The Art of Concha Espina

...Her treatment is at one moment vigorous and racy...

...This, and, in fact, nearly all of her works, are now used popularly for reading in the schools of Spain...

...Zalamea is merely a corruption of the Spanish form, Salomon...

...Two broad-arched entrances, divided by a masonry pillar, open to the courtyard...

...One of the most attractive characters created by Concha Espina is Don Miguel, the parish priest of Valdecruces, in Mariflor...

...Each nation should write its own works of the kind...

...Tradition says that the deposits were worked in the far-off days of the Great King Solomon, and that one of his sons lived there in charge of the slaves that extracted the red metal...

...In the Puritan north, of which mainly Concha Espina writes, there is little evidence of that easy virtue so often depicted by the Countess Pardo Bazan...

...nor does he ever hesitate to give of his own slender resources when there is need...

...Others find this a recommendation, "a new kind of geography," agreeing with Rafael, a character in Fernan Caballero's La Gaviota, who affirms that "the novel of manners is the novel par excellence . . . useful and agreeable...

...Pastorelas, a book of prose poems, is peculiarly Spanish in type as well as in its cast of characters, presenting glimpses of the lives of the peasants who till the fields with biblical primitiveness...

...El Metal de los Muertos, a great sociologic novel, is deemed by many critics the finest of the Espina stories, even one of the best that has been written by a European in the past decade...

...She is now chiefly a poetic realist in prose...

...The Spanish critics regard El Metal de los Muertos as a book that will endure, since it presents a masterly picture of a struggle between capital and labor, arising from resentment against foreign domination, culminating in one of the most formidable recent labor uprisings in Spain...

...The house was filled with books, and Concha Espina was an omnivorous reader...

...To obtain local color, Concha Espina went to Rio Tinto and lived with the miners, sharing their hardships and entering into an understanding sympathy with them...

...his zeal in guiding them along the narrow path never flags...

...As a story revealing the lives of the humble women of the Maragatan steppe, the original home of many of the noblest families of Spain, Mariflor likewise leaves "nothing untold, unanalyzed...

...The ruins of an ancient castle perched high on a red mountain above the mines are pointed out as the place where Solomon's son is supposed to have lived...

...Editions of her works are appearing in the United States, in France, in Portugal, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Roumania, and Czecho-Slovakia...

...With this mental attitude, with her ceaseless industry and her severe criticism of her own work, sparing no effort to attain polish and finish, with years ahead of her in which to grow in creative power, for she is only a little past forty, there is reason for believing that the future will register no less able work from her pen than the past...

...Agua de Nieve, which has been called an almost scientific monograph of a woman's character...

...It has a gallery finished in carved wood, shading the rooms of the third story, supplemented by individual balconies guarded by wrought-iron railings, marking the doors of the second story...

...The Municipal Council of Santander has officially named her Favorite Daughter of the City, while the Hispanic Society of America has voted her a corresponding member of that institution...

...It was presented at the Eslava Theatre in Madrid, under the direction of Gregorio Martinez Sierra...

...She entered the literary field early in life as a poet...

...again, she is dreamy and stylistic...

...He never fails to assume part of the burden of suffering that falls to the lot of his humble parishioners...

...In a forthcoming volume, Altar Mayor, she returns again to northern Spain, presenting a novel of Asturias in which, through a thrilling love story, rich in characters, Covadonga, the scene of sublime patriotic sacrifices, is depicted as the sacrificial altar of the patria, likened to the high altar of a great cathedral...

...She is seeking perfection in her work more earnestly than ever...

...Mariflor, called in Spanish, La Esfinge Maragata, or The Maragatan Sphinx, is the work preferred by some critics...

...The cast of characters in El Metal de los Muertos is large and varied, while the descriptions are Dantesque in their vividness...

...Others object on the ground that it is a "regional" novel, dealing with a district little known...

...Max Nordau, a pathologic critic of literature and morals, placed this work on a par with the old Greek tragedies...

...Concha Espina is a writer through whom the soul of Spain finds new and fuller expression...

...The faded reddish gray of the tiles on the house in which Concha Espina was born proclaims the centuries that have passed since it was built...

...Among the Maragatan women, "self-expression," in the sense of living for self alone, is unheard of...

...With them, the preservation of the home and the family is more vital than the whim of the individual...

...It is only among women of more advanced modernity, spoiled by luxuries, that selfish considerations rank first...

...and La Nina de Luzmela, are earlier novels, but written with the vigorous swing of one sure of her technique and atmosphere...

...Despertar para Morir, one of the most popular of the Espina books in Spain...

...Her natal city is...

...In depicting characters, events, and scenes, truth prevails, even in cases where deviation from veracity might make a more agreeable impression...

...In a series of confessions by distinguished authors, published by Fannie Butcher in a Chicago newspaper, Concha Espina stated that, of all the books in the world, she would have preferred to have written "that sublime Hebrew poem which has come to be one of the gems of Christianity, a repository of poetry and emotion that is supremely incomparable, the Book of Job...

...The house in which she was born is an ancestral manor strictly Castilian in style...

...The vocabulary is so extended that it has aroused comment even among readers to whom Spanish is the native tongue...

...In her novel, Mariflor, the American reader may experience disappointment that the heroine finally consents to cast her fate with Antonio, although she still loves the poet...

...Wherever Dona Concha's works are read outside of Spain they serve to dissipate the "black legend," that tradition of calumny and misrepresentation which Spain has so long endured...

...He is at once virile and sympathetic...

...To the Spanish nation Covadonga is a sacred shrine to which thousands make pilgrimages every year...

...Like Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Blasco Ibariez, and Benito Perez Galdos, she has achieved fame during her lifetime...

...The dramatic story is interwoven with the atmosphere of Old Castile...

...In The Red Beacon, (Dulce Nombre in the original) her genius is seen at its most characteristic flowering...

...The Spanish aristocrat considers the glaring red of the freshly tiled roof patent of vulgarity and newness...

...It was at Covadonga that Pelayo overcame the Moslems in 718, with this victory reviving the national spirit to such an extent that the tide was turned and the ultimate Christian recovery of Spain became assured...

...Excavations in the vicinity of the mines, even at this day, bring to light relics of the Phoenicians and Romans who labored there long ago to wrest metallic treasures from the earth—potsherds, earthen lamps, and "tear bottles...

...Her favorite works were religious writings...

...The happier finale, however, would have been out of harmony with the trend of life among the Maragatan people...

...Here the old order, with a thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, exists along with luxurious hotels, clubs, and casinos of the fashionable modern watering-place...

...These honors do not in the least turn her head...

...Thus consistency prevails...

...Xhe beach of Santander is washed by the Bay of Biscay, the Mar Cantabrico so frequently glorified in the works of Concha Espina...

...El Jayon (The Foundling) is a dramatic study of a human problem impossible of solution other than by self-extinction of one of the women rivals...

...The Spanish Academy has granted Concha Espina three substantial prizes, each carrying a generous sum of money, in appreciation of her literary work, and by way of atonement, perhaps, for not making an exception and admitting a woman to membership...

...It is due to the self-abnegation and unstinting labor of the Maragatan women that the tribe has been held together as a unit, pure in blood, down the passing centuries...

...If I were the Queen, I should have a novel of manners written in every province, and should leave nothing untold, unanalyzed...

...Ruecas de Marfil is a volume of novelettes reeled off the ivory spinning wheel of memory, and not without that inevitable touch of tragedy that so fills the lives of rural Spanish women...

...In keeping with ancient custom, the armorial bearings of the family appear in the centre of the facade, carved in stone...

...The title refers to the historic background of the mine...

...He is a likable personality, and takes a place among literary creations beside Don Abbondio, in Alessandro Manzoni's masterpiece, I Promessi Sposi...

...The impression conveyed is that Mariflor, through sacrifice, triumphed over mere egoism, and won a more enduring happiness through giving happiness to others...

...Confusion between the letters z and s exists among the illiterate...

...La Rosa de los Vientos, a novel of the Mar Cantabrico...

...Queen Victoria Eugenia laid the foundation stone of the monument to Concha Espina which is being executed by Victorio Macho, and is about to be erected in the Concha Espina Park at Santander, and King Alfonso has conferred upon her the Order of Maria Luisa...

...In choosing to sacrifice self to save the many members of her family who are in need, and whom Antonio promises to relieve on condition of her marriage to him, Mariflor responds to the traditional urge of the Maragatan Wood inherited from her father...

...The question is a pertinent one...

...Written in a swiftly moving, artistic manner, it is imbued with poetry and dignity, gathering power as it proceeds to the unexpected climax that brings happiness to Dulce Nombre and to Don Nicolas, the nobleman in his tower...

...Some of her prose seems to be attuned to the rhythmic rise and fall of the waves of this tempestuous sea that lulled her to sleep as a child...

...Sincerity is the dominant note through all her work...

...The work is a polished and beautiful classic...

...The name of a town not far distant, Zalamea la Real, also commemorates the industrial enterprise of this wise king of the Jews in this region...

...In El Caliz Rojo, and Tierras del Aquilon, the scene is laid in Germany, where Concha Espina recently toured, and where translations of her works have been received with enthusiasm...

...Firm in her religious convictions, she is a true exponent of the national character...

...Santander, on the north coast of Spain...

...It has been her province to reveal the individual consciousness of the Spanish mind...

...In her rectitude during weary hours of trial, Dulce Nombre symbolizes the loftiest Span572 THE COMMONWEAL March 31, 1926 ish ideals for the women of the nation...

...In Al Amor de las Estrellas, tribute is paid to the immortal genius of Cervantes, through a study of the women characters of his creation...

...The women of this little clan, a remnant of the earliest inhabitants of Iberia, are essentially selfsacrificing...