Page:Library of the World's Best Literature vol 19.djvu/520



was bom February 7th, 1834, at Polanco, a village of Northern Spain, near Santander, the capital city of the province of the same name, popularly termed also La Montana, or the Mountain. This is the region to which he has especially devoted himself in his literary work. He is generously named by the younger men of distinguished ability, like Galdos and Vald6s, as the most original of the contemporary Spanish writers of fiction, and as the most revolutionary, in the sense of having cast off the conventional influence of the romantic and classical traditions of the earlier half of the century. His influence is a distinct and valuable element in the work of the other leaders; and yet, unlike them,—owing to the local raciness, the idiomatic difficulties of his style,—he has been scarcely translated into any other of the modern languages, and into English not at all; except in some fugitive short stories, rendered for the periodical press by Mr. Rollo Ogden. Pereda is properly to be named as the pioneer and standard-bearer of the best kind of modern realism in Spain.

He is a country gentleman of good descent and liberal means, resident, at no great distance from Santander, at the village of Polanco, where his modern villa adjoins the casa solar or ancestral homestead of his family, with the arms heavily carved above the door in mediaeval fashion. He has never had to know the conflict between poverty and literary aspiration, which is so common a feature in the history of writers; yet this has in no way detracted from the masculine vigor, the evidence of assiduous labor, and the notable 'air of conscientiousness, in his work. In appearance he is of the spare ascetic type we are accustomed to associate with the Spanish hidalgo. The distinguished French traveler and novelist, Ren6 Bazin, in an account in the Revue des Deux Mondes of a visit to him at Polanco, says: ^As he drew near, one might have taken him for Cervantes himself.* Galdos speaks of him as ^the most amiable, the most excellent of men.» He seems to have in a high degree the faculty of inspiring warm personal regard. This is well exemplified in two most laudatory essays on two of his books,—the one by Gald6s, the other by Menendez y Pelayo, the eminent critic. Frankly colored