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Periods of European Literature

EDITED BY
PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY

VI.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE

PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE.

Edited by Professor SAINTSBURY.

“The criticism which alone can much help us for the future is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result.”

—Matthew Arnold.

In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. Price 5s. net each.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, Edinburgh and London.

THE
LATER RENAISSANCE

BY
DAVID HANNAY

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCVIII

All Rights reserved

PREFACE.

The general rules by which this series is governed have been fully stated by the Editor in the first published volume, The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory. It will therefore not be necessary for me to do more than endeavour to justify the particular application of them in this book. Mr Saintsbury has fully recognised the magnitude of the task which has to be overcome by the writer who should undertake to display “intimate and equal knowledge of all the branches of European Literature at any given time.” Nobody could be more conscious of his insufficiency to attain to any such standard of knowledge than I have had occasion to become in the course of executing the part of the plan intrusted to me. Though I hope my work has not been shirked, I still cannot venture to boast of “intimate and equal knowledge” of all the great bulk of literature produced during the later sixteenth century. Happily so much as this is not required. Some ignorance of—or at least some want of familiarity with—the less important, is permitted where the writer is “thoroughly acquainted with the literature which happened to be of greatest prominence in the special period.” I must leave others to decide how far my handling of the Spanish, English, and French portions of the subject can be held to excuse my less intimate familiarity with the Italian and Portuguese. The all but unbroken silence of Germany during this period made it unnecessary to take account of it. Modern Dutch and modern Scandinavian literature had hardly begun; such Scottish poets as Scott and Montgomerie are older than their age. These and other things, on the principles of the series, fall into the previous or the next volume.

Although the reasons for the course taken with the literature of Spain are given in the text, they may be repeated here by way of preliminary excuse. It has been decided to treat the Spaniards as an example of the overlapping necessary to the satisfactory carrying out of a series in periods. I have begun with them earlier than with others, have ended with them later, and have as far as space permitted treated them as a whole. For this there is what appears to me to be a sound critical reason. Although Spain undoubtedly belongs to Europe, yet there is in her something which is not quite European. The Spaniards, though they have always been, and are, vigorous and interesting, have a certain similarity to some oriental races. This is not the place for an essay on the Spanish national character. The comparison is only mentioned as a justification for pointing out that, like some oriental races, the Spaniards have had one great period of energy. At no time have they been weak, and to-day they can still show a power of resistance and a tenacity of will which promise that if ever the intellect of the nation revives, they will again play a great part in the world. But it is none the less a matter of fact that, except during their one flowering time, they have not been what can be called great. From the fifteenth century till well into the seventeenth, those defects in the national character, which have kept the Spaniards stationary and rather anarchical, were in abeyance. The qualities of the race were seen at work on a vast stage, doing wonderful things in war, colonisation, art, and letters. Yet the very reason that the Spaniard was then exercising his faculties to the full extent to which they would go, gives a complete unity to his Golden Age. It cannot be divided in any other than a purely arbitrary way. England and France were destined to grow and develop after the Later Renaissance. Tasso and Bruno were the last voices of a great Italian time. But Spain suspended the anarchy of her middle ages at the end of the fifteenth century, gathered force, burst upon the world with the violence of a Turkish invasion, flourished for a space, and then sank exhausted at the end of a hundred and fifty years.

It may be thought that too little attention has been paid to the Portuguese. I will not venture to assert that the criticism is ill founded. Still I shall plead by way of excuse that what the lesser Peninsular nation did in literature was hardly sufficiently original to deserve fuller notice in a general survey of a very fertile period. Sà de Miranda and his contemporaries, even Camoens and his follower Corte-Real, were after all little more than adapters of Italian forms. They were doing in kindred language what was also being done by the Spanish “learned poets.” In Camoens there was no doubt a decided superiority of accomplishment, but the others seem to me to have been inferior to Garcilaso, Luis de Leon, or Hernan de Herrera. And this “learned poetry” is in itself the least valuable part of the literature of the Peninsula. In what is original and important, the share of the Portuguese is dubious or null. They have a doubtful right to the Libros de Caballerías. They have a very insignificant share in the stage, and no part in the Novelas de Pícaros. Barros and the other historians were men of the same class as the Spaniards Oviedo or Gómara. For these reasons, I have thought it consistent with the scheme of the book to treat them as very subordinate.

CONTENTS.

THE LATER RENAISSANCE.

CHAPTER I.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.

THE UNITY OF SPANISH LITERATURE—LIMITS OF TREATMENT—A PREVAILING CHARACTERISTIC—THE DIVISION INTO NATIVE AND IMITATIVE—THE INHERITANCE FROM THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY—SPANISH VERSE—THE “CANCIONEROS”—THE ROMANCES—THE “ROMANCEROS”—THE QUALITY OF THIS POETRY—SPAIN AND ITALY—THE “DIÁLOGO DE LA LENGUA”—PROSE OF THE EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY—THE INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION.

The unity of Spanish Literature.

The Literature of Spain, of which the Portuguese is the little sister, or even at times the echo, stands apart. In this fact lies the excuse for the division adopted in this volume. There is at first sight something arbitrary in beginning a survey of Literature of the later Renaissance with a book written at the close of the fifteenth century. To carry the story on till the close of the seventeenth may well appear to be a violation of proportion. The Renaissance even in Italy was not in its later stages in 1500, and it is far behind us when we get to the years in which Boileau, Molière, and Racine were writing in France, while Dryden was the undisputed prince of English poets and prose-writers. Yet there is good critical reason for making a wide distinction between the one period of literary greatness of the Peninsula and those stages in the history of the Literatures of England, France, or Italy, which belong to the time of the later Renaissance. It is this—that we cannot, without separating things which are identical, divide the literature of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The years between the appearance of the Shepherd’s Calendar and the death of Shakespeare form a period possessing a character of its own in the history of our poetry, our prose, and our drama. It is still more emphatically true that French literature, between the rise of the Pléiade and the death of Mathurin Regnier, is marked off sharply, both from what had gone before and what was to follow. But we cannot draw a line anywhere across the Spanish drama, poetry, or prose story of the great time and say, Here an old influence ended, here a new one began. We have to deal with the slow growth, very brief culmination, and sudden extinction of a brilliant literature, which came late and went early, and which for the short time that it lasted is one and indivisible. It grew up partly from native roots, partly under an influence imparted by Italy; attained its full stature in the early years of the seventeenth century; then “withered, fell into puerile ravings, and died,” with the close of the Austrian dynasty.

Limits of treatment.

As, then, the Golden Age of Spain is one, we are justified in taking it as a whole, even though we appear to violate the harmony of the arrangement of the series to which this volume belongs. And this division of the matter imposes an obvious limitation on the treatment to be adopted. Spanish literature is, in one sense, exceedingly rich. During the century and a half, or so, of its vigour, it produced a vast number of books, and the catalogue of its authors is very long. Don Nicolas Antonio, the industrious compiler of the Biblioteca Hispana, has calculated the number of mystic and ascetic works (of which some are among the best of Spanish books) at over three thousand. The fecundity of its theatre is a commonplace; the fluency of its poets is boundless; the bulk of its prose stories is considerable; its historians are many, and not a few are good. It is needless to add that much was written on law, theology, and the arts which has value. In dealing with all this mass of printed matter in the space at our disposal, it is clearly necessary to remember the injunction, “il faut savoir se borner.”

We must, to begin with, leave aside all that is not primarily literature, except when it can be shown to have influenced that which is. Again, even in dealing with our proper subject, we must submit to limits. It is manifestly necessary to omit scores—nay, hundreds—of minor names. But that is not all. In making a survey of a fertile literature in a brief space, we are always obliged to go by kinds and classes rather than by individual writers. But in Spanish literature this is more especially true.

A prevailing characteristic.

In the course of an introduction to a translation of Shakespeare’s plays by Señor Clarke, Don Juan Valera (himself the author of stories both Spanish and good) has made a complaint, which is of the nature of an unconscious confession. He has lamented that the characters of Spanish drama are so little known. An artist, so he says, has only to paint a young man in a picturesque dress on a rope-ladder, with a beautiful young woman on a balcony above him, and all the world recognises Romeo and Juliet. If he takes his anecdote from Lope and Calderon, nobody will be able to guess what it is all about. With less than his usual good sense, Señor Valera accounts for the obscurity into which the world has been content to allow the characters and scenes of the Spanish drama to fall, by the political decadence of his country at the end of the seventeenth century. Yet the passing away of Spain’s greatness has not prevented Don Quixote and Sancho from being familiar to the whole world. If anecdote pictures are to be the test, Cervantes has no reason to fear the rivalry of the English dramatic poet. There is less of Spanish pride than of its ugly shadow, Spanish vanity, in Don Juan Valera’s explanation. The Drama of Spain, brilliant as it was within its limits, is not universally known, because it does not give what we find in Cervantes, and in boundless profusion in Shakespeare, characters true to unchanging human nature, and therefore both true and interesting to all time. It is mainly a drama of situation, and of certain stock passions working through personages who are rarely more than puppets. We may say the same of the prose stories, whether Libros de Caballerías, or Novelas de Pícaros—Books of Chivalry, or Tales of Rogues. They all have the same matter and the same stock figures. They differ only in the degree of dexterity with which the author has used his material. In the poetry of Spain we see two influences at work—first, the Italian Renaissance, which ruled the learned poetry of the school of Garcilaso; and then the native “romance” or ballad poetry, which held its ground beside the more varied and splendid metres imitated from abroad. Each of these, within its own bounds, is very uniform, and the works of each school vary only according to the writer’s greater or less mastery of what he uses in common with all others. Such a literature is manifestly best treated by classes and types. Cervantes, indeed, stands apart. His greatness is not a towering superiority but a difference of kind. It is as individual as the greatness of Velasquez in painting.

The division into native and imitative.

These two influences, the foreign and the native, divided Spanish literature of the Golden Age between them in very different proportions. To the first is owing the whole body of its learned poetry, and part of its prose. To the second belong all the “deliveries of the Spaniard’s self,” as they may be called in a phrase adapted from Bacon, the prose tale, the ballad, the drama, and the ascetic works of the so-called mystics. These are the genuine things of Spanish literature, and in them the Spaniard expressed his own nature. It was very shrewdly noted by Aarsens van Sommelsdyck, a Hollander who visited Spain in the later seventeenth century, that however solemn the Spaniard may be in public, he is easy and jocular enough in private. He is very susceptible to what is lofty and noble, capable of ecstatic piety, of a decidedly grandiose loyalty and patriotism, endowed with a profound sense of his own dignity, which nerves him to bear adversity well, but which also causes him to be contumaciously impenetrable to facts when they tell him he must yield or amend his ways. With all that, and perhaps as a reaction from all that, he can enjoy crude forms of burlesque, can laugh over hard realistic pictures of the sordid side of life, and delights in rather cynical judgments of human nature. The lofty and the low have their representations in his literature, in forms easily traced back to the middle ages. About the third quarter of the sixteenth century it might have appeared to a superficial observer that the native element was overpowered by the foreign. But the triumph of the “learned” literature was in show, not in reality.

The book already alluded to as marking the starting-point of the Golden Age is the once famous Celestina, a long story in dialogue, of uncertain authorship and age. It was written at some time between the conquest of Granada and the end of the fifteenth century. Precision is in this case of no importance, since the true descendants of the Celestina were the Picaresque stories. Its first successor was the Lazarillo de Tormes, which, though no doubt written earlier, appeared in or about 1547. Then at an interval of fifty years came the Beacon of Life—Atalaya de la Vida—better known as Guzman de Alfarache, of Mateo Aleman, and from him sprang the great Rogue family. But while the Picaresque novel was gathering strength, all the more slowly because it was not an imitation, the classic school of poetry had blossomed, and was already showing signs of decadence. The drama, another purely native growth, had risen by degrees alongside the prose tale, and reached its full development at about the same time. Both are intrinsically of far greater value than the learned verse. Yet since their maturity came later, they may be postponed while the story of the school of Garcilaso is told.

The inheritance from the fifteenth century.

Before entering upon that, it is necessary to say something of the conditions which the “new poetry” and the influence of the Renaissance found before them when they began to influence Spain. The fifteenth century had not been barren of literature. King John II. (1407-1454) had collected round him a school of Court poets whose chief was Juan de Mena. Although the last representatives of this school resisted the innovations of Boscan and Garcilaso as unpatriotic, it was itself entirely foreign in origin—being, in truth, little more than an echo of Provençal and early Italian poetry. Juan de Mena, the Prince of Poets of his time, wrote long allegorical poems in imitation of Dante, and was perhaps not uninfluenced by the French rhétoriqueurs. Indeed the earlier leaders of the school made no secret of their debt. The Marquis of Santillana, a contemporary of King John, candidly says, in a letter to the Constable of Portugal, that he sought the origin of poetry in the Gai Saber of Provence. The troubadours, when driven from France, had found refuge in the dominions of Aragon, and had there given rise to a school of imitators. The connection of Aragon with Italy was close. Dante found translators, and Petrarch imitators, among the Catalan poets of Valencia, and from thence their influence spread to Castile. Juan del Encina, who in 1496 prefixed a brief Ars Poetica to one of those collections of lyric verse called Cancioneros, and who was himself a poet of the Court school, confessed that he and his brother verse-writers had conveyed largely from the earlier Italians. Moreover, he made this the main ground of their claim to be considered poets. It was not till the next century, and until the last representatives of this school found themselves opposed by the Italian influence, that they began to claim to be essentially Spanish.

Spanish verse.

What there was of really Spanish in their verse must be allowed to have been mainly the impoverishment of the original models. The Spaniard has always been recalcitrant to the shackles imposed by complicated and artful forms of verse, and there is a natural tendency in him to drift at all times to his native trochaic assonants of eight syllables. His language, admirable when properly handled for prose, wants the variety of melody required for poetry. Impatience of the difficulties of metre is another name for the want of a due sense of the beauty of form. Indeed it is not by its form that Spanish literature has been distinguished. Given, then, a people who had very little faculty for delicate verse, and a language which wanted both the wealth of the Italian accent and the flexibility of the French, and it is easy to see what was likely to be the end of the Provençal and Petrarchian influence in the Court school. Its poetry, never more than an echo, sank into mechanical verse-making—mostly in eight-syllabled couplets, relieved by a broken line of four. The inborn preference of the Spaniard for loose metres gradually gained the upper hand. No doubt fine verses may be picked out from the bulk of the writings of the troubadour school of Castile. The rhythmus de contemptu mundi, known as the coplas de Manrique, which has been made known to English readers by Mr Longfellow, is even noble in its rigid gravity. But the merit lies not in the melody of the verse, which soon becomes monotonous. It is in this, that the coplas give us perhaps the finest expression of one side of the Spaniard. They are full of what he himself calls in his own untranslatable word el desengaño—that is to say, the melancholy recognition of the hollowness of man’s life, and “the frailty of all things here”—not in puling self-pity, but in manly and pious resignation to fate and necessity.

The Cancioneros.

This old or troubadour school did not give up the field to the new Italian influence without a struggle. Its models continued to be imitated nearly all through the sixteenth century. It was praised and regretted by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. Boscan and Garcilaso found an opponent and a critic in Cristobal de Castillejo, a very fluent verse-writer, a most worthy man, and a loyal servant of the house of Austria, who died in exile at Vienna in 1556. El buen de Castillejo—the good Castillejo, as he is commonly called, with condescending kindness—was an excellent example of the stamp of critic, more or less common in all times, who judges of poetry exclusively by his own stop-watch. He condemned Boscan and Garcilaso, not for writing bad poetry, but for not writing according to what he considered the orthodox model. The new school not unnaturally retorted by wholesale condemnation of the old. When Hernan, or Fernan, de Herrera published his edition of Garcilaso in 1572, he was rebuked for quoting Juan del Encina in the commentary. A pamphleteer, believed to have been no less a person than the Admiral of Castile, whose likeness may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery among the ambassadors who signed the peace at the beginning of the reign of James I., laughed at Herrera for quoting as an authority one who had become a name for a bad poet. This was pedantry as bad as Castillejo’s, and represented an opinion never generally accepted by the Spaniards. They continued to read the collections of ancient verse called Cancioneros, even when the new school was at the height of its vigour. The Cancioneros Generales of Hernan del Castillo, the great storehouse of the poetry of the fifteenth century, was reprinted, with some changes, no less than nine times between 1511 and 1573. The extreme rarity of copies of these numerous editions proves that they must have been well thumbed to pieces by admiring readers. Yet they constitute no inconsiderable body of literature. The modern reprint issued (unfortunately only to its own members) by the Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles is in two weighty volumes.

The romances.

In this Cancionero there are two elements, destined to very different fates. Hernan del Castillo included eighteen romances in his collection, and they reappeared in subsequent editions. The importance of this word in Spanish literature seems to call for some definition of its scope. The word “romance” bore originally in Spanish exactly the same meaning as in other tongues descended from the Latin. It was the vernacular, and to write en romance was to write Castilian, Galician, or Catalan. “Ni romance ni romano”—neither Romance nor Roman—is a phrase bearing more or less the meaning of our “neither rhyme nor reason.” But little by little, by use and wont, it came about the end of the sixteenth century to be applied exclusively to the form of verse dearest and most native to the Spaniard, the already mentioned trochaic eight-syllable assonant metre. As the ancient ballads are mainly, though not exclusively, written in this form, they are called romances. Yet to write romances does not necessarily mean to write ballads, but only to write in that metre, whether in the dialogue of a play or in long narrative poems, or for any other purpose.

The assonant metre, as is well known, is not peculiar to Spain. It may well have been imported into Castile from France by those churchmen to whom the country owes so much of its architecture, what learning it had, and its civilisation when it began to revive from the merely martial barbarism produced by the Moorish conquest. But if the Spaniard did indeed take the assonant metre from his French teachers, he soon subjected it to that process which all forms of verse are apt to undergo in his hands. He released it from shackles, and gave it a freedom amounting to licence. The romance is a loose-flowing rhythm, in which the rhyme is made by the last accented vowel. Sometimes the same vowel is used line after line until it is exhausted. More commonly the assonant comes in alternate lines. As a rule there is no division into stanzas, but the verse runs on till the speech is ended, or the tale is told. To this there are, however, exceptions, and the romance is divided into redondillas—that is, roundels or staves of four lines, assonanced either alternately, or the first with the fourth and the second with the third, or into quintillas of five lines, with an assonant in three. The recalcitrance of the Spaniard to all limitations in verse-making has caused him to give a very wide range indeed to the assonant. The vowel u is allowed to rhyme with o, and i with e, though they have a very different sound and force. The Spaniard, again, allows a diphthong to be assonant to a vowel, although he pronounces both the vowels in his diphthongs. It will be seen that such verse as this can be written with extreme facility. Indeed it is a byword in Spain that nothing is easier than to write romances—badly. The difficulty, in fact, is to avoid writing them in prose; and it is no small one, when the ear of a people finds a rhyme in so faint a similarity of sound, and in a language in which the accent is at once so pronounced and as little varied. It is not, I trust, superfluous to add that in Castilian, which we call Spanish, there is a marked accent in the last syllable of words ending in a consonant, on the penult of words ending in a vowel, while a limited number of words are esdrujulo—that is, accented on the antepenult. The addition of a syllable to form the plural, or of the adverbial termination mente, does not alter the place of the accent. These rules, though nowise severe, are not rigidly followed. Not infrequently the assonant rhyme falls into the full or consonant rhyme, while the liesse or stave formed on one vowel, and its equivalents, is broken by a line corresponding to nothing. Even the rule requiring the use of eight syllables is applied with restrictions,—an accented syllable at the end counts as two, while two unaccented syllables rank only as one. It must be acknowledged that this metre is unsatisfactory to an ear attuned to the melody of English poetry. In our language it renders hardly a tinkle. When we have become accustomed to it in Castilian—and until we do it tantalises with a sense of something wanting—its highest virtue seems to be that it keeps the voice of the speaker in a chanted recitative. It is more akin to numbered prose than to verse.

However incomplete the romance may seem to us, to the Spaniard it is dear. When romances were not being well written in Spain, it was because nothing was being written well. The metre not only held its ground against the court poetry of the fifteenth century, but prevailed against the new Italian influence. Here as in other fields the Spaniard was very tenacious of the things of Spain. To find a parallel to what happened in Spain we must do more than suppose that the Pléiade in France, or Spenser and his successors in England, had failed to overcome the already existing literary schools. It was as if the ballad metres had won a place even on the stage. No Spanish Sir Philip Sidney need have apologised for feeling his heart stirred by those ballads of the Cid, or of the Infantes de Lara, which answer to our Chevy Chase. They were strenuously collected, and constantly imitated, all through the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century. |The Romanceros| So far were they from falling into neglect, that they were first able to shake the slowly withering poetry of the troubadour school, and then to fill a long series of collections, known, in the beginning, as Cancioneros, or Libros, or Sylvas de Romances, but finally as Romanceros. Much bibliographical learning and controversy has collected about these early editions. Even if I could profess to be competent to speak on such matters, they would have no proper place here. From the point of view of the literary historian, the interesting fact is that at a time when classic, or at least new influences, born of the Renaissance, were carrying all before them in France and England, and in Italy had long ago definitively conquered, the Spaniards did not wholly part with their inheritance from the Middle Ages.

The few ballads, and fragments of ballads, printed by Hernan del Castillo in 1511, proved so popular that an editor was tempted to form a special collection. The place and date of this first ballad-book proper are both significant.[1] It appeared at Antwerp in or about 1546—that is to say, three years or so after the first edition of the poems of Boscan and Garcilaso. The editor was one Martin Nucio. Antwerp, be it observed, was always a great publishing place for Spanish books, a fact which may be accounted for, not only by the political connection between Spain and the Low Countries, the number of Spaniards employed there in various capacities, as soldiers, officials, or traders, and the then extensive use of their language, but also by the superiority of the Flemish printers. That same carelessness of form which is found in the Spaniard’s literature followed him in lesser arts, where neatness of handling was more necessary than spirit and creative faculty. He was, at any rate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rarely a good engraver, and hardly ever a good printer. The Cancionero de Romances, brought out, it may be, primarily for the pleasure of the Spaniards scattered over Flanders and Germany, was soon reprinted in Spain, by one Estéban de Najera, at Saragossa. These contemporary collections are not quite identical, but essentially the same. This Cancionero, or Sylva, de Romances met with a reception which proved how strong a hold his indigenous verse had on the Spaniard. Three editions, with corrections and additions, appeared by 1555. The latest of these was not reprinted until well into the next century. In the meantime other editors had followed Nucio and Najera. A Romancero in nine parts appeared at places so far distant from one another as Valencia, Burgos, Toledo, Alcalá, and Madrid, between 1593 and 1597. This again grew into the great Romancero General of 1604-1614, wherein there are a thousand ballads.

The quality of this poetry.

In so far as this great mass of verse is really an inheritance from the Middle Ages, it does not belong to the subject of this book. All that it is necessary to do here is to note the fact that it did survive, and did continue to exert an influence. But nothing is more doubtful than the antiquity of the vast majority of the romances. The best judges have given up the attempt to class them by age, and indeed that must needs be a hopeless task where poems have been preserved by oral tradition alone, and have therefore been subject to modification by every succeeding generation. The presence of very ancient words is no proof of antiquity, since they may be put in by an imitator. Neither is the mention of comparatively recent events, or of such things as clocks or articles of commerce only known in later times, of itself proof that the framework of the ballad was not ancient when it took its final shape. The Romances were collected very much in the style of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and we all know with what facility remains of popular poetry are found when there is a demand for them, when no critical tests are applied, and when the searchers are endowed with a faculty for verse-writing. The Moorish ballads have been called old, and yet nothing is more certain than that they were the fruits of a literary fashion of the later sixteenth century. The Moor, like the Red Man, became a picturesque figure only when he ceased to be dangerous. Another class of the ballads, those called of chivalry, are full of references showing that the writers were acquainted with Ariosto, and cannot have been written before the middle of the century at the earliest. Where the romance is identical in subject with, and very similar in language to, a passage in the great chronicle of Alfonso the Wise, or other unquestionably mediæval work preserved in writing of known antiquity, it may be accepted as ancient. Where that test cannot be applied, it is safer not to think that the ballad is older than the sixteenth century. In some cases the inspiration can be shown to have been French. The subject of the Molinero de Arcos, a popular ballad existing in several versions, was taken from a well-known French farce, Le Meunier d’Arleux.

It is very necessary, when judging this great body of verse, to stand on our guard against certain besetting fallacies. There is always a marked tendency in collectors to excuse what is grotesque on the ground that it is ancient, and to pardon what is bad on the ground that it is popular. The Spanish ballads have suffered from the too great zeal with which modern editors have reprinted what was accepted by the indiscriminate taste of first collectors. Many of the ballads belong to the class of romances de ciegos—i.e., “blindmen’s ballads”—which were doggerel at all times. Others are not above the level of the poets’ corner of not over-exacting newspapers. Even in the best, the intention and the first inspiration are commonly far better than the expression. The Spaniard’s slovenliness of form is found here as elsewhere. Lockhart, in the preface to his adaptations, has rebuked the Spaniards for “neglecting old and simpler poets,” who wrote the romances, in favour of authors “who were at the best ingenious imitators of classical or Italian models.” He has himself, however, subjected those he selected for translation into English to a treatment which conveys a severe and a just critical judgment. A comparison between his ballads and the originals will show that he occasionally, though very rarely, weakened a forcible phrase. Now and again there are signs that his knowledge of Spanish was not deep. He writes, “So spake the brave Montanez,” as if that had been the name of the Lord of Butrago, whereas montanes (mountaineer) was a common old Spanish equivalent for noble, a custom due to the belief that the old Castilian aristocracy drew its “blue blood,” shown by its grey or blue eyes, from the Visigoths, who held the mountains of Asturias against the Moors. The Lord of Butrago was a historical personage, and the head of the house of Mendoza. But if a few faults of this kind can be found, there are to be set off against them a hundred passages in which he has suppressed a redundancy or replaced the purely prosaic original by poetry. A very good test case is to be found in the last verse of the Wandering Knight’s song—which stands thus in Lockhart:—

“I ride from land to land,

I sail from sea to sea;

Some day more kind I fate may find,

Some night kiss thee.”

What can be more pretty or more fit? but it is not in the Cancionero de Romances, where the words stand:—

“Andando de Sierra en Sierra

Por orillas de la mar,

Por provar si en mi ventura

Ay lugar donde avadar;

Pero por vos, mi señora,

Todo se ha de comportar.”

“Wandering from hills to hills by the shore of the sea, to try whether my fortune will give me a ford; but for you, my lady, all things are to be endured,” is the bald literal meaning, which, though it is at least as old as 1555, and is simple enough, is also, unfortunately, bathos. And this is very far from being a solitary example. The result is, that Lockhart’s ballads give an unduly high estimate of the originals to those who only know the English rifacimento. A reader who refuses to be enslaved by authority will find that he is constantly compelled to make allowances for the faults which Lockhart was in the fortunate position of being able to correct—for redundancies, for lines of mere prose, for vulgarities, for flat, spiritless endings. He will often feel that he is reading mere repetitions in a popular form, written by painfully uninspired authors, whose too frequent use of stock literary phrases shows that they were far from the simplicity attributed to the ballad-maker. It is true that poetic feeling, and some poetic matter in the shape of traditional stories, is to be found in the romances, but, as it were, in solution. Nor is it to be denied that it is to the honour of a people when it clings to a national form of verse, and to its own traditions. Yet neither good poetic intention nor the most respectable patriotism will make inferior execution anything but inferior even in national ballads. It is unquestionably unjust to find fault with a body of professedly unlearned writers because they show the defects of men who have not a severe literary training. But the claim made for the Spanish romances is that they express the natural feelings of a poetic people with simplicity: it is quite fair to answer that the great mass of them belong to a time of high literary cultivation; that they show signs of being the work of its inferior writers; that, even at their best, their loose metrical form—far looser as it is than our own ballad stanza—permitted them to be written by persons who could not have mastered even doggerel rhyme; and that they are too often wanting in the direct, simple, passionate expression by which the rudest genuine poet can force his way to the realm of poetry.

Spain and Italy.

It was a real, but in all probability an inevitable, misfortune that the best poetic faculty in Spain during the sixteenth century neglected the native metre, and turned for inspiration “to the sweet and stately measures of the Italian poesie.” An Italian influence, as has been already pointed out, was no new thing in Spain, and as the sixteenth century drew on it was sure to be felt again. Italy, indeed, was full of Spaniards. They were numerous at the papal Court, and the wars for Naples brought them in greatly increased numbers. Until the close of the fifteenth century those who settled in the southern kingdom were mainly drawn from Aragon. A great change came with the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic. He claimed Naples by right of his inherited crown of Aragon, but he fought for it with the forces, and the arms, of Castile. Isabel was tenacious of her rights as queen of the greater kingdom, but she was scrupulous in fulfilling her wifely duty to comfort her husband. She supported him with her own subjects. After her death he was regent, except for the short period during which he was displaced by his worthless son-in-law, Philip the Handsome. Thus the Castilians came more directly in contact with Italy and Italian civilisation than they had ever done before. They abounded as soldiers, as diplomatists, lay and ecclesiastical, and as administrators. Some among them were sure to feel the artistic and literary influences of that many-sided time. The way was prepared in Spain by the alliance between the crowns of Castile and Aragon, which could not give the country administrative unity, but did give an internal peace. It was a time of expansion and vigour. Isabel had favoured learning. Her favourite scholar, Antonio de Lebrija—better known by the Latinised form of his name as Nebrissensis—drew up a Castilian grammar and dictionary. The language came rapidly to maturity, and was in fact full grown at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This speedy maturity, though perhaps not for the good of the language in the end, was natural. Castilian, in spite of a large admixture of Arabic words, is so thoroughly Latin that little was needed to fit it for literary purposes when once the study of classical models was seriously begun—much as the art of printing came quickly to perfection because the early typographers had beautifully executed manuscripts before them as models.

The early sixteenth century in Spain was not barren in prose-writers, mostly didactic, and also for the most part imitators of the Italians. Francisco de Villalobos, of whom little is known except that he was doctor to Ferdinand the Catholic and the Emperor Charles V., and Fernan Perez de Oliva of Córdova (1492-1530), are the best remembered of the class. But the Problems of the first, and the treatise on the Dignity of Man of the second, are mainly notable as examples of the growing wish to write Castilian for serious purposes.[2]

The Spanish tongue.

But a more interesting proof of the care the Spaniards were giving to their language is to be found in the Diálogo de la Lengua[3]—Talk about our Language, as it may be freely but not inaccurately translated. |The Diálogo de la Lengua.| This little book appears to have been written about, and perhaps a little after, 1530, but was not printed till Mayans included it in his Origenes de la Lengua Castillana in the last century. There is strong internal evidence to show that it was the work of one Juan de Váldes, a Spaniard belonging to the colony settled in Naples, a Castilian by birth, and a member of the doubtfully orthodox society collected round Vittoria Colonna. Juan de Váldes himself is included in the short list of Spanish Protestants, and his heterodoxy accounts for the length of time during which his work remained in manuscript. He smelt of the fagot, as the French phrase has it. All who possess even a slight acquaintance with the literary habits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are aware that we must not draw from the fact that work remained in manuscript the deduction that it was little known. The Diálogo de la Lengua was never quite forgotten. It is in itself somewhat disappointing, being altogether narrower in scope and less ambitious in aim than Joachim du Bellay’s Défense et Illustration de la Langue française, published in 1549. Much of it is devoted to nice points in the use of words, while the scholarly, perhaps also the patriotic, leanings of Váldes led him to assume the untenable position that the few Greek colonies on the Mediterranean coast of Spain had spread the use of their language all over the country before it was displaced by the Latin. But though the Diálogo is not, like the Défense, a great literary manifesto, and though its learning is at times fantastic, it has some intrinsic interest, and no small value as a piece of evidence. That exceedingly difficult literary form the dialogue is very fairly mastered. The four speakers—two Spaniards and two Italians—who take part in the conversation have a distinct dramatic reality, and the tone of talk, familiar, occasionally even witty in form, but serious in substance, is well maintained. The scheme is that three of a party of four gentlemen who are spending a day at a villa on the Bay of Naples join in a friendly conspiracy to draw the fourth, whose name, by the way, is Váldes, into expounding to them, before they take horse to return to the city, how a cultivated man ought to speak and write Castilian. The doctrine of Váldes differs significantly from the lesson enforced by Joachim du Bellay. He does not call upon his countrymen to go forth to the conquest of the haughty Greeks and Romans. On the contrary, it is his contention that although the vocabulary requires refining, and the grammar needs to be better fixed, the language is already as fit for every purpose of literature as the Italian, or even as the classic tongues. With the pride of a genuine Spaniard he seeks his examples in the refranes, the proverbs and proverbial phrases. He makes free use of the collection formed in the fifteenth century by the Marquess of Santillana, who gathered the traditional sayings “from the old women sitting round the hearth.” Váldes may be held to have given evidence in support of his own belief in the maturity of the language. The Castilian of the Diálogo has very little in it that is antiquated, and where it differs from the modern tongue it is in being more terse and manly. His literary doctrine, which is rather indicated than expounded, would have commended itself to our Queen Anne men. To be simple and direct, to avoid affectation, to prefer at all times the natural and straightforward way of saying what you have to say—that is the advice of Juan de Váldes. Withal, he has no squeamish dislike of the common, when, as in the case of his beloved proverbs, it is also pure Spanish. The principles of Váldes might have been fatal to a stately and embroidered eloquence (of which Castilian has in any case no great store), but they would preserve a literature from the affected folly of Góngorism on the one hand, and from the grey uniformity of general terms, which was the danger incident to the classic literature of the eighteenth century.

Váldes, who cited Garcilaso with praise, would not have agreed in many things with Cristobal de Castillejo, but he would have applauded his saying that Castilian is friendly to a “cierta clara brevedad”—to a certain lucid brevity. We shall be better able to judge later whether the recognition of this truth does not lead directly to agreement with Mr Borrow, when he says that Spanish Literature is not wholly worthy of the language. |The prose of the early sixteenth century.| Lucid brevity is certainly not the quality to be noted in Spanish prose-writers of what we may call the time of preparation—the earlier sixteenth century. The quality may indeed be found in an eminent degree in the writings of Spaniards who were not men of letters—in the despatches of Cortes, or in the numerous extant narratives of soldiers or priests who were eyewitnesses of the wars of Italy, of the sack of Rome, or of the conquest of America. It would be easy to make an excellent collection of stories of adventure from their letters, which would show the masculine force and the savoury quality of Castilian. But these were men of the sword, or churchmen as adventurous as they—not men of letters who knew by what devious paths the Muses should be approached. The prose-writers of this epoch as a class need not detain us in what must be a brief outline portrait of Spanish literature. There is, however, one exception in Antonio de Guevara, the Bishop of Mondoñedo (d. 1545), who is best known to us as the author of the once famous Golden Epistles, if only for the sake of the influence he may have had on Lyly.[4] Guevara wants, indeed, the quaint graceful fancy, and also the oddity of the English writer; but it is possible that his sententious antithetical style had some share in producing euphuism. Guevara is also worth notice as an early, though not the earliest, example of the pretentiousness and the tendency to wordy platitude which have been so fatal in Spanish literature. He had knowledge both of books and the world, and some command of sarcasm. These qualities were, however, swamped in the “flowing and watery vein” of his prose style. No writer ever carried the seesaw antithetical manner to a more provoking extent. To make one phrase balance another appears to have been his chief aim, and in order to achieve this end he repeated and amplified. In his own time, when whatever was at once sound as moralising, learned, and professedly too good for the vulgar was received with respect, Guevara had a wide popularity both in Spain and abroad. To-day he is almost unreadable, and for a reason which it is easy to make clear. It is known that La Fontaine took the subject of the Paysan du Danube from the Golden Epistles indirectly if not directly. Spaniards may be found to boast that there is nothing in the fable which is not in their countrymen. This is partly true, but it is stated in the wrong way. The accurate version is that there is nothing in Guevara’s prose which is not in La Fontaine’s verse, but that it is said in several hundred times as many words, and that the meaning (not in itself considerable) is smothered in tiresome digressions and amplifications.

The influence of the Inquisition.

A few words, and they need be very few, on the influence of the Inquisition seem not out of place in a history of any part of Spanish life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are even to be justified by the fact that its oppressive influence has been called on to account for the withering of the national will and intelligence, which dried up the very sources of literature. The prevalence of the destructive affectation called Góngorism has been excused by Mr Ticknor on the ground that men were driven back on mere playing with words because the Inquisition made thinking dangerous. But we are met at once by the problem of the Sufi pipkin. It is hard to tell which is potter and which is pot. Did the Spanish intellect wither because the Inquisition wrapped it in over-tight swaddling-clothes? or did the Spaniard first create and then submit to this repressive institution because he had little tendency to speculation? To judge by what went before and by what has come after the Inquisition, the second reading of the riddle is at least as plausible as the first. However that may be, it is difficult to see how the Inquisition is to be made responsible for the carelessness of form and the loquacious commonplace, which are the main defects of Spanish prose and verse, while it may fairly claim to have helped to preserve Spanish literature from one grave fault so visible in parts of our own. The Holy Office, which allowed Lope de Vega to write La Esclava de su Galan, would not have punished him for writing an As You Like It. Since it suffered Cervantes to create Don Quixote, it would not have burnt the author of a Novela de Pícaros, who had made his hero as real as Gil Blas. The Inquisition was no more responsible for the hasty writing of Lope than for his undue complacence towards the vices of his patron the Duke of Sessa. A literature which could produce La Vida es Sueño, El Condenado por Desconfiado, and the Mágico Prodigioso, had all the freedom necessary to say the profoundest things on man’s passions and nature in the noblest style. It was his own too great readiness to say “This will do,” and not the Inquisition, which prevented Tirso de Molina from making La Venganza de Tamar as perfect in form all through as it is in one scene. The Church had no quarrel with perfection of form. It had, indeed, a quarrel with mere grossness of expression, and would certainly have frowned on many so-called comic scenes of our own Elizabethan plays. This was a commendable fastidiousness of taste not peculiar to the Spanish Church. The Spaniard may not be always moral, but he has seldom been foul-mouthed. In this, as in other respects, the Church spoke for the nation; but it was the effective administrative instrument which could coerce an offending minority into decency—and that we may surely count to it for righteousness.

CHAPTER II.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS.

THE STARTING-POINT OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL—THE NATURAL INFLUENCE OF ITALY—PREVALENCE OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL—ITS ARISTOCRATIC SPIRIT—WHAT WAS IMITATED FROM THE ITALIANS—ITS TECHNIQUE AND MATTER—ARTIFICIALITY OF THE WORK OF THE SCHOOL—BOSCAN—GARCILASO—THEIR IMMEDIATE FOLLOWERS—THE SCHOOLS OF SALAMANCA AND SEVILLE—GÓNGORA AND GÓNGORISM—THE EPICS—THE ‘ARAUCANA’—THE ‘LUSIADS.’

The starting-point of the classic school.

Mr Ticknor has made the very just remark, that the manner of the introduction of the later Italian influence into Spanish poetry enables us to see for once in a way exactly, when and at whose instigation a literary revolution was begun. The story is told by the best possible authority, by Juan Boscan, who was one of the leaders of the movement, in the long letter to the Duchess of Soma, which is printed as a preface to the second book of the collected works of himself and his friend Garcilaso de la Vega, published at Barcelona in 1543.[5] En (to give him his native title) Juan Boscan Almogaver was a Catalan of a noble family and of good estate. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it probably fell in the last years of the fifteenth century. He died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he had gone in discharge of his duty as ayo, or tutor, to that formidable person the great Duke of Alva. The story has been often told, but must needs be repeated in every history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who had already written verse in the old forms of the previous century, was a cultivated gentleman who had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good knowledge of the language. This he afterwards turned to account in a translation of Castiglione’s Courtier, which was considered by the Spaniards as not inferior to the original, and had great popularity. In 1526 he attended the Court at Granada, and there met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian ambassador. Navagiero urged him to write “in the Italian manner.” Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his long ride back to Barcelona, and finally decided to act on it, though not without doubts, and not until he had been encouraged by a friend. This was the far more famous Garcia Laso de la Vega, whose names, according to a not uncommon custom, were combined into Garcilaso.[6] He was born in 1503 of a very ancient house of nobles of Toledo, and was killed by being hurled from a ladder while leading a storming-party at Frèjus in 1536. Little is known of their friendship, and indeed it would seem that they cannot have seen much of one another, for Boscan spent most of his life on his estate or at Court, whereas Garcilaso, who was first a page and then soldier to Charles V., lived, in common with all who followed “the conquering banners” of the emperor, on the march or on shipboard, from the Danube to Tunis.

The natural influence of Italy.

It would unquestionably be an error to conclude from the exact manner of its beginning that there would have been no Spanish imitation of Italian models if Boscan had not met Navagiero at Granada in 1526. Garcilaso, Diego de Mendoza, Gutierre de Cetina, and others, would no doubt have begun to write pastorals, epistles, and canzones “in the Italian manner” in any case. Allowing for the strength of the Italian influence of the day, the close kinship of the two languages, the frequent intercourse between the peoples, the ease with which Castilian could be run into a Tuscan mould, this was inevitable. Yet the story not only gives a curious incident in literary history, but it is characteristic of the classic poetry of Spain. Boscan we see took to playing with the foreign metres as a mere exercise of ingenuity, and as an amusement for his leisure. He implies that Garcilaso acted on the same motives as himself. With such a beginning there was an obvious danger that the Spaniards would work as mere pupils and produce only school exercises.

Prevalence of the classic school.

The ample following found by these two is itself a proof that Navagiero’s advice and Boscan’s docility were hardly necessary. It needed only an accident to provoke the literary activity of the Italianate Spaniards gathered round the emperor, in the Court of Rome, at Naples, and at home, where the “learned” men were all readers of Italian and of Latin. Greek was never much read in Spain, though a few of her scholars were good Hellenists. The ambition of the poets of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso is shown by their favourite epithet of praise—the word docto. The literal sense is “learned,” but educated expresses its true meaning more accurately. It did not necessarily imply much more than this, that the poet was familiar with Horace as well as with Sannazzaro and Ariosto, which, at a time when Latin was the language of education and diplomacy, and Italian was the language of society, hardly amounted to learning, in the full sense of the word. The seed fell on well-prepared soil. A quick and copious harvest sprang up, which for a time overshadowed all other forms of literary growth. The second half of the sixteenth century was the time of the learned poets of Spain. The school lasted, indeed, into the seventeenth century, but it had produced its best work before 1600.

Its aristocratic spirit.

The origin of this poetry would of itself lead us to expect to find it composed of imitators who produced more or less ingenious school exercises. Its works are extant to show that the expectation would be well founded. Again, we should expect to find that it was always much more of a society fashion than a manifestation of the real qualities of the Spaniard in literature, and here also experience will be found to confirm expectation. It was an aristocratic school, not perhaps quite so indifferent to appearing in print as some others have been, but still not uncommonly satisfied to leave its work in manuscript. These poets could afford to be indifferent to publication, since they did not thereby injure their fame in the only world to which they appealed. They were careless of the great unlearned public, whose tastes favoured the romances and the theatre. Manuscript copies sufficed for their own limited society. Luis de Leon, for instance, was the recognised chief of the Castilian learned poets in his lifetime, yet his works were not printed till they were brought out, forty years after his death, by Quevedo, in the idle hope of converting his countrymen from Góngorism by the sight of better examples, while Góngora was able to found a school of affectation by his influence, and yet his poems were not published during his lifetime. The learned poets did not expect to find readers among the vulgo, the common herd, of whose brutez, or bestial stupidity, they habitually spoke in a very high and mighty fashion. This attitude of superiority was not peculiar to the learned poets of Spain. It was habitual with the school of Ronsard, and indeed common to the whole Renaissance, which was emphatically scholarly and aristocratic. But though the pretensions of Spain’s learned poets were not different from those of the Italian, the Frenchman, or the Englishman, they were less fully justified. These very self-conscious “children of the Muses” were not so superior to the vulgar herd of writers of romances and coplas in poetic inspiration as to be entitled to look down upon them, on the strength of a certain mechanical dexterity acquired from foreigners by imitation.

What was imitated from the Italian.

The question what exactly it was that the innovators of the sixteenth century took from their Italian masters is easier to put than to answer. The mere imitation of Italian models was in itself no novelty. Cristobal de Castillejo denied the claim of the new school to originality in the writing of hendecasyllabics. They had, he said, already been written by Juan de Mena. So they had, and by Ausias March and other poets of the Catalan school also. The Marquess of Santillana had written sonnets on the Petrarchian model; the ottava rima and tercets were not unknown to the Court school of Castile or to the Catalans. The canzone had been written in Spain by imitators of the earlier Italian poetry. What then remained for the innovators to take? If we look at the names only, and the bare skeleton of the verse, little indeed; but when the manner of the execution is considered, a great deal. The Italian hendecasyllable, which the Spaniards allowed to be the original of their own line of eleven syllables, and of the line of ten with an accent on the final syllable, had become very monotonous in their hands. The cæsura fell with unvarying regularity after the fourth syllable. The innovators learnt to vary the pause, and thereby to give a new melody to the verse. It remained to them also to be more slavish in imitation than their predecessors had been. |Its technique and matter.| This slavishness was shown by the establishment of the endecasílabo piano, with the unaccented vowel termination as alone legitimate. Castilian abounds in vocablos agudos, in masculine rhymes, and was not under the same necessity as Italian to prefer the softer form. The Spanish poets were, we may suppose, influenced by the fact that the accented ending had become associated with comic verse among the Italians, and yet by submitting to a limitation which was not justified by the genius of their language, they began by impoverishing their poetic vocabulary, and they did it in pure unintelligent imitation. The restriction was not accepted without reluctance. Rengifo, who is the Spanish Puttenham[7]—the author, that is to say, of the standard work on the mechanism of verse written in Spain in the close of the sixteenth century—even puts in a plea for the verso agudo. He had good authorities to support him, for Garcilaso had dared to end a line with the word vestí. Boscan, who, however, is not accepted by the Spaniards as of unimpeachable authority, had been so left to himself as to end on nació, while Diego de Mendoza had done the evil thing “a thousand times.” According to the stop-watch of the new school this was wrong, and all three were duly pilloried for their offences in the Egemplar Poético—i.e., Ars Poetica—of Juan de la Cueva.[8]

Yet Juan de la Cueba or Cueva (the b and v, being very similar in Spanish pronunciation, were constantly written for one another before the spelling was fixed) was a man not unworthy of attention. His life is covered by the obscurity common to the men of letters of the time, and on the whole more dense in Spain than elsewhere. But we know that he lived in Seville during the latter half of the sixteenth century. His Egemplar Poético, though not considered as above reproach in form by Spanish critics, undoubtedly contains the orthodox poetic creed of the school, and is therefore of authority. Nothing is more striking or, when the future of poetry in the two countries is considered, more significant, than the contrast between the three verse epistles of Don Juan de la Cueva, and the Apologie for Poetrie of Sir Philip Sidney. The Egemplar is in tercets, and the Apologie in fresh youthful prose; but the work of the Englishman is all on fire with the very soul of poetic feeling, while the work of the Spaniard is a cold didactic treatise of the most mechanical kind. Sir Philip committed himself to the heresy that the essential of poetry is in the matter, the passion, and the intention, while the verse is an accident. Don Juan is spotlessly correct on the one point on which Sir Philip is heterodox. On the many on which our countryman goes to the root of the matter, the Sevillian is worse than wrong. He drops no single word to show that he thinks them worthy of consideration. A few general platitudes are to be found inculcating the wisdom of consulting your genius, the excellence of consistency and decency, the duty of despising the profanum vulgus, the folly of applying the metres and language proper to kings and great persons to the doings of common people. Then having cleared the way, he proceeds to the things really of necessity for a poet,—as that no cancion should contain more than fifteen stanzas; that a sestina is rhymed a b c, c b a, and that its lines ought to end in nouns and never in verbs; that three adjectives are more than enough for any substantive; that an agudo at the end of a hendecasyllable is the abomination of desolation; that the letter l is useful for sweetness; that r comes in with good effect “when violent Eurus opposes his rush with horrid fury to powerful Boreas”; and that s suits with soft sleep and savoury repose (“al blando sueño y al sabroso sosiego”), for he did not scorn alliteration’s artful aid.

It would be trivial to insist on the Egemplar Poético if the author had been an insignificant man, or if the bulk of Spanish classic poetry showed that he spoke only for himself. But Juan de la Cueva has an honourable place in the history of Spanish dramatic literature among the forerunners of Lope de Vega. When he comes to write upon the comedy he rises at once above the level of mechanism and commonplace. He ceases to be a mere schoolboy to the Italians, and roundly vindicates the right of his countrymen to reject the Senecan model, to be alive, Spanish, and original on the stage, in defiance of all the rules and all the doctors. The theatre was to imitate nature, and to please. Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic. That is the sum and substance of Juan de la Cueva’s teaching, and therein lies the explanation of the impassable gulf which separates the Spanish drama—a very genuine thing of its kind—from Spanish classic poetry—a school exercise, redeemed from time to time by a note of patriotism or of piety.

Artificiality of the work of the school.

When poetry is approached in this spirit its matter is likely to be as merely imitative as its form. Spanish classic poetry did not escape this fate, and there is only too much truth in the taunt of “sterile abundance” which has been thrown at it. We meet continually with the exasperating, nameless, characterless shadow of a lady whose “threads of gold” (which the rude vulgar call her hair) cruel hard tyrant Love has used to enchain the lamenting poet, whose sorrows just fill the correct number of stanzas. The pastoral raged. The same Tirsis and the same Chloe repeat many hundreds of times identical things in a landscape which has flowers but no flower, trees but no tree, and is withal most manifestly sham in arid, rocky Spain. Spanish critics have complained that their classic poets so seldom touched on the life of their time,—but that is a small matter. They have—piety and patriotism apart—little human reality of any kind. Love according to an Italian literary pattern, varied by platonism learnt from the Florentines, is the staple subject. Don Marcelino Menendez, the most learned of contemporary Spanish critics, has said, when controverting Ticknor’s theory that the Inquisition was accountable for the prevalence of Góngorism, that the real explanation of that disaster lies elsewhere. Europe, he says, was invaded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a sham middle age and a sham antiquity, which could end in nothing but verbal follies. One does not recognise the truth of this judgment in the case of France and England, but it has force as applied to Spain.

A general estimate of a school must always be difficult to justify except by a profusion of quotation, which is impossible here. We can do no more than leave it to be accepted or rejected by those who can control it by a knowledge of the original, and proceed to give such a sketch of the history of Spanish classic poetry as our limits allow.[9] It falls naturally under two heads—the Lyric and the Epic—and in both the presence of the Italian model is constant. The leading form in lyric poetry is the cancion in hendecasyllables with quebrados—that is, broken lines of seven syllables. But the Epístola in tercets, imitated from the capitolo of the Italians, is very common. The song proper is wholly absent. There is no “Come unto these yellow sands,” no voice of Ariel in Spanish poetry. The Spaniard does not sing; he chants.

Boscan.

Of the two chiefs of the school, Boscan ranks mainly by virtue of the example he set. He was somewhat harshly condemned by his follower, Herrera, for hanging jewels robbed from the classics and Italians on his own robe of frieze. The charge of plagiarism is not easily rebutted, for Boscan certainly took his goods where he found them in Virgil or Horace. As for the quality of his robe, it is undoubtedly of the nature of frieze. What strikes the reader most in Boscan is a certain worldly good sense, more like our own Queen Anne men than the poetry of a sixteenth-century school at its beginning. His most quoted piece, an Epístola addressed to Diego de Mendoza, is eminently rational prose disguised in verse, avowing a most heterodox affection for his wife (his whole tone to women is thoroughly modern), and a quite unpoetic liking for a good supper by a blazing fire of logs at the end of a day in the open air. But we note also the maturity of the language, in spite of a certain awkwardness due to the writer’s want of skill. |Garcilaso.| This same premature and fatal maturity is even more conspicuous in Garcilaso, who was more master of his pen. In the small body of his verse, and the one fragment which remains of his prose—a letter to his friend’s wife praising her good taste for enjoying the Courtier of Castiglione—there is hardly a word or phrase which has become antiquated. This classic poetry was born with an old head on young shoulders, and had no youth. His finished form earned and kept for Garcilaso the rank of Prince of Castilian poets. In the latter part of the century he was twice edited—once at Salamanca in 1577 by the Humanist, Francisco Sanchez, called, from the name of his native town, Las Brozas, el Brocense, and best known as the author of the Minerva; and then at Seville by Hernan de Herrera. The edition of Herrera has a commentary on a large scale, and is of considerable value for the history of Spanish poetry; but it set an example which was followed to an excess of tiresome pedantry by the editors of Góngora and Camoens. It led to a famous and not unamusing literary quarrel. The Castilian critics, who were banded in support of their own man, Sanchez, fell on Herrera with some justice for his inappropriate display of scholastic pedantry, and most unjustly for ignorance of Castilian. No Castilian will ever readily allow that an Andalusian (which Herrera was) speaks the language quite correctly. Of the matter of Garcilaso’s verse it may be said that it is pastoral, or gentlemanlike, and melancholy. The Spaniard finds, no doubt, a charm in the mere language, which of itself is enough; but even to him there may be suspected to be some tedium in this obvious determination to get a stool to be melancholy on. It is not the melancholy of Jorge Manrique, who is saddened by those eternal sorrows, death of kin and friends and the burden of life, but the melancholy of a gentleman who is imitating a model to pass the time in winter quarters. But the so-called Lira or ode, in lines of seven syllables mixed with hendecasyllabics, addressed “To the flower of Gnidus” is elegant. It is in stanzas of five lines, rhyming the first with the third, the second, fourth, and fifth together, and enforces the well-known lesson, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” for the instruction of a young lady at Naples who had not favoured the suit of one of the poet’s friends.

Their immediate followers.

Only a very full history of Spanish literature could afford to dwell on Ferdinand de Acuña (Ferdinand, Fernando, Fernan, and Hernan are all forms of the same name, employed according to taste or local usage), who was a Portuguese noble in the service of Charles V., a soldier of distinction, a writer of Castilian verse, and a copious translator from the classics; or Gutierre de Cetina, a soldier best known by a graceful madrigal;[10] or many others whom it would be a barren display to name; but Diego Hurtado de Mendoza is too strong a man to be passed in a crowd. He is chiefly famous as a man of action—as a soldier who governed Siena for Charles V., and a diplomatist who represented the emperor in a very military fashion at the Council of Trent. In literature he ranks chiefly as the undoubted author of a history of the revolt of the Moriscoes, and as the possible, though doubtful, author of the Lazarillo de Tormes. Diego de Mendoza (1503-1575) was a younger son of the Count of Tendilla, head of one of the many titled branches of his famous house—the Douglases of Spain. He was the direct descendant of the Marquess of Santillana, and through him of that Lord of Butrago who sacrificed his life for the king at the battle of Aljubarrota.[11] His poetry was the relaxation of a great noble who broke through the rules in a fashion well calculated to horrify such critics as Juan de la Cueva. But Don Diego had fire enough in him to burn up a wilderness of correct poets of that order. Sometimes it flamed out with little regard to decency. But in happier moments—as, for instance, in the ode to Cardinal Espinosa—he could strike that note of a haughty, or even arrogant patriotism, which is the finest in Spanish poetry. Even in his case we have examples of the same premature maturity noted in Boscan. One of his epistles addressed to this very writer begins by the Horatian “Nil admirari”—an excellent maxim, perhaps, but chilling in the first youth of a poetry. Mendoza wrote not only in the Tuscan, but the native metres, couplets, and glosas. The glosa is a favourite exercise of verse-making ingenuity with the Spaniard. It consists in taking any stanza of whatever number of lines, and building on it a poem of the same number of stanzas as there are lines. Each must end in one of the lines of the foundation stanza taken in their order. They must be brought in without violence, and the whole must be a variation on the theme of the stanza quoted. Diego de Mendoza outlived Charles V., and spent his last years in exile at Granada, incurred by a too great promptitude in resenting impertinence within the precincts of the Court.

The two schools of Salamanca and Seville.

It has been the custom to divide the poets of Spain into the Castilian and the Andalusian, or those of Salamanca and those of Seville. The division is somewhat arbitrary, and corresponds to very little distinction in tone, method, or language among the writers, or at least so it seems to a foreigner who compares Luis de Leon with Hernan de Herrera, though the first is counted as the chief of the school of Salamanca, and the second as the chief of the school of Seville. Both wrote the same fine Castilian, both were good scholars, and there was the same intense religious feeling, the same high patriotism, in both. Luis Ponce de Leon (1528-1591), as if to show how artificial this distinction is, was born at Granada, which is one of the sub-kingdoms of Andalusia.[12] He was an Augustine friar, and occupied two important chairs in succession at Salamanca. Between 1572 and 1576 he was imprisoned by the Inquisition. The charge made against him was that he had translated the Song of Solomon, which, at a time when the Reformers were making an active use of the Bible in the vernacular tongues against the Church, was a serious offence. The leader of the attack on him was the Dominican Melchior Cano, of whose De Locis Theologicis Dr Johnson wrote, “Nec admiror, nec multum laudo.” It is a well-known story of Luis de Leon that when the verdict of the Holy Office was given in his favour, and he was allowed to resume his lectures, he began where he had left off, and with the words, “As we were saying yesterday, gentlemen.” His poetry may be divided into that part which is inspired by Horace, and that which is inspired by the Bible. It is perhaps only natural that he should appear to more advantage when he is paraphrasing the description of a perfect wife from the Proverbs of Solomon than when he is endeavouring to adapt the lira of Garcilaso to some theme obviously taken because it bore a certain resemblance to the subject of one of the odes of Horace. These imitations of the classic models were not confined to the graver and more reflective parts of his originals. Luis de Leon, though a churchman of undoubted piety, wrote amatory poems. The coplas in the old Spanish metres called A una Desdeñosa—to a scornful lady—are on exactly the same subject as the already named Flor de Gnido of Garcilaso. Whether he was following the classics and learned poets of his own country, or paraphrasing the Psalms, Luis de Leon was always a master of the very purest Castilian; while his reflective poems—the Noche Serena, for instance, or the ode which imitates the Beatus Ille of Horace—are something more than mere exercises of ingenuity. It was his reputation as a stylist which secured the publication of his poems forty years after his death. Luis de Leon himself seems to have considered them only as amusements for his leisure. But in 1631 Quevedo brought out the first edition, in order to counteract the growing taste for Góngorism.

The poet who has the honour to rank as a stylist among the Spaniards, next to, if not on an equality with Garcilaso, is Hernan de Herrera of Seville (1534-1597), a churchman of whose life almost nothing is known with certainty.[13] As usual, he published little during his life, and much of his manuscript was lost by an accident after his death. The remainder was published by his friend the painter Pacheco in 1619. Spaniards, if asked to name the pieces of verse in their language which display the greatest measure of force and dignity, would certainly quote the famous odes on the battles of Lepanto and Alcázar el-Quebir, together with the sonnet in honour of Don John of Austria. The vigour of these verses is unquestionable, and if it cannot be claimed for them that they display any great originality of form, they are animated by a fine spirit of patriotism. Herrera, too, had a sense of the merits of compression, which is not common with his countrymen. He worked at the language in an artistic spirit.

Once more, as in the case of the immediate followers of Garcilaso, we must pass over the names of all but the chiefs very lightly.[14] The Aragonese brothers Lupercio and Bartolomé de Argensola, who may be classed among the poets of Castile; Francisco de Figueroa, who spent nearly all his life in Italy; Rioja, the poet of flowers, and the author of a moral poem on the Ruins of Italica (a Roman colony near Seville), inspired by Joachim du Bellay; Arguijo, and many others, must be passed over in silence. It is proper to note, however, that whatever anybody else was doing at this time, Lope de Vega did in as great quantities as men who did nothing else. But there will be occasion to speak of Lope elsewhere. For the present he must make room for the writer whom some have claimed as the most genuine lyric poet of Spain, and who bears the discredit of having flooded the literature of his country with a ruinous affectation.

Góngora and Góngorism.

Don Luis de Argote y Góngora, who habitually used the second of these names, which was his mother’s, was a Cordovese, born in 1561.[15] He was educated at Salamanca, followed the Court for some years, and was attached to the Duke of Lerma. He took orders, and received a benefice when advanced in life, and died in his native city in 1627. His evil fame, based on the invention of the particular form of bad literature called after him Góngorism, is greater than his good, which yet has some foundation. His romances on stories of captives among Barbary pirates, and of wars on the frontiers, are among the best of their kind. Among his earlier poems on the Tuscan models there are some which possess the lyric cry with a degree of intensity very rare among the Spaniards. The third cancion, for instance, contains a singularly passionate and admirably worded variation, on the theme of Shakespeare’s forty-fourth sonnet, “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought.” But it was not for this, the work of his earlier years, that the reputation of Góngora has been spread over the world, but because he, to steal an image from Carlyle, swings in chains on the side of Parnassus, as the inventor of “El Culteranismo” or “Góngorism.” At some period in his life he began to write in this style. Hostile critics say he did so because he could not attract sufficient attention by writing with sanity. Admirers have asserted that he had a literary ambition to improve the poetic language of Spain, to make it, in fact, more culto—more cultivated. The question what exactly Góngorism was, will be best answered by an example. Here, for instance, is a passage from the Pyramus and Thisbe, a short poem, published in 1636 by his admirer Cristobal de Salazar Mardones, with a wordy commentary of incredible pomposity, and futility. The English translation is put below the Spanish on the Hamiltonian system, and the reader is begged to observe that the inversions and transpositions are only a little more violent in English than in Spanish:—

Piramo fueron y Tisbe,

Pyramus they were and Tisbe,

Los que en verso hizo culto

Those who in verse made[16] polished

El Licenciado Nason

The Licentiate Naso

Bien romo ó bien narigudo

Maybe snub, maybe beak

Dejar el dulce candor

To leave the sweet white

Lastimosamente obscuro

Lamentably dark

Al que, túmulo de seda,

Of that which, tomb of silk,

Fue de los dos casquilucios

Was of the two feather-heads

Moral que los hospedó

Mulberry which gave them shelter

Y fue condenando al punto

And was condemned at once

Si del Tigris no en raizes

If by the Tigris not in root

De los amantes en frutos.

By the lovers in fruit.

Don Cristobal de Salazar Mardones explains in prose, and with copious references to Ovid, Meta., lib. iv., that what this means is that the mulberry-tree was not torn up by the roots as a punishment by the Tigris, but was coloured by the blood of the lovers. The reader will see at once that this is puerile nonsense, and that it is a mere trick. It is also a very old trick. When Thiodolf of Hvin, whose verse riddles adorn the Heimskringla, wrote of a certain king—

“Now hath befallen

In Frodi’s house

The word of fate

To fall on Fiolnir;

That the windless wave

Of the wild bull’s spears

That lord should do

To death by drowning,”—

he was writing in “góngorina especie”—that is, in what was to be the manner of Góngora. The whole secret lay, as Lope de Vega, indeed, pointed out, in never calling anything by its right name, and in transposing words violently. Given a great deal of bad taste, and a puerile mania for making people stare, and the thing is easily accounted for. In such conditions it may be thought clever to call mead which men drink out of horns “the windless wave of the wild bull’s spear,” or to describe a mulberry-tree as a tumulus of silk, though the mistake was incomparably more excusable in Thiodolf of Hvin than in Góngora, and the Norseman seems on the whole to have been the least silly of the two. The comparison which has been made between Góngorism and our own metaphysical school is too favourable to the Spaniards, in whom there was absolutely nothing but juggling with words.

This folly spread as rapidly as the imitation of Italian models had done. It was in vain that Lope argued against it for common-sense. He was himself conquered. Quevedo,[17] who attacked it, was driven to worse straits, for he endeavoured to resist it by means of another affectation, the conceptista, or conceited style, which is more like our “metaphysical” manner, but never had the popularity of Góngorism. The founder of this school of affectation was Alonso de Ledesma of Segovia (1552-1623). The poems which Quevedo published under the name of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre were meant to reinforce Luis de Leon, and were free from either kind of fault; but the learned poetry of Spain had not vitality enough to throw off the disease. Góngorism became the literary taste of the day, and was soon traceable everywhere.

The Epics.

The great mass of epics, or so-called epics,[18] which form the non-lyric side of the learned poetry of Spain, belong with rare exceptions, if not with only one exception, to the domains of bibliography and curiosity. I have to confess that I do not speak with any personal knowledge of the Carolea of Hierónimo Sempere, published in 1560, or many others, and with only a slight acquaintance with the Carlo Famoso of Don Luis de Zapata. This second poem, published in 1565, is in 50 cantos, and contains 40,000 verses. The subject is the history of the Emperor Charles V., and it may stand here as a specimen of the whole class to which it belongs. The Carlo Famoso is essentially prose, disguised in such ottava rima stanzas as any one who had once acquired the trick could probably write as easily as prose pure and simple. If Don Luis de Zapata, who had served the emperor, had been content to tell us of what he saw in prose, he would probably have left a readable, and perhaps a valuable, book. But, unfortunately, he felt called upon to build the lofty rhyme, in imitation of Ariosto, and this brought with it the necessity for supernatural machinery, which the Don Luis de Zapatas of all countries are very ill qualified to handle. The ease with which verses of a kind are written in Spanish, the influence of a fashionable model, and the prestige attaching to the writing of verse, led to the production of innumerable volumes on historical subjects of what would fain have been poetry if it could. Some of this mass of writing is not without merit, the Elegies of Famous Men of the Indies—Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias—of Juan de Castellanos[19] is readable enough, and has some historical value. Juan de Castellanos, whose dates of birth and death are unknown, was an old soldier turned priest, who in common with many others could in a fashion write ottava rima stanza. He seems to have thought that “Elegy” meant much the same thing as “Eulogy,” and his Elegias are, in fact, a history of the conquest of America by the Spaniards, carried down to 1588. It is only a fragment, but even so, it fills a crown octavo volume of 563 pages in double columns. Of course there are by the side of work of this kind imitations of the Italian epic serious or humorous, which have no pretensions to a historical character. Here it was only to be expected that Lope de Vega would be among the most fluent and the most conspicuous, for it may be repeated that he tried his hand at whatever others were doing. The epics in the Italian form being popular, he wrote several; and as he had an unparallelled command of facile verse which always stopped short of becoming bad, he is never unreadable, though, as he was also only a very superior improvisatore, his poems never quite compel reading. The subject of the Dragontea—the last cruise and death of Sir Francis Drake in 1594—is so much more attractive to an Englishman than the Angelicas and Jerusalem Conquistadas, taken from Ariosto and Tasso, that one is perhaps prejudiced in its favour. And yet it seems to me to have a certain vitality not present in the rest, and to be by no means inferior to them in other respects.[20]

The Araucana.

The partiality of his countrymen and the too good-natured acquiescence of foreigners have given the name of epic to the Araucana of Alonso de Ercilla.[21] The author was a very typical Spaniard of his century. He was born in 1533, and came to England as page to Philip of Spain at the time of his marriage with Mary Tudor. It was from England that he sailed to Chili for the purpose of helping in the suppression of the revolt of the Araucans, which, became the subject of his poem. While on service he was condemned to death for drawing his sword on a brother officer. The sentence was remitted, but Ercilla resented it so bitterly that he entirely omitted the name of his general, the Marquis of Cañete, in his poem. He returned to Spain in 1565, and passed the remainder of his life, until his end in 1595, partly in endeavouring to secure a reward from the king for his services, and partly in compiling his great Araucana. It appeared in three parts in 1569, 1575, and 1590. The story told by himself, that he wrote it on pieces of leather and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies, therefore, only to the first part. It is only by a figure of speech that the Araucana can be described as an epic. Ercilla said that he found courage to print it because it was a true history of wars he had seen for himself. The first part is almost wholly occupied with the skirmishes of the Araucan war. In the later parts he was tempted to provide a proper epic machinery, but the change is only a proof of the tyranny of a fashion. Ercilla was a good handicraftsman of ottava rima stanzas, he wrote very fine Castilian, and his poem has unquestionable vitality. Yet it is, after all, hybrid. At its best it is a superior version of the Varones Ilustres of Castellanos, at its weakest an echo of the Italians. The literature of the world would have been richer, not poorer, if Ercilla had written memoirs on the model of his French contemporary Monluc.

The Italian influence which produced the learned poetry of Spain had its effect on Portugal also. The Portuguese remember Francisco de Sa de Miranda (1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their language for literary purposes, and the work was continued by Antonio Ferreira and Pedro de Andrade Caminha, his younger contemporaries and followers. My own knowledge of these writers is small, but as far as it goes it leads me to believe that Southey’s sound literary judgment had as usual led him right when he said that, “They rendered essential service to the language of their country, and upon that their claims to remembrance must rest.”[22] They are interesting in fact as examples of a general literary movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all Western Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have naturally not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having no modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union of Spain and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that Portuguese would have shared the fate of Catalan. It would not have ceased to be spoken, but it would no longer have been the language of government and literature. Even as it was, Castilian had in Portugal something of the pre-eminence which mediæval French had had among neighbouring peoples. Portuguese who wrote their own tongue also wrote Castilian—even Camoens is in the list of those who used both languages. But the unity of the Peninsula was destined never to be completed, and Portuguese has escaped falling into the position of a dialect. Before the close of the sixteenth century it was illustrated by a poem which has at any rate “a world-wide reputation.”

The Lusiads.

It becomes the critic and historian of literature to approach works of great fame, which he cannot himself regard with a high degree of admiration, in a spirit of diffidence, or even of humility. I have to confess my own inability to feel the admiration other, and no doubt better, judges have felt for the Lusiads.[23] The pathetic circumstances of the life of the author, Luiz da Camoens (1524?-1580), are well known, and have perhaps served to prejudice the reader in favour of the poem. He was a Portuguese gentleman who served in the East Indies, who was ruined by shipwreck, and who ended his life in extreme misery in Lisbon. The foundation of the Lusiads is supplied by the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope; but Camoens has worked in a great deal from Portuguese history, and the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator. The matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion which has been claimed for the Lusiads is not great in a writer who had Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a coherent narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied—and no one need wish to deny—that Camoens wrote his own language with great purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more than bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He has a real tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his patriotism is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the best are fitter for the lyric than the scope of the epic, the Lusiads suffer from the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both in language and thought. The supernatural machinery is an example of childish imitation. Camoens has introduced the heathen mythology together with the sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese poet had many precedents for the combination, but he is not strong enough to make us endure its essential absurdity. The Lusiads has, in fact, the defect of all the learned poetry of the Peninsula—that it is very much of a school exercise. He saw his heathen gods and goddesses in Virgil, and transferred them bodily to his own Christian poem, not because they had any fit place there, but because they were ordered to be provided in the “receipt for making an epic poem.”[24]

The reader who compares the Lusiads, not with the Faërie Queen, which belongs to a very different mansion in the house of literature, but with the masterpieces of the class to which it really belongs, the purely literary epic, done by an accomplished writer according to rule, is, it may be, liable to be rendered impatient by the loud calls made on him for extreme admiration. He finds stanza following stanza of smooth, but somewhat nerveless, ottava rima, full of matter which might equally well be expressed in prose, and would not then appear to differ essentially from much of Hakluyt’s voyages. Now and then he will find incidents—the vision of the Spirit of the Cape, for example, and the episode of the island of Love—where the intention to be poetical is visible enough, but which do not come of necessity, and have no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is, and that is what is most truly poetical and genuine in Camoens. And of that again there are better and more spontaneous examples in his sonnets. On the whole, one has to come to the conclusion that he was a real poet, though of no wide scope, who could express a certain tenderness and melancholy in forms he had learnt from the Italians, but who owes his great name mainly to the fact that he is the only man his country can quote as worthy to rank with the great poets of the world. Therefore he has a whole nation to sing his praise, and nobody is concerned to contradict.[25]

CHAPTER III.
THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.

THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA—THE FIRST BEGINNINGS OF THE RELIGIOUS PLAYS—THE STARTING-POINT OF THE SECULAR PLAY—BARTOLOMÉ DE TORRES NAHARRO—LOPE DE RUEDA—LOPE DE VEGA’S LIFE—HIS INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA—THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORK—CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE—CALDERON—CALDERON’S SCHOOL.

The national character of the Spanish drama.

The dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own, purely national. The classic stage had no influence on it whatever; the contemporary theatre of Italy very little, and only for a brief period in the earlier years. There were in Spain translators both of the Greek and Latin dramatic literature, while her scholars were no less ready than others to impress on the world the duty of following the famous rules of Aristotle. But neither the beauty of the classic models, nor the lessons of scholars, nor even the authority of Aristotle—though it was certainly not less regarded in the last country which clung to the scholastic philosophy than elsewhere—had any effect. It would be too much to say that they were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic writers were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them with profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known passage of Don Quixote, reproaches his countrymen for their neglect of the three unities; and Lope de Vega, who more than any other man helped to fix the Spanish comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and place, and its habitual contempt for the rules that the comic and tragic should never be mingled in one piece, or that great personages should never be brought on except with a due regard to their dignity, avowed that he saw what was right, and confessed its excellence. He even boasted that he had written no less than six orthodox plays. But Cervantes, in the little he wrote for the stage, never made his practice even approach his precept, while nobody has ever been able to find of which of his plays Lope was speaking when he said that he had observed the unities. It has even been supposed that when he made the boast, he was laughing at the gentlemen to whom he addressed his Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias (New Art of Writing Comedies). Not a little ingenuity has been wasted in attempts to discover what both meant. The good sense of Don Marcelino Menendez[26] has found by far the most acceptable explanation of the mystery, and it is this,—that Cervantes, Lope, and their contemporaries had a quite sincere theoretical admiration for the precepts of Aristotle, or what were taken to be such by the commentators, but that in practice they obeyed their own impulses, and the popular will, though not without a certain shamefaced consciousness that it was rather wicked in them. Spanish dramatists, in fact, treated the orthodox literary doctrine very much as the ancient Cortes of Castile were wont to treat the unconstitutional orders of kings,—they voted that these injunctions were to be obeyed and not executed—“obedicidas y no cumplidas,” thereby reconciling independence with a respectful attitude towards authority. Some were bold enough to say from the first that the end of comedy was to imitate life, and that their imitation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally became as fully established in theory as it always had been in practice. Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the slavishness of Spanish learned poetry and the vigorous independence of the native stage.

The first beginnings of the religious plays.

There was little in the mediæval literature of Spain to give promise of its drama of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. Spaniards had mysteries, and they dramatised the lessons of the Church as other nations did; but they had less of this than most of their neighbours, and very much less than the French. In the earlier years of the sixteenth century there was a perceptible French influence at work in Spain.[27] The San Martinho of Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who wrote both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is a moral play like many in mediæval French literature. It is on the well-known story of Saint Martin and the beggar, is written in flowing verse, and breaks off abruptly with a note that the performers must end with psalms, for he had been asked to write very late, and had no time to finish. The Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja, which, from a reference to the spread of the Lutheran heresy, seems to belong to the years about 1520, betrays a French model by its very title. Farce had not the meaning it acquired later. The personages are Labour, Peralforja, his son, Teresa Jugon, Peralforja’s sweetheart, the Church, and Holy Writ. The subjects are the foolish leniency of Labour to his son, and its deplorable effects (a favourite theme with French writers of farses and moralities), the sorrows of the Church, who is consoled by Holy Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his weakness, and induce Peralforja to amend his ways. There is nothing here particularly Spanish—nothing which might not be direct translation from the French. The religious play was destined to have a history of its own in Spain; but its earlier stage is marked by little national character. Even the Oveja Perdida (the Lost Sheep), written, or at least revised and recast, by Juan de Timoneda about 1570, which long remained a stock piece with the strolling players, is a morality on the universal mediæval model. The Lost Sheep is of course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite, and rescued by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other characters are Saint Peter, the Archangel Michael, and the Guardian Angel. Except that it has an elaborate introduction, divided between an Introit to Ribera, the Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, before whom it was played, and an Introit to the people, it does not differ from the San Martinho or the Farsa Sacramental de Peralforja.

The starting-point of the secular play.

It has been customary to treat the Celestina as the foundation, or at least an important part of the foundations, of the Spanish secular drama. This curious story in dialogue is indeed called a “tragi-comedy,” and it most unquestionably proves that its author, or authors, possessed the command of a prose style admirably adapted for the purposes of comedy. But the Spanish is a poetic, not a prose drama. The qualities which redeem the somewhat commonplace love-story of Calisto and Melibœa, and the tiresome pedantry of much of the Celestina, its realism, and its vivacious representation of low life and character, are seldom found on the Spanish stage. We shall do better to look for the starting-point of the comedy of Lope de Vega in the Eclogas of Juan del Encina, who has been already mentioned as one of the last lights of the troubadour school.[28] The model here is obviously the little religious play of the stamp of Vicente’s San Martinho, modified by imitation of the classic Eclogue. The personages, generally shepherds, are few, the action of the simplest, and the verse somewhat infantile, though not without charm. Yet the mere fact that we have in them examples of an attempt to make characters and subjects, other than religious, matter of dramatic representation, shows that they were an innovation and a beginning. Juan del Encina, who was attached in some capacity to the Duke of Alva of his time, wrote these Eclogues to be repeated for the amusement of his patrons by their servants. It does not appear that they were played in the market-place, or were very popular. During the first half of the sixteenth century the Church endeavoured to repress the secular play. The struggle was useless, for the bent of the nation was too strong to be resisted. It conquered the Church, which, before the end of the century, found itself unable to prevent the performance of very mundane dramas within the walls of religious houses. Yet for a time the Inquisition was able to repress the growth of a non-religious drama at home. The working of the national passion for the stage, and for something other than pious farsas, is shown in the Josefina[29] of Micael de Carvajal. This long-forgotten work, by an author of whom nearly nothing is really known, was performed apparently for, and by, ecclesiastics at Valencia about 1520. It is on the subject of Joseph and his Brethren, is a religious play, but has divisions, and a machinery obviously adapted from the Latin, if not the Greek model. There are four acts, a herald who delivers a prologue to the first, second, and third, a chorus of maidens at the end of each. The dialogue has life, and there is a not unsuccessful attempt at characterisation in the parts of the brothers and of Potiphar’s wife. At the close comes the villancico, a simple form of song hovering towards being a hymn, which was obligatory at the close of the religious play. The Josefina had no progeny, and is to-day mainly interesting as an indication of the struggle of the national genius to find its true path. We cannot say even that of the few direct imitations of the classic form produced by the Spaniards. Such works as the Nise Lastimosa—the Pitiable Agnes—a strictly Senecan play on the story of Ines de Castro, first written in Portuguese by Ferreira, and then adapted into Castilian by Gerónimo Bermudez, a learned churchman, and printed in 1577, are simply literary exercises. They show that the influences which inspired Jodelle, and Garnier in France, were not unfelt in Spain; but there, as in England, the national genius would have none of them. In Bermudez himself the imitation of Seneca was forced. The Nise Lastimosa has a continuation called the Nise Laureada. The first, which ends with the murder of Agnes, is correct; but in the second, which has for subject the vengeance of the king, he throws aside the uncongenial apparatus of messenger and chorus, and plunges into horrors, to which the story certainly lent itself, with the zest of his contemporary Cristobal de Virues, or our own Kyd.

Bartolomé de Torres Naharro.

The true successors of Juan del Encina were to be found during the reign of Charles V. in the Spanish colony at Rome. The Spanish proverb has it that the Devil stands behind the cross—“tras la cruz está el diablo”—and the Spaniards who lived under the shadow of the papal Court enjoyed a licence which they would have missed under the eye of the Inquisition. One of them, Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, who lived and wrote in the early years of the century, is sometimes counted the father of the Spanish stage. He was the author of a number of comedies, published in Seville in 1520 under the title of Propaladia, which deal with the favourite subjects of comedy, love intrigues, and the tricks of lovers, rufianes—i.e., bullies—soldiers in and out of service, and so forth, types which he had many chances of observing at Rome when all Italy was swarming with Spanish bisoños, the wandering fighting men who were mercenaries when any prince would employ them, and vagabonds at other times. Naharro had considerable vis comica, and a command of telling fluent verse. His personages have life, and if his plays have touches of obscenity, which is not common in Spain, and brutality, which is less rare, his time must be taken into account. But Naharro, though a genuine Spaniard, lived too near the Italians not to be influenced by Machiavelli and Ariosto. His plays mark only a short step forward to the fully developed comedy of Lope. The Propaladia was soon suppressed by the Inquisition, not because it contained heresy, but for a freedom of language in regard to ecclesiastical vices which would have passed unrebuked in the previous century, but had become of very bad example after the Reformation had developed into a formidable attack on the Church. The form of his comedy was not that finally adopted by the Spaniards. It was in five acts, with the introito or prologue.

Lope de Rueda.

A truly popular national drama was hardly likely to arise among courtiers and churchmen. It needed a chief who looked to the common audience as his patron, and who also had it in him to begin the work on lines which literature could afterwards develop, Spain found such a leader in Lope de Rueda (floruit 1544?-1567?). Little is known of his life, but that little is more than is known with certainty of some contemporary men of letters. He was a native of Seville, and originally a goldbeater by trade. It may be that he acquired his taste for the stage by taking part in the performance of religious plays, which were always acted by townsmen or churchmen. The separation of the actor from the amateur, if that is the right word to apply to the burghers and peasants of the Middle Ages who appeared on the stage partly for amusement and partly from piety, on the one hand, and from the mere juggler, minstrel, or acrobat on the other, was going on in France and England. The same process was at work in Spain. By steps of which we can now learn nothing, Lope de Rueda became in the fullest sense a playwright and actor-manager. He strolled all over Spain. Cervantes, who had seen him, has immortalised his simple theatre—the few boards which formed the stage, the blanket which did duty as scenery, and behind which sat the guitar-player who represented the orchestra, the bags containing the sheepskin jackets and false beards forming the wardrobe of the company. The purely literary importance of Lope de Rueda’s work is not great. That part of it which survived is inconsiderable in bulk, and shows no advance on Naharro. He was not an ignorant man. The Italian plays were certainly known to him, and he wrote pure Castilian. But his chief contribution to the form of Spanish dramatic literature was the paso or passage, a brief interlude, generally between “fools” or “clowns” in the Shakespearian sense, frequently introduced between the acts of a regular comedy. The monologue of Lance over his dog, or the scene between Speed and Lance with the love-letter, in the third act of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, would serve as pasos. But Lope de Rueda’s chief claim to honour is that he fairly conquered for the Spanish stage its place in the sun. He hung on no patron, but set his boards up in the market-place, looking to his audience for his reward. When he died, in or about 1567, the theatre was a recognised part of Spanish life. If he had not much enriched dramatic literature, he had provided those who could with a place in which they were free to grow to the extent of their intrinsic power. It is pleasant to know that he had his reward. He seems to have been a prosperous man, and Cervantes speaks with respect of his character. The fact that he was buried in the Cathedral of Córdova is a proof that he was not considered a mere “rogue and vagabond,” but had at least as good a position as an English actor who was the queen’s or the admiral’s “servant.” As Lope de Rueda was nobody’s servant, we may fairly draw the deduction that the Spanish stage had a more independent position than our own.

The followers of Lope de Rueda.

The school of Lope de Rueda, as they may be called with some exaggeration, must be allowed to pass under his name. The most memorable of them was Juan de Timoneda, already named as the author, or adapter, of the Oveja Perdida. He was a bookseller of Valencia, who died at a great age, but at some uncertain date, in the reign of Philip II. Juan de Timoneda published all that were published of the plays of Lope de Rueda, and in his capacity of bookseller-publisher was no doubt helpful to literature. But as a man of letters he was mainly an adapter, and his plays are echoes of Naharro and Rueda, or were conveyed from Ariosto. The sap was now rising, and the tree began to bear fruit in more than one branch. Spain as it then was, and as it long remained, was rather a confederation of states than a state. There was no capital in the proper sense of the word. Charles V. had never rested, and had spent much of his life out of Spain. Philip II. did indeed fix his Court at Madrid, or in the neighbourhood, but it was not until the close of his life that the society of a capital began to form about him. In the earlier years of his reign the capitals of the ancient kingdoms were still centres of social, intellectual, and artistic activity, nor did they fall wholly to the level of provincial towns while any energy remained in Spain. Thus as the taste for the stage and for dramatic literature grew, it was to be expected that its effects would be seen in independent production in different parts of the Peninsula. |The dramatists of Seville and Valencia.| The writers who carried on the work of Lope de Rueda, and who prepared the way for Lope de Vega, were not “wits of the Court,” or about the Court. They were to be found at Seville and Valencia. Juan de la Cueva, the author of the Egemplar Poético, was a native of the capital of Andalusia. To him belongs the honour of first drawing on the native romances for subjects, as in his Cerco de Zamora—‘Siege of Zamora’—a passage of the Cid legend, and of first indicating, if not exactly outlining, the genuine Comedia de Capa y Espada in El Infamador—‘The Calumniator.’ In Valencia Cristobal de Virues (1550- ——?) wrote plays less national in subject but more in manner. He did once join the well-meaning but mistaken band which was endeavouring to bind the Spanish stage in the chains of the Senecan tragedy; but, as a rule, he wrote wild romantic plays, abounding in slaughter, under classic names. This was an effort which could not well lead anywhere to good, but at least it testifies to the vitality of the interest felt in the stage; and Valencia has this claim to a share in the development of the Spanish drama, that for a short time it sheltered, encouraged, and may have helped to determine, the course of the Phœnix of wits, the Wonder of Nature, the fertile among all the most fertile, the once renowned, the then unjustly depreciated, but the ever-memorable Lope de Vega.

If a writer is to be judged by his native force, his originality, the abundance of his work, the effect he produced on the literature of his country, and his fame in his own time, then Lope, to give him the name by which he was and is best known to his countrymen, must stand at the head of all Spain’s men of letters.[30]

If it is a rule admitting of no exception that the critic or historian of literature should have read all his author, then I at least must confess my incapacity to speak of this famous writer. Yet, encouraged by a firm conviction that there never lived nor does live, or at any future period will live, anybody who has achieved or will achieve this feat, being, moreover, persuaded, for reasons to be given, that it is not necessary to be achieved, I venture to go on.

Lope de Vega’s life.

Lope Felix de Vega Carpio came of a family which originally belonged to the “mountain,” the hill country of northern and north-western Spain, which never submitted to the Moor. His father was “hidalgo de ejucatoria,”—that is, noble by creation,—but his mother was of an old family, and both came from the valley of Carriedo in Asturias. He was born at Madrid on 25th November 1562. His life is known with exceptional fulness, partly because many passages of his works are avowedly biographical, partly because a number of his letters, addressed to his patron in later years, the Duke of Sessa, have been preserved. It would be better for Lope’s reputation if he had been more reticent, or his patron more careless. As it is, we know not only that he passed a stormy youth, but that in his later years he was an unchaste priest. His father died when he was very young, and he was left to the care of an uncle, the Inquisitor Don Miguel de Carpio. The Jesuits had the honour of educating him, among the many famous men trained in their schools. It is recorded by his biographers, and we can believe it, that he was very precocious. At five he could read Latin, and had already begun to write verses. After running away in a boyish escapade, he was attached as page to Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Ávila, who sent him to the University of Alcalá de Henares, the native town of Cervantes. From the account given of his youth in the excellently written dialogue story Dorotea, he appears to have been a mercenary lover, even according to the not very delicate standard of his time. His adventures were unsavoury, and not worth repeating. It is enough that, both before he took orders and in later life when he was tonsured and had taken the full vows, he presented a combination, not unknown at any time or in any race, but especially common on both sides in the seventeenth century, of intensity of faith with the most complete moral laxity. He alternated between penance and relapses. After leaving Alcalá he was for a time attached to the Duke of Alva, the grandson of the renowned governor of the Low Countries. For him he wrote the pastoral Arcadia, which deals with the duke’s amours. He married, but marriage produced no effect on his habits. He was exiled to Valencia for two years, in consequence of obscure troubles arising, he says, from “jealousy.” Shortly after his return to Madrid his wife died, but he continued to give cause for “jealousy,” and other troubles sent him off to join the Armada. From that campaign of failure and suffering he had the good fortune to return in safety, and he bore it so well that he wrote at least a great part of a long continuation of Ariosto, called The Beauty of Angelica, during the voyage. After his return to Madrid in 1590 he was again married, and again marriage made little difference. In 1609 he became a priest. During his later years he was attached, not apparently as a servant but as a patronised friend, to Don Pedro Fernandez de Córdova, first Marquess Priego, and then Duke of Sessa,—a very dissolute gentleman of literary tastes, belonging to the famous house which had produced the Great Captain, Gonsalvo de Córdova. He died at the age of seventy-three in 1635.

His influence on the drama.

A poet who could venture on so great an enterprise as a continuation of Ariosto amid all the distractions of the Armada cannot have wanted for confidence in himself, nor was he likely to have an idle pen. The productiveness of Lope was indeed enormous. He may be said to have tried every literary form of his time, from the epic on the Italian model down to the romance. In bulk, the life-work of an industrious journalist might be about equal to his surviving writings. And Lope was no mere journalist. His execution of everything he touched has a certain interest. If space allowed, there would be something to say of his religious poem on San Isidro and his sonnets, serious and burlesque. But space does not allow, and we must consider him here chiefly in his great and dominant character of dramatist, remembering always that he was a man of many-sided ability, and that the average cleverness of his non-dramatic work goes far to justify the admiration of his countrymen in his time, and the place they have never ceased to give him as, with the one exception of Cervantes, the chief of their literature. The number of his plays has remained a wonder and a legend. Eighteen hundred comedias and four hundred autos sacramentales is the figure given on fair authority as his total life-work for the stage. He himself confesses to two hundred and nineteen pieces as early as 1603, and in 1624 to one thousand and seventy. An eyewitness has recorded that he once wrote five plays in fifteen days; and that on another occasion, having undertaken to collaborate with two friends in a comedy, he finished his share of the work before breakfast, though it was one act out of three, and wrote some other verse into the bargain. Nor are these stories, incredible as they sound, altogether beyond belief.

They could be accepted without hesitation if the writing of Lope de Vega were all imitative and bad. But that is far from being the case. Over and above the fact that he sometimes—as in the Dorotea, for example—wrote an admirable style, he was the creator of a literary form. Lope de Vega was the real creator of the Spanish comedia, a word which must not be understood to mean only comedy, but stage-play of every kind. Others prepared the way, and some collaborated in the ending of the work, but the merit is none the less his. Without Lope there could have been no Calderon, who found the form ready made to his hands. That a writer of so much productiveness, and so little concentration, would have many faults will be easily understood. Finish was not to be expected from him, nor profundity. There would inevitably be much that was hasty and careless, much repetition, much taking of familiar situations, much use of stock characters, and a great deal of what the French call the à peu pris—the “that is good enough”—instead of the absolutely best, which is not to be attained except by thought and the labour of the file. He must have been prepared to do whatever would please an uncritical audience, as indeed Lope candidly avowed that he was. In short, he might be expected to have all the weaknesses of the class which Carlyle defined as “the shallow vehement,” and they would be the more conspicuous because he lived in a time of learning, but of no great criticism, because he was a beginner, and not least because he belonged to a people who have always been indifferent to finish of workmanship. But with all this, for which a narrow criticism of the stamp of Boileau’s would have condemned him utterly, Lope had the one thing necessary, which is creative faculty. The quality of his plays will be best shown later on, when we treat of the Spanish stage as a whole. For the present it is enough to deal with the more mechanical side of his workmanship. Before his time Spanish play-writers had hesitated between the classic division into five acts and a tentative division into four. One early and forgotten writer, Avendaño, took three. Lope, not without the co-operation of others, but mainly by his example, established this last as the recognised number of jornadas—acts—for a Spanish play. The choice was made for a definite reason. In the Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias—a verse epistle written to a friend who had asked him to justify his works before the critics who held by the classic rules—Lope laid it down that the first act should introduce the characters and knit the intrigue; the second lead to the crisis, the scène à faire of French dramatic critics; and the third wind all up. He formulated the great secret of the playwright’s craft, which is that the audience must always know what is going to happen, but never exactly how it is going to be brought about. They must never be left in a puzzling doubt as to the meaning of what is going on, and yet must always be kept in a pleasing uncertainty as to what is about to happen next. This supposed a very real unity of action, compatible with plot and underplot, but not with two independent plots. For the unities of time and place he cared as much, and as little, as our own Elizabethans.

The conditions of the work.

Not even Lope’s fertility and activity could have been equal to the production of two thousand two hundred plays, of which all, or even a majority, were executed in conformity with his own standard. Such a piece of construction as the Dama Melindrosa cannot have been one of the five plays written in fifteen days. There is a great deal in Lope’s literary baggage which is mere scribbling, meant to please an audience for an afternoon. Though the Spaniards loved the theatre much, they were not numerous enough in the towns to supply many audiences, and they clamoured for new things. To meet this demand, every Spanish dramatist who wished to stand well with the managers was compelled to produce a great deal of what may be called journalism for the theatre, the mere rapid throwing together of acceptable matter, which might be love-adventures or the news of the day, historical stories or religious legend, in stock forms. The stage was not only all the literature of the mass of the people, but all the newspapers, and all the “music-hall” side of their amusements too. In all cases the comedy was accompanied by interludes of the nature of music-hall “turns,” loas, pasos, or entremeses—brief scenes of a comic kind, songs, and, above all, dances. The patio or court—that is, the pit—filled by the poorest, most numerous, and most formidable part of the audience, who stood, and who were addressed in compliment as the Senate or the musketeers, and were known in actors’ slang as the chusma—i.e., the galley-slaves—would not endure to be deprived of their dances. So the most truly famous comedy would hardly have escaped the cucumbers with which the “grave Senate” expressed its disapproval, if it had been presented without “crutches” in the form of the dance, the song, or the farcical interlude. Thus it inevitably followed that the playwright was often called upon to supply what was in fact padding to fill up the intervals between the popular shows. And this Lope supplied, besides writing the entremeses, mojigangas, saynetes—all forms of brief farce. Such work could not well be literary. His reputation, and indeed the reputation of the Spanish drama, has suffered because matter of this kind was not allowed to die with the day for which it was written. During his later years, and the better part of the life of his successor, Calderon, the drama held its place at Court. Plays were frequently first given before the Court (which at that time, and at all festivals, meant substantially every lady and gentleman in Madrid), before reaching the public theatre. This audience demanded a higher level of work, and the best comedias were probably written for it. Yet the drama made its way to the palace, and was not originally directed to the king and courtiers. It came as Lope de Vega had shaped it, and so remained in all essentials. The metrical form was fixed by him: the silvas or liras—lyric verse in hendecasyllabic and seven-foot lines—for the passionate passages, the sonnet for soliloquies, the romance for narrative and dialogue, the redondillas or roundelays of assonant and consonant verse, are all enumerated by him in the Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias. And what he did for the secular play he did for the religious. The Voyage of the Soul, given in his prose story, El Peregrino en Su Patria, is an Auto Sacramental as complete as any of Calderon’s. Whatever the Spanish drama has to give us was either found undeveloped by Lope de Vega, and perfected in shape by him, or was his invention. Other men put their mark on their versions of his models, or showed qualities which he wanted, but nobody modified the Spanish drama as he had built it in any essential. He was, as far as any single man could be, the creator of the dramatic literature of his country; and even though Tirso de Molina was greater in this or that respect, Alarcon had a finer skill in drawing a character, Calderon a deeper poetic genius,—though he might have cause to envy this man’s art or that man’s scope—yet he must remain the chief of one of the very few brilliant and thoroughly national dramatic literatures of the world.

Contemporaries and followers of Lope.

This predominance of the Luca fa presto of literature may have been a misfortune, though when the conditions are remembered, and the innate indifference of the Spaniard to artistic finish is allowed for, an inevitable one. We must accept it and its consequences. One of them is this, that after Lope de Vega there could be no room for historical development on the Spanish stage. Calderon was a different man writing the same drama. There is no such difference between these two as between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; and nowhere in Spanish dramatic literature is there anything answering to the contrast between the Elizabethan and the Restoration stages. The division often made between the school of Lope and the school of Calderon is very arbitrary. It is largely a matter of date. The earlier men are classed with the first, and the later with the second. To find a distinction between them it is necessary to insist on mere matters of detail, or on such purely personal differences of genius and character as must always be found where there is life among a large body of men. The rule of a literary as of a political despot may cramp as well as support. It is possible that if they had not been overshadowed by the Marvel of Nature his contemporaries might have developed with more freedom. None of them may seem to have suffered more from the consecration of hasty writing than Gabriel Tellez (1570?-1648), known in literature as the Maestro Tirso de Molina, a churchman, who died as head of a religious house at Soria. Tirso de Molina may be said to live on the universal stage of the world as the first creator of Don Juan.[31] One of his plays, The Vengeance of Tamar, contains a scene of very high tragic power—that in which the outraged sister waits veiled outside the tent prepared by Absalom for the slaughter of his brother. She has a long double-edged dialogue with the offender, full of warnings of doom intelligible to the audience, but misunderstood by him, and when he has gone to his fate her soliloquy is a fine example of the legitimate dramatic use of the chorus. There is a certain quiet in this scene, a reserve, and an appeal not to the mere passion for seeing something going on, but to the emotions of pity and terror, which is rare indeed on the amusing, but too often noisy and shallow, Spanish stage. Calderon, using the freedom of a Spanish dramatist, conveyed the whole act into his Hairs of Absalom. One is inclined to think that the playwright who first rough-hewed the universally true character of Don Juan might, if he had felt called upon to finish as well as to imagine and sketch, have also given us the finished type of the debauchee whom the pursuit of his own pleasure has made a violator and brute, all the more odious because there is on him an outward show of gallantry and high-breeding. Tirso’s Marta la Piadosa—‘The Pious Martha’—has been most absurdly compared to Tartuffe. It is the story of a lively young lady who affects a passion for good works and a vow of charity in order to escape a disagreeable marriage, and is in other respects the usual comedia de capa y espada. Yet there is a power of characterisation in it, a liveliness and a genial humanity, which need little to be the most accomplished comedy. But it misses of what it might have reached, and we may say that it failed because his audience, and the taste of his time, called upon Tirso for nothing better than hasty work. In Guillen de Castro (1569-1631), again, the friend of Lope at Valencia, we find the same contrast between a vigorous original force of imagination, with great powers of presentment, and a sudden drop into what no doubt pleased the “musketeers,” but is now only worth looking at because it did. His Youth of the Cid, which up to a certain point supplied Corneille with more than a model, falls to puerile miracle and ends incoherently. Juan Ruiz de Alarcon reached very high comedy. His Verdad Sospechosa—‘The Doubted Truth’—has had a great progeny on the stage of the world. All the romancing liars—they who lie not for sordid ends but by imagination, and from a love of shining, or getting out of the immediate difficulty—who follow one another on all theatres, may claim descent from his hero. But Alarcon was not popular, and he also could be hasty. The list of names might easily be swollen in a country which counted its known dramatic writers at certain periods by sixties and seventies, but nothing would be gained for the understanding of the school by the repetition.[32]

Although he cannot be said to have developed or even modified the form of dramatic literature in Spain, Calderon was too considerable a man to be allowed to pass with a school.[33]

Calderon.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca Barreda Henao y Riaño, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Priest, Honorary Chaplain of his Majesty, and our Lords the New Kings of the Cathedral of Toledo—to give him all his names and titles—was a native of Madrid, “though from another place he took his name, an house of ancient fame.” The splendour of his pedigree was perhaps exaggerated by the partiality of friends. It is a point on which the Spaniard has all the reverence of the Scotsman. Yet he was undoubtedly a noble, and “came from the mountain,” as indeed did all Spain’s greatest men in letters and art. His long life, which lasted from 1600 to 1681, unlike Lope’s, was honourable, but is otherwise little known. We are told that he served as a soldier in his youth, but in a time of truce when not much service was to be seen. From one of the few certain passages in his life it appears that he was not slow to draw his sword on sufficient provocation. He had once to take sanctuary after chasing an actor through the streets of Madrid sword in hand. The man had stabbed Calderon’s brother in the back, and the excuse was held to be good. For the rest, the poet’s life was peaceful and prosperous. He was educated by the Jesuits and at Salamanca, was known as a writer when he was twenty, and after the death of Lope de Vega, he became the acknowledged chief of Spanish dramatists. Philip IV. greatly favoured and employed him. Calderon was, in fact, as much the king’s poet as Velasquez was his painter. By the favour of the king he also was admitted into the Order of Santiago, which might bring with it a commandery and a revenue. In the revolt of Catalonia in 1640, when the king went to the army, Calderon joined the other knights who rendered their military service under the royal banner. At the age of fifty-one he took orders. This was not always a proof of a sincere vocation, for Swift’s saying, that it was easier to provide for ten men in the Church than one out of it, was even truer of Spain than of England. But Calderon’s sincerity need not be doubted. He appears to have given up writing directly for the theatre after taking orders, but continued to produce plays for the Court which were repeated in public. During the latter half of his life he preferred to devote himself to the autos sacramentales, which he had an exclusive right to supply to the town of Madrid. No dramatic author of the time seems to have been so indifferent to the fate of his plays. A few were printed by his brother, but he himself published none, though he was continually vexed by piracies, and by learning that rubbish had been presented in his name to provincial audiences. In his old age he drew up a list of his genuine plays at the request of the Duke of Veragua, the representative of Columbus. From the letter sent with the list we learn that there were two noted pests of the Madrid theatre, one known as Great, and the other as Little, Memory. The first could remember a whole play (one supposes it must have been taliter qualiter) after hearing it once, the other after hearing it two or three times, and the two gained a dishonourable livelihood by poaching for piratical managers. As many dramas reached the press by their exertions, the wretched state of the text is easily accounted for. When Great or Little Memory was at a loss he put in his own trash. Even in Calderon’s genial and peaceful old age this outrage moved him to bitterness. Yet he never edited his plays. His executor, Don Juan de Vera Tasis, who published the first edition after his death, was unfortunately a partisan of the detestable estilo culto, and is suspected of having inserted some very bad examples of this vicious affectation. Between the indifference of the poet and the insufficiency of the editor the text has suffered greatly. Calderon’s high estimate, not perhaps so much of his own autos as of the sanctity of work written for a religious purpose, is shown by the fact that he did publish some of them, lest they should suffer the same misuse as his plays.

The reputation of Calderon has suffered from the opposite evil to that which has injured Lope’s. The Phœnix of Geniuses has been punished in modern times for the wild overpraise of his own, by some neglect. German criticism has treated him as a mere amuser. Calderon, on the other hand, has been the victim of the incontinence in praise of the Schlegels, who were determined to make another, and a better, Shakespeare if they could not find one. Many readers who had formed an idea of him at second hand have probably suffered a severe shock on becoming acquainted with his work.[34]

His limitations.

No reader should expect to find a world poet in Calderon, who was a Spaniard of the Spaniards. No more intensely national poet ever wrote, and it is for that he must be read and appreciated. Moreover, he is a Spaniard of the seventeenth century, when the monarchical sentiment was at its height, and when all life was permeated by a religion in which the creed had, in Mr Swinburne’s phrase, replaced the decalogue. His conception of honour (we shall come back to the point of honour as a motive for Spanish plays) is that of his time—thoroughly oriental. It was not the sentiment which nerves a man against fear of consequences, and enables him to resist the temptation to do what is dishonourable, or, better still, makes him incapable of feeling it, but the fixed determination not to allow the world the least excuse for saying that somebody has done something to you which renders you undignified or ridiculous. As has been already said, he added nothing to the formal part of Spanish dramatic literature, not even to the auto. He was too much affected by the Góngorism of his early manhood, for even the most partial of editors cannot throw all, or even the most, of the errors in that style found in his plays on Don Juan de Vera Tasis.

His qualities.

Yet with his limitations Calderon was a considerable poet, and a very skilful master of the machinery of the Spanish comedy. When not misled into Góngorism he wrote magnificently, and there are lyric choral passages in the autos which Mr Ticknor rightly praised as worthy of Ben Jonson’s masques. Indeed not a little of his work is identical in purpose with the masque, though different in form. As a Court poet he was called upon to write for the entertainment of the king and the courtiers, and to supply theatrical shows at royal marriages, births of princes, and so forth. There was no intrinsic novelty here, for Calderon did but give the high-bred Spaniard of the Court a finer poetic version of the dances, songs, and bright short pieces under various, names, which delighted the humbler Spaniard in the patios. The intensely national sentiment which he expresses may strike us at times as a little empty, but is high and shining, and lends itself to a certain stately treatment which he could give. The romantic sentiment was strong in Calderon, and even in the most purely Spanish trappings that is not remote from us. A poet who dealt not inadequately with great passions could hardly help sometimes piercing through the merely national to the universal, though it must be acknowledged that his characters rarely utter the individual human saying, and that he was far too fond of long casuistical amplifications, which are almost always frigidly pedantic, and not rarely bombastical. The most quoted passage in all his work, the lines which close the second act of La Vida es Sueño, gain by being taken apart from their context:

“Que es la vida? Un frenesi:

Que es la vida? Una ilusion,

Una sombra, una ficcion

Y el mayor bien es pequeño

Que toda la vida es sueño

Y los sueños sueño son.”

“We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.”

It is a fine poetic reflection, well fitted to stand beside the yet more beautiful lines of the Tempest, but it is not wise to approach the play in the hope that all of it will be found at the same level.

As in the case of Lope, though not to the same extent, the critic who is severely limited in space must be content to speak in general terms of much of Calderon’s work. It would be interesting to take El Mágico Prodigioso (‘The Wonder-working Magician’), El Mayor Monstruo los Zelos (‘Jealousy the greatest Monster’), and La Puente de Mantible (‘The Bridge of Mantible’), and show what has been added in any of them—or a score of others which it were as easy to name—to the unchanging framework of the Spanish play. In the Mágico Prodigioso, for instance, perhaps the most generally known of Calderon’s greater dramas, which has been ineptly enough compared to Faust, we have, in addition to the usual machinery of dama, galan, and gracioso, a story of temptation by the devil. Looked at closely, it is a tale told for edification, and for the purpose of showing what a fool the devil essentially is. He is argued off his legs by Cyprian the hero at the first bout, beaten completely by stock arguments to be found in text-books. His one resource is to promise Cyprian the possession of Justina, and he signally fails to keep his word. The false Justina he has created to satisfy the hero turns to a skeleton at once, and Cyprian becomes a Christian because he discovers that the devil is unable to give him possession of a woman, and is less powerful than God, which he knew by the fiend’s own confession at the beginning. It is an edifying story to all who accept the premisses and the parade of scholastic argument, and are prepared to allow for the time, the nation, and the surroundings.

The school of Calderon.

Calderon wound up and rounded off the historical development of the Spanish drama so completely that little need be said of his school, which indeed only means contemporaries who wrote Lope’s drama with Calderon’s style. Yet Moreto was a strong man, and to him also belongs the honour of having put on the stage an enduring type, the Lindo Don Diego, who was the ancestor of our own Sir Fopling Flutter, of Lord Foppington, and of many another theatrical dandy. Francisco de Roxas, too, has left a point-of-honour play, not unworthy of his master, Del Rey Abajo, Ninguno—‘From the King downwards, Nobody.’ One feature common to all the later writers for the old Spanish stage may be noticed. It was their growing tendency to re-use the situations and plots of their predecessors. Moreto was a notable proficient in this, and Calderon himself did as much. It seems as if a theatre which dealt almost wholly with intrigue and situation had exhausted all possible combinations and could only repeat. When men began to go back in this fashion the end was at hand. Calderon, less fortunate than Velasquez, outlived the king who was their common patron, and saw with his own eyes the decadence of Spain. Beyond him there was only echo, and then dotage prolonged into the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER IV.
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.

THE PREVAILING QUALITY OF THE SPANISH DRAMA—TYPICAL EXAMPLES—‘LA DAMA MELINDROSA’—‘EL TEJEDOR DE SEGOVIA’—‘EL CONDENADO POR DESCONFIADO’—THE PLAYS ON “HONOUR”—‘A SECRETO AGRAVIO SECRETA VENGANZA’—THE “AUTO SACRAMENTAL”—THE “LOA”—THE ‘VERDADERO DIOS PAN’—‘LOS DOS HABLADORES.’

The prevailing quality of the Spanish drama.

There may well seem to be something over-bold, even impudent, in the attempt to give an account of the different kinds of Spanish drama in one brief chapter. Its abundance alone would appear to render the effort vain, and the common elaborate classification of the plays into heroic, romantic, religious, of “cloak and sword,” and so forth, seems to imply the existence of a number of types distinct from one another, and calling for separate treatment. Yet though I cannot hope to be exhaustive, it is, in my opinion, possible to be at least not wholly inadequate. The task is materially facilitated by the great uniformity of the Spanish drama. No matter what the name may be, the action is much the same, and the characters do not greatly vary. It has been said that Calderon’s personages are all like bullets cast in a mould; and though this, as is the case with most sweeping assertions, fails to take notice of the exceptions, it has much truth, and may be applied to others. The Spanish drama is above all a drama of action, conducted by fixed types. Juan de la Cueva had said in a spirit of prophecy that the artful fable was the glory of the Spanish stage, and Lope appeared in good time to prove him right. The types who move in the action are the Dama, the Galan, the Barba, and the Gracioso—the Lady, the Lover, the Old Man, and the Clown. They have the stage to themselves in the comedia de capa y espada. This phrase, when translated into French or English, has an air of romance about it which is somewhat misleading. The cloak and sword were the distinctive parts of the dress of the private gentleman. Caballero de capa y espada was the man about town of our own Restoration plays, who is neither great noble, churchman, nor lawyer. The comedia de capa y espada was then the genteel comedy of Spain. But the Dama, the Galan, the Barba, and the Gracioso figure in every kind of play, even in those of religion. By these is meant the stage drama turning on some religious motive, and not the auto sacramental, which was a mystery differing from those of the Middle Ages only in this, that it was written by men of letters on whom, and on whose art, the Renaissance had had its influence. In the Romantic plays there is more passion, and the sword is more often out of its scabbard, but we find the same types, the same general action. Spain produced a certain number of plays approaching our own comedy of humours. These are the comedias de figuron. La Verdad Sospechosa and the Lindo Don Diego are the best known examples. But here again the “humour”—the figuron—is placed in the midst of the stock types and the customary action.

Typical examples.

To show what these types and this action were in general terms would be easy enough, but perhaps a better, and certainly a more entertaining, method is to take half-a-dozen typical plays, and to give such an analysis of them as may enable the reader to appreciate for himself that skilful construction of plot at which the Spaniards aimed, and to judge how far it is true that however much the subject differed, the dramatis personæ did not greatly vary. For this purpose it is not necessary to take what is best but what is most characteristic. I have selected as an example of the comedy of lively complicated action the Dama Melindrosa, which may be translated ‘My Lady’s Vapours,’ by Lope de Vega; as a romantic play, the Tejedor de Segovia—‘The Weaver of Segovia’—by Juan Ruiz de Alarcon; as a religious play, the Condenado por Desconfiado—‘Damned for want of Faith’—of Tirso de Molina; for the play which has “honour” for its motive, the A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza—‘A Secret Vengeance for a Hidden Wrong’—of Calderon. The Dama Melindrosa draws a little towards the comedia de figuron, but it is none the less a perfect specimen of the cloak-and-sword comedy, and a good example of Lope. It is chosen also because it possesses a plot sufficiently entangled to show the Spanish enredo (i.e., tangle), and yet not so complicated as to be obscure in the telling. Specimens of the romantic, and religious, play might have been easily found in Calderon, but to show the general quality of a literature, we must not confine ourselves to the greater men. There remain the auto sacramental, and the short interludes, which under various names surrounded, and enlivened, the comedia. For the first we must go to Calderon, and none seems more fit to show what the Renaissance had done with these survivals of the Middle Ages than the Verdadero Dios Pan—‘The True God Pan.’ For an example of the smaller pieces we can take the Dos Habladores—‘The Two Chatterers’—of Cervantes, who excelled in this, and only in this, dramatic form.[35]

La Dama Melindrosa.

Belisa, the Dama Melindrosa, the lady with the vapours, of Lope’s comedy, is the daughter of a rich widow, Lisarda, and she has a brother, Don Juan. The brother spends his nights serenading ladies, in company with his friend Eliso, and lies in bed till midday. Belisa has hitherto refused all the husbands proposed by her mother, giving more or less fantastical reasons in each case, and is a very airy whimsical young person. In the first scene of the play Lisarda confides her troubles with her children to her brother Tiberio, the barba—beard, or old man—of the piece. Lisarda professes her desire to get her children married and settled in life, in order that she may retire to the country with one gentlewoman and a slave, there to bewail her lost lord (who, we learn, has been dead for about a year), like the tender turtle on a thorn. Tiberio pooh-poohs his sister’s sentiments, and makes the unsympathetic remark that widows generally seem to find solitude a thorn, to judge by their perpetual fidgeting, but offers to use his influence to persuade Belisa to marry. Then follows a scene with the young lady. She knows she is going to be sermonised, and puts on all her airs and graces. A chair is brought for Tiberio and cushions for the ladies, who squat on them in the old Spanish fashion. Mme. d’Aulnoy, the author of the fairy tales, who came to Spain as wife of the French Ambassador, has explained how intolerable she found this attitude. Belisa provokes her uncle, who has the usual peppery temper of the barba, into expressing a desire to box her ears, but will accept no husband. To this party enter an alguacil, or officer of police, with an escribano, a species of attorney and process-server. We learn that Lisarda has a claim on her son’s friend Eliso, who owed her husband money, and will not pay it. She has therefore sued out a writ, and is sending the officers to seize a prenda, or pledge, which she can keep or sell for the discharge of the debt, if Eliso will not pay what he owes.

The scene now changes to the house of Eliso, who is found discussing with his servant Fabio the question whether it is better to pay the debt or compound by marrying Belisa, with her vapours. His conversation is broken off by the hurried entry of Felisardo, sword in hand. He has found a Navarrese cavalier persecuting Celia, who is on her way home from church, with unwelcome attentions. The usual duel has followed. The Navarrese is on the pavement, and Felisardo is on his way to take sanctuary, bringing Celia with him to leave her under the protection of Eliso. Of course Eliso behaves like a gentleman, orders his front door to be shut in case the police-officers are in pursuit, and gives his friends refuge. He persuades the two to disguise themselves in the holiday dresses of his Morisco slaves, Pedro and Zara, who are absent on his estate. Meanwhile Fabio reports that there are police-officers below, and is sent down with orders to delay them as long as he can. Eliso has a soliloquy on the hazards of love, in the form of a half-burlesque sonnet in which all the last words are esdrújulo, accented on the antepenult. At last the alguacil is admitted, deeply angered by the delay, and announces that he has come to serve Lisarda’s writ. Eliso is relieved, and tells him to take what he likes—and he takes the two supposed slaves. The scene now returns to Lisarda’s house. She is much pleased by the intelligence of the alguacil, and the attractive appearance of the supposed Pedro and Zara. Belisa, too, is impressed by the gallant bearing of Felisardo, who enters into the game with spirit. Meanwhile Don Juan is at last up. He finds Celia among the servants, and on learning who she is supposed to be, observes that his friend Eliso was wise not to let him see her. Of course he makes hyperbolical love to her at once. Celia is not pleased at the admiration of Lisarda’s female servants for Felisardo, and he is jealous of Don Juan. And so the first act ends. Lope, it will be seen, has carried out his dramatic scheme so far with great success. He has introduced his persons, and knitted his intrigue. Everything has happened in a probable way, and there are infinite possibilities of complications and cross purposes.

The second act opens with Belisa’s confession of her love for the supposed Pedro. It is made to the indispensable confidante, who, as a matter of course, is her servant Flora, the counterpart of the gracioso, and the soubrette of the French comedy. Belisa speaks largely in infantile little lines of six syllables. She explains and excuses her own melindres at considerable length, and asks Flora how to escape from a love which she feels is disgraceful, and half considers as a punishment for her whims. Flora makes the ferocious suggestion that she should insist on having Pedro branded on the face, after the manner of runaway slaves. This was a rebus formed of the letter s, pronounced “es,” and a nail—clavo—which together make the word esclavo, a slave. The object of this precious device is to kill Belisa’s love by degrading its object. The melindrosa hesitates, but finally takes her servant’s counsel, and when her mother, who is as much in love with Pedro as herself, declines, threatens hysterics. Lisarda in despair applies to Tiberio, who advises that the rebus should be painted on the faces of the slaves, which will quiet Belisa, and do no harm. In the meantime Eliso pays a visit to Lisarda. He has at last made up his mind to become Belisa’s suitor. The mother warns him of her daughter’s humours, but promises her help, insisting, however, that he must make her a present of the slaves, although he has now satisfied the debt. Eliso, who knows he gives nothing, consents with just sufficient appearance of reluctance to provoke the lady’s wishes still further. He also drops hints that the slaves are not what they seem. In a short conversation with Felisardo, Eliso tells him that the Navarrese still lives, though in danger, that the police are seeking for him and Celia, and that they will be wise to stay where they are. They agree, and allow the infamatory mark to be painted on their faces. The play need no longer be told scene by scene, and could not be so told except at inconvenient length. Lisarda hankers after the man slave, and Don Juan makes furious love to Celia. Belisa finds her love is not cured by the supposed branding of Pedro, and is perpetually either making advances to him, or flying off in more or less affected hysterics. Celia for her part is jealous of the mother and daughter. She and her lover are twice surprised in talk, and have to use their wits to escape discovery. There is no small truth in the part Belisa plays. Lope accepted slavery as a matter of course, and was writing to amuse, not to enforce a moral, but he comes very near the best passages in that powerful book Uncle Tom’s Cabin,—the scenes which follow the death of St Clair. Mrs Beecher Stowe wrote to prove that slavery makes it possible for a weak self-indulgent nature to be horribly brutal in act. Belisa is not allowed to go beyond whims. The second act ends by her insisting that an iron collar shall be put on Pedro’s neck, which makes an effective “curtain,” and no doubt left the audience highly excited as to what was coming next.

The third act opens with a scene between Lisarda and Eliso, who reproaches her with ill-treating the slaves, and repeats his warning that they are not what they appear to be. This only excites Lisarda in her determination to marry Pedro. Then Eliso is angered by Don Juan’s servant Carrillo, the gracioso of the piece, who tells him that the slave is making love to Belisa. With a want of scruple too common with the Spanish galan, he eggs on Don Juan to persevere in his pursuit of Celia. Belisa also has begun to have her suspicions as to the real character of the slaves, but cannot believe that a free man and woman would allow themselves to be branded. Now follows a set of scenes hovering between farce and melodrama. In a more than usually exalted state of the vapours, Belisa pretends to faint, in order that Pedro may carry her to her room. She has first given him a ring. Pedro is not a little embarrassed, but finally takes her up with disgusted resignation, and is about to carry her to her room, when Celia comes in, and “makes him a scene of jealousy.” Supposing the melindrosa to be insensible they address one another by their true names, and say some uncomplimentary truths of Belisa. At last Felisardo puts Belisa down on a sofa, as Celia insists upon it, gives his lady-love the ring as a proof of his loyalty, and walks off to the stable. Belisa is furious, puzzled, but still doubtful. In a fit of rage she accuses Celia of stealing the ring, and the dama is in some danger of learning that it is perilous to play the part of slave. She is, of course, rescued from the officious Carrillo, who is eager to inflict the punishment ordered by his mistress, by Don Juan. The young gentleman is in high indignation, and swears that he will marry the slave. His mother, who means to do the same with Pedro, is not on that account the less angry with him. Being now thoroughly tired of Don Juan’s rebellion and Belisa’s whims, she begs the help of Tiberio to bring about her marriage with the slave. The helpful Tiberio has a resource. He has seen a gentleman named Felisardo about the court who is wonderfully like Pedro. Let the slave be dressed as a gentleman and introduced as Lisarda’s proposed husband. In the meantime Don Juan has plotted with Eliso that Celia shall be helped to resume her true place, when he will of course marry her, and present his mother with the accomplished fact. After a well-handled passage of mutual reproaches between mother and daughter, there comes a stage device which the play-goer will recognise as now worn threadbare, but which is always effective. Lisarda decides that when Tiberio returns with Felisardo, whom she still believes to be the slave Pedro, she will put out the light by an affected accident, and seize the opportunity to make a declaration of love. What follows need hardly be told. The light is put out. Everybody says the wrong thing to everybody, and when the candles are lit again the play is over. Felisardo is married to Celia, who arrives at the right moment. Belisa, her vapours being no longer heeded, consents to marry Eliso. Carrillo is paired off with Flora. Lisarda declares herself satisfied, and so the play being played out, the puppets return to their box.

Here, it will be allowed, is a play—and it is one of many—which may well have amused a Spanish audience for an afternoon. We may confess that this was its main purpose. Yet it is also amusing to read. Lope, indeed, wrote well. His verse in its various forms, including blank verse, which has been comparatively little written by other Spaniards, is accomplished, when haste did not make him careless; and it has the qualities of the prose of our own Vanbrugh—straightforward simplicity and natural ease. The actors must have found it pleasant to learn. His characters, again, have a respectable measure of general truth to human nature. They are not, indeed, the living persons we meet in Molière and Shakespeare. Even Belisa is only a dama with melindres, and as Celia is, so his other damas are; nor does one galan, gracioso, or barba differ essentially from another. Yet they are true, with the measure of truth possible to conventional types, and their doings are lively. The doings are always the essential thing. Whatever literary merit Lope’s play may have, it is always strictly subordinate to the purely theatrical purpose, to the necessity of pleasing an audience by a lively action which must be full of surprises in the details, but always intelligible in the general lines. Of this purely theatrical art he was a master. He knew how to bring about a good situation, how to lead up to an effective ending to his act, how to make the wildly improbable look probable on the boards. In so far he is very modern. The popular play of to-day, the French comedy of quiproquo, is only Lope’s comedy of intrigue in modern trappings. It is never better in these qualities than his are at their best. He had discovered all the devices which the playwright finds more effective, and much easier to produce, than passion, or thought, or poetry. And he did at least present them in poetic form. He was the most poetic of playwrights, and the ancestor of all who write merely for the stage, whose aim it is to amuse, and to move by direct appeal to the eye, and the laughter, or tears, which lie near the surface.

El Tejedor de Segovia.

The enredo supplied the canvas on which, or the background against which, the Spanish dramatist had to place whatever romantic, religious, or other figure or action he wished to present to his audience. In the Tejedor de Segovia—‘The Weaver of Segovia’—of Alarcon we have romance of the most approved type, the story of a gentleman who is driven by oppression to become a Robin Hood, a “gallant outlaw,” and who finally earns pardon, and restoration to his honours, by service against the Moor. This is Don Fernando Ramirez, whose father has been unjustly put to death by the king Don Alfonso, at the instigation of the favourite, the Marques Suero Pelaez. It is supposed that Fernando has also been killed, but he is living disguised as a weaver at Segovia, with his dama Teodora. A sister, Doña Ana Ramirez, is living in retirement near the town with a servant, Florinda. She is in love with the Count Don Julian, son of Suero Pelaez, who neglects her, and is tired of her. Don Julian has caught sight of Teodora, and has fallen in love with her in the usual fire-and-flames style. He is determined to carry her off, and when the play opens, is prowling about the weaver’s house with his servant Fineo. Don Julian is convinced that a mere mechanic will not dare to resist the son of so powerful a man as Suero Palaez. As a matter of fact the weaver is absent, and Teodora is alone in the house with the servant Chinchon, the gracioso of the piece, and an accomplished specimen of the greed, cowardice, brag, and low cunning proper to the type. A moderately experienced reader of romance sees at once what the course of the story must be. The count endeavours to gain admittance. Chinchon the coward proves no protection. He is rather a traitor, and Teodora is assailed by the count, when the weaver returns. Fernando takes a high line with Don Julian, and when the count endeavours to carry things with a high hand, shows that, weaver as he appears to be, he can use a sword like a gentleman. The count and his servant are ignominiously driven into the streets. Then the storm breaks on the weaver. He is imprisoned, and Teodora has to fly to hiding. In prison the weaver finds Don Garceran de Miranda, and various others, who form the raw material of a model band of brigands. The courage and craft of Fernando aiding, they all break out and take to “the sierra”—the hillside—which is the Spanish equivalent of our green wood. Through many adventures, each coming one out of the other, all the personages playing their part with that sense of the theatre which Lope had conveyed to his countrymen, Don Fernando works back to his own, and to revenge. It is a Robin Hood story, told by a Spaniard for the stage, and with Spanish types.

There are individual scenes of the best Spanish romance. One is that in which Suero Pelaez, the barba, the personification of austere Castilian honour and loyalty, reproaches his son with his disorderly life. Suero Pelaez is the typical père noble, the heavy father of the stage, comparable for rigid loftiness of sentiment to the Ruy Gomez of Hernani. Victor Hugo would have done the scene magnificently, and as Alarcon wrote it, it will stand comparison with the best of the French romantic plays. In another scene Teodora and Fernando are prisoners to the count, and she saves her lover by pretending to betray him. She asks to be allowed to kill him, and when supplied with a sword for that atrocious purpose, cuts his bonds and gives him the weapon—a coup de théâtre repeated with more or less disguise many thousands of times, but unfailing in its effect. In a more thoroughly Spanish scene, Fernando forces the count to do justice to his sister, Doña Ana, by promising to marry her, and having so salved the honour of his family, kills him in fair fight. Doña Ana displays the philosophy rarely wanting in the second dama at the end of a play. While Don Julian was alive, honour required her to insist on marriage; but now that he is dead, and she has been righted, she is quite prepared to marry Don Garceran, who has gallantly played his part as Patroclus, Achates, Horatio, Amyas Leigh’s Lieutenant Cary, or Jack Easy’s friend Gascoigne—in short, hero’s right-hand man. It is not King Lear, or even Phèdre, but it is very amusing reading, made of such stuff as romance is made of at all times.

El Condenado por Desconfiado.

With the play on a religious motive we come to what is far more alien to ourselves. In Tirso de Molina’s Condenado por Desconfiado we have something which, at any rate in such a form as this, is unknown on the modern stage. Paul the hermit is a man of thirty, who has fled from the world ten years ago, and is living in the practice of every austerity. Inappropriate as it may seem, he has with him a servant, Pedrisco, the gracioso of the piece, who differs in nothing from others of the same function on the Spanish stage. In the first scene Pedrisco is absent begging for the herbs on which the hermit lives. The play opens with a soliloquy by Paul, which is a rapid theatrical equivalent for Lord Tennyson’s monologue of St Simeon Stylites. The hermit is troubled by no doubts on any point of faith, but he is racked by anxiety to feel assured that his austerities have earned him salvation, and we see that he has yielded to spiritual pride. After giving expression to his doubts and fears, through which there pierces an aggrieved sense that heaven owes him salvation, Paul retires to his cave. We have a buffoon interlude from Pedrisco, who complains of his diet (the gracioso is ever a glutton), and tells us that he smuggles in something more substantial than herbs for his own consumption. Then he goes into his cave to eat, and Paul returns in great agitation. He has dreamt, and in his dream has been taken to the judgment-seat of heaven. There he has seen his good deeds weighed against his evil, and the good have proved by far the lighter. He breaks into a wild prayer for assurance, for a sign, which is by far the finest passage of verse in the play. It is strictly according to tradition that he should be heard by the enemy of mankind. The devil tells us that he is empowered to tempt the holy man, that vulgar temptations have failed, but that now Paul is wavering in his faith in the divine mercy, and he will tempt him in another way. A disappointment now awaits the reader, who expects a scene of temptation, and gets a device for helping on the action. Satan appears in the shape of an angel, and tells Paul to go to Naples. There at a certain place near the harbour he will meet one Enrico, son of Anareto. He is to watch that man, for as the fate of Enrico is, so will his own be, the devil being a liar from the beginning. Paulo wonders, but obeys, and departs with Pedrisco for Naples.

There we precede him, and find ourselves with two gentlemen at the door of Celia, who is a courtesan. From the conversation of these two we learn of her beauty, her rapacity, her great wit, and many accomplishments, as also that she is devoted to one Enrico, a ruffler, gambler, and bully, who beats and robs her. One of the two gentlemen has never seen her, and after due warning from his friend, it is decided that they shall go in on pretence of asking Celia, who is a poetess, for some love verses to be sent to their damas. They go in, bearing gifts, and then Enrico bursts in with his follower Galvan. Enrico plays the bully to perfection, drives off the two gentlemen, and seizes their gifts to Celia, who wheedles and adores him as the most valiant of men. All this scene is full of vigour, and is written with astonishing gusto. When placated by Celia, Enrico promises her a feast on her own money, and sending for friends, they go out to the sea-shore by the harbour. Here Paulo is waiting, as he was directed by the fiend. There is a scene, very intelligible, and not at all ridiculous to a Spanish audience of the day, in which Paulo proves his Christian humility by throwing himself on the ground and telling Pedrisco to trample on him. Then Enrico and his riotous party burst on the scene. Enrico has just tossed a troublesome old beggar into the sea out of pure wickedness, and is in jovial spirits. He glories and drinks deep, bragging of his own sins, and extorting the admiration of Celia and the subordinate scoundrels who form the party. This, again, is an excellent scene, and not untrue to nature. Paul recognises the man with whose fate his own is bound up, and is horrified. He feels convinced that this man can never be saved, and revolts at thinking that after all his austerities he is to be lost. In an explosion of passion, not unhuman, and certainly very southern, he decides that he too will lead a life of crime and make the world fear one who, “although just,” has been condemned.

So ends the first act. In the second and third we have the perpetual contrast between the two men. Paulo has become a brigand, but is still in trouble about his soul. He has a warning by an angel, who appears in the shape of a shepherd-boy, and tells him a parable of the lost sheep. Paulo understands, but still his doubts haunt him. Meanwhile we learn, with some surprise, that Enrico has one virtue amid his thousand crimes—a tender affection for his old father. He refuses to kill an aged man, though he has taken pay to kill him. The old man’s resemblance to his father disarms Enrico. When reproached by his employer he kills him. He has now to fly Naples, and in order to escape pursuit has to take to the water. Before plunging in he prays for God’s mercy, for though a sinner Enrico has never doubted. Considerations of time and space troubled the Spanish dramatist but little. Enrico swims from Naples to the place where Paulo is camped with his band. He falls into the hands of the ex-hermit. Paulo now conceives a hope. If he can find that Enrico is repentant there will be a chance for his salvation. He causes his prisoner to be tied to a tree blindfold, in order that he may be shot to death, and then resuming his hermit’s dress, exhorts him to prepare for death. But Enrico will not go beyond a general acknowledgment that the divine mercy can save him if God so pleases. Of confession and repentance he will not hear a word, but is in all respects a hardened sinner. Paulo is again plunged into despair, and repeats his determination to exceed the crimes of Enrico, “since it is to be all one in the end.” The words are trivial, but they contain blasphemy in the real sense. The close of the play finds Paulo still revolving his weary doubt, and Enrico in a dungeon waiting for execution. Here we have another very arbitrary and pointless scene of temptation. The fiend shows Enrico a means of escape, but he hears voices warning him to stay, and he stays. The scene has no purpose, for the devil makes no attack on the prisoner’s faith, and Enrico remains still an unbending sinner. At last he yields to the prayers of his old father, confesses, and makes an edifying end. In the last scene, while Paulo soliloquises, the soul of Enrico is borne to heaven by two angels. But Paulo will not believe that so great a sinner can have been saved. He does not, it is true, see the vision, and has only the word of Pedrisco for Enrico’s pious end. Then Paulo is killed by soldiers who are hunting him down. Flames are seen round his dead body, and his voice is heard announcing that he is lost for ever, “por desconfiado,” as one who did not trust God’s mercy.

The morality and doctrine of this play need not concern us here, all the more because they are not unfamiliar. There is some virtue in a name, for if the Maestro Tirso de Molina had called his play ‘Justification by Faith,’ as he well might, he would have been in peril of ending at the stake. Head of a house of Nuestra Señora de la Merced Calzada at Soria, as he was, his play might pass for an illustration of Luther’s much-debated “pecca fortiter.” The purely literary interest of the piece is great. The scenes filled with the crimes and violence of Enrico are written with the greatest brio. Indeed this venerable churchman Gabriel Tellez excelled in drawing types, and more especially a type of woman, of the simple, sensuous, and passionate order. He appears to have had a strong sympathy with them, and a belief, less monastic than sound, that there was something better in their unfettered loyalty to nature than in the coward virtue of those who fly the battle. His Enrico is a better fellow from the first than the hermit. There is a manfulness about him which is more hopeful than the self-seeking, conventional piety of Paulo. Whether Tirso de Molina meant so much or not, his lost hermit is a vigorous rough sketch of the stamp of man who is not essentially good, but only very much afraid of hell-fire, and abjectly eager to escape it by acting according to rule. The play, it will be seen, does not differ essentially from the accepted model of the Spanish drama. There is no development of character. The action is imposed on the personages, not produced by them. Enrico does not repent in any real sense of the word. He only makes a pious end, because his father, whom he loves, persuades him, and the act is sufficient. As Paulo is at the beginning so he remains to the end.

The plays on “honour.”

With the play on the “point of honour” we return to more familiar regions. There are hundreds of modern comedies in which the leading personages are the lover, the wife, and the husband. But the Spaniards were limited in their treatment of the theme. Neither the Church nor their own more than half-oriental sentiment permitted of the presentation of adultery as sympathetic, or even pardonable. When they took this subject it was only for the purpose of showing by a lively action how the husband vindicated his “honour.” This honour, as has been already said, lay in the opinion the world had of him. Don Gutierre Alfonso, in the Médico de su Honra, kills his wife, not because he believes her guilty, but because she has been pursued by a lover and he will not have it said that this has been, and that he has not avenged himself. To do this effectually he must kill both—the innocent woman and the lover who sought to seduce her. If you ask Why? he answers “Mi opinion”—which means not what I believe, but what the world may believe of me—leaves me no choice. If I do not, it will say, There is a man whose wife was courted, and she lives. Where one failed another may succeed. There must be no doubt of my “honour.” And so after a little complaint over the tyranny of the world he kills her with no more scruple than he would show in despatching a worthless horse or hound. The father, or brother, who is head of a house, is under the same obligation as the husband. His honour is concerned in seeing that his daughter or sister gives no occasion to the evil tongues of the world. In Calderon’s very typical comedia de capa y espada, the Dama Duende—the ‘Fairy Lady’—the heroine is a young and beautiful widow living with a brother, who keeps her in a separate set of rooms in his house, and will not let her be seen. She accepts this tyranny as a matter of course, and has no more doubt of her brother’s right to control, and if she is found disobeying his orders, to punish her, than she would have had of a husband’s. How far all this gives a true picture of the society of the time has been a debated question. It certainly was the picture which that society liked to see drawn of itself. We may accept it as giving no more than an exaggerated theatrical representation of truth. Spain is a country of the Roman law, which allows a husband to kill an unfaithful wife and her lover. It had also been affected by the long Moorish dominion, and the women of all ranks were certainly less independent than in England. In the higher classes they were, and in provincial towns where ancient customs linger, still are, much secluded.

A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza.

None of the many plays in which Calderon set forth this conception of honour is more interesting than A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza. The action takes place in Portugal in the reign of Don Sebastian, just before that king sails on his disastrous expedition to Africa. Don Lope de Almeida, a Portuguese gentleman of great fortune, has made a contract of marriage with Doña Leonora de Guzman, a Castilian lady. He has never seen his future wife, who is travelling to Lisbon under the escort of Don Lope’s uncle, Don Bernardino, when the play opens. In the first scene Don Lope informs the king of his approaching marriage, and asks leave not to accompany him on his invasion of Morocco. Then after a brief conversation with his servant Manrique, the inevitable gracioso, he catches sight of an old friend, Don Juan de Silva, who comes on the stage poorly dressed. Don Lope greets him warmly, and with some difficulty learns his story. In a long speech, disfigured, according to a fault too common with Calderon, by repetitions, apostrophes, and frigid ornament, Don Juan explains that at Goa he has killed the son of the governor, and has been compelled to fly, leaving his possessions, and is a ruined man. The provocation was great, for Manuel de Sousa had given him the lie. Don Juan describes how he drew at once and killed the insulter on the spot—not, be it observed, in a duel, but by a thrust delivered before Sousa could draw his sword. A passage of this speech is very necessary for the understanding of the play. Don Juan breaks into an outcry against “the tyrannical error of men,” the folly of the world, which allows honour to be destroyed by a breath. He labours the point, he repeats himself to insist that his honour was destroyed when he was called a liar, and that though he avenged himself in the not very heroic fashion described, still it will remain the fact that he has been called a liar. At a later stage of the play this works. For the present Don Lope gives his old friend refuge, and tells him of his marriage. We are now introduced to Doña Leonor, and learn that she has had a lover, in all honour of course, Don Luis de Benavídes. He, she thinks, is dead on an expedition to Africa. She is marrying because she is forced, but will carry his love to the altar. Beyond that it shall not go, for it would touch her honour. But Don Luis is not dead. He appears, and makes himself known to her by pretending to be a diamond-merchant, and sending her by the hand of Don Bernardino a ring she has formerly given him. There is a scene of reproach and explanation between them, but Doña Leonor is loyal to honour so far. Her husband now comes on the scene, and greets her with a sonnet, to which she answers with another of double meaning. It is addressed both to Don Luis and her husband—each may read it his own way, the first as a farewell, the second as a promise of faithful obedience. Don Luis decides to follow her to Portugal and die for his love, if die he must. So the personages being introduced, and the intrigue on foot, the first act ends.

Now Don Luis establishes himself near the house of Don Lope, and is for ever prowling about the neighbourhood. Don Lope sees him, and wonders what he is doing. He suspects wrong at once, for the wronged husband of these plays is not of a free and noble nature. From the Spanish, and Italian, point of view he who is not suspicious is credulous, and a fool. Yet he will not believe at once, his wife being what she is, and he what he is. He shows his confidence by asking his wife’s leave to join the king’s expedition to Africa. Leonor gives it, and he sees no danger. But his friend Don Juan does. He drops a hint that it is strange the lady should be ready to part with her husband so soon. Again Don Lope is set speculating and wondering. Meanwhile Don Luis has been persecuting Leonor for a last interview, and she agrees to see him in the house, in the early morning, when she thinks she will not be discovered by her husband. Don Luis comes and is caught by Don Lope, but invents a story to the effect that he has taken refuge in the house to escape an enemy. Don Lope pretends to believe, but does not, and warns Don Luis plainly enough, though not in direct terms, that he will permit no trifling with his honour. Now the action advances very rapidly. Don Juan warns Don Lope by putting the supposed case of a man who knows that an insulting word has been used of a friend, who has not heard it, and asking whether he ought to be told. Don Lope advises silence, because the more an offence to honour is repeated, the worse. But he knows what is meant, and makes his mind up to take a secret revenge for the secret wrong when once he is sure. The king refuses to take him to Africa, on the ground that he is more needed in his own house. “Is my wrong already so public?” is Don Lope’s comment.

Now a very skilful use is made of Don Juan’s story to influence the mind of Don Lope. Don Juan hears himself described by two cavaliers as the man to whom the lie was given by Manuel de Sousa. He draws, kills one, and drives the other off. Then, in a paroxysm of grief, he once more complains to Don Lope of the injustice which compels the insulted man to bear the stigma of a public insult for ever. This incident confirms Don Lope’s intention to be secret in his revenge, lest it should make his wrong known. Fortune throws a chance in his way. Doña Leonor, encouraged by what she believes has been her escape from discovery, invites Don Luis to meet her on the other side of the river in a garden. He comes on the stage reading her letter, and meets Don Lope. The husband does not know what is in the letter, but he suspects. He invites Don Luis to cross the river with him, pushes off without the boatman, stabs his enemy in mid-stream, and upsets the boat. Then he swims ashore to the garden where his wife is waiting for Don Luis. To her he tells a story of an accident, and gives her the name of the Castilian gentleman who has perished. Leonor faints, and thus confirms Lope’s belief that she meant to betray him. He pretends that her anxiety was for himself; but that night he fires his house, strangles his wife in the confusion, and appears from among the flames bearing her body in his arms, pretending that she has been stifled by the smoke. The scene between husband and wife is not given. At the end he tells the king what has happened as to the death of Don Luis, and says that being no longer needed in his own house he is ready to sail for Africa. Don Sebastian approves of his hidden vengeance for the secret wrong, and we are left to suppose that Don Lope goes to perish at Alcázar el Quebir.

This is a powerful drama, and a good example of Calderon’s command of stage effect. It is written in the finished poetic form with which he replaced the free-flowing dialogue of Lope de Vega. The defect of this lay in the temptation it afforded to redundancy and undramatic ornament, but it has a sparkling icy beauty of its own. There is no development, even very little play, of character. The interest lies in the consistent working of a fierce, sullen, suspicious jealousy.

The Auto Sacramental.

The Auto Sacramental is very Spanish, very remote from us. These mysteries were performed during the month containing the feast of Corpus Christi in the streets, not in the theatres, which were shut at this time, but they were acted by professional actors. “Andar en los carros”—to go in the cars—was the regular phrase used by the actors for this form of their work. The cars were elaborate structures, covered, but capable of being opened to show scenes, and of letting down drawbridges which served as the stage. They were taken to different parts of the town, so that performances might be given in the squares, or before the houses of distinguished people.

The True God Pan may represent for us what the Auto Sacramental had become in Calderon’s hands when his genius was at its fullest development.[36] Calderon was fond of taking classical myths for his autos, and treating them as symbols of things to come since fulfilled. He used the story of Psyche and Cupid, and also the Andromeda. The application of the myth of Pan to Christianity was not uncommon in the Renaissance. Pan in Spanish means “bread,” and the auto was especially meant to set forth the mystery of the Sacrament. This play on words is the key to the whole auto. If the reader thinks the conceit puerile, and of more than dubious taste, he must remember that he is asked to look not at what would please us, but at what did please the Spaniards,—what was accepted by their still mediæval simplicity of piety, and was in keeping with their love for playing on words. |The loa.| First came the loa, or praise. This was an introductory piece, sometimes delivered by a single speaker, sometimes containing a little action. It was common on the secular stage, but had no necessary connection with the piece to follow, being only part of the surroundings and dependencies of the comedia. Calderon’s loa was a regular introduction to the auto. In The True God Pan there are five personages in the loa—History, Poetry, Fable, Music, and Truth. History, the dama, begins by announcing that in this time of general joy it becomes her to speak, since she by the mouth of Paul and John has told how the Bread (Pan) became flesh, and the Word had become flesh. She calls in Music and the other personages. A forfeit dance takes place—that is to say, all sing as they dance, and each who makes a fault is called upon to pay a small forfeit. This was, and is, a form of amusement in Spain. The songs all refer to the mystery of the Sacrament, and the faults are the successive departures of Music, Poetry, and the others from the Catholic truth. Fable promises to pay her forfeit by telling one of her stories, and beginning with the Spanish once upon a time—“Érase que se era”—gives an allegorised version of the myth of Pan. Poetry promises an auto on the same subject, to show that the heathen had foreknowledge of our pure truths, but being blind, without the light of Faith, applied them to their own False Gods. The auto shall be on the True God Pan. With a loyal address to Charles the Consoler—the unhappy Carlos II., then a small boy, before whom the auto was performed—the loa ends.

El Verdadero Dios Pan.

The personages of the auto are—Pan, Night, the Moon, the World, Judaism, Synagogue, Heathenism, Idolatry, Apostasy, Malice, Simplicity, the Fiend, Faith, a child, shepherds, shepherdesses, with musicians and attendants. Pan comes out of a tent, and begins by a lyric appeal to Night. Night comes, and Pan explains that his birth was at Bethlehem, which in Hebrew means house of grain, and from that point goes on to allegorise, in a fashion which it is difficult to interpret, out of its own proper language of piety and poetry, without offence. He asks Night to lead him to the Moon, and then again allegorises, explaining that she is Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, and Proserpine in hell, therefore the type of human nature, which dwells on earth, aspires to heaven, and can sink to the infernal regions. Night refuses, telling him that all the country is ravaged by a monster of whom Paul, Chrysostom, and Saint Augustine speak. Here we have an example of those “impertinences” which excited the ridicule of Madame D’Aulnoy, who would, no doubt, have found Ben Jonson’s masques “impertinent.” Pan recognises the monster as “Sin,” and announces that he will retire to the desert while the Gentiles sing to their false gods. The last words are taken up by a chorus, and we have now a scene at the altar of the Moon. Judaism, Heathenism, Synagogue, and the others appear, only to quarrel and debate. The auto goes on, with constant interludes of singing and dancing. The monster “Sin” is heard of, ravaging the flocks. All prove hireling shepherds except Pan, who appears to help Luna in her distress. There is a scene of defiance between him and the Fiend, quite in the style of the comedia when galan is opposed to galan. The Fiend flies, leaving the trunk of a tree with which he meant to strike down Pan. The comic element is not wanting. Judaism takes up the weapon which the Fiend has dropped, and threatens Pan with it, but he only succeeds in knocking down, and killing, Synagogue. Then he carries off the body, saying in an aside that though all the world knows Synagogue is dead, yet he will always consider him as alive. Judaism rejects Pan, and Apostasy will not be persuaded that Flesh can be Bread. Apostasy, of course, stands for the heretics who will not accept the doctrine of transubstantiation. But Heathenism is persuaded, and Luna, typifying human nature, believes. Pan takes her as “spouse,” and both ascend to the celestial mansions.

Los Dos Habladores.

The entremes—interlude or farce—was by nature a slight thing. In the Dos Habladores—‘The Two Chatterers’—of Cervantes we have the simple story of a gentleman who is plagued in the streets by a ragged gabbler of insufferable fluency. He makes several attempts to shake him off without success, but at last sees how to make use of him. Sarmiento, the pestered gentleman, has a talkative wife. He takes the bore home, introduces him as a poor relation, and sets him at her. Roldan the chatterer drives the woman frantic by torrents of talk which leave her no chance to speak. The merit of the piece on the stage lay no doubt in the opportunity it presented for “patter” and comic acting. Yet the entremeses—not this one only, but the whole class—have great literary interest as storehouses of vivid, richly coloured, familiar Castilian.

A drama which flowered for a century, and was so productive as the Spanish, cannot be fully illustrated by six examples. Yet these may serve to show the reader what he may expect to find there. Much he will not find, or will find only in passing indications. Perfection of poetic form in the verse is too rare; the more than human beauty of the Elizabethan lyric, the “mighty line,” whether of Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Corneille, the accomplishment of Molière or Racine, are wanting. The personages are constantly recurring types, with here and there a humour. The Juan Crespo of Calderon’s Alcalde de Zalamea stands almost alone among the characters of the Spanish stage as a being of the real world fixed for us by the poet. What has been called the au delà of Molière, and what is found in the very greatest masters—the something which transcends the mere action before us, and is immortally true of all human nature—is not on the Spanish stage. But there is much good verse, easy, with a careless grace, and spirited in Lope, or stately with a peculiar Spanish dignity in Calderon; there is a fine wind of romance blowing all through, and there is ingenious, unresting, yet lucid action. If it never reaches the highest level of our Elizabethan drama, neither does it fall to the vacant horseplay which is to be found side by side with the tragedy of Marlowe or Middleton. And though this essentially theatrical drama cannot be said to have held the mirror up to nature, yet it does give a picture of the time and the people, adapted and coloured for the boards, but still preserving the likeness of the original. This may be said to be its weakness. Spanish dramatic literature is so much a thing of Spain, and of the seventeenth century, that it must needs appeal the less on that account to other peoples and later times. None the less the spectacle is picturesque in itself, while the great theatrical dexterity of the Spanish playwrights will always make their work interesting to all who care for more than the purely literary qualities of drama. The religion of the Spaniard is conspicuous in his plays. It has been said that Calderon was the poet of the Inquisition, and if this is not said as mere blame, it conveys a truth. That solution of the riddle of the painful earth which A. W. Schlegel professed to have found in him, is no doubt only the teaching of the mediæval Church. We may on this account decline very properly to receive him as a deeper thinker than Shakespeare, but that teaching of the Church, to which the Inquisition strove to confine all Spaniards, had been the guide and consolation of all civilised Europe. To have given it a lofty poetical expression for the second time, as Dante had for the first, was no contemptible feat.

CHAPTER V.
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE.

PASTORALS AND SHORT STORIES—THE ORIGINAL WORK OF THE SPANIARD—THE “LIBROS DE CABALLERÍAS”—THE ‘AMADIS OF GAUL’—FOLLOWERS OF ‘AMADIS OF GAUL’—INFLUENCE AND CHARACTER OF THESE TALES—THE REAL CAUSE OF THEIR DECLINE—THE CHARACTER OF THE “NOVELAS DE PÍCAROS”—THE ‘CELESTINA’—‘LAZARILLO DE TORMÉS’—‘GUZMAN DE ALFARACHE’—THE FOLLOWERS OF MATEO ALEMAN—QUEVEDO—CERVANTES—HIS LIFE—HIS WORK—THE MINOR THINGS—‘DON QUIXOTE.’

Pastorals and short stories.

The mere bulk of the Spanish stories was great, but it is subject to many deductions before we can disentangle the permanently important part. Pastorals, for instance, were much written in Spain, and one, the Diana[37] of Jorge de Montemayor (1520?-1561?), is excellent in its insipid kind. But they were and could be only echoes of Sannazzaro. In estimating the literature of any nation we can afford to pass over what it has only taken from a neighbour with a notice that the imitation was made. The merit of creating the type, be it great or little, belongs to the original. Even when an imitator is himself widely read, as was the case with Montemayor, he is but carrying on the work of the first master. Short stories, again, were popular enough in Spain; but to a large extent they, too, were imitations. The Patrañuelo—‘The Story-Teller’—of Juan de Timoneda, or the Cigarrales de Toledo of Tirso de Molina, are full of the matter of the Fabliaux and the Italian Novelli.[38] What the Spaniard did which was also a contribution to the literature of Europe was done neither in the pastoral nor in the short story, but in the long tale of heroic or of vulgar adventure. His are the Libros de Caballerías—‘Books of Knightly Deeds’ which are the parents of the true modern romance; and the Novelas de Pícaros, or, ‘Tales of Rogues,’ the counterpart, and even perhaps a little the burlesque of the first, are the ancestors of all the line which comes through Gil Blas. Then his was Don Quixote, which belongs to no class, but is at once universal and a thing standing by itself, a burlesque of the Libros de Caballerías which grew into a sadly humorous picture of human delusion, and was also an expression of the genius of Miguel de Cervantes.

The books of Chivalry, or of Knightly Deeds, which is perhaps the more accurate translation of the Spanish plural Caballerías, like the Romances, cannot be said to belong to the literature of the Renaissance. They were a survival of the Middle Ages, the direct successors of the Romans d’Aventures, which had sprung from the Chansons de Gestes.

The Arthurian stories of Lancelot and of Merlin were known to the Spaniards, and had an enduring popularity by the side of their own Tales of Chivalry. There is even one book belonging in essential to the school which certainly preceded the Amadis. This is the Valencian Tirant lo Blanch, written in Catalan, of which the first three books are the work of Juan Martorell, and the fourth was added by Mosen Juan de Galbá, at the request of a lady, Isabel de Loriz. It was printed in Valencia in 1490, was translated into Spanish, though with suppressions, and had the rather curious fortune to be published in a French version in 1737 by a gentleman whose own name was not unworthy of a Libro de Caballerías, A. C. P. Tubières de Grimoard de Pestels de Levi, Count of Caylus.

Here it is, perhaps, but fair to warn the reader of the extreme difficulty of making more than a slight acquaintance with these once widely read tales. Popularity and neglect have alike been fatal to them. They were thumbed to pieces while they were liked, and thrown aside as worthless when the fashion had changed. Single copies alone remain of some, as, for instance, the curious ‘Don Florindo, he of the Strange Adventure,’ of which Don Pascual de Gayangos gives a long analysis. Even Don Pascual had never seen the Spanish original of the once renowned Palmerin of England. Southey was compelled to make up his Palmerin by correcting Anthony Munday’s translation from a French version. Surviving copies are scattered in the public libraries, and it is probable that nobody has seen them all. So we must speak with a certain reserve concerning them, but yet with a tolerably well-founded conviction that what one has not seen does not differ in material respects from what has come in one’s way.

The Libros de Caballerías.

It is not the matter of these tales, but the spirit, which attaches them to the Middle Ages. Knights and damsels errant, dwarfs, dragons, giants, and enchanters were not neglected by the poets of the Italian Renaissance, but they were dealt with in gaiety, and more than half in mockery. But the Libros de Caballerías are very serious. Chivalry was not to their authors an old dream, but a still living standard of conduct, and they carried on the tradition of the Middle Ages with absolute sincerity.

The Amadis of Gaul.

When the Libros de Caballerías are described as the direct descendants of the Romans d’Aventures, it must be understood that this does not imply that the actual story had its origin out of Spain. We cannot say stories, because there is in reality only one, which was constantly rewritten, with changes which in the majority of cases hardly go beyond the names. There is one parent story closely imitated by the others, and that is the Amadis of Gaul.[39] The honour of the first invention has been claimed by the French, on the general ground that their influence in Spain and Portugal was great, and that therefore they must not only have carried the taste for tales of chivalrous adventure beyond the Pyrenees, but have created all the stories and personages. But the French Amadis has been lost, and though that may be his only defect, it suffices to leave us entitled to doubt whether he ever existed, except in the patriotic French literary imagination. What is certain is that Amadis was a popular hero of romance with the Castilians and Portuguese before the end of the fourteenth century. It also appears to be put beyond doubt that a version of the story was written by Vasco de Lobeira, a Portuguese gentleman who died in 1403. Whether it was the first, or was a version of a Castilian original, or whether the French, who were then very numerous both in Castile and Portugal, and had an undeniable influence on the poetry of both countries, and more especially of the second, did not at least inspire Vasco de Lobeira, are questions which can be debated for ever by national vanity, without settlement. The Amadis of Gaul, which belongs to literature, and not to the inane region of suppositions, disputes, and lost manuscripts, is the work of Garcia Ordoñez de Montalvo, of Medina del Campo in Leon. It was announced as an adaptation from the Portuguese. As the manuscript of Vasco de Lobeira was lost in the destruction of the Duke of Arveiro’s library in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, we cannot tell how far Montalvo followed, or improved upon, or did not improve upon, his original. Indeed, in the absence of a Portuguese manuscript, it is impossible to be sure that the Spanish author did not adopt the common device of presenting his work as a translation, when in fact it was wholly his own. It is certainly strange, considering the immense popularity of the Amadis of Gaul all over Europe, that the Portuguese did not vindicate their right to him by publishing Vasco de Lobeira, since the manuscript was known to exist, and to be accessible in the library of a great noble.

Be all that as it may, we are on firm ground when we come to the proved facts concerning the actual writing of the Spanish Amadis. It belongs to the years between 1492 and 1504. The first known edition, that of Rome, is dated 1519; but it is unlikely, though not impossible, that there had not been a Spanish predecessor. There is a known edition of the first of the rival Palmerin series, which is dated 1511. What is beyond doubt is that its popularity was immediate and widespread. Spain produced twelve editions in fifty years. It was translated in French and Italian with immense acceptance. One of the best known stories of lost labour and disappointment in literature is that Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato, founded a considerable reputation on the fact that he had undertaken to make the Amadis the foundation of an epic, which reputation endured until the appearance of the poem.

As if in direct imitation of the mediæval custom, Amadis was made the founder of a family. Montalvo gave the world the deeds of his son Esplandian in 1526, and from another hand came in the same year his nephew, Florisando, and then a long line, reaching to the twelfth book. The succession in France was even longer, for it reached the twenty-fourth. Beside the house of Amadis, there arose and flourished the distinguished family known as the Palmerines. The first two of this series, the Primaleon and the Palmerin de Oliva, are said to have been the work of a lady of “Augustobriga, a town in Portugal.” But her name and very existence are uncertain, while neither of the places called Augustobriga in the time of the Roman dominion in the Peninsula is in Portugal. The most famous of this line, the Palmerin of England, was for long attributed to a Portuguese, Francisco de Moraes, who after a rather distinguished public career was murdered at Evora in 1572; but it was probably the work of a Spaniard, Luis Hurtado of Toledo. It was the confusing habit of the authors of these tales to call them the fifth, or sixth, or other, “book” of Amadis, or of Primaleon. Sometimes rival fifths or sixths appeared, and translators did not follow the Spanish numeration. Hence much trouble to the faithful historian. Yet the family history can be followed with tolerable accuracy. Don Pascual de Gayangos has been at the pains to make a regular pedigree for both, showing the main lines and collateral branches. It is a satisfaction to be able to state with confidence that the lady Flérida, daughter of Palmerin de Oliva, married Don Duardos (Edward), son of Frederick, King of England, and of a sister of Melèadus, King of Scotland, and that Palmerin of England was their son. He again married Polinarda, and was the father of Don Duardos de Bretaña II., who was the father of Don Clarisel. The Palmerin series, by the way, is much less rich than the Amadis in those superb names which are not the least of the pleasures of the Tales of Chivalry. It rarely rises to the height of Cadragante, or Manete the Measured, or Angriote de Estravaus, and never to the level of the Queen Pintiquinestra, or the Giant Famongomadan, whom Cervantes had in his mind when he imagined Brandabarbaran de Boliche. The stories independent of these two series are numerous, though less numerous than the reader who has not looked into the matter may suppose. Their names—and that is all which survives of some—will be found in their proper places in the lists of Don Pascual de Gayangos.

It will be seen that much of this work is either anonymous, or is attributed on vague evidence to authors of whom the name only is known. The chief exception is the Feliciano de Silva at whose style Cervantes laughed. It happens that something is known of Feliciano, and that it is to his honour. He was page to the sixth Duke of Medina Sidonia, and he saved the Duchess from being drowned in the Guadalquivir at the risk of his own life; which, it will be allowed, was an action not unworthy of the author of Libros de Caballerías. He wrote the Lisuarte de Grecia, the Amadis de Grecia, and several others, including the Florisel de Niquea. Feliciano was an industrious man of letters, who would have been a useful collaborator with, and fairly successful imitator of, Dumas, had time and chance suited. He adulterated his tales of knightly deeds by imitations of the pastoral model, and his style certainly laid him open to the ridicule of Cervantes. Yet it is not more pompous and mechanical than our own Lyly, and is better than the manner of some of the Novelas de Pícaros.

Influence and character of these Tales.

None of the commonplaces in the history of literature are better established than these: that the Libros de Caballerías were tiresome and absurd; that they appeared in immense numbers, and flooded out all better and more wholesome reading; and that they were killed by Don Quixote. Yet there are probably not three worse founded commonplaces. That these books can be tedious, and that the worst of them can be very tedious, is true. But none are more long-winded than the Golden Epistles, which had an equally great popularity, or than some well-accepted reading of any generation is apt to look to later times, when fashion has changed. They were certainly neither more tiresome nor more essentially absurd than the Novela de Pícaros. Their number was not very great. The whole body is not nearly as numerous as the yearly output of novels to-day in England; and even when their inordinate length is allowed for, their total bulk is not greater, though they were written during a century. As for their supposed predominance, it must be remembered that the great time of the Libros de Caballerías was also the time of the “learned poetry” of Spain, of the growth of the drama, of most of the romances, and of some of the best work of the historians and the mystic writers. That Don Quixote destroyed them may seem to be a truth too firmly established to be shaken, and yet the contrary proposition, that it was the waning popularity of the Tales of Knightly Deeds which made Don Quixote possible, is on the whole more consistent with fact. They had been less and less written for a generation before Cervantes produced his famous First Part. The Novela de Pícaros was taking their place. Readers were predisposed to find them laughable, and therefore enjoyed the burlesque. Cervantes’ own half-humorous boast has been taken too seriously. The ridicule of the Libros de Caballerías is the least valuable part of Don Quixote, and is not in itself better than much satire which has yet failed to destroy things more deserving of destruction than the family of Amadis.

Neither the popularity nor the decline of the Libros de Caballerías was in the least unintelligible. These books supplied the Spaniards with stories of fighting and adventure in a fighting adventurous time, when the taste for reading, or at least hearing others read, was spreading, and when the theatre—the only possible rival—was still in its feeble beginnings. And what they gave was not only suited to the time but not inferior to what came after. The English reader who wishes to put it to the test has an easy way open to him. Let him take the adaptations which Southey made of Amadis of Gaul, or Palmerin of England, and compare them, not with Sir Walter Scott, who showed what a great genius could do with a motive not unlike that of the Libros de Caballerías; not with Gil Blas, which shows what genius could do with the machinery of the Novela de Pícaros; not with Don Quixote, which is for all time,—but with an English version of the Guzman de Alfarache, the book which first firmly established the gusto picaresco at the very close of the sixteenth century. He will find much repetition (though Southey, who made one or two notable additions, has suppressed largely) in both, but in the Guzman it is endless sordid roguery, in which there is no general human truth, and in place of it a mechanical exaggeration of a temporary form of Spanish vagabondage, while in the Amadis or Palmerin it is something not unlike the noble fancies of the Arthurian legend.

The real cause of their decline.

The decline of the Libros de Caballerías is easily accounted for. They ended by wearying the world with monotony, and the increasing extravagance of incident and language, which was their one resource for avoiding monotony. The Spaniard’s tendency to repeat stock types in the same kind of action was visible here as elsewhere. The Amadis gave the pattern, and it was followed. A hero who is the son of a king, and is also a model of knightly prowess and virtues, with a brother in arms who, while no less valiant, is decidedly less virtuous, are the chief figures. Amadis, the Beltenebros—the lovely dark man—is the pink of loyalty to his peerless Oriana, who is the fairest and most loving of women. Galaor is gay and volatile, light of love, but loyal in friendship. Amadis is born out of wedlock, and left to fortune by his mother, or for some other reason brought up far away from the throne which is lawfully his, and fights his way to his crown without ever failing for an instant in his devotion to Oriana. Galaor helps him, and loves what ladies he meets on the road. Amadis breathes out his mistress’s name as he lays his lance in rest, Galaor throws a defiant jest in front of him; Amadis has the gift of tears, but Galaor laughs in the jaws of death, laughs in fact at everything except the honour of a gentleman—and on that he smiles. It is a brotherhood between Sir Charles Grandison and Mercutio. Combats, giants, fairy ladies, enchanters good and bad, make up the matter of the story. If it is essentially unwholesome, so is the Round Table legend; and if it is necessarily absurd, so is the Faërie Queen. But when it had been done once in Amadis, and for a second time in Palmerin, it was done for good. To take the machinery of the Libros de Caballerías, and put a new spirit into it, which, as Cervantes saw, was possible, was not given to any Spaniard. All they could do was to repeat, and then endeavour to hide the repetition by multiplying everything on a fixed scale. The giants grew bigger, the sword-cuts more terrific, the combats more numerous, the monsters more hideous, the exalted sentiments swelled till they were less credible than the giants. The fine Castilian of Garcia Ordoñez was tortured into the absurdities which bad writers think to be style. The Libros de Caballerías, which had been a natural survival, and revival, of the Middle Ages in the early sixteenth century, were unnatural at its close. Don Quixote did but hasten their end. They would have perished in any case before the Novelas de Pícaros, which in turn ran much the same course, and were extinguished without the intervention of satire. That the taste of the time was tending away from the higher forms of romance is shown by the little following found for the Civil Wars of Granada by Ginés Perez de Hita, of whom little or nothing is known.[40] This book, of which the first part was published in 1598 and the second in 1604, is the original source of all the stories of the Zegries and Abencerrages. It gave the Spaniards a model for the historical novel proper, but though it was popular at the time—so popular that it was taken for real history—Perez de Hita founded no school. The Spanish character was becoming too impoverished for a large and poetic romance. What imagination there was, was becoming concentrated in the theatre before withering entirely.

Character of the Novelas de Pícaros.

The fate of the Novelas de Pícaros is one of the most curious in literature. But for them, and their popularity outside of Spain, there could not well have been any Gil Blas, and without him the history of modern prose fiction must have been very different. Yet apart from the example they set, and the machinery they supplied, their worth is small. We find in them the same monotony of type and incident as in the comedia and the Libros de Caballerías, while they have neither the fine theatrical qualities of the first (which was, we may allow, inevitable) nor the manly spirit of the second. Poetry, heroic sentiment, or deep religious feeling we could not expect from what only professed to deal with the common and animal side of life. But they do not give what might have compensated for these things, average sensual human nature, acting credibly and drawn with humour. Their fun—and they strained at jocularity—is of the kind which delights to pull the chair from below you when you are about to sit down, and laughs consumedly at your bruises. To make the jest complete you must be old, ugly, sickly, and very poor. There is no laugh in the Novelas de Pícaros, only at their best a loud hard guffaw, and when they do not rise to that, a perpetual forced giggle. Truth to life is as far from them as from the Libros de Caballerías, but the two are on opposite sides. In mere tediousness they equal the heroic absurdity, for—and this is not their least offensive feature—they are obtrusively didactic. The larger half of the Guzman de Alfarache is composed of preachment of an incredibly platitudinous order. Boredom for boredom, the endless combats of the knight-errant are better. And withal we find the same childish effort to attain originality by mere exaggeration. The Lazarillo de Tormés forces the tone of the Celestina, Guzman de Alfarache advances, more particularly in bulk, beyond Lazarillo, Marcos de Obregon improves on Guzman, and so it goes on to the grinning and sardonic brutality of Quevedo’s Pablo de Segovia and the jerking capers of Don Gregorio Guadaña. This last is the work of an exiled Spanish Jew, Enriquez Gomez (f. 1638-1660). Imagine Villon’s Ballade des Pendus without the verse, without the pathos, spun out in prose, growing ever more affected through endless repetitions of sordid incident, and you have the Novela de Pícaros.[41]

The Celestina.

Yet they started from what might well have been the beginning of better. The Celestina had a certain truth to life in its really valuable parts, and it did not strive to amuse with mere callous practical joking.[42] This curious dialogue story was written perhaps before, or it may be about, the time of the conquest of Granada—1492—and both the identity of its author and its date of publication are obscure. It is divided into twenty-one so-called acts, of which the first is very long and the others are very short. Fernando Rojas of Montalvan, by whom it was published, says that the first act was the work of Rodrigo Cota of Toledo, a Jew, the known author of some tolerable verses in the style of the Court school; and that he himself finished it at the request of friends. This account has been disputed by the criticism which delights in disputing the attribution of everything to everybody. It is neither supported by internal, nor contradicted by external, evidence. The literary importance of the tale is not affected by it in the least. There are two elements in the Celestina. It contains a love-story of the headlong southern order, sudden and violent in action, inflated, and frequently insufferably pedantic in expression, withal somewhat commonplace. With this, and subservient to this, there is a background, a subordinate, busy, scheming world of procuresses, prostitutes, dishonest servants, male and female, and bullies, which is amazingly vivid. Celestina, whose name has replaced the pompous original title of the story, Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibœa, is the ancestress of the two characters of similar trade in Pamela and Clarissa. She had many forerunners in mediæval literature, in and out of Spain. But she has never been surpassed in vividness of portraiture, while her household of loose women and bullies, with their intrigues and jealousies, their hangers-on, and their arts of temptation, is drawn with no less truth than gusto. The quality of their talk is admirable, and the personages are not described from the outside, or presented to us as puppet types, but allowed to manifest themselves, and to grow, with a convincing reality rare indeed in Spanish literature.

Though the popularity of the Celestina, not only in Spain but abroad, was great, it did not produce any marked effect on Spanish literature until a generation had passed. It was adapted on the stage, but there it left few traces except on the racy dialogue of the prose entremeses. The poetic form of the Spanish comedy did not, and even perhaps could not, adapt itself to the alert naturalistic tone of the Celestina, and the subjects of the plays grew ever more romantic and more remote from the vulgar world. But this answered too well to a natural taste of the Spaniards to remain without a following. |The Lazarillo de Tormés.| Its first real successor (apart from rifacimentos or mere echoes, of which there were several) was the Vida de Lazarillo de Tormés; sus Fortunas y Adversidades,[43] attributed on very dubious evidence to the famous Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and with not much greater probability to Fray Juan de Ortega, of the Order of St. Jerome. The date of its composition is uncertain. The first known edition is of 1553, but it may have been read in manuscript before that. In the Lazarillo we have the Novela de Pícaros already complete, differing only from those which were to come after in the greater simplicity of its style and in freshness. The hero is a poor boy of Tormés, in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, none too honest by nature, and made perfectly unscrupulous by a life of dependence on harsh, or poverty-stricken, masters. The story tells how he passes from one service to another, generally after playing some more or less ferocious trick on his employer. It is a scheme which affords a good opening for satirical sketches of life, and the author, whoever he was, clearly adopted it for that among other reasons. Lazarillo’s master, the poor cavalier who keeps up a show of living like a gentleman while in fact he is starving at home—too proud either to work or beg, but not too proud to cherish schemes of entrapping a wife with a dowry, and not spirited enough to serve as a soldier—was no doubt a familiar figure in Spain, and he became a stock puppet of the Novelas de gusto Pícaresco. Another scene of real, though not peculiarly Spanish, satire deals with a dishonest seller of pardons and his sham miracles. The Reformation had imposed limits on the freedom of orthodox writers to deal with the sins, or even absurdities, of churchmen, and this passage was suppressed, as of bad example, by the Inquisition. The majority of the figures are, however, less satirical than grotesque. We find in the Lazarillo, though not to the extent which afterwards become common, the love of dwelling on starvation, poverty, and physical infirmities as if they were things amusing in themselves. But this is less the case than in its successors, and being nearly the first, or even the actual first, in the fully developed form, it has a certain freshness. It has the merit of being short, and leaves its hero dishonourably married, with a promise of a continuation, which was never written by the author.

Guzman de Alfarache.

Putting aside spurious “second parts” of the Lazarillo, the next event in the advance—we cannot say the development—of the Novela de Pícaros is the publication of the Guzman de Alfarache of Mateo Aleman, a Sevillian of whose birth, life, and death nothing certain is known. This book, appearing just as the Libros de Caballerías were dying of exhaustion, set the example to a swarm of followers. Yet it was itself but an imitation of Lazarillo, greatly enlarged, and over-burdened with what Le Sage, who translated it, most justly called “superfluous moral reflections.” The second title of the book, La Atalaya de la Vida—‘The Beacon of Life’ indicates Aleman’s didactic intention, which even without it is obtrusive. But a beacon of life, to be other than a useless blaze, must be set to warn us off real dangers in real life: it must flame with satire on possible human errors. The satire of Aleman is akin to Marston’s, and Marston’s many followers among ourselves,—it is a loud bullying shout at mere basenesses made incredible by being abstracted from average human nature, and kneaded into dummies. Celestina, besides being an impudent, greedy servant of vice, is also a woman with humour and an amusing tongue. Her household are the scum of the earth, but they are human scum, with a capacity for enjoying themselves as men and women without dragging their humour of vice in, when no cause sets it in motion. They can laugh and cry, like and dislike, as other human beings do. But the personages of Mateo Aleman are grinning puppets, galvanised to imitate the gestures of greed, cowardice, mendacity, and cruelty, abstracted from humanity. Then, they are set to play a wild fantasia in vacuo. What is true of Mateo Aleman applies equally to his followers.

Followers of Mateo Aleman.

A brief outline must suffice for his successors. A spurious second part of Guzman de Alfarache was published in 1603, written, as it would seem by one Marti, a Valencian, who assumed the noble name of Luxan. This, by the way, is one proof among many that the Libros de Caballerías were not the prevailing taste of readers when Cervantes published his first part of Don Quixote in 1605, or else it would have suggested itself to nobody to trade on the popularity of Guzman. In 1605 Aleman wrote a second part, in which he victimises the plagiarist in a fashion afterwards followed by Cervantes when provoked in the same fashion. In the same year came out the Pícara Justina of Andreas Perez, a Dominican who wrote under the name of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda, with a she rogue as heroine, with exactly the same spirit and machinery, and an identical didactic purpose, but written in a tortured style. Vicente Espinel (?1551-?1630), who was otherwise notable for adding the fifth string to the guitar and as a verse-writer, published El Escudero (i.e., Squire) Marcos de Obregon in 1618. This squire is of the class of the Biscayan whom Don Quixote overthrew, an elderly man who waited on ladies—the forerunner of the footman with the gold-headed stick, familiar to ourselves till very recent times. He has led the usual life. The Marcos de Obregon had the honour of contributing a few incidents to Le Sage. The soul of Pedro Garcia is not taken from the introduction, but put in place of what Espinel had written. In the Spanish story two students find a tombstone on which are written the words “Unio, unio,” a pun on pearl and union. One sees nothing in the riddle, and goes on. The other digs and finds—the skeletons of the lovers of Antequera, who threw themselves together from a precipice to escape capture by the Moors. Here we see what Le Sage did with the framework supplied him by the Spaniards. He took what was only Spanish, and made it universal. We can all laugh over the bag of coin which was the soul of Pedro Garcia, but who understands the story of the Spanish lovers without a commentary? After Marcos de Obregon there follow mainly repetitions.

Quevedo.

An exception must, however, be made for the Gran Tacaño—‘The Great Sharper,’ Paul of Segovia, by Quevedo.[44] Don Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas, Señor de la Torre de Juan Abad (1580-1645), was a very typical Spaniard of those who came from “the mountain,” and lived an agitated life in the Spain of the seventeenth century. He served under the once famous Duke of Osuna, viceroy of Sicily and Naples, was implicated in the mysterious conspiracy against Venice, and finally suffered from the hostility of the Count Duke of Olivares. In literature he is still the shadow of a great name as poet, scholar, and satirist. Among his countrymen his memory is still popular as the hero of innumerable stories of much the same kind as those told in Scotland of Buchanan, and in France of Rabelais. For his sake Pablo de Segovia may be mentioned, and also because it is the Novela de Pícaros as the Spaniards wrote it, stripped of the last rag of whatever could disguise its essential hard brutality. If you can gloat over starvation—if the hangman expatiating joyfully over halters and lashes seems a pleasant spectacle to you—if blows, falls, disease, hunger, dirt, and every form of suffering, told with a loud callous laugh, and utterly unrelieved, seem to you worth reading about, then Pablo de Segovia is much at your service. But Quevedo did other than this. Some of his satiric verse has life, and if not gaiety, still a species of bitter jocularity; and moreover, he gave a new employment to the gusto picaresco in his Visions. These once world-renowned satires are composed of such matter as the vices of lawyers, doctors, police-officers, unfaithful wives, complacent husbands, &c. To those who wish to master the Castilian language in all its resources they are invaluable, and it is in itself so fine that we can endure much to gain access to its treasures. But it is possible to gain a quite accurate understanding of Quevedo by reading the translation and amplification of his Visions by our own Sir Roger L’Estrange. Then, just in order to see where this spirit and this method lead, it is not a waste of time to go on to Ned Ward. There was something very congenial to the Restoration in the Spanish gusto picaresco, and that is its sufficient condemnation. Yet it did supply Le Sage with what he might not have been able to elaborate for himself, and thereby it contributed to the gaiety and the wisdom of nations.

Cervantes.

That the name of Miguel de Cervantes towers above all others in Spanish literature is a commonplace. Montesquieu’s jest, that Spain has produced but one good book, which was written to prove the absurdity of all the others, is only the flippant statement of the truth that the one Spanish book which the world has taken to itself is Don Quixote. What else the Spaniards have done in literature may have its own beauty and interest. It may even have affected the literature of other nations. The Spanish drama did something to form the purely theatrical skill of the playwright, and the Novela de Pícaros gave a framework for the prose story of common life. Yet the plays of Lope or of Calderon, the tales of Aleman, Espinel, and others, are essentially Spanish, and Spanish of one time. It is only in touches here and there that we find in them, behind their native vesture, any touch of what is human and universal. Even when they dealt with what was common to them with other peoples, the emotions of piety and devotion, they gave them their own colour, their own purely Spanish flavour. There is no Imitation of Christ, no Pilgrim’s Progress, in their religious writing. But Don Quixote is so little purely Spanish that its influence has been mainly felt abroad, that it has been, and is, loved by many who have neither heard nor wish to hear of the literature lying round it.

His life.

The life of Cervantes has been made so familiar that the details need only be briefly mentioned here.[45] It is within the knowledge of all who take any interest in him at all that he was by descent a gentleman of an ancient house. His own branch of it had become poor. He was born, probably on some day in October 1547, at Alcalá de Henares, a town lying to the east of Madrid, and the seat of the university founded by Cardinal Jimenez. It does not appear that Cervantes ever attended the university, or received more than the trifling schooling which fell to the lot of Shakespeare also. Mar, Iglesia, y casa de rey—the sea (i.e., adventure in America), the Church, and the king’s service—were the three careers open to a gentleman at a time when trade, medicine, and even the law, were plebeian. Cervantes began life in the household of a great Italian ecclesiastic, Cardinal Acquaviva, in one of those positions of domestic service about men of high position which were then, in all countries, filled by gentlemen of small or no fortune. From 1571 to 1575 he served as a soldier under Don John of Austria, and received that wound in the left hand at the battle of Lepanto in which he took a noble pride. From 1575 to 1580 he was a prisoner in Algiers. After his release in 1580 till his death in 1616—for thirty-six long years full of misfortune—he led the struggling life of a Spanish gentleman who had no fortune, no interest, no command of the arts which ingratiate a dependent with a superior. At the very end he may have enjoyed some measure of comparative ease, but few men of letters have been poorer. Most men of his class were no richer than himself,—for Spain was a very poor country, and mere poverty was deprived of its worst sting when men ranked by birth and not by their possessions. No want of means could cause a noble to be other than the social superior of the merely rich man, while the Church had been only too successful in investing poverty with a certain sanctity. Yet though there were alleviations, the lot of Cervantes was a hard one, embittered by disappointments and imprisonments, which seem to have been chiefly due to the clumsy brutality of the Spanish judicial system. All this he bore with that dignity in misfortune which is one of the finest features in the character of the Spaniard, and with a cheerful courage all his own. Everything known of his life shows that he possessed two of the finest qualities which can support a man in a life of hardship—pride and a sweet temper.

His work.

The written work of Cervantes is divided in a way not unexampled in literature, but nowhere seen to the same extent except in the case of Prevost, a far smaller, but a real, genius. If he had left nothing but Don Quixote, his place in literature would be what it is. If he had not written his one masterpiece, he would have passed unnoticed; and there would have been no reason why he should have been remembered, unless it were with Bermudez and Virues, as one of the forerunners of Lope who made vague, ill-directed experiments in the childhood of Spanish dramatic literature. Even the Novelas Ejemplares, though they possess a greater measure of his qualities than any part of his literary inheritance, other than Don Quixote and his entremeses, are mainly interesting because they are his. Other Spaniards did such things as well as he, or better, but none have approached Don Quixote. The difference is not in degree, it is in kind.

The minor things.

We may, then, pass rapidly over the minor things. It is to be noted that his natural inclination was not towards letters, but to arms. When a mere boy he did, indeed, write some verses on the death of Isabelle of Valois, the wife of Philip II., but they were school exercises written at the instigation of his master, Juan Lopez de Hoyos, and published by him. Like Sir Walter Scott, he believed in the greater nobility of the life of action, and more particularly in the superiority of the “noble profession of arms.” If he could have had his choice it would have been to serve the king, and more especially to serve him in the reconquest of Northern Africa from the Mahometans. He was driven to write by mere necessity, and the want of what he would fain have had. During his captivity in Algiers he made plays for the amusement of his fellow-prisoners. After his release, when he was again employed as a soldier in the conquest of Portugal, in 1580 he wrote his unfinished pastoral, the Galatea. He was married in 1584, and established in Madrid. At this period he wrote many plays, now lost, and two which have survived. The Trato de Argel, or ‘Life in Algiers,’ has some biographical interest, and some general value as a picture of the pirate stronghold, but is valuable on these grounds only. The Numancia belongs to the class of works describable in the good sense as curious. It is a long dialogued poem divided into scenes and acts, on the siege of Numantia by Scipio, and is not without a certain grandiose force. As a play it shows that the Spanish drama had not found its way, and that Cervantes was not to be its guide. It struggles between imitation of the mystery, vague efforts to follow an ill-understood classic model, and attempt to strike a new and native path which the author could nowhere find. Then comes a long interval, during which Lope was sweeping all rivals from the stage, and Cervantes, in his own phrase, was buried “in the silence of oblivion.” He was struggling for mere subsistence, working as a clerk under the Commissary of the Indian fleet, collecting rents for the Knights of St John, and finally, as it would seem, supporting himself, his wife, a natural daughter born to him in Portugal before his marriage, and a sister, by the trade of escribiente at Valladolid. The escribiente, still a recognised workman in Spain, writes letters for those who cannot write for themselves.

He never quite lost his connection with literature. A few commendatory verses in the books of friends, and other slight traces, remain to show that in the intervals of the work by which he lived he endeavoured to keep a place among the poets and dramatists of the time. During these years he wrote the first part of Don Quixote. It appeared in 1605, but, according to the usual practice, had been shown to friends in manuscript. His last years were spent in Madrid. How he lived must remain a mystery. The Don Quixote was popular, but copyrights were then not lucrative, even if they could be said to exist. He again tried the stage, and was again unsuccessful. In 1613 he published the Novelas Ejemplares, a collection of short stories, partly on the picaresque, partly on an Italian, model. During the following year he brought out the Voyage to Parnassus, a verse review of the poets of his time, a common form of literary exercise, and not a good specimen of its kind. In 1614 he was provoked by the false second part of Don Quixote. This was a form of literary meanness from which Mateo Aleman had already suffered, but Cervantes had particular cause to be angry. The continuer of Guzman de Alfarache appears to have been only an impudent plagiarist, but the writer who continued Don Quixote was obviously animated by personal hostility. He descended to a grovelling sneer at Cervantes’ wounded hand. It has been guessed that this is another chapter in the miserable history of the quarrels of authors. Avellaneda, as the author of the false second part called himself, is supposed to have acted on the instigation of Lope de Vega, who is known to have had no friendly feelings for Cervantes. The trick, which was as clumsy as it was spiteful, probably hastened the appearance of the genuine second part. It undoubtedly had some influence on the form, for it induced Cervantes to alter the course of the story, in order to make the two as unlike as possible. Perhaps it decided the author to kill the hero lest another should murder him. The second part was printed in 1615. Cervantes died in the next year. Cheerful and hopeful to the end, even when “his foot was in stirrup” for the last journey, he had prepared his Persiles y Sigismunda for the press before he died. This was meant to be a model of what a tale of adventure might be, and was written with more care in the formal and mechanical parts than he gave to Don Quixote; but, like almost all he is known to have done with deliberate literary intentions, it is dull and lifeless.

Don Quixote.

There is a difficulty in speaking of Don Quixote. One has to come after Fielding and Scott, Heine, Thackeray, and Sainte-Beuve, not to mention many others hardly less illustrious. These are great names, and it may seem that after they have spoken there is nothing left to say. The first duty which this position imposes is not to endeavour deliberately to be different, in the vain hope of attaining originality. But the cloud of witnesses who might be summoned to prove the enduring interest of Don Quixote is itself a part of the critical history of the book, and a tribute to its solitary place in Spanish literature. The ascetic and so-called mystic writers had their day of influence among us in the seventeenth century. Crashaw alone is enough to prove that here, and in a certain section of English life and literature, Santa Teresa and Juan de la Cruz were living forces. Quevedo had his day, and the Novela de Pícaros their following. During the romantic movement, the dramatists were much in men’s mouths. But in each case the Spaniard remained only for a time. Calderon once had his place in Lord Tennyson’s Palace of Art, but he fell out, and that has been the fate of all things Spanish in literature. They have given an indication, have been used—and forgotten, or they have been welcomed as strange, mysterious, probably beautiful, and then silently dropped as too exclusively Spanish, too entirely belonging to a long past century. But Don Quixote has been always with us since Shelton’s translation of the first part appeared in 1612. This of itself is proof enough that there is something in Don Quixote which is absent from other Spanish work, whether his own or that of other men.

No words need be wasted in controverting the guesses of those who wish to account for the greatness of a great piece of literature by some hidden quality not literary. They have ranged from the fantastic supposition that Cervantes was ridiculing Charles V. down to the amazing notion that he was attacking the Church. Nor need much respect be shown to the truth that Don Quixote was meant to make fun of the books of chivalry. This would be self-evident even if Cervantes had not said so. It may be that this was all he meant, and then he builded better than he knew. The work of burlesque, though often necessary, and, when decently done, amusing, is essentially of the lower order. In this case it was not necessary, for the Libros de Caballerías were already dying out before the sordid rivalry of the Novelas de Pícaros. It was the less necessary, because it was no reform. The Spain of the Libros de Caballerías was the Spain of Santa Teresa and Luis de Leon, of the great scholars of the stamp of Francisco Sanchez El Brocense, of Diego de Mendoza, of Cortés and Pizarro and Mondragon—the Spain which Brantôme saw, “brave, bravache et vallereuse et de belles paroles proférées à l’improviste.” It was a better country than that in which the Count Duke of Olivares had to complain that he could find “no men.” The follies of the Libros de Caballerías were a small matter. It was not a small matter that a nation should replace Amadis of Gaul by Paul of Segovia, should pass from the lofty romantic spirit of Garcia Ordoñes to the carcajada—the coarse, braying, animal, and loveless guffaw of Quevedo.

In so far as Cervantes forwarded that change he did evil and not good. He did help to laugh Spain’s chivalry away. But in truth it was dying, and the change would have come without him. He is great in literature, because while consciously doing a very small, unnecessary, and partially harmful thing, he created a masterpiece of that rare and fine faculty which while thinking in jest still feels in earnest (the definition of what is, it may be, undefinable is taken from Miss Anne Evans), and which we call humour. Elsewhere in Spanish literature we find a type fixed and unvarying, or even a mere puppet, met through a succession of events, and moved about by them. In Don Quixote we have two characters acting on one another, and producing the story from within. And these two characters are types of immortal truth—the one a gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of good faculty, for whom a slight madness has made the whole world fantastic; the other an average human being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere coward, and ignorant, yet not unkindly, nor incapable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what his limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his greed. The continual collisions of these two with the real world make the story of Don Quixote. Cervantes had a fine inventive power, the adventures are numerous and varied, yet the charm lies not in the incidents, but in the reality and the sympathetic quality of the persons. We have no grinning world of masks made according to a formula. The country gentlemen, priests, barbers, shepherds, innkeepers, tavern wenches, lady’s-maids, domestic curates, nobles, and officials are living human beings, true to the Spain of the day no doubt, but also true to the humanity which endures for ever, and therefore intelligible to all times. In the midst is honest greedy Sancho with his peering eyes, so shrewd, and withal so capable of folly, the critic, and also the dupe of the half-crazed dreamer, by whom he rides, and will ride, as long as humanity endures, in this book, and under every varying outward form in the real earth. As for Don Quixote, is he not the elder brother of Sir Roger de Coverley, of Matthew Bramble, of Parson Adams, of Bradwardine, of Colonel Newcome, and Mr Chucks, the brave, gentle, not over-clever, men we love all the more because we laugh at them very tenderly?[46]

CHAPTER VI.
SPAIN—HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND THE MYSTICS.

SPANISH HISTORIANS—HISTORIES OF PARTICULAR EVENTS—EARLY HISTORIANS OF THE INDIES—GENERAL HISTORIANS OF THE INDIES—GÓMARA, OVIEDO, LAS CASAS, HERRERA, THE INCA GARCILASO—MENDOZA, MONCADA, AND MELO—GENERAL HISTORIES—OCAMPO, ZURITA, MORALES—MARIANA—THE DECADENCE—SOLIS—MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS—GRACIAN AND THE PREVALENCE OF GÓNGORISM—THE MYSTICS—SPANISH MYSTICISM—THE INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION ON SPANISH RELIGIOUS LITERATURE—MALON DE CHAIDE—JUAN DE ÁVILA—LUIS DE GRANADA—LUIS DE LEON—SANTA TERESA—JUAN DE LA CRUZ—DECADENCE OF THE MYSTIC WRITERS.

Spanish historians.

It was natural that a very active time of great literary vigour should be rich in historians. Spanish literature is, indeed, fertile in historical narratives of contemporary events written by eyewitnesses, and not less in authoritative narratives, the work of almost contemporary authors. A people so proud of the present could not be indifferent to the past. The Spaniard least of all; for he is, in his own phrase, linajudo—proud of his lineage—not less concerned to show that he had ancestors than to convince the world of his greatness. Thus the sixteenth century, and the early years of the seventeenth, saw the production of a very important Spanish historical literature. It followed the fortunes of the country with curious exactness. Every great campaign, every great achievement in America during the reign of Charles V., has been well and amply described. The reign of Philip II. is equally well recorded by contemporaries, and was the period of the great general histories of Morales, Zurita, and Mariana. But as the seventeenth century drew on, there was less and less which the Spaniard cared to record, till after the revolt of Catalonia and the separation of Portugal in 1640 we come to a period of entire silence. The exhaustion of the national genius was felt here as elsewhere. When the voice of Spanish history was last heard, it was in the conquest of Mexico by Antonio de Solis—the work of an accomplished man of letters who looked back over the disasters of his own time to the more glorious achievement of the past.

Historians of particular events.

Much of the historical writing of the great epoch—the histories of religious orders, of which there are many, and of towns, of which there not a few, and genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable—does not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But it would be a very pedantic interpretation of the word which would exclude the Comentario de la Guerra de Alemaña[47] of Luis de Ávila y Zuñiga. It is an account of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an eyewitness who served the emperor, and attended him in his retirement at Yuste. The merit of this, and many other books of the same order, lies less in any beauty of style they possess than in the interest which attaches to the evidence of capable men who saw great events. Luis de Ávila is also valuable because he gives expression to that pride and ambition of the emperor’s Spanish followers, who really dreamt that they were helping towards the establishment of a universal empire. Another writer of the same stamp, who lived when the fortune of Spain had reached its height and was beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier of the school of the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of distinction, was ambassador in England some years before the Armada, and in France during that great passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and “in religion,” having lived the full life of a fighting pious Spaniard who could use both sword and pen. He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low Countries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the Theory and Practice of War. The commentaries were published in 1592. The treatise had appeared in 1577. The great subject of the Low Country wars of a somewhat later period—1588-1599—was also treated by another Spaniard of the same stamp as Don Bernardino. This was Don Carlos Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist (he came on an embassy to England in the reign of James I.), and man of letters. Besides his Guerras de los Paises Bajos he made a translation of Tacitus.