It is because Spanish literature is intensely national that it has so universal an interest, and in its most recent phase, the novel, it has a local character that is full of charm. José María de Pereda, for instance, scarcely ever left his native Cantabrian province. He wrote of the places and people that he understood and loved. Yet no one who has read his great novels, “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” or “Sotileza,” or “Peñas Arriba,” will contend that they are provincial, or that their interest is merely local.[96] His characters are universal, and Pereda is another instance of the truth that he who digs a little land deep reaps a better reward than he who works shallowly over a wide extent. So Señor Blasco Ibáñez is read with most delight when he cultivates his own garden--the city and province of Valencia. XVII THE POEM OF THE CID 1.--A PRIMITIVE MASTERPIECE The national hero of Spain has been presented in many guises, but is nowhere more intensely Spanish than in the “Poema del Cid.” Here are no marvellous events and miracles, no journeyings out of Spain to Paris and Rome; everything occurs naturally and simply in Spanish surroundings, and this the first great masterpiece of Spanish letters has a strong flavour of the soil. After winning a “victory marvellous and great” over the Moors in Spain, the Cid says, “I give thanks to God who is Master of the world; I was in want before, now I am rich, for I have goods and land and gold and honour.... Moors and Christians live in great fear of me. There, inland in Morocco, where the Mosques are, they look to have some night an inroad from me. It is but their fear, for I think not of it. I shall not go to seek them, in Valencia shall I be.” The Cid is chivalrous, brave, magnanimous, simple, with a strong sense of humour and love of fair-play. With simple good faith the poet sees no need to explain or excuse actions of his hero that may seem blameworthy to a later age, such as the deceit practised upon the two Jews. Though not historical, the poem has an air of truth and sincerity deeply impressive. It was probably composed in the middle of the twelfth century, not much more than fifty years after the Cid’s death in 1099. It has been attributed to the beginning of the thirteenth century, but intrinsic evidence warrants the earlier date. The language is more archaic than that of thirteenth-century writers. Traces of the Latin chrysalis appear. “To-morrow morning” is _cras á la mañana_, half Latin and half Spanish, and “each” in the same way is _quiscadauno_, while the word _huebos_, which frequently occurs in the sense of _menester_, is but the Latin _opus_ thinly disguised. The poem, as it has come down to us incomplete, has nearly four thousand verses. It is written in long assonant lines of unequal number of syllables. “The poet,” as Tomas Antonio Sánchez, who first edited the “Poema del Cid” in 1779, remarks, “thought nothing of giving two or three syllables more to a line as his