SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON MODERN SPANISH FICTION 1 43 



opment so evident in Spain is wholly lacking. The short stories of 

 the Middle Ages were in verse (fableaux) and represented fairly the 

 esprit gaulois. Bonaventure des Periers and Rabelais continued the 

 tradition ; but it was soon interrupted. The Heptameron of Marguerite 

 de Navarre (1558) is derived from Boccaccio. In the seventeenth 

 century various foreign currents flow side by side. D'Urfe's Astree 

 (1607-27) comes from the Italian pastorals; the interminable novels 

 of Mile, de Scudery twine the same strand with that of the Spanish 

 romances of chivalry. Sorel and Furetiere, Scarron and Lesage 

 recall in greater or less degree the picaresque tales. Mme. de la 

 Fayette, Marivaux and Voltaire wrote some admirable fiction, con- 

 taining touches of realism and of psychology, but not representing 

 a continuous development. 



In like manner, the French novels of the nineteenth century, famous 

 as they are and brilliant in many ways, exemplify a tendency to take 

 up a European theory or current of feeling and develop it to a high 

 degree, without sufficient consideration of the fitness of its appli- 

 cation to the particular case. Blind logic is a trait of French char- 

 acter which has often been pointed out, usually in contrast to the 

 practical, unsystematic English habit of mind. The French them- 

 selves call it "la raison raisonnante," and recognize in it the cause 

 of the artificial restrictions of their pseudo-classic drama as well as 

 of the excesses of the French Revolution. So, the romantic novel of 

 Chateaubriand and Hugo was merely one offshoot of a general move- 

 ment in Europe, a movement that produced more valuable results 

 in other forms of literature, as far as France is concerned. The 

 genius of Stendhal and Balzac raised the novel to a plane of perma- 

 nent value, but it soon slipped back into another rut worse than the 

 preceding. Naturalism, the result of scientific methods more or 

 less unskilfully applied to art, has cast a veil of sordid commonplace- 

 ness over much of the work of Flaubert, Zola, Daudet and Maupas- 

 sant, notwithstanding the keen sense of form which inspires the 

 work of the first and last. Zola carried the system to an extreme 

 from which there was an inevitable reaction. The two important 

 novelists of the present day, Pierre Loti and Anatole France, are 



