In 1895 appeared “Peñas arriba” (On the heights), the crown and masterpiece of Pereda’s work. It is a novel of the high mountain, as “Sotileza” is a novel of the sea. Don Celso lives in Tablanca in his ancestral house which holds lordship over a whole valley and has had the honour of lodging two prelates, the Bishops of León and Santander; but Don Celso is old and in failing health, and he so urgently begs his nephew Marcelo to come to him that, against his will, the latter leaves Madrid and his comfortable rooms in the _Calle del Arenal_. After a long ride on and on over high mountain passes and narrow, precipitous paths and haunts of bears, he reaches Tablanca after nightfall. A whistle from his attendant, Chisco, the barking of dogs, an uncertain light moving to and fro, black shapes round the light, a sound of voices, and Marcelo is received into his uncle’s arms. Next day, from the wide balconies, he discovers the mountains on one side nearly touching the house, on the other a chequer-work of green meadows and yellow stubble-fields of maize against a background of mountains green and brown and grey, and the village among rocks and brushwood and intricate paths. There is a saying in the village that the largest piece of flat ground is the floor of Don Celso’s dining-room. Of the characters of the book Don Sabas belongs to that noble army of humble parish priests described by Pereda--the village priest in “De tal palo tal astilla”; Don Frutos, discreet and talkative, in “Don Gonzalo”; the joyous priest of Robleces, _regocijado de humor_, in “La Puchera,” whose only vice is to go out to sea twice a week with the fishing-boats; and the incomparable _pae Polinar_ in “Sotileza.” Don Sabas has a passion for the mountain, and, once upon the heights, the exact word and the right phrase come to him in which to express his enthusiasm and his deep knowledge of their plants and animals. To have given him a bishopric in a flat country would have meant death to him. He is fearless and untiring whether he is tracking a bear, or out in a snow-blizzard on the heights to rescue some peasant or herdsman who has not returned to the village, or visiting the sick on a black night of storm. Don Celso is also a noble figure, practical and imposing, and in his immense kitchen of an evening he holds a patriarchal gathering of peasants. We have, too, the splendid Tolstoian figure of the _hidalgo_ of ancient race, Gómez de Pomar, the author of many books, unloading a cart of hay in his simple peasant’s dress. He is a model of noble courtesy--_hidalga cortesía_, his style is “spirited and vigorous, pure Castilian untainted, as the blood that flows in his veins.” Consciously or unconsciously, it is a self-portrait of Pereda. The book abounds in impressive scenes and characters; it was a subject dear to Pereda’s heart, and he produced a work which ranks among the great novels of the world. There is a certain solidity in Pereda’s writing well suited to describe the stern deep-shadowed mountain-country, while his unlatin love of the wild and desolate rejoices in the hurricanes that tear up trees and whirl the snow-drifts on the mountain-side. “Peñas arriba” represents the whole life and being of the author and gives us a full measure of the true _sabor de la tierruca_, the savour of the soil. In “Esbozos y Rasguños” Pereda ridicules those mad Cervantists who prove that Cervantes was omniscient, an excellent theologian, a cook, a sailor, a geographer, a freethinker, and who will soon prove that neither is Cervantes Cervantes, nor _Don Quixote Don Quixote_. But of the true spirit of Cervantes he had imbibed a large part, even though he never attained to his great-hearted tolerance and the wider outlook of those more spacious times. His prose[114] is robust and austerely free from foreign idioms, laden with dialect and phrases native to the soil. It has caught the vigorous freshness of the mountain air, and the scent of earth and woods and moors, the rush of the sea and the elemental simplicity of men ennobled by constant contact with earth and ocean. Pereda wrote out of the fulness of his heart, without seeking popularity. His rough grandeur, rugged as the country of “Peñas arriba,” his frequent use of dialect, his untranslatableness, make for few readers. But those who, like Don Sabas, care to leave the level country and climb the mountain height, will find in Pereda a classic, high and steadfast as the hills. Blindly though the iniquity of oblivion scattereth her poppy, it is perhaps not “prodigiously temerarious” to suspect that Pereda may still be read when Zola is forgotten.