Similarly, Señor Menéndez y Pelayo remarks that “about the year 1870, the date of Pérez Galdós’ first book, the Spanish novel was slumbering in the arms of insipid or monstrous productions, _entre ñoñerías y monstruosidades_.” There is little insipidity or sentimentalism in the more modern Spanish novel. Realism is the dominant note of Spanish literature. The very atmosphere of Spain makes for clear vision. Its artists are realistic, even brutally realistic, as Goya occasionally is; even its mystics have not been wrapped wholly from the world: they do not live in a cloud, insensible to the real facts of life. And in the same way the great Spanish novelists are realistic. There is, however, a true Castilian dignity about their realism. They do not, in George Meredith’s phrase, mistake the “muddy shallows” for the depths of Nature. They may treat of the vulgar and the base, but they do not treat of them in a way that is vulgar and base. They may be as outspoken as Martial, but their realism is eminently sane and clean.
The modern fashion, strongly in favour of realism, should do justice to the merits of Spanish novels. It is no doubt guided by the love of contrast that caused Stendhal, a romantic and an enthusiast at heart, to read pages of the “Code Civil” before writing his novels, and to adopt a style mathematically cold and thin, and Flaubert, a poet, to analyse a subject so vulgar as that of _Madame Bovary_. A simpler age may delight in works of a fantastic imagination, but a more complex and perhaps hypocritical age must have truth and away with vagueness and pretence.
Minds so complicated and many-sided as to be rarely themselves, admire the simple and concrete, and the Spanish genius, which is essentially objective, answers to this taste both in its literature and in its art. Yet it is characteristic that in many Spanish novels realism and mysticism go hand in hand. That peculiarly Spanish mysticism which shows its false side in Clarín’s “La Regenta,” its practical spirit in Palacio Valdés’ “Marta y María,” its sadness in Azorín’s “La Voluntad,” is by no writer more sympathetically treated than by Juan Valera, in “Pepita Jiménez” and other novels. Valera was too great an artist to belong to any school. He repeated in many prefaces that his aim was not to instruct or to edify, but rather to give pleasure. The old heresy that works of art should edify has had great influence in Spain, and it makes its presence felt in modern novels with a set purpose, _romans à thèse_. It cast its shadow over the work of Fernán Caballero and Pereda, and, passing to the enemy, reappears at intervals in Pérez Galdós and Blasco Ibáñez. But Valera would have none of it. A novel, he said, “should be poetry, not history, that is, it should paint things not as they are but fairer than they are, illuminating them with a light that may cast over them a certain charm.” The magic of his style, which he caught by his own confession from the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, supplied this charm, and is sufficient to make his work imperishable. It is a charm that is exquisite and escapes analysis, reminding of that metallic lustre in ancient Spanish _azulejos_, or glazed tiles, of which modern manufacturers in vain seek to recapture the secret. Valera was not, in a strict sense, a great novelist. The construction of his stories is often weak, and the characters all speak the language of Don Juan Valera. “In Valera,” it has been said, “there are no Sanchos, all are Valeras.” He was himself aware of these limitations. He would sometimes say in a preface that he was not certain if his book were or were not a novel, and as to the invariably polished speech of his characters, the conversation of the nurse Antoñona with Luis de Vargas, in “Pepita Jiménez,” is accounted for by the fact that she had prayed that it might be given her to speak on this occasion, not in grotesque language, as was her wont, but in elegant and cultured style. Similarly, Juana la Larga says to her discreet daughter Juanita, “All that you have said seems to be taken from the books that Don Pascual gives you to read.”