Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878

A SPANISH STORY-TELLER

In these days of pessimism in literature, when Tourgueneff and Sacher-Masoch represent man as the victim of blind Chance and annihilation his greatest happiness, it is pleasant to turn to a writer who still believes in God, his country and the family, and recognizes an overruling Providence that directs the world. It is not strange that these old-fashioned ideas should be found in Spain, where, in spite of much ignorance and superstition, the lower classes are deeply religious in the best sense of the word, and distinguished for their patriotism and intense love for their homes.

Antonio de Trueba, the subject of this sketch, was born in 1821 at Montellano, a little village in Biscay. He thus describes the home of his childhood in the preface to his collected poems: "On the brow of one of the mountains that surround a valley of Biscay there are four little houses, white as four doves, hidden in a grove of chestnut and walnut trees—four houses that can only be seen at a distance when the autumn has removed the leaves from the trees. There I spent the first fifteen years of my life. In the bottom of the valley there is a church whose belfry pierces the arch of foliage and rises majestic above the ash and walnut trees, as if to signify that the voice of God rises above Nature; and in that church two masses were said on Sunday—one at sunrise and the other two hours later. We children rose with the song of the birds and went down to the first mass, singing and leaping through the shady oak-groves, while our elders came down later to high mass. While our parents and grand-parents were attending it I sat down beneath some cherry trees that were opposite my father's house—for from that spot could be seen the whole valley that ended in the sea—and shortly after four or five young girls came to seek me, red as the cherries that hung over my head or as the graceful knots of ribbon that tied the long braids of their hair, and made me compose couplets for them to sing to their sweethearts in the afternoon, to the sound of the tambourine, under the walnut trees where the young people danced and the elders chatted and enjoyed our pleasure."

The young poet's parents were simple tillers of the soil, who gave their son a meagre education. In one of his letters he says that his father's library consisted of the Fueros de Viscaya (the old laws of Biscay), the Fables of Samaniego, Don Quixote, some ballads brought from Valmaseda or Bilbao, and two or three lives of the saints. Antonio seems to have had from his earliest childhood an ardent love of poetry, and in the passage quoted above he mentions his own compositions. He continues by saying, "I remember one day one of those girls was very sad because her sweetheart was going away for a long time. She wanted a song to express her grief, and I composed one at her request. A few days later she did not need my aid to sing her sorrow: in proportion as it had increased her ability to sing it herself had also increased, for poetry is the child of feeling. Her songs, as well as those I composed, soon became popular in the valley."

When the poet was fifteen years old the civil war waged by Don Carlos was desolating Spain. The inhabitants of Biscay espoused his cause, but Antonio's parents were unwilling to expose their son to the dangers he must run if he remained at home, and therefore decided to send him to a distant relative in Madrid who kept a hardware-shop. "One night in November," says Trueba, "I departed from my village, perhaps—my God!—never to return. I descended the valley with my eyes bathed in tears. The cocks began to crow, the dogs barked, the owls hooted in the mountains, the wind moaned in the tops of the walnut trees, and the river roared furiously rushing down the valley; but the inhabitants of the village slept peaceably, except my parents and brothers, who from the window followed weeping the sound of my footsteps, about to be lost in the noise of the valley. I was just leaving the last house of the village when one of those girls who had so often sought me under the cherry trees approached the window and took leave of me sobbing. On crossing a hill, about to lose the valley from my sight, I heard a distant song, and stopped. That same girl was sending me her last farewell in a song as beautiful as the sentiment that inspired it."

Antonio devoted himself to his duties during the day and pursued his studies with eagerness during the night. What he suffered from home-sickness the reader can easily imagine. All through his later works are scattered reminiscences of those unhappy years in Madrid, when his memory fondly turned to the mountains and cherry-groves of his beloved Encartaciones.1 Often dreaming of the country, which, he says, is his perpetual dream, he imagined the moment in which God would permit him to return to the valley in which he was born. "When this happens, I say to myself, my brow will be wrinkled and my hair gray. The day on which I return to my native valley will be a festal day, and on crossing the hill from which I can behold the whole valley, I shall hear the bells ringing for high mass. How sweetly will resound in my ears those bells that so often rilled my childhood with delight! I shall enter the valley, my heart beating, my breathing difficult and my eyes bathed with tears of joy. There will be, with its white and sonorous belfry, the church where the holy water of baptism was poured upon the brows of my parents and my own; there will be the walnut and chestnut trees beneath whose shade we danced on Sunday afternoons; there will be the wood where my brothers and I looked for birds' nests and made whistles out of the chestnut and walnut bark; there, along the road, will be the apple trees whose fruit my companions and I knocked off with stones when we went to school; there will be the little white house where my grand-parents, my father, my brothers and I were born; there will be all that does not feel or breathe. But where will be, my God, all those who with tears in their eyes bade me farewell so many years ago? I shall follow the valley down: I shall recognize the valley, but not its inhabitants. Judge whether there will be among sorrows a greater sorrow than mine! The people gathered in the portico of the church waiting for mass to begin will look over the wall along the road, and others will look out of the windows, all to see the stranger pass. And they will not know me, and I shall not know them, for those children and those youths and those old men will not be the old men nor the youths nor the children whom I left in my native valley. I shall follow sadly the valley down. 'All that has felt,' I shall exclaim, 'has changed or died. What is it that preserves here pure and immaculate the sentiments which I inspired?' And then some village-woman will sing one of those songs in which I enclosed the deepest feelings of my soul, and on hearing her my heart will want to leap from my breast, and I shall fall on my knees, and, if emotion and sobs do not stifle my voice, I shall exclaim, 'Holy and thrice holy, blessed and thrice blessed, poetry which immortalizes human sentiment!'"

Antonio after a time left his relative's shop to enter another in the same business, from which he was relieved by the owner's financial difficulties. He then determined to devote himself to literature, and became a writer for the papers. In 1852 he published Libro de Cantares (Book of Songs), which at once made his name a household word throughout Spain. He tells us that most of the poems in it were composed mentally while dreaming of his native country and wandering about the environs of Madrid, "wherever the birds sing and the people display their virtues and their vices, for the noble Spanish people have a little of everything." He warns his readers not to expect from him what he cannot give them: "Do not seek in this book erudition or culture or art. Seek recollections and feeling, and nothing more. Fifteen years ago I left my solitary village: these fifteen years, instead of singing under the cherry trees of my native country, I sing in the midst of the Babylon which rises on the banks of the Manzanares; and, notwithstanding, I still amuse myself with counting from here the trees that shade the little white house where I was born, and where, God willing, I shall die: my songs still resemble those of fifteen years ago. What do I understand of Greek or Latin, of the precepts of Horace or of Aristotle? Speak to me of the blue skies and seas, of birds and boughs, of harvests and trees laden with golden fruit, of the loves and joys and griefs of the upright and simple villagers, and then I shall understand you, because I understand nothing more than this."

These poems are what the author calls them, nothing more—pure and simple records of the life of the people around him, their loves and griefs, their hopes and disappointments. The most usual metre is the simple Spanish asonante, or eight-syllable trochaic verse, with the vowel rhyme called asonante.2 They are pervaded by a tender spirit of melancholy, very different from the Weltschmerz of Heine, with some of whose lyrics the Spanish poet's cantares may be compared without losing anything by the comparison. In one poem he says: "In the depths of my heart are great sorrows: some of them are known to men, others to God alone. But I shall rarely mention my griefs in my songs, for I have no hope that they can be alleviated; and where is the mortal who, in passing through this valley, has not encountered among the flowers some sharp thorn?" In the same poem he says: "All ask me, Who taught you to sing? No one: I sing because God wills it—I sing like the birds;" and he explains his method by a touching incident. One evening he was singing on the bank of the Manzanares when he saw a child smiling on the breast of its mother. The poet went and caressed it, and the child threw its arms about Antonio's neck and turning to its mother cried, "Mother, Antonio, he of the songs, is a blind man who sees."3 The poet continues: "I am a blind man who sees: that angel told the truth. With my guitar resting on my loving heart, you may see me wandering from the city to the valley, from the cabin of the poor to the palace of the great, weeping with those who weep, singing with those who sing, for my rude guitar is the lasting echo of all joys and all sorrows. I shall sing my songs in the simple language of the laborer and the soldier, of the children and the mothers, of those who have not frequented learned schools.... In this language I shall extol the faith and the holy combats of the soldiers of Christ with the sacrilegious Saracen; I shall sing the heroic efforts of our fathers to conquer the proud legions of Bonaparte; and the beauty of the skies, and the flowers of the valley, and love and innocence—all that is beautiful and great—will find a lasting echo in my rude guitar."

Many of these songs are ingenious variations on a theme supplied by some old and well-known poem, a few lines of which are woven into each division of the new song.

The success of the Libro de los Cantares was immediate and great; the first three editions were exhausted in a few months; the duc de Montpensier wished to defray the expenses of the fourth, and Queen Isabella of the fifth; since then others have followed. Some years later the poet married, and since then has written chiefly in prose.

In 1859 appeared a volume of short tales entitled Rose-colored Stories (Cuentos de Color de Rosa): these were followed by Tales of the Country (Cuentos campesinos), Popular Tales (Cuentos popolares), Popular Narrations (Narraciones popolares), Tales of Various Colors, Tales of the Dead and Living, etc.4

Before examining in detail any of these collections it may be well to learn the author's views of his task and definition of his subject. In the introduction to the Popular Tales he says, addressing his friend Don José de Castro y Serrano: "The object of this preface is simply to tell you why I have given the name of Popular Tales to those contained in this volume, what I understand by popular literature, and why I write tales instead of writing novels or comedies or cookbooks. There are two reasons why I have called these tales popular. First, because many of them are told by the people; and, secondly, because in retelling them I have used the simple and plain style of the people.... In my conception, popular literature can be defined in this manner: That literature which by its simplicity and clearness is within the reach of the intelligence of the people.... However, in popular literature the simplicity of form is not enough: it is necessary to reproduce Nature, because if not reproduced there will be no truth in it; and if there is no truth in it the people will not believe it; and if they do not believe it they will not feel it. For my part, I take such pains in studying Nature, in order that my pictures may be true, that I fear you will accuse me of extravagance, and will laugh at me when you read the two examples I am going to cite. On a very severe night in January I was writing in the fourth story of the street Lope de Vega, No. 32, the tale which I named De Patas en el Infierno ('The Feet in Hell'), and when a detail occurred which consisted in explaining the changes in the sound made by water in filling a jar at a fountain, I found that I had never studied these changes, and I did not have in the house at that moment water enough to study them. The printers were going to send for the story early in the morning, and it must be finished that night. Do you know what I did to get out of my difficulty? At three o'clock in the morning, facing the darkness, rain and wind, I went to the little fountain near by with a jar under my cloak, and spent a quarter of an hour there listening to the sound of the water as it fell into the jar. A short time after I was preparing to write the rural tale called Las Siembras y las Cosechas ('Seed-time and Harvest'), and the description of a sunrise in the country entered into my plan. I had often seen the sun rise in the country, but it was necessary to contemplate and study anew that beautiful spectacle in order to describe it exactly; and early one morning, long before the dawn, accompanied by two friends, I went to the hills of Vicalvaro, where we made some good studies, but were very much frightened by some thieves who attacked us knife in hand, believing we were people who carried watches."

These words of the author reveal better than we could explain his aim and method. He is a follower of Fernan Caballero, in so far as he has devoted himself to illustrate the every-day life of the Spanish people. The former writer has filled her pages with brilliant pictures of the life of Andalusia. Her canvas is, however, larger than Trueba's: she depicts the society of the South in all its grades; Trueba has chosen a more limited circle on which he has lavished all his care.

The volume of Rose-colored Tales is in many respects the best that Trueba has produced. The dedication to his wife explains the title and reveals the author's optimistic views. He says: "I call them Rose-colored Tales because they are the reverse of that pessimistic literature which delights in representing the world as a boundless desert in which no flower blooms, and life as a perpetual night in which no star shines. I, poor son of Adam, in whom the curse of the Lord on our first parents has not ceased to be accomplished a single day since the time when, still a child, I left my beloved valley of the Encartaciones,—I shall love this life, and shall not believe myself exiled in the world while God, friendship, love and the family exist in it, while the sun shines on me every morning, while the moon lights me every night and the flowers and birds visit me every day."

The scene of all the stories of this collection is in the Encartaciones, and an examination of a few of them will make us acquainted with the usual range of characters and the author's mode of treatment. The first is entitled "The Resurrection of the Soul" (La Resurreccion del Alma), and opens with an account of the village of C–, one of the fifteen composing the Encartaciones. Here lived Santiago and Catalina, the latter a foundling whom Santiago's parents had found at their door one winter morning. The good people, who had always desired a daughter, cared tenderly for the little stranger, and she grew up with their son, who was a few years older. It had been decided that when Santiago was fifteen he should go to his uncle in Mexico; which country, for the simple inhabitants of Biscay, is still "India," and the retired merchants who return to spend their last days in their native towns are "Indians"—a class that often play an important part in the dénouement of Trueba's simple plots. At the beginning of the story the two children (Santiago was nearly fifteen) had gone off to play and allowed the goats to get into the fields. The angry father is about to punish Catalina, who has assumed all the blame, but his wife mollifies him by reminding him that they have received a piece of good news. Ramon good-humoredly says, "You women always have your own way," and proceeds to tell a story to illustrate it. We give it as an example of the popular tales that Trueba often weaves into his stories:

"Once upon a time, when Christ went through the world healing the sick and raising the dead, a woman came out to meet him and said to him, seizing hold of his cloak and weeping like a Magdalen, 'Lord, do me the favor to come and raise my husband, who died this morning.'