SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH LITERATURE
There is not a literature in Europe more individual than that of Spain. It has been influenced greatly at various times by other countries, especially Italy and France, but in its many masterpieces it has a flavour of the soil, a local colouring that is all its own. Even when Spanish authors have borrowed most freely they have usually succeeded in casting their own individuality over their “honourable kind of thieving.” Who has a more individual genius than Juan Ruiz, the merry Archpriest of Hita? Yet it has been shown that his debt to French, Latin, and other authors is very considerable. In this form of borrowing--practised by Shakespeare--which is not a direct imitation but a loan of bricks to make them marble, there is in fact a high originality. The phrase in which the merits of the Marqués de Santillana have been summed up might be applied to the whole of Spanish literature: when it ceases to imitate it is inimitable. Santillana’s mountain songs--his _serranillas_ are scented as it were with the thyme of the Castilian hills, whereas his sonnets in the Italian manner are colourless and artificial.
Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly speaks of “that forcible realistic touch, that alert vision, that intense impression of the thing seen and accurately observed which give to Spanish literature its peculiar stamp of authenticity.” The clear atmosphere of Spain, in which distant mountains seem to be close at hand, is also the atmosphere of Spanish literature. The Spaniard may have little subtlety of insight or critical judgment, but he has a directness of vision that has manifested itself in bigotry, brutality, and cynical satire, as well as in keen humour, straight-forwardness, and dignity of character. The realism which has produced the terrible Christs of the Cathedrals, with their long human hair and life-like wounds, or the polychrome statues of Spanish carvers, with a presentation of pain on the human face in all and more than all its horror--this realism may be due either to a hatred of all that is false and factitious or to a lack of sensibility, an inability to sympathize without a harsh shock, a thrill of terrified awe. What would the Greeks have said to these tortured features, these agonizing brows and flowing wounds? It is as false art to perpetuate in wood or stone the agony of a few culminating moments as it is to picture a face laughing or yawning, from whose perpetually open mouth we will soon turn with a laugh or a yawn. This realism has found a less harsh expression in Spanish literature, as in the sane and brilliant art of Velázquez. The brutality occasionally makes itself felt, as in some of Quevedo’s bitter writings, but most often the spirit is nobler and more human. In the twelfth-century “Poema del Cid” all the figures stand out in wonderful clearness, from the Cid himself to the nine years’ old child at Burgos, who tells the Cid that they dare not open their doors to him for fear of the King’s edict. And the events of the poem are brought to pass before our eyes with a joyful zest and rapidity and a stamp of truth that are worthy of Homer. We see the Cid ride with a hundred chosen knights across the Bridge of Alcántara and up Toledo’s narrow streets. We see him knocking at the gate of San Pedro de Cardeña to bid farewell to his wife Doña Jimena, and the abbot, who was saying Mass for the return of dawn, running out with lights and torches to welcome “him who was born in happy hour.” We see him again in battle as the pennants rise and fall, we hear “the sword’s griding screech” and the trampling of the horses at which the earth trembles. In “Celestina,” the long prose drama of the end of the fifteenth century, we have the same truth to life, though in very different scenes. Here it is not knights and battles, but common people of the street--the old hag Celestina, or Calisto’s servants--that are drawn with a master hand.