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The Spanish painter Antonio Pereda married Doña Maria de Bustamente, a woman of some rank, and greater pretension, who would associate only with people of high fashion, and insisted on having a duenna in constant waiting in her antechamber, like a lady of quality.
These poor Giants, of whom Zola would talk, have become so weak and shrunken with time, that nobody is able any longer to make them out, even as dwarfs. The Spanish realists of the same period are the height of the disagreeable. The most repugnant of them all is Pereda.
Yet the gesture of the grand style of Valera is palsied, except, perhaps, for the conservative Quixote, Ricardo Leon, a functionary in the Bank of Spain, while the idyllic method lingers fitfully in such gentle writers as Jose Maria Salaverria, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, headed by Mesonero Romanos and Coloma.
Pereda was not rich enough to maintain such an attendant; he therefore compromised matters by painting on a screen an old lady sitting at her needle, with spectacles on her nose, and so truthfully executed that visitors were wont to salute her as they passed, taking her for a real duenna, too deaf or too discreet to notice their entrance!
“The Parroquial Church of Havana was about to be made into a cathedral, through the efforts of the prelate, Armen Dariz, but these were opposed by the captain-general, Pereda. The bishop then excommunicated said chief and all in his vicinity, all the clergy even going in procession to curse and stone his house.
To the extent of my ability I always avoid the rhetoric of the major key, which is assumed as the only proper style, the very moment that one sits down to write Castilian. I should like, of course, to rise to the heights of solemnity now and then, but very seldom. "Then what you seek," I am told, "is a familiar style like that of Mesonero Romanos, Trueba and Pereda?"
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