D. A. Williams

SOURCE: "The Practice of Realism," in The Monster in the Mirror: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Realism, edited by D. A. Williams, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978, pp. 257-79.

[In the following excerpt, Williams briefly discusses the handling of time period and the role of historical accuracy in several Realist novels.]

The Realist pays close attention to the physical and historical setting as well as to the social context.… Balzac may claim that the physical environment has a determinative influence on behaviour but, most typically the physical setting can be read as effect rather than cause, an indication of rather than an influence upon character. There is a widespread tendency … to exploit the symbolic potential of the physical setting, although this need not necessarily detract from its authenticity. Attentiveness to the physical setting grows, too, out of an 'archaeological' interest in the shape of things in the past. Although it is commonly assumed that the Realist deals with the present,… [many] novelists… set the action on average between ten and twenty years in the past. [Ivan] Turgenev, in setting the action only two years earlier and [George] Eliot and [Giovanni] Verga in making the action begin over forty years in the past, represent two extremes. The existence of a temporal gap allows the distinction between now and then, hoc tempus and illud tempus to be underlined, the past to be objectified and the understanding between narrator and reader who together look back on it to be strengthened. The straw bonnet which Eliot says 'our contemporaries might look at with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket' and the 'refinements' of Rosanette's apartment 'which would seem paltry to Rosanette's present-day counterparts' are presented as museum pieces which provoke a certain degree of mirth or scorn. 'Those days', Strindberg observes, very rapidly become mythologized as 'the good old days'. The most obvious explanation of the Realist's preference for the recent past is that the retrospective view makes for a clearer understanding of how society works. Also, as Stoneman suggests, 'research and documentation could be more easily accomplished at a distance in time, when records were more easily available and judgement had the benefit of perspective'. In some cases setting the novel in the past allows the writer to 'pull his punches' (Holmes) or to avoid, like Verga, a critical period in the history of his country. On the other hand, moving back in time takes Flaubert into the thick of one of the most turbulent periods of French history out of which no group or class emerged unblemished. Setting the novel in the recent past does, however, simplify the novelist's task, since it allows him to leave out whatever might interfere with or complicate the working of his model of society, without causing the reader to object. And as well as allowing him to be selective it also allows him to be evasive. Eagleton has pointed [out in Criticism and Ideology, 1976] that in some respects Middlemarch is lacking in historical substance: 'The Reform Bill, the railways, the cholera, machine-breaking; these "real" historical forces do no more than impinge on its margins.'Turgenev's silence about Bazarov's past and his possible connections with other radicals might seem a more serious omission to the reader of the time, who would like some indication of the strength of the faction he represents.

It could be argued that the Realist, whilst appearing to be concerned with the past, is in fact mainly preoccupied with the present. A period of twenty years earlier is sufficiently distant to admit the simplification and stylization necessary for his purpose but at the same time is sufficiently close for more up-to-date issues not to seem anachronistic when projected back into it. The commercialization of literature was particularly acute in the thirties but its backdating to the twenties in Lost Illusions allows it to be isolated and visualized more clearly in the context of an age whose contours, since the Revolution of 1830, have become sharper and more schematized. Likewise the rise of Gesualdo may, Gatt-Rutter points out, have been put a decade or two too far back in history but this allows the 'drive to monopoly' to emerge more powerfully as the salient characteristic of a new class, since the contrast between old and new becomes accentuated.

In some cases the effort to bring out the specificity of an earlier phase of history is perfunctory. There are some surprising omissions from Balzac's account of the year 1821-2 and Verga, in fact, confuses the years 1820 and 1821. Balzac, Mount argues, is concerned only with the general features of the age, not with precise details. On the other hand a novelist like Flaubert feels the historian's compulsion to make sure the factual details are correct and in documenting himself for his novel proceeds very much like a historian. Too much historical material, however, can be an embarrassment and Flaubert was worried that his insipid hero would be eclipsed by colourful historical figures such as Lamartine. The common practice, adopted by Eliot, Strindberg, Galdós, and Fontane is to avoid the two extremes represented by Balzac and Flaubert, making passing reference to the major events and figures of the age in which the novel is set, whilst omitting references to more transient phenomena and figures of the kind that Flaubert inserted into the political discussions of Sentimental Education. The balance between the historical accuracy to which the Realist is ostensibly committed and the 'de-historicizing' to which his interest in 'perennial' problems and 'basic' human nature conduces, is always a delicate one. It is not clear, Gatt-Rutter argues, whether Verga sees Gesualdo as a particular embodiment of a timeless, universal figure, 'homo economicus', or as the embodiment of a unique moment in the evolution of society. Flaubert's attitude to Frederic is also ambiguous; on the one hand, he illustrates the deleterious effects of the Romantic legacy, on the other, his psychological state is viewed as a permanent possibility.

There is one way in which the Realist can avoid 'overloading' when integrating historical material into his model and that is to 'use history as a means of characterization' (Macklin) by setting up parallels between what happens in the public, historical sphere and what happens in the private, fictional sphere. It may simply be a question of making developments in the fictional microcosm conform with what is happening in society at large, as when George Eliot writes: 'While Lydgate … felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch, Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national struggle for another kind of Reform'. Subtler parallels may be engineered between political and emotional regimes. These are present in Middlemarch but more carefully orchestrated in Fortunata andfacinta and Sentimental Education. In both cases changes of political regime are aligned with changes of heart in the hero. In Fortunata and facinta 'Juanito's oscillations between mistress and wife are an image of Spain's swing from order to revolution, from anarchy to peace.' In Sentimental Education each of Frederic's affairs is closely associated with a distinct phase of French history. In both cases a jocular analogy is drawn by the character himself; Frederic's 'I'm following the fashion. I've reformed' is akin to Juanito's 'Anyway, I can't stand any more and this improper relationship is going to end today. Down with the republic!' In Fortunata andfacinta the country alternates between 'intermittent fevers of revolution and peace'just as Juanito switches backwards and forwards between Fortunata and Jacinta but in Sentimental Education the movement does not seem reversible. The drama of profanation in both spheres prevents the swing back to earlier hopes and aspirations and the reactionary movement, when it comes, is decisive. Whilst Galdós emphasizes the basic instability of both political régimes and marriage, Flaubert stresses the necessary deterioration and gradual impoverishment which overtake both high political hopes and high emotional enterprise.

Despite the rich diversity of contexts in which the various [Realist] novels are produced, there is clearly much that they have in common—the technique of impersonality, the movement towards a more dramatic presentation, an elaborate though rarely obtrusive patterning, a profound understanding of the way society works and affects the individual, an interest in the forces and changes which characterize different phases of historical development. These various features will not necessarily all be found in any single novel nor, when they are present, need they be identical. There is, however, much to be gained from viewing Realism as a family likeness which … undoubtedly exists between novelists working at different times and in different places throughout the nineteenth century.

George Lukics

SOURCE: "Balzac and Stendhal," in Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others, translated by Edith Bone, Hillway Publishing Co., 1950, pp. 65-84.

[Lukdcs, a Hungarian literary critic and philosopher, is acknowledged as a leading proponent of Marxist thought. His development of Marxist ideology was part of a broader system of thought in which he sought to further the values of rationalism (peace and progress), humanism (socialist politics), and traditionalism (Realist literature) over the counter-values of irrationalism (war), totalitarianism (reactionary politics), and modernism (post-Realist literature). The subjects of his literary criticism are primarily the nineteenth-century Realists and their twentieth-century counterparts. In major works such as Studies in European Realism (1950) and The Historical Novel (1955), Lukdcs explicated his belief that "unless art can be made creatively consonant with history and human needs, it will always offer a counterworld of escape and marvelous waste. "In the following excerpt, Lukdcs compares Balzac's views on romanticism and realism with those of Stendhal as evidenced through their novels and correspondence.]

In September 1840, Balzac, then at the zenith of his glory published an enthusiastic and most profound review of The Monastery of Parma by Stendhal, an as yet quite unknown author. In October Stendhal replied to this review in a long and detailed letter, in which he listed the points on which he accepted Balzac's criticism and those in reference to which he wished to defend his own creative method in opposition to Balzac. This encounter, which brought the two greatest writers of the XIXth century face to face in the arena of literature, is of the greatest importance, although—as we will show later—Stendhal's letter was more guarded and less candid in expressing his objections than Balzac's review. Nevertheless it is clear from the review and the letter that the two great men were essentially in agreement as to their view of the central problems of realism and also of the diverging paths which each of them pursued in search of realism.

Balzac's review is a model for the concrete analysis of a great work of art. In the whole field of literary criticism there are few other examples of such a detailed, sympathetic and sensitive revelation of the beauty of a work of art. It is a model of criticism by a great and thinking artist who knows his own craft inside out. The significance of this criticism is not in the least diminished by the fact—which we propose to show in the course of our argument—that despite the admirable intuition with which Balzac understood and interpreted Stendhal's intentions, he yet remained blind to Stendhal's chief aim and attempted to foist on the latter his own creative method.

These limitations, however, are not limitations of Balzac's own personality. The reason why the comments of great artists on their own works and the works of others are so instructive is precisely because such comments are always based on the inevitable and productive single-mindedness. But we can really benefit by such criticisms only if we do not regard them as abstract canons but uncover the specific point of view from which they spring. For the singlemindedness of so great an artist as Balzac, is as we have already said, both inevitable and productive; it is precisely this single-mindedness which enables him to conjure up before us life in all its fullness.

The urge to clarify his attitude to the only contemporary writer he regarded as his equal caused Balzac to define at the very beginning of his review with more than his accustomed precision, his own position in reference to the development of the novel, i.e. his own place in the history of literature. In the introduction to The Human Comedy he confined himself in the main to establishing his own position in relation to Sir Walter Scott, mentioning only the features he regarded as a continuation of Scott's life-work and those which transcended it. But in his review of The Monastery of Parma he gives a most profound analysis of all the trends of style existing in the novel of his time. The concrete depth of this analysis of style will not be diminished in the eyes of the intelligent reader by the fact that Balzac's terminology is rather loose and sometimes misleading.

The essential content of this analysis could be summed up as follows: Balzac distinguishes three principal trends of style in the novel. These trends are: the "literature of ideas" by which he means chiefly the literature of the French enlightenment. Voltaire and Le Sage among the old and Stendhal and Merimee among the new writers are in his view the greatest representatives of this trend. Another trend is the "literature of images," represented mainly by the romantics Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo and others. The third trend, to which he himself adheres, strives for a synthesis of both the other trends. Balzac—rather unfortunately—calls this trend "literary eclecticism." (The source of this unfortunate term is probably his over-estimation of the idealist philosophers of his time, such as Royer-Collard). Balzac enumerates Sir Walter Scott, Mme. de Stael, Fennimore Cooper and George Sand as representing this trend. The list shows clearly how lonely Balzac felt in his own time. What he has to say about these writers—for instance his most interesting review of Fennimore Cooper's works which he published in the Revue Parisienne, show that his agreement with them regarding the deeper problems of creative methods did not go very far. But in the Stendhal review, when he wanted to justify his own creative method, as a great historical trend, in the eyes of the only contemporary writer whom he regarded as his equal, he felt compelled to point to a galaxy of precursors, of writers striving towards similar goals.

Balzac works out the contrast between his own trend and the "literature of ideas" most pointedly and this is understandable enough because his opposition to Stendhal shows itself here more clearly than anywhere else. Balzac says: "I don't believe that it is possible to depict modern society by the methods of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century literature. I think pictures, images, descriptions, the use of dramatic elements of dialogue are indispensable to the modern writers. Let us admit frankly that the form of Gil Blas is tiring and that there is something infertile in the piling up of events and ideas." When immediately after this he extols Stendhal's novel as a masterpiece of the "literature of ideas," he stresses at the same time that Stendhal has made certain concessions to the other two schools of literature. We shall see in the following that Balzac understood with exceptional sensitivity that it was impossible for Stendhal to make concessions in artistic detail either to romanticism or to the trend represented by Balzac himself; on the other hand we shall also see that when discussing the final problems of composition, the problems which already almost touch on basic problems of Weltanschauung, he censured Stendhal precisely for his failure to make concessions.

What is at issue here is the central problem of the nineteenth-century world-view and style: the attitude to romanticism. No great writer living after the French revolution could avoid this issue. Its discussion began already in the Weimar period of Goethe and Schiller and reached its culminating point in Heine's critique of romanticism. The basic problem in dealing with this issue was that romanticism was by no means a purely literary trend; it was the expression of a deep and spontaneous revolt against rapidly developing capitalism, although, naturally in very contradictory forms. The extreme romanticists soon turned into feudalist reactionaries and obscurantists. But the background of the whole movement is nevertheless a spontaneous revolt against capitalism. All this provided a strange dilemma for the great writers of the age, who, while they were unable to rise above the bourgeois horizon, yet strove to create a world-picture that would be both comprehensive and real. They could not be romanticists in the strict sense of the word; had they been that, they could not have understood and followed the forward movement of their age. On the other hand they could not disregard the criticism levelled by the romanticists at capitalism and capitalist culture, without exposing themselves to the danger of becoming blind extollers of bourgeois society, and apologists of capitalism. They therefore had to attempt to overcome romanticism (in the Hegelian sense), i.e. to fight against it, preserve it and raise it to a higher level all at the same time. (This was a general tendency of the time and by no means required acquaintance with Hegel's philosophy, which Balzac himself lacked.) We must add that this synthesis was not achieved completely and without contradictions by any of the great writers of the age. Their greatest virtues as writers rested on contradictions in their social and intellectual position, contradictions which they boldly followed through to their logical conclusion, but which they could not objectively solve.

Balzac may also be counted among the writers who while accepting romanticism, at the same time consciously and vigorously strove to overcome it. Stendhal's attitude to romanticism is on the contrary a complete rejection. He is a true disciple of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This difference between the two writers is of course manifest in their creative methods. Stendhal for instance advises a novice author not to read modern authors; if he wanted to learn to write good French he should study, if possible, books written before 1700; if he wanted to learn to think correctly, he should read Helvetius' "De l'esprit" and Jeremy Bentham.

Balzac on the contrary admired such outstanding romanticists as Chénier and Chateaubriand, although not uncritically. We shall see later that it is this divergence of opinion that lies at the root of the decisive controversy between them.

We must stress this divergence from the start, for unless we are clear on this point we cannot assess the true significance of the praise Balzac gave to Stendhal's book. For the feeling, the wealth of thought and the perfect absence of envy with which Balzac championed his only real rival is admirable not only as a personal attitude,—although the history of bourgeois literature knows very few examples of a similar objective tribute. Balzac's review and his enthusiasm are so admirable because by them he strove to ensure the success of a work which was in diametrical opposition to his own most cherished aims. Again and again Balzac stresses the streamlined, concentrated structure of Stendhal's novel. He describes this structure with some justification as dramatic, and claims that in this incorporation of a dramatic element Stendhal's style is related to his own. Following this train of thought he praises Stendhal for not embellishing his novel with "hors d'oeuvres", with insertions. "No, the persons act, reflect and feel and the drama goes forward all the time. The poet, a dramatist in his thoughts, does not stray from his path to pick any little flower; everything has a dithyrambic speed." All along Balzac stresses the absence of episode, the directness, and frugality of Stendhal's composition. In this praise a certain community of tendencies inherent in both writers is made manifest. Superficially it would be precisely in this sphere that the contrast in style between Stendhal's "enlightenist" severity and Balzac's romantically many-coloured and almost inextricably rich and chaotic mode of composition is greatest. Yet this contrast conceals a deep affinity as well; in his better novels Balzac also does not stoop to pick a flower by the roadside; he, too, depicts the essential and nothing but the essential. The difference and the contrast is in what Balzac and Stendhal, each for his part, consider essential. Balzac's conception of the essential is far more intricate and far less concentrated into a few great moments than Stendhal's.

This passionate striving for the essential, this passionate contempt for all trivial realism is the artistic link that unites these two great writers in spite of the polar divergence of their philosophies and creative methods. That is why Balzac, in his analysis of Stendhal's novel, could not refrain from touching upon the deepest problems of form—problems which are highly topical to this day. Balzac the artist sees quite clearly the indissoluble connection between a felicitous choice of subject and successful composition. He therefore considers it most important to explain in detail the consummate artistry shown by Stendhal in setting the scene of his novel in a little Italian court. Balzac, quite rightly, stresses the point that Stendhal's picture grows far beyond the framework of petty court intrigues in a small Italian duchy. What he shows in his novel is the typical structure of modern autocracy. He brings before us in their most characteristic manifestation the eternal types produced by this form of social existence. "He has written the modern Il Principe," says Balzac, "the novel that Macchiavelli would have written had he been exiled to nineteenth-century Italy. The Monastery of Parma is a typical book in the best sense of the word. Finally it brilliantly lays before the reader all the sufferings inflicted on Richelieu by the camarilla of Louis XIII."

In Balzac's view Stendhal's novel achieves its comprehensive typicality precisely because its scene is laid in Parma, on a stage of trivial interests and petty intrigues. For—Balzac continues to present such vast interests as those which occupied the cabinets of Louis XIV or Napoleon would necessarily require so wide a stage, so much objective explanation, as would greatly impede the end,—the period following upon the return of Count Mosca and the Duchess of Sanseverina to Parma, the story of the love between Fabrice and Clelia and Fabrice's withdrawal to the monastery.

Here Balzac would like to impose his own method of composition on Stendhal. Most of the Balzac novels have a much rounder plot and their predominant atmosphere is much more of one piece than is found in Stendhal or in the novels of the eighteenth century. Balzac mostly depicts some catastrophe tensely concentrated both in time and space or else shows us a chain of catastrophes, and tints the picture with the magic of a mood that is never inconsistent or out of tune. Thus does he seek artistic escape from the flabby shapelessness of modern bourgeois life by embodying certain compositional features of the Shakespearean drama and of the classical novella in the structure of his novels. A necessary result of this mode of composition is that many characters in such a novel cannot fulfil their destinies within its limits. The Balzacian principle of cyclic structure rests on the assumption that such unfinished and incomplete characters will reappear as the central figures of some other story in which the mood and atmosphere are appropriate to their occupying a central position. This principle has nothing in common with later forms of the cyclic novel, such as we find in the works of Zola. One should think of how Balzac makes Vautrin, Rastignac, Nucingen, Maxime de Trailles and others appear as episodic figures in "Le Pere Goriot," but find their true fulfilment in other novels. Balzac's world is, like Hegel's, a circle consisting entirely of circles.

Stendhal's principle of composition is diametrically opposed to Balzac's. He too, like Balzac, strives to present a totality, but always tries to crowd the essential features of a whole epoch into the personal biography of some individual type (the period of the Bourbon restoration in Le Rouge et le Noir, the absolutism of the small Italian states in The Monastery of Parma and the July monarchy on Lucien Leuwen). In adopting this biographical form Stendhal followed his predecessors, but endowed it with a different, quite specific meaning. Throughout his career as a writer he always presented a certain type of man and all representatives of this type, despite their clear-cut individuality, and the wide divergences in their class position and circumstances, are at the core of their being and in their attitude to Stendhal's whole epoch are very closely related to each other (Julien Sorel, Fabrice del Dongo, Lucien Leuwen). The fate of these characters is intended to reflect the vileness, the squalid loathsomeness of the whole epoch—an epoch in which there is no longer room for the great, noble-minded descendants of the heroic phase of bourgeois history, the age of the revolution and Napoleon. All Stendhal heroes save their mental and moral integrity from the taint of their time by escaping from life. Stendhal deliberately represents the death of Julien Sorel on the scaffold as a form of suicide and Fabrice and Lucien withdraw from life in a similar way, if less dramatically and with less pathos.

Balzac entirely failed to notice this decisive point in Stendhal's world-view when he suggested that The Monastery of Parma ought to be concentrated around and restricted to the struggles at the court of Parma. But all that Balzac considered superfluous from the viewpoint of his own method of composition were for Stendhal matters of primary importance. Thus, to begin with, the opening of The Monastery of Parma—the Napoleonic age, Eugene Beauharnais' glittering, colourful viceregal court, as the decisive influence determining Fabrice's whole mentality and development, and in contrast to it the vivid satirical description of the vile, contemptible Austrian tyranny and the portrayal of the Del Dongos, the rich Italian aristocrats demeaning themselves to act as spies of the hated Austrian enemy—all these things were absolute essentials to Stendhal, and for the same reason the same applies to the end of the novel, Fabrice's final evolution.

True to his own principles of composition, Balzac suggests that Fabrice might be made the hero of a further novel under the title: "Fabrice or the Italian of the Nineteenth Century.". "But if this young man is made the principal figure of the drama," says Balzac, "then the author is under the obligation to inspire him with some great idea, give him some quality which ensures his superiority over the great figures surrounding him—and such a quality is lacking here." Balzac failed to see that according to Stendhal's conception of the world and his method of composition, Fabrice did possess the quality which entitled him to be the principal hero of the novel. Mosca and Ferrante Palla are far more characteristic representatives of the type Balzac wanted to see, i.e. of the nineteenth-century Italian, than is Fabrice. The reason why Fabrice is nevertheless the hero of Stendhal's novel is that, despite his constant adaptation of himself to realities in his external way of life, he nevertheless represents that final refusal to accept a compromise, to formulate which was Stendhal's essential poetic objective. (I mention only en passant Balzac's almost comic misunderstanding of Fabrice's withdrawal to a monastery which he, Balzac, would have liked to see motivated on a religious, preferably Catholic basis. Such a possibility, quite feasible in the case of Balzac—we need only to recall the conversion of Mlle. de la Touche in Beatrix—is quite foreign to the world created by Stendhal.)

Things being thus, one may well understand that Balzac's criticism roused very conflicting emotions in Stendhal. As an artist unrecognised or misunderstood in his own time and hoping for recognition and understanding only in a distant future, he was naturally deeply moved by the passionate enthusiasm with which the greatest living writer had acclaimed his book. He realised, too, that Balzac was the only man who had on many points recognized his own deepest creative aspirations and paid tribute to them in a brilliant analysis. He was especially gratified by the part of Balzac's analysis which dealt with his choice of subject and the setting of the scene in a little Italian court. But in spite of the sincere pleasure he felt at Balzac's review, he yet voiced objectively his very sharp opposition, although in a very polite and diplomatic form, especially to Balzac's strictures on his style. Balzac, at the end of his review, criticized Stendhal's style rather severely, although he again showed his deep appreciation of Stendhal's great literary qualities, especially his ability to characterize people and bring out their essential traits by very few words. "Few words suffice M. Beyle; he characterizes his figures by action and dialogue; he does not fatigue the reader with descriptions but hurries forward towards the dramatic climax—and achieves it by a word, a single remark." In this sphere, therefore, Balzac accepted Stendhal as his equal, although—specifically in respect of characterization—he often mercilessly criticized other authors, even those whom he regarded as belonging to his own trend of thought. Thus he frequently criticizes Sir Walter Scott's dialogue and, in the Revue Parisienne, deplored Cooper's proneness to characterize his personages by a few constantly recurring phrases. He pointed out that examples of this can be found in Scott's writings too, "but the great Scotsman never abused this device which indicates an aridity, an infertility of the mind. Genius consists in throwing light on every situation by words which reveal the character of the figures, and not in muffling the personages in phrases which might apply to anything." (This remark is still most pertinent, for since the days of naturalism and through the influence of Richard Wagner and others, the leitmotiv-like stereotyped characterization of figures is still in vogue. Balzac rightly stresses that this is merely a means of concealing the inability to create lifelike characters in their movement and evolution.)

But although Balzac greatly appreciates Stendhal's capacity for characterizing his figures succinctly and yet profoundly by the words he puts in their mouths, he yet expresses considerable dissatisfaction with the style of his novel. He quotes a number of lapses of style and even grammar. But his criticism goes further than this. He demands that Stendhal should subject his novel to very extensive editing, and argues that Chateaubriand and De Maistre often rewrote some of their works. He concludes with the hope that Stendhal's novel, thus rewritten, "would be enriched by that ineffable beauty with which Chateaubriand and De Maistre endowed their favourite books."

Stendhal's every artistic instinct and conviction revolted against this conception of style. He readily admitted slovenliness of style. Many pages of the novel were dictated and sent to the publisher without revision. "I say what children say: 'I won't do it again'." But his acquiescence in the criticism of his style is almost entirely limited to this one point. He heartily despises the models of style quoted by Balzac. He writes: "Never, not even in 1802 …could I read even twenty pages of Chateaubriand.…IfindM. De Maistre unbearable. The reason why I write badly is probably that I am too fond of logic." In defence of his style he adds the further remark: "If Mme. Sand had translated the Monastery into French, it would have been a great success. But in order to express all that is contained in the present two volumes, she would have needed three or four. Please consider this." The style of Chateaubriand and his companions he characterizes in these terms: "1. Very many small pleasant things which it was quite superfluous to say.… 2. Very many small lies which are pleasant to hear."

As we see, Stendhal's criticism of the romantic style is very severe indeed, although he by no means said all that he thought about Balzac as a stylist and as a critic of style. He seizes the opportunity of hinting, when he makes these polemical remarks, that he has the greatest admiration for certain writings of Balzac (The Lily in the Valley, Old Goriot), and naturally this was not mere politeness. But at the same time he passes over in silence, with understandable diplomacy, the fact that he despises the romantic traits in Balzac's style just as much as the style of the romanticists proper. Thus he once said about Balzac: "I can quite believe that he writes his novels twice. First he writes them sensibly and the second time he decorates them in a nice neologistic style with 'Pdtiments de l'dme,'HI neige dans son cceur' and similar charming things." Nor does he mention how deeply he despises himself for every concession he makes to the neologistic style. Once he wrote of Fabrice: "He went for a walk, listening to the silence." On the margin of his own copy he apologised for this phrase to "the reader of 1880" in these terms: 'In order that an author should find readers in 1838 he had to write such things as "listening to the silence."' This shows that Stendhal had no intention of concealing his dislikes, he merely refrained from expressing them and drawing conclusions from them as radically and explicitly as he felt them.

To this negative criticism he appends a positive admission: "Sometimes I consider for a quarter of an hour whether I should put the adjective before or after the noun. I try to relate clearly and truthfully what is in my heart. I know only one rule: to express myself clearly. If I cannot speak clearly, my whole world is annihilated." From this point of view he condemns the greatest French writers, such as Voltaire, Racine and others, for filling their lines with empty words for the sake of a rhyme. 'These verses,' says Stendhal, 'fill up all the spaces that rightly belong to the true little facts.' This ideal of style he finds realized in his positive models. 'The memoirs of Gouvion-St.-Cyr are my Homer. Montesquieu and Fenelon's Dialogues of the Dead are I believe very well written.… I often read Ariosto, I like his narrative style.'

It is thus obvious that in matters of style Balzac and Stendhal represent two diametrically opposed trends, and this conflict manifests itself sharply on every individual issue. Balzac, in criticizing Stendhal's style, says of him: "His long sentences are ill-constructed, his short sentences are not rounded off. He writes approximately in Diderot's manner, who was not a writer." (Here Balzac's sharp opposition to Stendhal's style drives him into an absurd paradox; in other reviews he judges Diderot with far more justice.) It is true, however, that even this paradoxical utterance expresses a trend of style really existing in Balzac. To it, Stendhal replies: "As for the beauty, roundness, and rhythm of sentences (as in the funeral oration in faques the Fatalist) I often consider that a fault."

What is revealed in these problems is a conflict of style between the two great trends in French realism. During the subsequent evolution of French realism the principles of Stendhal fall ever more into disuse.

Flaubert, the greatest figure among the post-1848 French realists, is an even more enthusiastic admirer of Chateaubriand's beauties of style than was Balzac. And Flaubert no longer had any understanding at all of Stendhal's greatness as a writer. The Goncourts relate in their diary that Flaubert flew into fits of rage every time 'M. Beyle' was described as a writer. And it is obvious without any special analysis that the style of the greater representatives of later French realism, of Zola, Daudet, the Goncourts, etc. was determined by their acceptance of the romanticist ideals and not at all by a Stendhal-like rejection of the romantic 'neologisms.' Zola, of course, thought his teacher Flaubert's worship of Chateaubriand a fad, but this did not prevent him from modelling his own style on that of another great romanticist, Victor Hugo.

The reason for the contrast in style between Balzac and Stendhal is at core one of world-view. We recapitulate: the attitude to romanticism of the great realists of the period, the attempt to turn it into a sublimated element of a greater realism is, as we have already said, no mere question of style. Romanticism, in the more general sense of the word, is no mere literary or artistic trend, but the expression of the attitude taken up towards the post-revolutionary development of bourgeois society. The capitalist forces liberated by the revolution and the Napoleonic empire are deployed on an ever widening scale and their deployment gives birth to a working class of ever more decidedly developing class-consciousness. Balzac's and Stendhal's careers as writers extend to the period of the first great movements of the working class (e.g. the rising in Lyons). This is also the time when the Socialist world-view was born, the time of the first Socialist critics of bourgeois society, the time of the great Utopians St. Simon and Fourier. It is also the time when, parallel with the Utopian-Socialist criticism of capitalism, its romanticist criticism also reaches its theoretical culminating point (Sismondi). This is the age of religious-feudalist Socialist theories (Lamennais). And it is this period which reveals the pre-history of bourgeois society as a permanent class war (Thiers, Guizot, etc.).

The deepest disagreement between Balzac and Stendhal rests on the fact that Balzac's world-view was essentially influenced by all these newer trends, while Stendhal's world-view was at bottom an interesting and consistent extension of the ideology of pre-revolutionary Enlightenment. Thus Stendhal's world-view is much clearer and more progressive than that of Balzac, who was influenced both by romantic, mystic Catholicism and a feudalist Socialism and strove in vain to reconcile these trends with a political monarchism based on English models and with a poetic interpretation of Geoffroy de Saint Hilaire's dialectic of spontaneous evolution.

This difference of world-view is quite in keeping with the fact that Balzac's last novels were full of a profound pessimism about society and apocalyptic forebodings regarding culture, while Stendhal, who was very pessimistic regarding the present and criticized it so wittily and with such profound contempt, optimistically expected his hopes regarding bourgeois culture to be realized around 1880. Stendhal's hopes were no mere wistful dreams of a poet unappreciated by his own time; they were pregnant with a definite conception of the evolution of bourgeois society, although of course an illusory conception. In Stendhal's view, in pre-revolutionary times there had been a culture and a section of society able to appreciate and judge cultural products. But after the revolution, the aristocracy goes in eternal fear of another 1793 and has hence lost all its capacity for sound judgment. The new rich, on the other hand, are a mob of self-seeking and ignorant upstarts indifferent to cultural values. Not until 1880 did Stendhal expect bourgeois society to have reached the stage again permitting a revival of culture—a culture conceived in the spirit of enlightenment, as a continuation of the philosophy of enlightenment.

It is a curious result of this strange dialectic of history and of the unequal growth of ideologies, that Balzac—with his confused and often quite reactionary world-view—mirrored the period between 1789 and 1848 much more completely and profoundly than his much more clearthinking and progressive rival. True, Balzac criticized capitalism from the right, from the feudal, romantic viewpoint, and his clairvoyant hatred of the nascent capitalist world order has its source in that viewpoint. But nevertheless this hatred itself becomes the source of such eternal types of capitalist society as Nucingen and Crevel. One need only contrast these characters with old Leuwen, the only capitalist ever portrayed by Stendhal, in order to see how much less profound and comprehensive Stendhal is in this sphere. The figure itself, the embodiment of a superior spirit and superior culture, with an adventurous gift for finance, is a very lifelike transposition of the prerevolutionary traits of the Enlightenment into the world of the July monarchy. But however delicately portrayed and lifelike the figure is, Leuwen is an exception among capitalists and hence greatly inferior to Nucingen as a type.

We can observe the same contrast in the portrayal of the main types of the restoration period. Stendhal hates the restoration and regards it as the era of petty baseness, which has unworthily supplanted the heroic epoch of the revolution and Napoleon. Balzac in contrast, is personally an adherent of the restoration, and although he flays the policy of the nobility, he does so only because he thinks it was not the policy by means of which the nobility could have prevented the July revolution. But matters stand quite otherwise when we turn to the worlds created by the pens of the two great writers. Balzac the writer understands that the restoration is merely a backdrop for the increasing capitalisation of France and that this process of capitalisation is carrying the nobility along with it with irresistible force. So he proceeds to put before us all the grotesque, tragic, comic and tragicomic types engendered by this capitalist development. He shows how the demoralising effect of this process must of necessity involve the whole of society and corrupt it to the core. Balzac the monarchist can find decent and sincere adherents of the ancient regime only among borne and outdated provincials, such as old d'Esgrignon in the Cabinet of Antiques and old Du Guenic in Beatrix. The ruling aristocrats, who keep up with the times, have only smiles for the honourably narrow-minded backwardness of these types. They themselves are concerned only with making the best use of their rank and privileges in order to derive the greatest possible personal advantages from this capitalist development. Balzac the monarchist depicts his beloved nobles as a gang of gifted or ungifted careerists and climbers, emptyheaded nitwits, aristocratic harlots, etc.

Stendhal's restoration novel, Le Rouge et le Noir, exhales a fierce hatred of this period. And yet Balzac has never created so positive a type of romantic monarchist youth as Stendhal's Mathilde de la Mole. Mathilde de la Mole is a sincere convinced monarchist who is passionately devoted to romantic monarchist ideals and who despises her own class because it lacks the devoted and passionate faith which burns in her own soul. She prefers the plebeian Julien Sorel, the passionate Jacobin and Napoleon-admirer, to the men of her own station. In a passage, most characteristic of Stendhal, she explains her enthusiasm for the romantic monarchist ideals.'"The time of League wars was the most heroic period of French history," she said to him (Julien Sorel) one day, her eyes flashing with passion and enthusiasm. "In those days everyone fought for a cause they chose for themselves. They fought to help their own party to win, not just in order to collect decorations, as in the days of your precious Emperor. Admit that there was less self-seeking and pettiness then. I love the cinquecento."' This Mathilde de la Mole counters Julien's enthusiasm for the heroic Napoleonic epoch with a reference to another, in her eyes even more heroic, period of history. The whole story of Mathilde's and Julien's love is painted with the greatest possible authenticity and accuracy. Nevertheless Mathilde de la Mole as a representative of the young aristocrats of the restoration period is by no means as truly typical as is Balzac's Diane de Maufrigneuse.

Here we come back again to the central problem of Balzac's criticism of Stendhal: to the question of characterization and in connection with it to the ultimate principles of composition applied by the two great writers to their novels. Both Balzac and Stendhal chose as central characters that generation of gifted young people on whose thoughts and emotions the storms of the heroic period have left deep traces and who at first felt out of place in the sordid baseness of the restoration world.

The qualification "at first" really applies only to Balzac. For he depicts precisely the catastrophe, the material, moral and intellectual crises in the course of which his young men do finally find their bearings in a French society rapidly evolving towards capitalism and who then conquer or attempt to conquer a place for themselves (Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempre, etc.). Balzac knew perfectly well the price that had to be paid for finding a niche in the society of the restoration period. It is not by accident that the almost superhuman figure of Vautrin appears twice, like another Mephistopheles, to tempt the heroes struggling in a desperate crisis onto the path of "reality," or, in other words, the path of capitalist corruption and unprincipled careerism. Nor is it by accident that Vautrin succeeds in this on both occasions. What Balzac painted here is how the rise of capitalism to the undisputed economic domination of society carries the human and moral degradation and debasement of men into the innermost depths of their hearts.

Stendhal's composition is quite different. As a great realist, he of course sees all the essential phenomena of his time no less clearly than Balzac. It is certainly no accident and probably not due to Balzac's influences that Count Mosca, in his advice to Fabrice, says much the same about the part played by ethics in society as Vautrin does in his advice to Lucien de Rubempre when he compares life with a card game, in which he who wants to play cannot first investigate the rules of the game as to their rightness, their moral and other values. Stendhal saw all this very clearly, sometimes with even greater contempt and cynicism (in the Ricardian sense) than Balzac. And as the great realist that he is, he allows his hero to take part in the game of corruption and careerism, to wade through all the filth of growing capitalism, to learn, and apply, sometimes even skilfully, the rules of the game as expounded by Mosca and Vautrin. But it is interesting to note that none of his principal characters is at heart sullied or corrupted by this participation in the "game." A pure and passionate ardour, an inexorable search for truth preserves from contamination the souls of these men as they wade through the mire, and helps them to shake off the dirt at the end of their career (but still in the prime of their youth), although it is true that by so doing they cease to be participants in the life of their time and withdraw from it in one way or another.

This is the deeply romantic element in the world-view of Stendhal the enlightened atheist and bitter opponent of romanticism. (The term 'romanticism' is of course used here in the widest, least dogmatic sense). It is in the last instance due to Stendhal's refusal to accept the fact that the heroic period of the bourgeoisie was ended and that the 'antediluvian colossi'—to us a Marxian phrase—had perished for ever. Every slightest trace of such heroic trends as he can find in the present (although mostly only in his own heroic, uncompromising soul) he exaggerates into proud reality and contrasts it satirico-elegiacally with the wretched dishonesty of his time.

Thus the Stendhalian conception comes into being; a gallery of heroes who idealistically and romantically exaggerate mere tendencies and dawnings into realities and hence can never attain the social typicality which so superbly permeates The Human Comedy. It would be quite wrong, however, to overlook the great historical typicality of Stendhal's heroes because of this romantic trait. The mourning for the disappearance of the heroic age is present throughout the whole of French romanticism. The romantic cult of passion, the romantic worship of the Renaissance all spring from this grief, from this desperate search for inspiring examples of great passions which could be opposed to the paltry, mercenary present. But the only true fulfiller of this romantic longing is Stendhal himself, precisely because he nevertheless always remained faithful to realism. He translates into reality all that Victor Hugo tried to express in many of his plays and novels. But Victor Hugo gave us only abstract skeletons dressed in the purple mantle of rhetoric, while Stendhal created flesh and blood, the destinies of real men and women. What makes these men and women typical—although regarded superficially they are all extreme individual cases—is that these extreme cases incarnate the deepest longings of the best sons of the post-revolutionary bourgeois class. Stendhal differs sharply from all romanticists in two respects: firstly, in that he is quite aware of the exceptional, extreme character of his personages and renders this very exceptionality with incomparable realism by the aura of loneliness with which he surrounds his heroes; secondly, in that he depicts with admirable realism the inevitable catastrophe of these types, their inevitable defeat in the struggle against the dominating forces of the age, their necessary withdrawal from life or more accurately their necessary rejection by the world of their time.

These characters possess so great a historical typicality that a similar conception of human destinies was put forward in post-revolutionary Europe quite independently by many writers who knew nothing of each other. We find this conception in Schiller's Wallenstein, when Max Piccolomini rides to his death. Hoelderlin's Hyperion and Empedocles abandon life in the same way. Such, too, is the fate of more than one of Byron's heroes. It is therefore not a chase after literary paradoxes, but merely an intellectual expression of the dialectic of class evolution itself, if we here set Stendhal the great realist side by side with such writers as Schiller and Hoelderlin. However profound are the differences between them in all points relating to creative method (the reason for which is the difference in French and German social evolution) the affinity of basic conception is no less profound. The accents of Schiller's elegiac 'such is the fate of beauty upon earth' are echoed in the accents with which Stendhal accompanies his Julien Sorel to the scaffold and his Fabrice del Dongo to the monastery. Finally it must be said that not all these accents were purely romantic, even in Schiller. The affinity of the conception of hero and destiny in all these writers derives from the general affinity of their conception of the evolution of their own class, from a humanism that despairs of the present, from a steadfast adherence to the great ideals of the rising bourgeoisie and from the hope that a time would come when these ideals would be realized after all (Stendhal's hopes of the year 1880).

Stendhal differs from Schiller and Hoelderlin in that his dissatisfaction with the present does not manifest itself in lyrical elegiae forms (like Hoelderlin's) nor limit itself to an abstract-philosophical judgment on the present (like Schiller's) but provides the foundation for his portrayal of the present with a magnificent, profound and sharply satirical realism.

The reason for this is that Stendhal's France had recently experienced revolution and the Napoleonic empire and live revolutionary forces had actually taken the field in opposition to the Restoration, while Schiller and Hoelderlin, living in a Germany as yet socially and economically unchanged, a Germany that had not yet had its bourgeois revolution, could only dream of developments, the real motive forces of which necessarily remained unknown to them. Hence Stendhal's satirical realism, hence the elegiac lyricality of the Germans. What nevertheless lends Stendhal's writings a wonderful depth and richness, is that despite all pessimism in regard to the present he never abandoned his humanist ideals. The hopes Stendhal harboured in conjunction with bourgeois society as it would be in 1880, was a pure illusion, but because it was an historically legitimate, basically progressive illusion, it could become the source of his literary fertility. One should not forget that Stendhal was also a contemporary of Blanqui's risings, by which that heroic revolutionary attempted merely to renew a plebeian-Jacobin dictatorship. But Stendhal did not live to see the distortion of bourgeois Jacobinism into a travesty of itself, the transformation which turned the best revolutionaries from citizens into proletarians. His attitude to the working-class unrest of his time (see Lucien Leuwen) was democratic-revolutionary; he condemned the July monarchy for its ruthless bludgeoning of the workers; but did not and could not see the part the proletariat was to play in the creation of a new society, nor the perspectives opened up by socialism and by a new type of democracy.

As we have already seen, Balzac's illusions, his incorrect conception of social evolution, were of a totally different nature. That is why he does not conjure up, and oppose to the present, the 'antediluvian' monsters of a past heroic age. What he did was to depict the typical characters of his own time, while enlarging them to dimensions so gigantic as in the reality of a capitalist world can never pertain to single human beings, only to social forces.

Because of his attitude to life Balzac is the greater realist of the two and, despite the wider acceptance of romantic elements in his world-view and style, he is in the final count the less romantic too.

In their attitude to the development of bourgeois society in the period between 1789 and 1848, Balzac and Stendhal represent two important extremes in the gamut of possible attitudes. Each of them built a whole world of characters, an extensive and animated reflection of the whole of social evolution, and each of them did so from his own distinct angle. Where their point of contact lies is in their deep understanding and their contempt of the trivial tricks of mere naturalistic realism and of the mere rhetorical treatment of man and destiny. A further point of contact is that they both regard realism as transcending the trivial and average, because for both of them realism is a search for that deeper essence of reality that is hidden under the surface. Where they diverge widely is in their conception of what this essence is. They represent two diametrically opposed, although historically equally legitimate, attitudes towards the stage of human development reached in their time. Hence, in their literary activities—with the one exception of the general problem of the essence of reality—they must of necessity follow diametrically opposite paths.

Thus the profound understanding and appreciation of Stendhal shown by Balzac in spite of all divergencies, is more than a mere piece of fine literary criticism. The meeting of these two great realists is one of the outstanding events of literary history. We might compare it with the meeting of Goethe and Schiller, even though it did not lead to so fruitful a co-operation as that of those two other great men.

J. Lloyd Read

SOURCE: "From the Reform Movement to the Beginning of Realism," in The Mexican Historical Novel, 1826-1910, Instituto de las Espaiias, 1939, pp. 134-252.

[In the following excerpt, Read discusses the trend toward greater realism in the late-nineteenth-century Mexican historical novels of several authors.]

In the late [eighteen] fifties there began a struggle without possibility of compromise between two opposite points of view, the liberal and the reactionary. The heat of that struggle separated the population into two camps, both radical in their attitudes and bent on extermination, each unaware of its own weaknesses. Mexico was a nation seething with hatreds, wherein moderation scarcely existed. In that period every fireside was a forum for fierce outbursts; all eyes were blinded by swirling storms of passion, and all ears were filled with the roar of fanaticisms. But for the first time in Mexican history the issue was clearly defined and understood, and for the first time the liberals had a clear conception of their own program.

It is significant that the outstanding leaders of the liberals were Indians and mestizos, representatives of the majority of the population, and that the reactionaries were creoles forming themselves around the church as a nucleus.

Speaking in general of conditions in Mexico during that period, and in particular of the inefficiency of the republican group, Jesus Agras exclaimed:

iQue es y ha sido Mexico desde el gran dfa de su independencia?… el pueblo más desgraciado de la tierra… Victima sucesivamente o de la ciega tiranfa militar o del desenfreno de la demagogia, ni un solo dia ha disfrutado los goces de una verdadera sociedad … todas y cada uno de los mexicanos… han visto irse destruyendo hasta extinguirse todo aquello que forma el atractivo de la vida social [Reflecciones sobre la naturaleze y origen de los males y trastornos Que han producido la decadencia en Mexico, 1864].

[What is Mexico and what has she been since the great day of her independence? … the most unhappy nation on earth… The victim successively either of blind military tyranny or of the license of demagoguery, not for a single day has she enjoyed the fruits of a true society … every Mexican has seen everything that contributes to the attractiveness of social life destroyed.]

He charged that Mexico was worse than a nomadic society, for in the forests at least people would not be plagued with

… una mentida civilización, los odios, las venganzas, las miserias, laspasiones todas, en fin, de una reunión monstruosa sin leyes eficaces, sin autoridad verdadera, sin obediencia, sin moralidad puTblica y sin amor procomunal.

[…the false civilization, the hatreds, the vengeance, all the passions … of a monstruous hoard without efficacious laws, without true authority, without discipline, without public morality and without public loyalty.]

One of the most damaging bits of testimony concerning society in Mexico in that epoch is the statement of the Empress Charlotte:

Your majesty perhaps believes, as I did, that nothingness is incorporeal; on the contrary, in this country one stumbles upon it at every step, and it is made of granite, it is more powerful than the spirit of man, and God alone can bend i t … one has to struggle against the wilderness, the distances, the roads, and the most utter chaos [Egon Caesar Corti, Maximilian and Charlotte of Mexico, 1929].

Altamirano protested that literary gatherings were of no interest to people, the theatres were unattended, except by the few who had no other way to escape from the sight of the poverty, degradation, filth, and prosaic barbarism of the human ant-hill. The capital he thought melancholy, anemic, with the squalor, nakedness, indolence, starvation and abysmal depravity of the proletariat overbalancing the attractions of El Zócalo and Plateros Avenue. The social functions of the higher class were stagnant. There was neither initiative nor variety, even among the leaders of society who held their roles by divine right rather than by merit. There were no critics, only eulogizers.

Such conditions could not stimulate or even support literary production. Juan Díaz Covarrubias, aware of the futility of writing for such a public in such stressful times, wrote to Luis G. Ortiz:

Tal vez habró muchos que digan que sólo un nitio o un loco es el que piensa escribir en Mexico en esta epoca aciaga de desmoronamiento social, y pretende ser lefido a la luz rojiza del incendio y al estruendo de los canones.

[There will perhaps be those who will say that nobody but a child or a crazy man would think of writing in Mexico in this unfortunate period of social disintegration, and hope to be read by the red glow of incendiarism and to the accompaniment of roaring canons.]

Though, as previously stated, education in Mexico was in general still ineffective at the time of the Reform movement, in fact was to continue so to be throughout the century, there had developed a group of thinkers and teachers whose love for liberalism amounted to religious ardor. This group, beginning with Ignacio Ramírez, the intellectual whip of his generation, and including such men as Ignacio Manuel Altamirano and Justo Sierra, did more to renovate Mexican society and literature than all other educational agencies combined; in fact they constituted the only progressive factor in education.

Ramírez, widely known by his pseudonym El Nigromante, while still a student showed his rebellious and independent temperament by defending the thesis "There is no God; all animate nature is self-sustaining." That heretical pronouncement was not the prattle of an undisciplined student; it was a declaration of war against practically all traditionally consecrate attitudes on the part of one of the sharpest intellects Mexico has produced. As an orator, as a journalist, and as a teacher, Ramírez became the implacable destroyer of everything associated with the old regime. He became the guiding spirit of a group of young intellectuals into whose minds he planted ideas that constituted the basis of the reform movement.

As the mentor of liberalism Ignacio Ramírez represented the tardy application of a true cosmopolitanism to the social problems of Mexico. Though his attitudes were stimulated largely by extensive reading of foreign literatures, they were not the uncritical products of that reading. That he had only disdain for the superficial liberalism that manifested itself in the repetition of catch phrases taken from superficial foreign thinkers is shown by such statements as the following:

Devoramos en las ciencias a los vulgarizadores enciclopedicos, sin notar que no son extensos en sus tratados, sino porque son superficiales.

[We devour in the sciences the works of encyclopedic quacks, without noticing that they are not extensive in their treatises, but because they are superficial.]

He was unerring in his diagnosis of Mexico's intellectual ills as results of ignorance and undigested erudition.

The ideals of Ramírez and of his disciples systematized the movement for reform and culminated in the Constitution of 1857 and the Reform Laws, the two most important achievements of Mexican history in that they laid bare the basic ills of the nation and pointed out the road to progress.

With Benito Juárez, the exponent of the political ideals of this group, we have little to do here; but of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, the literary preceptor of his generation, we must take account at the proper time, for it was he that indoctrinated Mexican writers in literary nationalism and became teacher and personal adviser to a whole generation of amateur novelists and poets.

ELIGIO ANCONA

Eligio Ancona was born in Merida, Yucatan, in 1836. He studied law at the Universidad Literaria del Estado. Like many other literary figures of Mexico, he was prominent in political affairs, serving as governor pro tem. of his native state, judge in a circuit court, judge of the Supreme Court of Mexico, and as deputy to the national congress. As a journalist he used the columns of La Pildora and Yucatdn in defense of the liberal cause against the regime instituted by the imperialists. He was recognized by the learned societies of his time as one of Mexico's important erudites. His contribution to the history of Yucatan is largely contained in his Historia de Yucatdn.

Acona wrote six novels, of which five are historical: La cruzy la espada and Elfilibustero, 1866; Los martires del Andhuac, 1870; El Conde de Penialva, 1879; and Memorias de un alférez, published in 1904, eleven years after the author's death. All of these historical novels have two volumes each except El Conde de Pe, ialva.

Elfilibustero is the story of Leonel, an orphan left in infancy on the doorstep of D. Gonzalo Villagómez, a rich encomendero of Valladolid. D. Gonzalo and his wife, dofia Blanca, loved the child as if he were their own until the birth of a daughter, Berenguela, four years later; then they grew strangely cold toward him.

Leonel learned rapidly under the instruction of Father Hernando of the Franciscan convent of Sisal and became the self-appointed tutor to Berenguela. The two fell in love; but their plans to marry met the determined opposition of D. Gonzalo and his wife, who had arranged Berenguela's marriage to a nobleman. Leonel challenged his rival to a duel, but instead of fighting him attempted to save him from a mob. In the confusion the fiancé of Berenguela was killed and Leonel was wounded.

Intent on keeping the two lovers separated, dofia Blanca and Father Hernando had Leonel thrown into prison. When the latter was released he learned that Berenguela had married. He left home and became a pirate, assuming the name Barbillas.

In one of his raids the pirate Barbillas and his men captured the Captain General of the provine of Yucatan and several political dignitaries traveling in his company, among whom was the husband of Berenguela. Later, when Berenguela was free from her husband, Leonel wanted to marry her. Father Hernando, his old teacher, imprisoned the girl in a convent; but in the face of the threat of Leonel to take her by force the friar revealed to him that his lover was in reality his half sister, for Leonel was the son of Father Hernando and dofia Blanca.

Leonel in desperation visited a man unjustly condemned by the Inquisition to prison for the remainder of his life, exchanged clothes with him and permitted him to escape, taking thus on himself the sentence he allowed the other to avoid.

The story is somewhat emotional in tone. In one case it was said of Leonel:

El se llevaria aquel caddver que nadie habia visto, escogeria un rincón ignorado del mundo para sepultarlo, construiria junto a la tumba una cabauia, y alli allado de Berenguela…conversando diariamente con ella, esperaria tranquilo y feliz elfin de sus dias.

[He would carry away that corpse which nobody had seen; he would choose an unknown corner of the world in which to bury it; he would build a cabin close to the tomb, and there at Berenguela's side… talking to her every day, he would await serene and happy the end of his days.]

Other traces of romantic subjectivism are apparent in the violence of reactions, in extraordinary situations, in the mystery surrounding the origin of the chief character, in the interest in the distant past, in the resort to piracy, and in the manipulation of plot for the sake of effect. Berenguela is like the typical romantic heroine, beautiful, helpless, and self-effacing; Leonel is the perfect lover driven by desperation to piracy.

There is in this work a tendency to give free reign to fancy in the manner of dealing with historical facts. Historical accuracy was wisely rejected as a criterion by the author. His aim was creation within a very loose framework of historical trends. Characters such as he presented in this work never existed except in his fancy, but they had real existence there.

The author, furthermore, capitalized his personal reactions to the institutions of the colonial regime to add effectiveness to his interpretation. Those institutions and their personnel furnished the element of difficulty or dramatic conflict in the story. Justice and virtue are augmented in attractiveness by such descriptions of their opposites as the following:

Al valiente conquistador… ha sucedido el indolente encomendero que … sólo cuida de explotar al miserable indigena.

Al celoso misionero … ha sucedido el fraile o el cura convertido en publicano, que gasta la mayor parte de su tiempo en inspeccionar el cobro de sus rentas.

A los grandes aventureros … han sucedido los gobernadores y capitanes generales, que con muy honrosas excepciones sólo se dedican a sacar de su posición toda la utilidad posible.

[The valiant conquistador has been succeeded by the indolent landholder whose only interest is the exploitation of the natives.

The zealous missionary has been supplanted by the friar and the priest turned publican, who spends most of his time overseeing the collection of dues.

The great adventurers have been followed by governors and captains general, who, with honorable exceptions, dedicate themselves to wresting from their positions all the gains they can.]

There is something of pathos in his description of his own native state of Yucatan as one of the most unhappy places of Spanish America, partly because of its subjection to repeated attacks of pirates who established their base at Belice.

The author injected something of the holy zeal of a crusader into his attacks on the Inquisition and on ecclesiastical organizations in general. These were developed in the role of opposition to the realization of the legitimate aspiration of the chief characters. Without concerning ourselves with the accuracy of his characterization, the reader can accept the depiction for artistic purposes. Whether fair or not, Ancona's satire and ridicule are part of the effectiveness of the story. Especially indicative of his use of these literary tools is his treatment of the customs of honoring saints with bull fights, and of trying men before the Inquisition on charges of being Mohammedans because they never drank wine, and on charges of being Jews because they bathed themselves and changed clothes on Saturday. The latter charge was brought against the innocent Cifuentes by a priest's niece, with the result that Cifuentes was found guilty and sent to prison. Ancona related with convincing indignation that the goods of heretics were accursed, that their possessions would corrupt any Christian except the inquisitors themselves. He included in this story a rather vivid description of the Inquisition's instruments of torture and the use to which they were put.

An interesting manifestation of Ancona's zeal to find virtue and value in unsanctified places and to uncover conventionalized abuses among official spokesmen of authoritative bodies is seen in the statement he put into the mouth of a pirate:

… esa sociedad perversa en donde el hermano vende al hermano, en donde el que debe proteger os sacrifica a sus infames pasiones, en donde las más dulces y las más santas afecciones ceden a la insaciable codicia del oro o al vil influjo del poder.

[… that perverse society in which brother sells brother, in which the one whose duty it is to protect sacrifices you to his vile passions, in which the sweetest and most saintly affections give way to insatiable greed for gold or to the evil influence of power.]

In the formation of his interest it was natural that Ancona feel the influence of his famous fellow-townsman, Justo Sierra. Not only did Ancona absorb much of Sierra's interest in the history of Yucatan, but he was the first Mexican novelist to follow the lead offered in Un ano en el Hospital de San Ldzaro by writing a novel based on the pirates that infested the coast of Yucatan. So strongly was he impressed with Sierra's use of colonial history as a field for the novel that three of his stories deal with the same generation as La hija deljudio. Leaving out Payno's El hombre de la situación, Ancona's El filibustero is the first full length novel after Sierra to deal with the pre-independence period; and, counting Jicotencal as a Mexican novel, it is the third Mexican novel to deal with that epoch.

Ancona owed more than general fields of interest to Sierra; he was indebted to his predecessor for his zeal for liberal institutions and his antagonistic attitude toward the old regime. The Inquisition assumes in Ancona's work much the same aspect and role as in La hija deljudio. The same is true of other institutions and of conditions in general in the province of Yucatan. But Ancona is more subjective than Sierra; his attacks against the colonial regime are more direct. His portrayals are interesting; indeed El filibustero is of interest even to the reader of today.

In the same year that El filibustero was published there appeared another historical novel of Ancona under the title La cruzy la espada, in two volumes of 296 and 312 pages respectively.

Four years later, in 1870, he published his Los mártires del Andhuac in two volumes of 326 and 322 pages respectively. Since writing El filibustero, Ancona had acquired a more definite conception of the technique and material of the historical novel. In Los mártires del Andhuac the progression of the story is more logical, the plan is clear and is more carefully followed, and there is less to offend one's sense of reality. Out of the mass of details connected with the conquest of Mexico Ancona chose a few and developed them in such a manner as to leave a clear impression of the significant aspects of the struggle.

Because Ancona emphasized the importance of Cortes' strategy in utilizing the dissidence existing among the Amerinds rather than attributing the success of the invader to superhuman bravery and prowess, the novel has more verisimilitude than the accounts of some of the professional chroniclers of the conquest. It gains in plausibility by attributing much of the success of Cortes to the internal disintegrating forces that had destroyed the solidarity of the Aztec empire before the coming of the Spaniards. Cortes' genius stands out more clearly in the dextrous manipulation of local forces than in superhuman military exploits.

His success was made more natural by the fact that the superstitious Amerinds, bewildered by the horses and cannons of the invaders, and restrained for some time by the belief that Cortes was the returned spirit of Netzahualcoyotl, delayed their resistance long enough to permit the invader to win for himself the support of some influential local leaders.

So natural and inevitable does the course of events seem that the reader is almost prepared to agree with the Aztec priests that the gods had decreed the destruction of Anahuac; and that the strange beared invaders were merely catalytic agents, intrinsically insignificant, furnishing only the impetus for the long and tragic processes of reduction. Ancona utilized this situation in creating a dramatic sense of impending doom, with the bearded captain playing constantly the role of villain and hero. The entire work has a good balance of dramatized history and novelistic elements.

In no other Mexican historical novel is the reader made to sympathize with both the contending forces so much as in this one. The daring band of Spaniards, led by a brave adventurer into the territory of a people capable of crushing them with an army of a quarter of a million men, excites admiration; and the intrepidity shown in the burning of their only means of escape is a true epic not surpassed by the exploits of all the imaginary knights of literature. Yet sympathy of Cortes is tempered by a like feeling for the Amerinds, superstitious, defeated by themselves and threatened with the most humiliating fate ever experienced by a people. Their grief for Anahuac is like the lament of the Jews over the fall of Jerusalem: "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept," and like the song of the Babylonians: "Babylon is fallen, is fallen to rise no more." The reader is made to regret that the proud race was to be swept into the ignominy of practical slavery and spiritual annihilation.

But not all is admiration and sympathy. The Amerinds are despicable at times for their weakness and cowardice, and Cortes changes his role from that of hero to that of cruel and treacherous schemer, then back to that of hero. He is at once a genius of unsurpassed bravery and a monster of inhumanity, admired and hated by the reader.

There are a few contradictions in the story; for example, in relating the story of Tizoc's father the author has the Aztecs furnish beautiful maidens for the enjoyment of the sacrificial victim during the period of preparation for the sacrifice. This fornication is sanctioned by the priests and by the people; but later, sex irregularity is branded as the most heinous crime in the eyes of the Aztecs and their gods, punishable by crushing the heads of the guilty parties. Gelitzli, the daughter of Montezuma, whom Cortes violated after giving her a powerful drug, was cursed forever by the gods; and although she was not a willing party to the act, the people determined to sacrifice her.

The chronology is not always accurate. But the discrepancies the work contains are few and not serious, for Ancona was quite familiar with the general facts of the conquest and subsequent domination. In this story the author has aided popular appreciation of the basic social forces involved, and what is more important, has used the historical background as materials for an interesting bit of literary creation.

By pointing out the fact that the introduction of Christianity into Mexico was aided greatly by the similarity between the religion of the Amerinds and Christianity, Ancona creates a feeling of the basic similarities of human aspirations of all races, however widely dispersed. Some of the factors of each are pathetic, some are admirable; but in essence they are all human and therefore similar. Both emphasized the device of pleasing God by the infliction of suffering on human beings, especially on those considered to be enemies or heretics. In both religions that sacrifice at times went to the extreme of taking human life. The author does not descend to the plane of polemics by attempting to show the fallacies of one and the credibility of the other; he uses both to build his situations as his purposes demand.

Missing entirely the beauty of symbolism of Christian ceremonies, the aborigines had no difficulty in substituting the statues of saints for their idols and the various members of the Holy Family for their deities. Santiago, the patron saint of warriors, fitted into the place of Huitzilopochtli; San Isidro, the patron of harvests, was easily confused with Matlacueye and Centectl. Even the idea of the Trinity caused the Amerinds no trouble, its acceptance being a matter of changing names.

The system of encomiendas and repartimientos is described as a device conceived for the protection of the natives but one that resulted in their practical enslavement. It was a Don Quijote who had left the shepherd lad in the hands of Juan Haldudo for protection.

The style of Los mártires del Andhuac is not attractive; it is common-place, distinctly inferior to that of the better Spanish novelists and to that of Altamirano. Indeed its lack of variety and sparkle would render a less interesting plot quite boresome.

Several of the characters are well drawn and convincing; especially is this true of Cortes and Moteuczoma. The Spanish soldiers, fired by zeal for adventure and gold, the Amerinds, astonished and bewildered, both European and native made cautious by superstition, all are interesting as literary characters.

Concha Meléndez calls attention [in El libro y el pueblo, 1932, Vol. X, No. 5] to the fact that Los mártires del Andhuac is the first Mexican novel based on the conquest, but acceptance of her statement must be deferred until the authorship of Jicotencal is definitely established. The latter work, however, was probably unknown to Mexican authors of the latter half of the century. The Cuban, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Guatimozin (Madrid, 1846 and Mexico, 1853 and 1857) had acquired considerable popularity, however, and was still widely read at the time when Ancona was writing Los mártires del Andhuac.

Las memorias de un alférez, published in Merida in 1904, is a historical novel dealing with the attempts of a minor official of the Spanish army stationed in Yucatan to solve the mystery of the murder of the Captain-General of the colony. His activities brought him into conflict with the family of the girl he loved.

The plot is weakened by useless manipulations, v. gr., in one instance the protagonist was captured in a forest, bound, gagged, blindfolded and searched by a group of assassins who then disappeared, leaving him alone. Later they returned, searched him again, carried him a little farther into the woods and left him. The work abounds in unusual actions and situations. It is not entirely plausible that the protagonist should fall casually in love with a woman connected with those who were scheming to kill him, nor that without knowing her name, station or family he should call her "the one whom I loved most in all the world" twenty-four hours after seeing her for the first time. Neither is it natural that a letter found in the drawer of an old desk should be torn by chance in all the places that contained names and other data that could clear up a murder mystery. The reader cannot be expected to believe that a total stranger should be sufficiently interested in a local murder scandal to become terror-stricken, have his heart action impeded and his hair raised on his head by reading a letter written by the murderers, who probably would never have written such an incriminating document in the first place. And surely no sane man would be so indiscreet in the face of threats of death from a secret enemy as the protagonist was.

The work does contain, however, some interesting recreation of the epoch involved. Attention is called to the scarcity of books in the province as the result of censorship and import restrictions. The author compares the forces of justice to degenerate Roman nobles equipped with shields and steel swords fighting blindfolded slaves armed with wooden weapons.

Occasional statements reveal the author's tendency to seek the cause for attitudes and actions, for example:

.. . pero es tan hermoso desempeiiar el papel de redentor.

[… but it is so thrilling to assume the role of redeemer.]

… ese egoismo de la naturaleza humana que tiende a buscar en otras personas el origen de las desgracias que acaso nos acarreamos con nuestra propia imprudencia.

[… that egoism of human nature which tends to seek in others the origin of the misfortunes which we perhaps bring on ourselves by our own imprudence.]

… El valor en el hombre se halla en razón directa de la salud que disfruta.

[ … Courage exists in a man in direct ratio with the health that he enjoys.]

Ancona incorporated into this work a few paragraphs on the primitive state of man and the delights of freedom in the wilds of nature that sound much like Rousseau's writing.

La cruzy la espada, 1866, a story of the love of Alonso de Benavides and Donia Beatriz, into which Zuhuy-Kak, the daughter of an Amerind king is injected, contains practically all of the abuses of the early historical novels of Spain and France. Benavides wounded his lover's father while trying to elope with her. After the young man fled to America, Doina Beatriz followed him disguised as a man. She appeared in time to save him from the Amerinds, who were in the act of sacrificing him on a stone altar. ZuhuyKak had fallen in love with Benavides; but she was killed by an Amerind woman in order to prevent her marriage to a Spaniard. Benavides' troubles were removed when he learned that Beatriz' father was not her father at all and had desisted from his attempts to keep the two lovers apart.

There are evidences of poor imitation of Cooper and of Chateaubriand, and an abundance of illogical imagination. Even the life of the Amerinds, which might have saved the work from complete oblivion if it had been well portrayed, has no appeal, even in fancy. It, along with the plot, lacks the semblance of reality that is necessary even in a fantastic work.

El Conde de Pehialva is an historical novel published in 1879; but it is not available for study. Though La mestiza, 1891, is not historical, its emphasis on the conflict between the whites on one hand and the Amerinds and mestizos on the other is in keeping with Ancona's preoccupation with the indigenous racial spirit.

IGNACIO MANUEL ALTAMIRANO

Ignacio Manuel Altamirano was born in Tixtla, in what is now the state of Guerrero, December 12, 1834. His family, of pure Indian stock, was given a Spanish name by the Spaniard who baptized them. The poverty common to Indians of Mexico was no stranger to Altamirano. González Obregón remarked that the boy lived to the age of fourteen like all Indian boys, ignorant, speaking only the tribal dialect of his people, untamed and occupied only with hunting and childish combats.

Ignacio Manuel's father was elected alcalde of the little village. This distinction aroused in the local schoolmaster an interest in the boy's education. Then Manuel started on his remarkable career as a student.

By virtue of his excellence, demonstrated in competitive examinations, he won a scholarship that intitled him to free instruction in the Instituto Literario de Toluca. In 1849 he took up the study of Spanish, Latin, French and philosophy in that school. His abilities engenered respect for him among his teachers and fellows to such an extent that he was made librarian of the school.

González Obregón considers the contact with books given him by his duties as librarian one of the most important influences of his career, for "there it was that he fed his soul on knowledge and erudition."

The sharp-witted scourge of authoritarianism and obscurantism in Mexico, Ignacio Ramírez, noticing this young Indian seated often outside the door of his classroom listening to his lectures, invited him in. The fiery liberalism of the teacher was the orienting force in the early attitude of the student.

Later Altamirano was given board and room at a private college in Toluca for his services as teacher of a class in French. But he was poor and impatient. He became a wanderer, trying his hand at teaching and even at production of a mediocre dramatic work, Morelos en Cuauhtla, which he had composed.

He entered the Colegio de San Juan Letrán, but his work was interrupted in 1854 by participation in the revolution. Though he was a good soldier, he realized that he was more of a student than a military man and soon resumed his study of law with the ambition of reforming the legal codes and the political machine. But even this was not enough to occupy all his attention. He became the leader of a group of young journalists interested in general social reform and in the improvement of literature. His private room became "the editorial office of a newspaper, a reformist club and a literary center which grew with the attendance of numerous students and partisans of the revolution."

His role as teacher of Latin brought him a close acquaintance with classical literature from which emanated much of his grace and good taste.

When the Congress met in 1861, after the War of Reform had stirred anew the political passions of the nation, Altamirano went to that body as a deputy. When the amnesty bill came up for discussion, Altamirano, who had already acquired fame as an orator, asked for recognition on the floor. The effect of his speech is known to most school children of Mexico today. As an example of oral eloquence it has no superior in Mexican literature.

After the triumph of the liberals under the leadership of Benito Juárez, Altamirano, Ignacio Ramírez and Guillermo Prieto founded El Correo de México. (González Obregón is authority for the statement that Altamirano had already founded El Eco de la Reforma and La Voz del Pueblo in the state of Guerrero.) He and Manuel Payno established El Federalista, La Tribuna and La República, the directorship of which he gave up in 1881.

In 1869 Altamirano founded El Renacimiento, a weekly literary magazine of considerable influence in the development of literary trends of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Altamirano was editor of El Siglo xix, El Monitor Republicano and La Libertad. He contributed generously to El Domingo, El Artista, El Semanario Ilustrado, El Federalista, El Liceo Mexicano and many provincial and foreign magazines.

But Altamirano's activities did not stop here. He was the center of several literary societies. He revived the defunct Liceo Hidalgo, was Secretary and Vice-President of La Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, founded the Sociedad Gorostiza composed of dramatic authors, was President of Escritores Públicos and of the Sociedad Netzahualcoyotl. He was a member of many foreign scientific and literary societies.

In political circles Altamirano was prominent, serving at various times as Fiscal de la Suprema Corte de Justicia, Procurador General de la Nación, Oficial Mayor de la Secretaría de Fomento and deputy to the National Congress.

In the field of education he was Professor of Administrative Law in the National School of Commerce, Professor of General and Mexican History in the School of Jurisprudence and Professor of Philosophy in the last named institution. In the latter part of his life his chief interest was education.

Leer y enseñar, y conversar sin descanso: tales fueron sus últimos afanes; los libros y lajuventud, sus fieles amigos y sus hijos predilectos.

[To read and to teach, and to converse without ceasing; such were his greatest desires; books and youth, his faithful friends and his favorite sons.]

In 1889 Altamirano was appointed Mexican Consul General in Spain. Later he held the same post in France, having exchanged places with Manuel Payno because of his poor health. He died in San Remo February 13, 1893.

López Portillo y Rojas pronounced Altamirano's Clemencia the best Mexican novel of its time. It was written after the author's return from the military campaign described in the work, a campaign in which he himself had taken part. It is an expansion of a story Altamirano told one night to a group of ladies who later insisted that he put it in novel form. The first chapter appeared in El Renacimiento in 1869 as a part of Cuentos de invierno, and the remainder followed in the same magazine in serial form. In the same year Díaz de León y Santiago White printed a very attractive second edition with good photographs by Cruces y Campa and with several excellent drawings. The popularity of the second edition was so great that it was sold in a few days. Clemencia was later reproduced in serial form by the Grand Journal de Pérou, a French-Spanish newspaper of Lima. The fourth edition was printed by Mr. Armas, director of a New York illustrated newspaper called El Ateneo, in the first volume of his paper. The fifth edition is that which appeared with Las tres flores, Julia, and La navidad en las montañas in a collection called Cuentos de invierno, printed by F. Mata in Mexico in 1880. Another edition appeared in Mexico and in Paris, no date, and still another in Valencia, no date.

The setting of the story is the region around Guadalajara in December, 1863, the year of the French occupation of Mexico. The historical material serves only as a frame for the actions of two officers in the army of the republic, one handsome and with an unusual appeal for women, talented and cultured, but at heart a coward and traitor; the other unattractive, but diligent, loyal and decent. A conflict developed over the affections of a beautiful woman, with a none too pleasant result.

The characterization of the four chief personages is well done, but the most attractive features of the work are the depiction of natural scenery and the pleasing style. There is a tone of genuine artistic dignity that contrasts sharply with the perorative style of most Mexican authors of the times. The fact that occasional excesses of inflated language creep in does not destroy the general impression of artistic discretion and sincerity. It is not too much to say that this novel and others of Altamirano incorporate the best aesthetic judgment and balance to be found in the Mexican novel up to the dates of their respective compositions.

In his narrative the author knew only one vein, that of constantly serious narration in which everything conforms to the sweet sadness of his temperament. At times the effect could be heightened if he had shed his seriousness long enough to relieve the strain.

He could not escape a constant preoccupation with the sense of tragedy of human life, the melancholy that was a part of his racial heritage and that made romanticism so attractive to him and his compatriots.

Altamirano's genius was too short of flight to create fulllength novels, and he lacked the organizing ability necessary to present his excellent material in impressive plots. As a result, his works are little more than short stories. But his poetic genius gave a magic touch of life to nature and laid bare the beauties of the realm beyond superficial facts of the world and human nature. It is on this penetration into the soul of things that his fame is based. His was no surface world, but one of beauty hidden from the eyes of the unworthy; and he succeeded in painting that world with beauty and grace.

Altamirano's influence in the novel was primarily that of a preceptor who illustrated his teachings with short models. His stories were too few and too scant of plot to serve as complete novels; but his teachings gave encouragement and orientation to an inexperienced generation of writers, many of whom, however, needed much more than advice.

Altamirano sensed the increase of interest in literature that followed the fall of the empire of Maximilian and attempted to turn that interest into national channels. In the press, with which he was closely connected throughout his long career, in the classroom, from the lecture platform and in gatherings of literary men he preached consistently that Mexican authors should apply the best technique of universal art to Mexican life with the interpretation of the soul of their country as an ideal. Something of his spirit of patriotism may be seen in the following statements quoted from one of his critical essays:

¿Acaso en nuestra patria no hay un campo vastisimo de que puede sacar provecho el novelista… ?

¡Ohi si algo es rico en elementos para el literato, es este país, del mismo modo que lo es para el minero, para el agricultor y para el industrial.

La historia antigua de México es una mina inagotable… Los tres siglos de la dominacion españiola son un manantial de leyendas poéticas y magníficas …

Nuestras guerras de independencia son fecundas en grandes hechosy en terribles dramas. Nuestras guerras civiles son ricas de episodios, y notables por sus resultados …

Nuestra era republicana se presenta a los ojos del observador interesantísima …

¿Yel último imperio? ¿Pues se quiere además de las guerras de nuestra independencia un asunto mejor para la epopeya?… Este pueblo mísero y despreciado, levantándose poderoso y enérgico, sin auxilio, sin dirección y sin elementos, despedazando el trono para levantar con sus restos un cadalso…

[Is there not perchance, in our country a vast field from which the novelist can profitably draw materials?

Oh! if anything is rich in material for the writer, it is this country, just as for the miner, for the farmer and for the industrialist.

The ancient history of Mexico is an inexhaustible mine … The three centuries of Spanish rule are a veritable spring of poetic and magnificent legends.

Our wars of independence abound in great deeds and terrible dramas. Our civil wars are rich in episodes and notable for their results.

Our republican era is exceedingly interesting to the observer.

And the last empire? Does one wish in addition to the wars of our independence a better subject for epic literature? This people, miserable and despised, arousing itself, powerful and energetic, without help, without direction and without equipment, destroying the throne to raise from its debris a scaffold … ]

But not only in Mexican history did Altamirano see a field rich in material for the writer; in the country's natural scenery and in its picturesque human types he saw an inexhaustible field that had scarcely been touched. He deplored the fact that since the days of Fernandez de Lizardi and Manuel Payno Mexican writers had neglected this richest of all sources of inspiration. He called attention to the progress that had been made in other important Spanish American countries, where writers

Cantan su América del Sur, su hermosa virgen, morena, de ojos de gacela y de cabellera salvaje. No hacen de ella ni una dama española de mantilla, ni una entretenue francesa envuelta en encajes de Flandes.

Esos poetas cantan sus Andes, su Plata, su Magdalena, su Apurimac, sus pampas, sus gauchos, sus pichireyes; trasportan a uno bajo la sombra del ombú, o alpie de las ruinas de sus templos del So, o al borde de sus pavorosos abismos o al fondo de sus bosques inmensos,… 1e hacen.. escuchar el rugido de sus fieras terribles … y meditar a orillas de sus mares.…

[They sing their South America, their beautiful virgin, dark with gazelle-like eyes and luxuriant hair. They make of her neither a Spanish lady with a mantilla nor a French entretenue wrapped in Flemish lace.

Those poets sing their Andes, their River Platte, their Magdalena, their Apurimac, their pampas, their gauchos, their pichireyes; they transport one to the shade of the ombú tree, or to the foot of the ruins of the temple of the sun god, or to the brink of their awe-inspiring abysses or to the depths of their immense forests, or they make him hear the roar of terrible wild beasts and meditate on the shore of their seas.]

As is to be expected, Altamirano saw as the chief obstacle to the proper development of this national material the habit of imitating slavishly the European models with which Mexico was flooded. He did not go to the extreme of advocating lack of attention to foreign literature; indeed he insisted that the literature of the older civilizations must be taken as a guide in the acquisition of good taste.

No negamos la gran utilidad de estudiar todas las escuelas literarias del mundo civilizado; seriamos incapaces de este desatino, nosotros que adoramos los recuerdos clásicos… No: al contrario, creemos que estos estudios son indispensables pero deseamos que se cree una literatura absolutamente nuestra, como todos los pueblos tienen, los cuales también estudian los monumentos de los otros, pero nofundan su orgullo en imitarlos servilmente.

[We do not deny the great profit of studying all literary schools of the civilized world; we would be incapable of such folly, we who adore the memory of the classics… No; on the contrary, we believe that these studies are indispensable; but we wish for the creation of a literature entirely ours, like all peoples have, each of which also studies the literary monuments of the others, but does not base its pride on servile imitation of them.]

He expressed profound respect for such masters of the novel as Walter Scott, Cooper, Richardson, Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, and Dumas, and considered the study of their works essential to any novelist.

But he contended that foreign works were valuable to Mexican writers only for instruction in the general procedure and technique of composition, and not as sources whose materials were to be imitated. The author's attitude in this regard is best expressed in his own words:

En cuanto a la novela nacional, a la novela mexicana, con su color americano propio, nacerd bella, interesante, maravillosa. Mientras que nos limitemos a imitar la novela francesa, cuya forma es inadaptable a nuestras costumbres y a nuestro modo de ser, no haremos sino pdlidas y mezquinas imitaciones, así como no hemos producido más que cantos debiles imitando a los trovadores españoles y a los poetas ingleses y a los franceses…

Nosotros todavia tenemos mucho apego a esa literatura hermafrodita que se ha formado de la mezcla monstruosa de las escuelas espafiola y francesa en que hemos aprendido, y que sólo serd bastante a expulsary a extinguir lapoderosa e invencible sdtira de Ramírez, que el si es tan original y tan consumado como habró pocos en el nuevo continente.

[As for the national novel, the Mexican novel, with its distinctively American color, it will be born beautiful, interesting, marvelous. As long as we limit ourselves to the imitation of the French novel, whose form is inadaptable to our customs and to our spirit, we shall produce only pale and mediocre imitations, just as we have produced only weak poetry while imitating Spanish, English and French poets …

We still have much fondness for that hermaphrodite literature which is made up of a monstruous mixture of the Spanish and French schools in which we have learned, and which can be expelled and extinguished only by the powerful and invincible satire of Ramírez, who is indeed as original and as nearly perfect as few others in the New World.]

Altamirano called attention to the recent tendency toward expansion of the novel to such a degree that it had become a medium for the presentation of historical facts, intellectual and moral viewpoints, philosophical positions, and social, political, and religious propaganda. It had come to be "the best vehicle of propaganda."

Reasoning from his major premise that morality is the most desirable characteristic of any people, and from his contention that the novel was the school of the people, he camne to the conclusion that the chief duty of the novelist is to guide the masses in the formation of virtuous and wholesome attitudes. Hence, the novelist was to concern himself with teaching patriotism, chastity, industry, honesty, and order. In this connection he cited the success that had attended the church's policy of indoctrinating the public by an educational program adapted to the end it sought, and advocated the pursuit of the same policy by the novelist.

Granted the wisdom of the procedure of the church in religious instruction and the fact that art does have a moral mission to perform, such advice given to unseasoned writers of a nation without literary orientation and experience had some unfortunate results, as will appear in the examination of many subsequent works whose authors were dominated by the desire to indoctrinate their fellow countrymen. It was easy for writers of an immature society to substitute superficial conventionalities for the deep moral principles Altamirano had in mind. By morality he meant what Plato meant when he used the word; but unfortunately, not all of his followers had the philosophical background necessary for a complete understanding of its true nature.

But in spite of his views concerning the duty of the novelist to indoctrinate, he persisted in his demand for impartiality and careful study of facts.

En las novelas de costumbres se necesita tan grande dosis de fina observación y de exactitud, como para las novelas históricas se necesitan instrucción y criterio. De otro modo sólo seproducirdn monstruosidades ridiculas … [La critica literaria en Mexico, 19071.

[In the novels of customs one needs a wealth of fine observation and accuracy and for historical novels, knowledge and sound criteria are indispensable. Otherwise there will be produced only ridiculous monstrosities …]

Statements concerning Altamirano's contribution to Mexican literature as critic and guide of his own and the following generations abound in the works of historians of Mexican literature. Morena Cora wrote concerning him:

Altamirano más que ningun otro escritor ejerció grande influencia en lajuventud estudiosa de su patria.

[Altamirano more than any other writer exercised great influence on the studious youth of his country.]

Jimenez Rueda wrote:

Poeta, novelista, maestro, ejerció en su tiempo una influencia decisiva en la marcha de los acontecimientos [Historia de la literatura mexicana, 1928].

[Poet, novelist, teacher, in his time he had a decisive influence on the march of events.]

González Penia is not less enthusiastic in his praise:

Altamirano es el más grande escritor de su tiempo.

[Altamirano is the greatest writer of his time.]

… realiza una de las más extraordinarias carreras que la historia de nuestras letras registra; es el maestro de dos generaciones; trabaja activamente en la prensa; da el tono en la critica literaria; estimula y alienta a los que comienzan…

[… he made for himself one of the most extraordinary careers that the history of our literature records; he is the teacher of two generations; he works actively in the press; he gives guidance in literary criticism; he stimulates and encourages those who are beginning … ]

An examination of his literary prose, poetry and critical articles and a study of his activities in originating and directing literary societies composed of writers justify the statements quoted. But as a critic Altamirano's kind, fatherly feeling led him to praise some young writers to their hurt. His desire to encourage kept him from being as severe as his role demanded. In discussing Florencio del Castillo's work, for instance, he called the young writer:

… un escritor distinguido que fue honra de las bellas letras mexicanas…

[… a distinguished writer who was the honor of Mexican belles lettres… ]

Such empty phrase-making indicates that Altamirano was too prone to let his kindness soften his criticism.

Madeleine de Gogorza Fletcher

SOURCE: "The Episodio Nacional: An Approach to the Genre," in The Spanish Historical Novel 1870-1970, Tamesis Books Limited, 1973, pp. 1-10.

[In the following excerpt, de Gogorza Fletcher differentiates between two kinds of historical fiction in Spanish literature—the episodio nacional and the traditional historical novel.]

Spanish literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has developed a new genre, the episodio nacional, or the historical novel of the recent past, of which two types may be discerned: (1) the novel of a recent historical period prior to the writer's experience and (2) the novel of historical events contemporary with the writer's own lifetime.

The fact that prominent critics have disputed the term "historical novel" as applied to [Benito Pérez] Galdós' Episodios and have seen a fundamental similarity between the Episodios and Galdós' other novels opens up the question of genre which we shall try to clarify briefly. Amado Alonso, "Lo espaniol y lo universal en Galdós", in his Materiay forma enpoesia (1955), referring to the real life origin of some of the characters in the Novelas contempordneas, notes that real life characters and invented ones and real historical circumstances and fictional ones are present in both the Episodios nacionales and the Novelas contempordneas. He also points out that novels which deal with the period of the author's own lifetime are not generally called historical novels. Joaquin Casalduero in his definitive book, Vidayobra de Galdós (1943), states the fundamental similarity between the Episodios and Galdós' other novels:

Por uiltimo, Episodios nacionales es titulo con que (Galdós) agrupaba en colección una serie de obras que fundamentalmente en nada se diferencian del resto de sus novelas.

The Marxist critic George Lukács in his general study The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1963), points to this lack of differentiation as a general phenomenon, concluding that the best novels of each type (the realistic novel of contemporary society and the realistic historical novel) are precisely those in which the characteristics of the two genres are most mingled.

Having said this much, we must insist that the Episodios do fulfill a different function from Galdós' other novels. Initially, Galdós intended them to teach the Spanish people of their history, and indeed, the Episodios reached a wider audience than the other novels and sold more copies. The more pedestrian tone of the opinions in the first Episodios (especially Series I) as contrasted to the other novels written in the same period show that Galdós was consciously addressing himself to this wider audience, using his powers of persuasion as well as of artistic judgment in the selection of his material. Contrasting Episodios I and II with Doiha Perfecta for example, we see that Galdós is careful not to offend religious sentiment in the Episodios. The type of pious moralizing which he puts in the mouths of his two domestic females who are made to triumph over the revolutionary character in each series, Ines in Series I who verges on smugness in her advice to her dying father, the revolutionary Santorcaz and Soledad in Series II who gives lessons in Christian charity to the revolutionary Pedro Sarmiento and even lectures Monsalud, shows not only Galdós' desire at that period for moderation but also the submission of his own views (more like those of the liberal heroes) to the prevailing views of the average Spanish middle class individual (represented by the women). Joaquin Casalduero (Vida y obra) contrasts the symbolic value of Salvador Monsalud with that of Pepe Rey, noting that while Pepe Rey represents the philosophical-religious aspect of the struggle, Monsalud is only concerned with the political world. This is an important difference between the other novels and the Episodios. It is the concrete practical aspect of the national problem which comes to the fore in Galdós' Episodios rather than philosophical-religious theorizing. In the works of the novelists who followed Galdós in writing episodios we can find a strong politico-didactic element and a tendency to focus on historically significant public events occurring in the recent past or even in the author's own life time. These characteristics make it possible to differentiate the episodio nacional from the novel of contemporary society.

I distinguish the episodio nacional from the historical novel of the distant past (the traditional historical novel) only on the basis of subject matter. There is no noteworthy difference in form between the two genres as such. They differ only in content, that is, in the nature of the historical subject matter itself. Recent national history (the province of the episodio nacional) exerts a stronger emotional pull on the author than remoter history does and makes the author reveal his political beliefs and his expectations for the future of his country. Recent history is more alive for him, more emotionally charged than events of the distant past. Because the historical period which he describes is recent, he automatically understands many of its customs, ideas, and preoccupations and thereby avoids some of the pitfalls confronting the author of the historical novel of the distant past.

An example illustrating the difference between the episodio nacional and the traditional historical novel can be taken from the work of Ramón Sender, who wrote historical novels of both kinds. Mister Witt en el cantón, Sender's episodio written about the Spanish revolutionary experiment of Cartagena in 1873, reflects the emotional warmth of his current preoccupation with the contemporary revolutionary situation of Spain in 1934, and the similarities between the two situations deepen his understanding of the past. On the other hand, his five or six traditional historical novels are colder, and in them Sender's treatment of the historical subject matter, with which he is less directly acquainted, is less convincing.

… [Formalistic] developments in the style of an author are seen to reflect changes in the attitude of the author toward his subject matter. Of course this is an oversimplification of the complex relationship between form and content, but it is intended as a challenge to habits of critical thought which have been working mechanically on the basis of formalistic assumptions. The nature of this experimental point of view can be seen most clearly in … Valle-Inclan, because, of all the writers discussed, he is the most concerned with style and the most inventive and fecund in stylistic innovation. An examination of Valle-Inclin's work reveals four major phases: (1) the Sonatas, (2) the Comedias bdrbaras, (3) the last two novels of the Carlist trilogy, and (4) the Ruedo iberico. Each of these four phases is characterized by a change in historical perspective and a parallel change in stylistic expression.

In the historical novels discussed here, the content often seems to impose a form. There is a shape to content, to the extent even that one may ask whether style and content in the historical novel are not practically the same thing. For example, in Unamuno's Paz en la guerra the paradoxical nature of the philosophical content makes for discontinuity in style. Unamuno's basic ideas, in this novel as elsewhere, are paradoxical aphorisms metaphorically combining several different levels of experience, … where the two ideas contained in the title Paz en la guerra, "peace in war", are analyzed.

When Unamuno's paradoxical ideas are extended and magnified in a realistic novel, their lack of coherence tends to separate elements of dialogue, realistic description, philosophical generalization, historical information, and so on. In spite of being related to the same subject matter, these elements do not cast light on each other. Indeed they often seem to be in contradiction. In Unamuno's work the ideas that "fighting leads to love and mutual comprehension" or that "the conflict between regionalism and centralism leads eventually to a peaceful internationalism," often contradict the experience of the fictional characters or the concrete historical events described. Elements which are interesting in themselves are forced into false relationships with other elements for the sake of the philosophical unity represented in the title.

The genre of the episodio nacional was initiated by the greatest Spanish novelist of the nineteenth century, Benito Pérez Galdós. In his Episodios nacionales, which are the first and most extensive example of the genre, there are two slightly different categories of recent history. Series I and II and part of Series III reconstruct the period of his parents' and grandparents' generation and thus belong to the first type of episodio nacional mentioned above. Part of Series III and Series IV and V deal with the history of Spain during Galdós' own lifetime and cannot be totally separated from his own personal reminiscences, or even perhaps from his view of contemporary society in his Novelas contempordneas. Accordingly, these novels belong to the second type of episodio.

Corresponding to Galdós' first Episodios—that is, recent but not contemporary history—are Baroja's Memorias de un hombre de acción, Valle-Inclan's Ruedo iberico (one would also tend to include his trilogy on the second Carlist war, since it took place when he was only seven years old), Unamuno's Paz en la guerra (he was nine at the time of the same war), Sender's Mister Witt en el cantón, and Juan Goytisolo's Senas de identidad. Some of these novels attempt to understand the present in historical context or to draw the lessons of the past for the future; others represent a flight from the present to a more congenial past.

The second group of novels in this category, those which correspond to Galdós' later Episodios (that is, novels dealing with national history during the writer's own lifetime), includes novels written about the Civil War of 1936-39 by men who took part in the conflict as adults, among them Ramón Sender (Los cinco libros de Ariadna), Jose Maria Gironella (Los cipreses creen en Dios, Un millón de muertos, Ha estallado la paz), Max Aub (Campo cerrado, Campo abierto, Campo de sangre, Campo frances, Campo del moro, Campo de los almendros), and Camilo Jose Cela (San Camilo, 1936). In writing about the war, none of these Spanish novelists has the exalted and poetic vision of Hemingway and other foreigners, because the foreign writers see the Spanish war as a crusade, and it is the symbolic role of Spain in the international conflict which determines their emotional attitude.