What would have become of the English Church without him? And yet who could have hoped great things from this old man, chosen as a last resort, drawn as it seemed by chance from a monastic retreat, sent among strangers whose ways were as foreign to him as their language, into a land of civil strife and not yet wholly Christian? He brought order from chaos, he set up and pulled down, he held councils, and made the voice of his Church heard in the catholic world and stayed the feuds of princes by his presence. And none save Wilfrid raised a voice of protest, for when he was most arbitrary they saw the earnest purpose and foresaw the good result. And yet the smallest matters were not too lowly for him. While he ordered parishes and governed monasteries, he himself taught the rudiments of science and language in the school that he founded and compiled in his hours of study a manual of confessional law. And as he stands alone, so he lay alone in his grave, for the porch where his predecessors lay was filled and Theodore was the first to find a resting place within St. Peter's Church, whose abbot, Adrian, might well look with satisfaction on the memorial of the man his insight had given to England.

ONE

MODERN SPANISH FICTION.

NE of the most marked features in the Southern renaissance, if one may use this word, of the new birth of literary and scholarly aspirations in a country that has long been compelled to turn its strength to more pressing needs, is the growing interest in the language and literature of our Southern neighbors, the Spanish Americans, who are producing far more of permanent literary value than many, even of the well-read among us, are wont to suppose. Nor is this unnatural, for though close at hand to us geographically, they are removed from us politically and commercially by barriers that prove harder to pass than the broad Atlantic. They know less of us and we of them than is known in England or Germany. Yet there is, as has been said, the promise of better things. Spanish is now taught in many institutions where but ten years ago it was quite unknown, classes are growing in size, and greater demands are made on our instructors. It is therefore a timely, and not ungracious task, to direct the attention of Southern scholarly men to the development of that branch of Spanish literature which is in closest touch with the people of today-that is, fiction in the form of the novel and of the short story, a form that under the influence of the public school and the cheapening of printing has quite taken the place of the theatre in popular estimation in Spain.

The chief factor in this comparatively recent popularization of the Spanish novel is its frank conversion to the ideals and methods of the realistic school, not indeed in its extreme form, as we see it in Zola's Roman Experimental, but yet in a healthy and conscious revolt against the strained romanticism of Hugo and his decadent followers.

The founder of this modern school was a woman, Cecilia Bohl de Faber, more widely known by her pseudonym, Fernan Caballero, who died in 1877 at the ripe age of eighty.

It is significant to note that her father was a German by birth, though thoroughly identified by residence and marriage with Spain. This stood the daughter in good stead, for though a thorough Spaniard in spirit, she could not but profit from the familiarity with English, French, and German that her father's wide culture induced him to seek and that his vigilance enabled him to obtain for her. Indeed, her first story, a story that will mark an epoch in Spanish literary history, was written first in German, though immediately translated into Spanish. This novel, La Familia de Alvareda, won the high praise of our countryman, Washington Irving, who was minister to Spain at that time, and it deserved it both for its bold initiative and for its intrinsic worth. In it Caballero broke once and for ever with the tradition of Fernandez y Gonzalez and the others, who copied from Hugo and Sue whatever they were capable of copying -that is, chiefly their faults: We leave with her those revels of drunken imagination, and though we are perhaps less disturbed, we are surely more "delighted, raised, refined" by this first of Spaniards who dared to make her pen tell what her eyes saw. That indeed had been the trouble with Spanish fiction and drama from the first. It had been artificial, consciously so, and gloried in its artificiality. For the fantastic "light that never was on sea or land" Caballero substituted the daily sun of the Andalusian plains, roads, paths, churches, and ruins, that many of her readers had visited and that all might find with her book for a guide; and on this foundation of fact she built up a faithful, loving study of Andalusian peasant life, all the more charming because it rejects the meretricious ornament of outlandish dialect, whose baneful influence can be studied nearer home.

It is true she never quite emancipated herself, she is not quite sure that others will appreciate what is best to her mind. An extravagant situation is admitted once and again; and it would be more generous than just to attribute the mawkish moralizing of certain passages to a desire to represent the religion of the peasants which, however it may have

been superstitious, was not sentimental. And yet her critics have perhaps exaggerated this defect and doubtless there are many pious souls to whom it will seem no defect at all, and that not in Spain alone. Are there not many thousands, not nursed in Spanish nor Roman Catholic cradles, whose stomachs feel no qualm at the curdled milk of George MacDonald?

The public in Spain was not slow to recognize its liberator, and her second story, La Gaviota, which appeared as a serial in a Spanish newspaper, aroused a general enthusiasm. This, too, is an Andalusian tale, but, as its name implies, of fishermen and the sea. Such also is Lágrimas, and many others, the greater part of which, by the way, are readily accessible in the collection of Spanish authors published by Brockhaus in Leipzig.1

Caballero had so obviously struck the popular taste that it was natural that she should find imitators who should try to do for other parts of Spain what she had done for Seville and Andalusia. Larra's vivid sketches of Madrid life, published under the name of "Figaro," in the words of a recent Spanish critic, are "embalmed in the precious myrrh of truth." They are the legitimate product of the impulse of Caballero, and live to this day because they are true to life." But the real successor of Caballero in the field of fiction is De Trueba, who was for a long period the most popular of Spanish novelists both at home and abroad. He does not

1At Mk. 3.50 a volume in paper or Mk. 4.50 in cloth. The stories published in this series are: No. 1, Clemencia. No. 2, La Gaviota. No. 5, La Familia de Alvareda, Lágrimas. No. 8, Cuentos y Poesias Populares AndalucesNo. 13, Relaciones. No. 16, Elia, El Ultimo Consuelo, La Noche de Navidad Callar en vida y pardonar en Muerte. No. 17, Cuadros de Costumbres. No. 20 Cuatro Novelas. No. 23, La Farisea, Los dos Gracias y otras Novelas escogidas. No. 32, Un Verano en Bornos Cosa Cumplida, Lady Virginia. No. 40, Cuentos, Oraciones, Adivinas y Refranes populares é infantiles.

"Two of Larra's newspaper articles may be found in Knapp's Spanish Readings (Ginn & Co.), a book of very considerable value to those who desire to acquaint themselves briefly with the literary activity of Spain in the past half century.

A considerable number of De Trueba's novels are readily accessible in

mark, however, as great an advance on Caballero as might have been hoped for. Like the title of one of his books his stories are all apt to be color de rosa. He is too much an optimist to be a truthful painter of country life, and there is an idyllic note of the artificial pastoral that jars sadly with his peasants' native simplicity and the humor that smacks of mother earth. Caballero could have taught him that country life was not paradise..

José Maria de Andueza brings us back to nature again. His "Spaniards painted by themselves" (Los españoles pintados por sí mismos) is perhaps as good a piece of character drawing, of careful study of the peculiarities of the common people, as one is likely to find anywhere. Quite his equal is Pereda, often called the Teniers of Spanish Fiction, and not unjustly, so minute and painstaking is his delineation of life in the narrow sphere with which he had a life-long uninterrupted acquaintance, for so far as the writer can learn he never left his native province of Santander.

Yet while his predecessors had dealt mainly with the country, he is the first to make careful studies of city life. Pedro Sanchez is a journalistic novel, representing the fourth estate in its glory of revolutionary tumult. But it was not here that Pereda achieved his greatest success or left the deepest mark on the rising school of fiction. For this we must look to such novels as Sabor de la Tierruca or Sotileza, the former a story of life in the uplands, which he invests with a certain majestic calm; the latter a story of fishermen and the sea. Both apt to puzzle the foreign reader at times by their faithful imitation of an untutored dialect, but so true to nature that it exercised an irresistible charm on the public and successfully quelled the opposition of the purists who saw the Dictionary of the Academy treated with shocking disrespect by the street gamins and country lads.

Yet it is probable that Pereda owes more fame to his short

Brockhaus' collection: No. 6, El libro de los Cantares. No. 9, El Cid Campeador. No. 10, Las Hijas del Cid. No. 18, Cuentos Campesinos. No. 19, Cuentos Populares. No. 20, Cuentos de color de Rosa. No.`33, Narraciones Populares.