Spanish Stories of the Romantic Era /Cuentos españoles del Romanticismo

The Romantic Era in Spain
Spanish Romantic literature shared many basic features with that of other European countries: an emotional exaltation of the self; a preference for instinct over reason, and inspiration over rules; idealism and mysticism; a love of the wilder aspects of nature, the eccentric, the exotic, and the morbid; a partiality for the (imperfectly understood) Middle Ages as an era of heroism and pageantry; and a renewed appreciation of national folkways, including legends and other lore, as well as naïve piety, and entailing a greater emphasis on regionalism. A writer’s approach might be somber and self-important, but there was also much humor, either hearty or sarcastic.
Political conservatives celebrated the elements that they saw as being particularly grandiose in Spain’s past, especially the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberals worshipped freedom and dreamed of utopias which were then more closely defined, with preciser goals, by the militant socialists toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Naturally, not every writer of the time was a Romantic, nor could any one Romantic subscribe to each and every Romantic tenet. Indeed, certain writers who are thoroughly identified with Romanticism lampooned elements of the movement which they found excessive, their barbs being aimed chiefly at hangers-on and overeager followers of trends; there are a few examples of such criticism in the stories anthologized here.
Romanticism began to flourish in Spain much later than in England, Germany, or even France. Its inception is usually dated to 1814, when the German Hispanist Johann Niklaus Böhl von Faber (1770–1836), by then resident in Cádiz, introduced to Spain the great German Romantics’ revaluation of Spanish Golden Age literature and rehabilitated the romancero (the corpus of Spanish medieval and Renaissance narrative ballads) and such dramatists as Lope de Vega and Calderón. In the following years, Romanticism spread, but still under great duress.
The pan-European post-Napoleonic reaction was championed in Spain by King Fernando VII, who for most of his reign (except for a brief period, 1820–1823, when he had some degree of liberalism imposed upon him, and for his last couple of years, when he partially gave up the struggle) enforced a rigid censorship and drove many of the most eminent writers into exile. By 1832 there was much greater freedom of the press, and the exiles, who had profited greatly by their experiences and contacts in France and England, began to return home. (When Fernando died in 1833, the evil he had done lived after him: without secure constitutional underpinnings, he left his throne to his baby daughter, later Isabel II, under a regency, passing over his already disaffected brother Carlos, who plunged the nation into what would be some forty years of intermittent civil war; the first Carlist War lasted from 1833 to 1839.)
The 1830s and 1840s were the glory years of Romanticism in Spain. By 1850 the consolidation of the middle class led to a decline in idealism and the beginnings of Realism in fiction, which developed in