself in life. He was born in Gaudix in 1833; studied law at the University of Granada; and naturally gravitated toward Madrid, the center of political and literary interests. He flung himself headlong into the republican anti-clerical ideas of that troubled time, but in later life his theories toned down so that he ended as a believer and a liberal conservative. Throughout a long political career Alacón kept his honor unstained; although often with friends in power, it was only after twenty-one years of politics that he accepted a post, on the advent of Alfonso XII, whose return he had advocated long before it came about. He had begun writing when very young, thus "El Clavo," a powerful sketch, was done when barely twenty. Like many of Spain's authors, he turned soldier when the call came, and served in the 1860 campaign in Africa of which he has left a vivid chronicle, "Diario de un Testigo de la Guerra en Africa." "El Sombrero" was followed by "El Escándalo," a novel widely discussed in Spain. The story opens strongly, but it scatters toward the end; Alacón is better in the tale than in sustained work. He can snap his fingers at our criticism, his Corregidor and his Molinera have made him one of the immortals.
To another modern novelist, to Pérez Galdós, I feel I am not fair, but I find so much of his work antipathetic that, as he has not a good style and often offends good taste, I cannot force a liking. Brunetière speaks of the intolerance of the naturalist school of novelists, the intolerance of the free-thinker. Those who advocate the extreme republican, anti-clerical theories in Spain have this intolerance to a marked degree. Pérez Galdós is so biassed that he distorts his characters from their natural evolution by making them voice his own ideas. The "roman à thèse" may win a greater fame for the first hour, but it is sure to pass with the changing questions of the time. The much-praised "Doña Perfecta" struck me as absurdly untrue to human nature. The heroine is presented as a not uncommon type of religious development, naturally where there is intense religious feeling there is a bigot here and there, but this Lady Perfection is not a consistent human being, but a monster. While anxious for her nephew to leave she yet urges him to stay, no reason why; she could easily have rid herself of him yet she brings about his death. Her character of the beginning does not match with her character of the end (the novelist offends several times in this way). The thin-visaged, oily priest-villain gives an aside over the footlights: "I have tried tricks, but there is no sin in tricks. My conscience is clear": evidently old-fashioned melodramatics are not yet extinct. It is quite impossible for a well-bred Spaniard to have insulted his kind hosts, as does Pepe, by telling them crudely that their Christian belief is a fable as past as paganism, "all the absurdities, falsities, illusions, dreams, are over," to-day there is no more multiplication of bread and fishes, but the rule of industry and machines. I think most people will feel that the characters of this book can intrigue and murder and throw in realistic asides as much as they will, we do not hate them because they fail to convince us that they ever really existed. They are just mouthpieces for their author's theories. In another novel, "Gloria," a beautiful passionate girl of sixteen is incapable of being the pedantic prig Galdós makes her in the opening chapters. Happily for the romance and for the weary reader, once the novelist warms to his story, religious discussions go to the wall and he presents a moving tragedy. Would that he could have kept up to the level of parts of this novel, that which presents Gloria's uncles, for instance, but he is very unequal. After scenes so true to life that they are a joy, he will indulge in the pseudo-giantesque of some of Hugo's purple patches, and only high genius can take such liberties. Thus in a tempest a church lamp falls; it breaks the glass of the urn in which lies the Dead Christ, it slaps St. Joseph in the face, it knocks the sword from the hand of St. Michael, and finishes its zig-zag career by crashing into a confessional. Lamps of anti-clerics only seem to act in this all-round, satisfying way; realists, like Pereda and Valera, are incapable of such exaggeration. Some critics hold "Angel Guerra" and "Fortuna y Jacinta" to be the best of Galdós. His "Episodios Nacionales" are a series of novels on the events of the past century in Spain. In spite of vivid scenes, they seemed to me long-winded and confusing; one must be Spanish, they say, to appreciate them.
Benito Pérez Galdós was born in 1845 in the Canary Islands. He has been an artist, a lawyer, a politician, and a journalist; in twenty years he has produced forty-two volumes, a record which makes his inequalities easy to understand. Personally he is a sincere and upright character. Although an avowed free-thinker he sits in reverence at the feet of his fellow novelist, Pereda, an ardent believer, and it was to be near him that he fixed his home in Santander: "Our master," he calls him, "a great poet in prose, the most classic and at the same time the greatest innovator of our writers."
Far below Pérez Galdós, who, if not the first, is a distinguished and talented novelist, is Blasco Ibáñez, of the same school of anti-clerics and extreme republicanism. His stories are vigorous, crude studies of Valencia, that province which the proverb says is "a paradise inhabited by demons," and because so local, the books are valuable; personally I lay down such a tale as "Flor de Mayo" or "Arroz y Tartana" depressed and sick at heart. Ibáñez lacks ideality and elevation of sentiment; he pictures ignoble lives in monotonous detail, all is labored description, for the characters never speak themselves, the author describes their conversation. One sentence of Sancho, one sentence of the Don and you know who speaks! It is to this minor novelist that a recent French book, "Les Maîtres du Roman Espagnol Contemporain," by a Monsieur F. Vézinet, devotes a fourth of its pages, while dismissing Pereda contemptuously, and not even mentioning "Sotileza," his great sea-masterpiece. Under the guise of literary criticism, the French writer veils a polemic against religion: "For Christians actually do find solace in a belief in a future life," is one of his remarks. On meeting in Spanish fiction a dignified reserve in scenes of passion, this teacher of young men—he is professor in the Lycée of Lyons—supplies the pepper lacking by telling how a French naturalist would have described the same scenes.
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?
"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.
Copyright, 1910, by Underwood & Underwood A Roadside Scene in Spain
Copyright, , 1910, by Underwood & Underwood
A Roadside Scene in Spain
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.
It is strange in Spain how little they know of districts that lie at no appreciable distance. At the inn at Cáceres we asked for information about Alcántara, and they could give none. The landlord himself came over to our table to look at us in astonishment. "But there is nothing to see there!" he assured us, too polite to ask the question that showed in his voice,—why were two ladies seeking a dismal spot such as Alcántara? I positively blushed as I answered there was a bridge. "A bridge!" He beat a hasty retreat to his wife in the office, where their merriment burst out. The next day he told us, that having inquired, he found we could take the train to Arroyo, an hour away, whence a diligence ran in a short time to Alcántara. We left the train at Arroyo, and on the other side of the station found the smallest diligence ever seen, so packed already with big countrymen that we could just force our unwilling selves in. When we were well started, we found to our consternation that we did not reach Alcántara before ten hours, the distance being about thirty miles. Una legua una hora runs the saying, and this part of the world is ruled by its wise old proverbs. Too late to turn back, we tried to make the best of it. When in each of the desolate villages long pauses were made, we got out to visit the market or church. In the first village the altar was dressed with coarsest but freshest linen. Artistic pewter, unconscious of its charm, held the water and wine, and a score of sturdy young peasants came in from selling in the plaza outside, knelt on the very steps of the altar, then having made their serious preparation, each bashfully approached a white-haired priest who sat there all market day in readiness to hear confessions. The dismallest corner of Spain has compensations.
The first ten miles of the journey reminded me of New England, with its stone walls and semi-cultivated land. The next ten miles were indeed the proverbial desolation of Estremadura; hardly an inhabitant was to be found on those bleak hills. We had stumbled on one of the three days of the yearly fair of Brozas, so we passed flocks of sheep, cattle with a royal spread of horns, and dozens of the nervous Andalusian horses. Even automobiles went by, and one Portuguese noble drove abreast three truly glorious cream-white mules. Seeing them, one could understand how a mule here can cost more than a horse. The fair was held in meadows outside the town, and it looked so animated that we should have liked to stop, but no time was given us. A mile outside Brozas we found we had to change from the tiny diligence, a primitive enough way of travel, and to continue the remaining miles to Alcántara in the mail cart, which consisted of a board laid across two wheels, and that one seat had to be shared with the driver. Fuming did no good, not another vehicle would take us. The cold wind howled across the treeless upland, our umbrellas could not break its biting force, and we were far too thinly clad from the warm Seville winter; I could feel the chill seize on me that was to lead to a month's bad illness. The final touch was when the young scamp who drove the mail cart found it impossible to forego his eternal cigarette, which, despite remonstrance, he smoked continuously. That evening (we had left Cáceres in the pitch dark at 5 A.M.) we were set down at an inn whose spacious rooms and staircase told of former prosperity, but so shrunken was its hospitality that it could offer nothing fit to eat; yet, curiously enough, the old landlady made the best coffee I have tasted in Europe. We kept her busy grinding and boiling it.
Alcántara is one of the most God-forsaken places in the world. Pigs walk the ill-kept streets, and the vast buildings of the monkish-knights who formerly guarded the frontier pass are crumbling into such universal ruin that the lanes are a mass of broken rubbish. They are not romantic ruins, but depressing and almost terrifying. When we climbed down the precipitous hill that led to the bridge, our shoes were cut to pieces by the flinty stones.
And the bridge, that lode-star of our pilgrimage, worth going five hundred miles to see! We thought with exasperation of the sixty we were wasting on it. No doubt Trajan did build it eighteen centuries ago, but they have chipped off the beautiful gray toning of ages, filled in with mortar the boulders after they had stood unaided till our time, and made a modern boulevard from Portugal. All solitude and sublimity are well eliminated from the scene. We sat on the benches of that banal little park and glared at the disappointing thing. The Tagus, Lope de Vega's hidalgo Tajo, was here a low stream, yellow with mud, flowing beneath bleak, unimposing hills. The bridge, in spite of its two hundred feet of height, did not appear as high as the aqueduct at Mérida, an effect due probably to the arches standing on stilts. And it may sound blatant, but a memory of once passing under that superb thing the Brooklyn Bridge, at dawn, made this ancient monument suffer in comparison. The ludicrousness of our having traveled out of our way to see this sight struck us at last, and when we recalled the Cáceres landlord's astonishment, and that of Brazilian friends at Seville who had tried to persuade us our Estremadura plan was quite mad, we too burst into a hearty laugh, soon sobered at the prospect of the next day's weary return to Arroyo. We climbed back to the inn and dined on glasses of coffee.
The following morning, after some more glasses of our only modus vivendi, we explored the decayed town. In it is a pearl of architecture built by the Benedictine knights in 1506, the now ruined church of San Benito, with lofty slender piers, one of the most gracefully proportioned of semi-Renaissance things. Truly was the transition from Gothic to Renaissance a most harmonious moment in Spanish architecture. This interesting discovery could not do away with the fever and cold of the awful drive back to Arroyo. Such petty miseries are best passed over. More dead than alive, late the second night we reached again the comfortable hotel at Cáceres, where we were glad to pause a few days to pick up strength to push on.
Our plans had been to go to Trujillo, the birthplace of Pizarro. It was Estremadura that produced many of the rude, energetic conquistadores of Peru and Mexico, and the province never has recovered from that drain on its population. Just as the number of Jewish and Moorish exiles and the loss to their country's vitality has been exaggerated for partisan reasons, so there has been an underestimation of the more serious drain which Spain suffered when hoards of sturdy adventurers set out for the New World. The emigration was untimely; it came a century too early. The country had just been brought from political chaos to law and order by Isabella's great reign; but before the fruit of her planting could ripen (by peace and its natural sequence of settled trade) it was plucked from the bough. I have never been able to see that the expulsion of two hundred thousand Jews, the execution of thirty-five thousand heretics, and the exile of under a million Moriscoes, are sufficient causes to explain Spain's decay. Other countries of Europe, prosperous to-day, suffered from evils quite as bad. Why did Segovia, with an "old Christian" population independent of Moorish banishment, have thirty-five thousand weavers of cloth in the beginning of the seventeenth century and but a few hundred in the next generation? A score of questions similar to this can be asked to which the hackneyed explanation of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Moors gives no answer.
The causes of Spain's decay must be sought farther afield than in single acts of bad government which crippled the country for a time but were not irremediable. Through emigration, just when with the ending of the seven hundred years' crusade the nation should have turned to peaceful industries, she lost her agriculturists and her possible traders. And following swift on this, for emigration does not permanently weaken a strong race, Spain was bled of her best blood by Charles V's senseless European wars. She profited nothing by them, in fact they lowered her to the position of a mere province in the Empire. The treasure that poured in from the New World was poured out over Europe, it merely passed through Spain. American gold was a curse for her; it undermined the national character; the spirit of adventure, not of patient work, was fostered. The policy of the Emperor was continued by his descendants, and for two hundred years more Spain was at war. Anæmia of the whole race followed: so true is it that the nation of fighters to-day runs the risk of being the nation of weaklings to-morrow.
Good government might have helped the ill, but Charles V pursued in that line a policy as fatal as his continental wars. He tried to force on these subjects whom he never understood an iron autocratic rule, ruthlessly crushing their tenacious spirit of independence. The death of Ximenez and the execution of the Comuneros leaders may be said to mark the ending of the sensible old régime of self-centering her resources, exclusive and provincial perhaps, but it had been Spain's salvation. To meet the expenses of ceaseless wars in Europe, when the first influx of colonial gold ceased, the Peninsula was heavily taxed: a fourteen per cent tariff on all commodities will soon kill trade. For the same reason, to pay for wars, the currency was debased under Philip III; and the Crown held monopolies on spirits, tobacco, pottery, glass, cloth, and other necessities, a system always bad for commerce. The agrarian laws were neglected, too much land was in pasturage, which tends to lower the census, and too vast tracts were held by single nobles. The loss of population went on; in 1649 an epidemic carried off two hundred thousand people. The economic discouragement was aggravated by a host of minor reasons, such as the insecurity of property along the coast from African pirates; a too generous allowance of holidays; the prejudice against trading inherited from crusading ancestors; and there being no alien element—for this Moor or Jew would have served—to give the spur of competition which keeps a nation in health. Hapsburg and Bourbon misgovernment and wars blighted Spain for three centuries. But to-day new life is stirring in her. She is returning to Ximenez's wise rule of not scattering but of concentrating her powers. Happily those unhealthy growths, the colonies, are lopped off at last: