e in prose fiction. French
taste dominated Spanish literature, and poor imitations of the French
satisfied the reading public. A foreigner by birth and a cosmopolitan by
education, the clever new-comer cried out against this foreign
influence, and set herself to bring the national characteristics to the
front. She belonged to the old Spanish school, with its Catholicism, its
prejudices, its reverence for the old, its hatred of new ideas and
modern improvements. She painted thus Old Spain with a master's brush.
But she especially loved Andalusia, that most poetic province of her
country, with its deep-blue luminous sky, its luxuriant vegetation, its
light-hearted, witty populace, and she wrote of them with rare insight
and exquisite tenderness. Tasked with having idealized them, she
replied:--"Many years of unremitting study, pursued _con amore_, justify
me in assuring those who find fault with my portrayal of popular life
that they are less acquainted with them than I am." And in another place
she says:--"It is amongst the people that we find the poetry of Spain
and of her chronicles. Their faith, their character, their sentiment,
all bear the seal of originality and of romance. Their language may be
compared to a garland of flowers. The Andalusian peasant is elegant in
his bearing, in his dress, in his language, and in his ideas."

Her stories lose immensely in the translation, for it is almost
impossible to reproduce in another tongue the racy native speech, with
its constant play on words, its wealth of epigrammatic proverbs, its
snatches of ballad or song interwoven into the common talk of the day.
The Andalusian peasant has an inexhaustible store of bits of poetry,
_coplas_, that fit into every occurrence of his daily life. Fernan
Caballero gathered up these flowers of speech as they fell from the lips
of the common man, and wove them into her tales. Besides their pictures
of Andalusian rural life, these stories reveal a wealth of popular
songs, ballads, legends, and fairy tales, invaluable alike to the
student of manners and of folk-lore. She has little constructive skill,
but much genius for detail. As a painter of manners and of nature she is
unrivaled. In a few bold strokes she brings a whole village before our
eyes. Nor is the brute creation forgotten. In her sympathy for animals
she shows her foreign extraction, the true Spaniard having little
compassion for his beasts. She inveighs against the national sport,