Chapter I: Introduction

According to the Spanish critics, the novel has flourished in Spain during only two epochs--the golden age of Cervantes and the period in which we are still living. That unbroken line of romance-writing which has existed for so long a time in France and in England, is not to be looked for in the Peninsula. The novel in Spain is a re-creation of our own days; but it has made, since the middle of the nineteenth century, two or three fresh starts. The first modern Spanish novelists were what are called the _walter-scottistas_, although they were inspired as much by George Sand as by the author of _Waverley_. These writers were of a romantic order, and Fernan Caballero, whose earliest novel dates from 1849, was at their head. The Revolution of September, 1868, marked an advance in Spanish fiction, and Valera came forward as the leader of a more national and more healthily vitalised species of imaginative work. The pure and exquisite style of Valera is, doubtless, only to be appreciated by a Castilian. Something of its charm may be divined, however, even in the English translation of his masterpiece, _Pepita Jimenez_. The mystical and aristocratic genius of Valera appealed to a small audience; he has confided to the world that when all were praising but few were buying his books.

Far greater fecundity and a more directly successful appeal to the public, were, somewhat later, the characteristics of Perez y Galdos, whose vigorous novels, spoiled a little for a foreign reader by their didactic diffuseness, are well-known in this country. In the hands of Galdos, a further step was taken by Spanish fiction towards the rejection of romantic optimism and the adoption of a modified realism. In Pereda, so the Spanish critics tell us, a still more valiant champion of naturalism was found, whose studies of local manners in the province of Santander recall to mind the paintings of Teniers. About 1875 was the date when the struggle commenced in good earnest between the schools of romanticism and realism. In 1881 Galdos definitely joined the ranks of the realists with his _La Desheredada_. An eminent Spanish writer, Emilio Pardo Bazan, thus described the position some six years ago: "It is true that the battle is not a noisy one, and excites no great warlike ardour. The question is not taken up amongst us with the same heat as in France, and this from several causes. In the first place, the idealists with us do not walk in the clouds so much as they do in France, nor do the realists load their palette so heavily. Neither school exaggerates in order to distinguish itself from the other. Perhaps our public is indifferent to literature, especially to printed literature, for what is represented on the stage produces more impression."

This indifference of the Spanish reading public, which has led a living novelist to declare that a person of good position in Madrid would rather spend his money on fireworks or on oranges than on a book, has at length been in a measure dissipated by a writer who is not merely admired and distinguished, but positively popular, and who, without sacrificing style, has conquered the unwilling Spanish public. This is Armando Palacio Valdes, who was born on the 4th of October 1853, in a hamlet in the mountains of Asturias, called Entralgo, where his family possessed a country-house. The family spent only the summer there; the remainder of the year they passed in Aviles, the maritime town which Valdes describes under the name of Nieva in his novel _Marta y Maria_. He began his education at Oviedo, the capital of Asturias. From this city he went, in 1870, up to Madrid to study the law as a profession. But even in the lawyer's office, his dream was to become a man of letters. His ambition took the form of obtaining at some university a chair of political economy, to which science he had, or fancied himself to have, at that time a great proclivity.

Before terminating his legal studies, the young man published several articles in the _Revista Europea_ on philosophical and religious questions. These articles attracted the attention of the proprietor of that review, and Valdes presently joined the staff. In 1874 he became editor. He was at the head of the _Revista Europea_, at that time the most important periodical in Spain from a scientific point of view, for several years. During that time he published the main part of those articles of literary criticism, particularly on contemporary poets and novelists, which have since been collected in several volumes--_Los Oradores del Ateneo_, ("The Orators of the Athenaeum"); _Los Novelistas Espanoles_ ("The Spanish Novelists"); _Un Nuevo Viaje al Parnaso_ ("A New Journey to Parnassus"), sketches of the living poets of Spain; and, in particular, a very bright collection of review articles published in conjunction with Leopoldo Alas, _La Literatura en_ 1881 ("Spanish Literature in 1881"). These gave Valdes a foremost rank among the critics of the day. He wrote no more criticism, or very little; he determined to place himself amongst those whose creative work demands the careful consideration of the best judges.

Soon after he took the direction of the _Revista_, Valdes wrote his first novel, _El Senorito Octavio_, which was not published until 1881. In 1883 he brought out his _Marta y Maria_, a book which, I know not why, is called "The Marquis of Penalta" in its English version. This novel enjoyed an extraordinary success, and had more of the graphic and sprightly manner by which Valdes has since been distinguished, than the books which immediately followed it. Spanish critics, indeed, remembering the wonderful freshness of _Marta y Maria_, still often speak of it as the best of Valdes' stories. In this same year, 1883, he married, at the seaside town of Gijon, in Asturias, on the day when he completed his thirty years, a young lady of sixteen. His marriage was a honeymoon of a year and a half, of which _El Idilio de un Enfermo_ ("The Idyll of an Invalid"), a short novel of 1884, portrays the earlier portion. His wife died early in 1885, leaving him with an infant son to be, as he says, "my allusion and my fascination." His subsequent career has been laborious and systematic. He has published one novel almost every year. In 1885 it was _Jose_, a shorter tale of sea-faring life on the stormy coast of the author's native province. About the same time appeared a collection of short stories, called _Aguas Fuertes_ ("Strong Waters").

It was not until 1886, however, that Valdes began to rank among the foremost novelists of Europe. In that year he published his great story, _Riverita_, one of the characters in which, a charming child, became the heroine of his next book, _Maximina_, 1887. Of this character he writes to me: "My Maximina in these two books is but a pale reflection of that being from whom Providence parted me before she was eighteen years of age. In these novels I have painted a great part of my life." A Sevillian novice, who has helped to care for Maximina in Madrid, reigns supreme in a succeeding novel, _La Hermana San Sulpicio_ ("Sister San Sulpicio"), 1889. But between these two last there comes a massive novel, describing the adventures of a journalist who founds a newspaper in the provincial town of Sarrio, by which Gijon seems to be intended. This book is called _El Cuarto Poder_ ("The Fourth Power"), and was published in 1888. To these, in 1891, was added _La Espuma_ ("Froth"), of which a translation has already appeared in the "International Library." In 1892 Valdes published _La Fe_ ("Faith").

In _La Espuma_, his best-known novel, Valdes reverted from those country scenes and those streets of provincial cities which he had hitherto loved best to paint, and gave us a sternly satiric picture of the frothy surface of fashionable life in Madrid. From the illusions of the poor, pathetic and often beautiful, he turned to the ugly cynicism of the wealthy. With his passion for honesty and simplicity, his heart burned within him at the parade and hollowness which he detected in aristocratic and bureaucratic Madrid. One conceives that, like his own Raimundo, he was invited to enter it, took his fill of its pleasures, and found his mouth filled with ashes. His talent for portraiture was never better employed. If he was occasionally tempted to commit the peculiarly Spanish fault of exaggeration--scarcely a fault there, where the shadows are so black and the colours so flaring--he resisted it in his more important characters. The brutality of the Duke de Requena, the sagacity and urbanity of Father Ortega, the saintly sweetness of the Duchess, the naivete of Raimundo, the sphinx-like charm of Clementina de Osorio, with her mysterious sweetness and duplicity, these are among the salient points of characterisation which stand out in this powerful book. _La Espuma_ was a cry from the desert to those who wear soft raiment in king's palaces. It was the ruthless tearing aside of the conventions by a Knox or a Savonarola. It was stringent satire, yet tempered with an artist's moderation, with a naturalist's self-suppression.

The latest novel which Valdes has published is that which we here present under the title of _The Grandee_ ("El Maestrante"). Here, as it will be seen, the author is no longer engaged in the jarring notes of satire, but, with more lightness and a greater effusion of humour, he dissects the quaint elements which make up old-fashioned society in a provincial city of Spain. This is one of those books which peculiarly appeal to the foreign reader who desires to enter into a phase of life from which his own experience absolutely excludes him. We may suppose that a limited number of Englishmen can penetrate to the palaces and the club-rooms of Madrid, and see something, however superficially, of the life described in _Froth_. But the grim and ancient mansions which look down through ancient mullioned windows on the narrow streets of such a town as is brought before us in _The Grandee_--what can the most privileged Englishman possibly know of the manners and customs of their stately inhabitants?

In the second half of the book, the gaiety and grotesqueness of the pictures of life sink before the solemnity of the terrible and tragic corruption of Amalia, and the martyrdom of Josefina. The last pages of _The Grandee_ are, indeed, tinged with almost intolerable gloom, and in a society comparatively so civilised as our own, the revenge of the unnatural mother may seem almost overdrawn. The author contends, however, that in the cryptic and cloistered provincial life which he describes, where the light of censure can hardly reach a powerful criminal, such wickedness as is perpetrated upon Josefina is neither improbable nor unprecedented. Nor do the reports of Mr. Benjamin Waugh permit us to question that such horrors are daily committed at our own doors. Whether these maladies of the soul are or are not fit subjects for the art of the novelist is a question which every reader must answer for himself.

In the pages of _The Grandee_ we have a singular transcript of Spanish pride and picturesqueness, of a narrow society absolutely fortified against public opinion by its ancient prejudices, a society, nevertheless, in which the primitive passions of humanity stir and interact with as much dangerous vivacity as in freer and more democratic conditions. I may perhaps mention, on the authority of the author, that by Lancia Valdes intends us to understand Oviedo, the capital of the province of Asturias, where he spent many years of his childhood and early youth. The story opens between thirty and forty years ago, and represents Oviedo and its social customs at an epoch a little earlier than the time when the novelist was forming his freshest and most vivid impressions of life.

Of the author of so many interesting books but little has yet been told to the public. In a private letter to myself, the eminent novelist gives a brief sketch of his mode of life, so interesting that I have secured his permission to translate and print it here:--"Since my wife died," Senor Valdes writes, "my life has continued to be tranquil and melancholy, dedicated to work and to my son. During the winters, I live in Asturias, and during the summers, in Madrid. I like the company of men of the world better than that of literary folks, because the former teach me more. I am given up to the study of metaphysics. I have a passion for physical exercises, for gymnastics, for fencing, and I try to live in an evenly-balanced temper, nothing being so repugnant to me as affectation and emphasis. I find a good deal of pleasure in going to bull-fights (although I do not take my son to the Plaza dressed up like a miniature _torero_, as an American writer declares I do), and I cultivate the theatre, because to see life from the stage point of view helps me in the composition of my stories."

EDMUND GOSSE.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE GRANDEE'S HOUSE 1

II. THE DISCOVERY 25

III. THE TOWN 55

IV. THE HISTORY OF THEIR LOVE 75

V. THE JOKES OF PACO GOMEZ 100

VI. THE SENORITAS DE MERE 113

VII. THE INCREASE OF THE CONTINGENT 138

VIII. FERNANDA AND THE WINE 153

IX. THE MASQUERADE 172

X. FIVE YEARS AFTER 188

XI. AMALIA'S RAGE 206

XII. THE BARON'S JUSTICE 226

XIII. THE MARTYRDOM 239

XIV. THE CAPITULATION 258

XV. JOSEFINA SLEEPS 276

THE GRANDEE