[Transcriber's note]

[Table of Contents]

[Index]

History of Spanish Literature (vol. 3 of 3)

HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.

VOL. III.

HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.

BY

GEORGE TICKNOR.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOLUME III.

NEW YORK:

HARPER AND BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET.

M DCCC XLIX.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by
George Ticknor,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

CONTENTS
OF
VOLUME THIRD.

SECOND PERIOD.
(Continued.)

THIRD PERIOD.

The Literature that existed in Spain between the Accession of the Bourbon Family and the Invasion of Bonaparte; or from the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century to the Early Part of the Nineteenth.

HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.

SECOND PERIOD.

The Literature that existed in Spain from the Accession of the Austrian Family to its Extinction, or from the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century To the End of the Seventeenth.

(CONTINUED.)

HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.

SECOND PERIOD.

(CONTINUED.)

CHAPTER XXXI.

Satirical Poetry: The Argensolas, Quevedo, and others. — Elegiac Poetry and Epistles: Garcilasso, Herrera, and others. — Pastoral Poetry: Saa de Miranda, Balbuena, Esquilache, and others. — Epigrams: Villegas, Rebolledo, and others. — Didactic Poetry: Rufo, Cueva, Céspedes, and others. — Emblems: Daza, Covarrubias. — Descriptive Poetry: Dicastillo.

Satirical poetry, whether in the form of regular satires, or in the more familiar guise of epistles, has never enjoyed a wide success in Spain. Its spirit, indeed, was known there from the times of the Archpriest of Hita and Rodrigo Cota, both of whom seem to have been thoroughly imbued with it. Torres Naharro, too, in the early part of the sixteenth century, and Silvestre and Castillejo a little later, still sustained it, and wrote satires in the short national verse, with much of the earlier freedom, and all the bitterness, that originally accompanied it.

But after Mendoza and Boscan, in the middle of that century, had sent poetical epistles to one another written in the manner of Horace, though in the Italian terza rima, the fashion was changed. A rich, strong invective, such as Castillejo dared to use when he wrote the “Satire on Women,” which was often reprinted and greatly relished, was almost entirely laid aside; and a more cultivated and philosophical tone, suited to the stately times of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, took its place. Montemayor, it is true, and Padilla, with a few wits of less note, wrote in both manners; but Cantorál with little talent, Gregorio Murillo with a good deal, and Rey de Artieda in a familiar style that was more winning than either, took the new direction so decidedly, that, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the change may be considered as substantially settled.[1]

Barahona de Soto was among the earliest that wrote in this new form, which was a union of the Roman with the Italian. We have four of his satires, composed after he had served in the Morisco wars; the first and the last of which, assailing all bad poets, show plainly the school to which he belonged and the direction he wished to follow. But his efforts, though seriously made, did not raise him above an untolerated mediocrity.[2]

A single satire of Jauregui, addressed to Lydia, as if she might have been the Lydia of Horace, is better.[3] But in the particular style and manner of the philosophical Horatian satire, none succeeded so well as the two Argensolas. Their discussions are, it is true, sometimes too grave and too long; but they give us spirited pictures of the manners of their times. The sketch of a profligate lady of fashion, for instance, in the one to Flora, by Lupercio, is excellent, and so are long passages in two others against a court life, by Bartolomé. All three, however, are too much protracted, and the last contains a poor repetition of the fable of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, in which, as almost everywhere else, its author’s relations to Horace are apparent.[4]

Quevedo, on the other hand, followed Juvenal, whose hard, unsparing temper was better suited to his own tastes, and to a disposition embittered by cruel persecutions. But Quevedo is often free and indecorous, as well as harsh, and offends that sensibility to virtue which a satirist ought carefully to cultivate. It should, however, be remembered in his favor, that, though living under the despotism of the Philips, and crushed by it, no Spanish poet stands before him in the spirit of an independent and vigorous satire. Góngora approaches him on some occasions, but Góngora rarely dealt with grave subjects, and confined his satire almost entirely to burlesque ballads and sonnets, which he wrote in the fervor of his youth. At no period of his life, and certainly not after he went to court, would he have hazarded a satirical epistle like the one on the decay of Castilian spirit and the corruption of Castilian manners, which Quevedo had the courage to send to the Count Duke Olivares, when he was at the height of his influence.[5]

The greatest contemporaries of both of them hardly turned their thoughts in this direction; for as to Cervantes, his “Journey to Parnassus” is quite too good-natured an imitation of Caporali to be classed among satires, even if its form permitted it to be placed there; and as to Lope de Vega, though some of his sonnets and other shorter poems are full of spirit and severity, especially those that pass under the name of Burguillos, still his whole course, and the popular favor that followed it, naturally prevented him from seeking occasions to do or say any thing ungracious.

Nor did the state of society at this period favor the advancement, or even the continuance, of any such spirit. The epistles of Espinel and Arguijo are, therefore, absolutely grave and solemn; and those of Rioja, Salcedo, Ulloa, and Melo are not only grave, but are almost entirely destitute of poetical merit, except one by the first of them, addressed to Fabio, which, if neither gay nor witty, is an admirably wise moral rebuke of the folly and irksomeness of depending on royal favor. Borja is more free, as became his high station, and speaks out more plainly; but the best of his epistles—the one against a court life—is not so good as the youthful tercetos on the same subject by Góngora, nor equal to his own jesting address to his collected poems. Rebolledo, his only successor of any note at the time, is moral, but tiresome; and Solís, like the few that followed him, is too dull to be remembered. Indeed, if Villegas in his old age, when, perhaps, he had been soured by disappointment, had not written three satires which he did not venture to publish, we should have nothing worth notice as we approach the disheartening close of this long period.[6]

Nearly all the didactic satires and nearly all the satirical epistles of the best age of Spanish literature are Horatian in their tone, and written in the Italian terza rima. In general, their spirit is light, though philosophical,—sometimes it is courtly,—and, taken together, they have less poetical force and a less decided coloring than we might claim from the class to which they belong. But they are frequently graceful and agreeable, and some of them will be oftener read, for the mere pleasure they bestow, than many in other languages which are distinguished for greater wit and severity.

The truth, however, is, that wit and severity of this kind and in this form were never heartily encouraged in Spain. The nation itself has always been too grave and dignified to ask or endure the censure they imply; and if such a character as the Spanish has its ridiculous side, it must be approached by any thing rather than personal satire. Books like the romances of chivalry may, indeed, be assailed with effect, as they were by Cervantes; men in classes may be caricatured, as they are in the Spanish picaresque novels and in the old drama; and bad poetry may be ridiculed, as it was by half the poets who did not write it, and by some who did. But the characters of individuals, and especially of those in high station and of much notoriety, are protected, under such circumstances, by all the social influences that can be brought to their defence, and cannot safely be assailed.

Such, at least, was the case in Spain. Poetical satire came there to be looked upon with distrust, so that it was thought to be hardly in good taste, or according to the conventions of good society, to indulge in its composition.[7] And if, with all this, we remember the anxious nature of the political tyranny which long ruled the country, and the noiseless, sleepless vigilance of the Inquisition,—both of which are apparent in the certificates and licenses that usher in whatever succeeded in finding its way through the press,—we shall have no difficulty in accounting for the fact, that poetical satire never had a vigorous and healthy existence in Spain, and that, after the latter part of the seventeenth century, it almost entirely disappeared till better times revived it.

Elegies, though from their subjects little connected with satire, are yet, by their measure and manner, connected with it in Spanish poetry; for both are generally written in the Italian terza rima, and both are often thrown into the form of epistles.[8] Garcilasso could write elegies in their true spirit; but the second that passes under that name in his works is merely a familiar epistle to a friend. So is the first by Figueroa, which is followed by others in a tone more appropriate to their titles. But all are in the Italian verse and manner, and two of them in the Italian language. The eleven “Lamentations,” as he calls them, of Silvestre, are elegiac epistles to his lady-love, written in the old Castilian measures, and not without the old Castilian poetical spirit. Cantorál fails; nor can the Argensolas and Borja be said to have succeeded, though they wrote in different manners, some of which were scarcely elegiac. Herrera is too lyric—too lofty, perhaps, from the very nature of his genius—to write good elegies; but some of those on his love, and one in which he mourns over the passions that survive the decay of his youth, have certainly both beauty and tenderness.

Rioja, on the contrary, seems to have been of the true temperament, and to have written elegies from instinct, though he called them Silvas; while Quevedo, if he were the author of the poems that pass under the name of the Bachiller de la Torre, must have done violence to his genius in the composition of ten short pieces, which he calls Endechas, in Adonian verse, but which read much like imitations of some of the gentler among the old ballads. If to these we add the thirteen elegies of Villegas, nearly all of which are epistles, and one or two of them light and amusing epistles, we shall have what is most worthy of notice in this small division of Spanish poetry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that has not been already considered. From the whole, we should naturally infer that the Spanish temperament was little fitted to the subdued, simple, and gentle tone of the proper elegy; a conclusion that is undoubtedly true, notwithstanding the examples of Garcilasso and Rioja, the best and most elegiac portions of whose poetry do not even bear its name.[9]

Pastoral poetry in Spain is directly connected with elegiac, through the eclogues of Garcilasso, which unite the attributes of both. To his school, indeed, including Boscan and Mendoza, we trace the earliest successful specimens of the more formal Spanish pastoral, with the characteristics still recognized. But its origin is much earlier. The climate and condition of the Peninsula, which from a very remote period had favored the shepherd’s life and his pursuits, facilitated, no doubt, if they did not occasion, the first introduction into Spanish poetry of a pastoral tone, whose echoes are heard far back among the old ballads. But the Italian forms of pastoral verse were naturalized as soon as they were introduced. Figueroa, Cantorál, Montemayor, and Saa de Miranda—the last two of whom were Portuguese, and all of whom visited Italy and lived there—contributed their efforts to those of Garcilasso and Boscan, by writing Spanish eclogues in the Italian manner. All had a good degree of success, but none so much as Saa de Miranda, who was born in 1495, and died in 1558, and who, from the promptings of his own genius, renounced the profession of the law, to which he was bred, and the favor of the court, where his prospects were high, in order to devote himself to poetry.

He was the first of the Portuguese who wrote in the forms introduced by Boscan and Garcilasso, and none, perhaps, since his time has appeared in them with more grace and power,—certainly none in the particular form of eclogues. His pastorals, however, are not all in the new manner. On the contrary, some of them are in the ancient short verse, and seem to have been written before he was acquainted with the change that had just been effected in Spanish poetry. But all of them are in one spirit, and are marked by a simplicity that well becomes the class of compositions to which they belong, though it may rarely be found in them. This is true, both when he writes his beautiful pastoral story of “The Mondego,” which is in the manner of Garcilasso, and contains an account of himself addressed to the king; and when he writes his seventh eclogue, which is in the forms of Enzina and Vicente, and seems to have been acted amidst the rejoicings of the noble family of Pereira, after one of their number had returned from military service against the Turks.

But a love of the country, of country scenery and country occupations, pervades nearly every thing Saa de Miranda wrote. The very animals seem to be treated by him with more naturalness and familiarity than they are elsewhere; and throughout the whole of his poetry, there is an ease and amenity that show it comes from the heart. Why he wrote so much in Spanish, it is not now easy to tell. Perhaps he thought the language more poetical than his native Portuguese, or perhaps he had merely personal reasons for his preference. But whatever may have been the cause, six out of his eight eclogues are composed in natural, flowing Castilian; and the result of the whole is, that, while, on all accounts, he is placed among the four or five principal poets of his own country, he occupies a position of enviable distinction among those of the prouder nation that soon became, for a time, its masters.[10]

Montemayor, Polo, and their followers in prose pastorals, scattered bucolic verse of all kinds freely through their fictions; and sometimes, though seldom, they added to the interest and merit of their stories by this sort of ornament. One of those who had least success in it was Cervantes; and of those who had most, Balbuena stands in the first rank. His “Golden Age” contains some of the best and most original eclogues in the language; written, indeed, rather in the free, rustic tone of Theocritus, than with the careful finish of Virgil, but not on that account the less attractive.[11]

Of Luis Barahona de Soto, we possess an eclogue better than any thing else he has left us;[12] and of Pedro de Padilla, the friend of Cervantes and of Silvestre, a remarkable improvisator and a much loved man, we have a number of pastoral poems which carry with them a picturesque, antique air, from being made up in part of ballads and villancicos.[13] Pedro de Enzinas attempted to write religious eclogues, and failed;[14] but, in the established forms, Juan de Morales and Gomez Tapia, who are hardly known except for single attempts of this kind,[15] and Vicente Espinel,—among whose eclogues, that in which a Soldier and a Shepherd discuss the Spanish wars in Italy is both original and poetical,[16]—were all successful.

The eclogues of Lope de Vega, of which we have already spoken, drew after them a train of imitations, like his other popular poetry. But neither Balvas, nor Villegas, nor Carrillo, nor the Prince of Esquilache equalled him. Quevedo alone among his compeers, and he only if he is the author of the poems of the Bachiller de la Torre, proved himself a rival of the great master, unless we must give an equal place to Pedro de Espinosa, whose story of “The Genil,” half elegiac and half pastoral, is the happiest and most original specimen of that peculiar form of which Boscan in his “Hero and Leander” gave the first imperfect example.[17] Pedro Soto de Roxas,—who wrote short lyric poems with spirit, as well as eclogues,—Zarate, and Ulloa, belong to the same school, which was continued, by Texada Gomes de los Reyes, Barrios the Jew, and Inez de la Cruz the Mexican nun, down to the end of the century. But in all its forms, whether tending to become too lyrical, as it does in Figueroa, or too narrative, as in Espinosa, Spanish pastoral poetry shows fewer of the defects that accompany such poetry everywhere, and more of the merits that render it a gentle and idealized representation of nature and country life, than can perhaps be found in any other literature of modern times. The reason is, that there was more of a true pastoral character in Spain on which to build it.[18]

Quite as characteristic of the Spanish national genius as its pastorals were short poems in different forms, but in an epigrammatic spirit, which appeared through the whole of the best age of its literature. They are of two kinds. The first are generally amorous, and always sentimental. Of these, not a few are very short and pointed. They are found in the old Cancioneros and Romanceros, among the works of Maldonado, Silvestre, Villegas, Góngora, and others of less merit, to the end of the century. They are generally in the truest tone of popular verse. One, which was set to music, was in these few simple words:—

To what ear shall I tell my griefs,

Gentle love mine?

To what ear shall I tell my griefs,

If not to thine?[19]

And another, of the same period, which was on a Sigh, and became the subject of more than one gloss, was hardly less simple:—

O gentle sigh! O gentle sigh!

For no more happiness I pray,

Than, every time thou goest to God,

To follow where thou lead’st the way.[20]

But of those a little longer and more elaborate a favorable specimen may be found in Camoens, who wrote such with tenderness and beauty, not only in his own language, but sometimes in Spanish, as in the following lines on a concealed and unhappy passion, the first two of which are probably a snatch of some old song, and the rest his own gloss upon them:—

Within, within, my sorrow lives,

But outwardly no token gives.

All young and gentle in the soul,

All hidden from men’s eyes,

Deep, deep within it lies,

And scorns the body’s low control.

As in the flint the hidden spark

Gives outwardly no sign or mark,

Within, within, my sorrow lives.[21]

The number of such compositions, in their different serious forms, is great; but the number of the second kind—those in a lighter and livelier tone—is still greater. The Argensolas, Villegas, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, the Prince Esquilache, Rebolledo, and not a few others, wrote them with spirit and effect. Of all, however, who indulged in them, nobody devoted to their composition so much zeal, and on the whole obtained so much success, as Francisco de la Torre, who, though of the culto school, seemed able to shake off much of its influence, when he remembered that he was a fellow-countryman of Martial.

He took for the foundation of his humor the remarkable Latin epigrams of John Owen, the English Protestant, who died in 1622, and whose witty volume has been often translated and printed at home and abroad down to our own times;—a volume, it should be noted, so offensive to the Romish Church as to have been early placed on its Index Expurgatorius. But La Torre avoided whatever could give umbrage to the ecclesiastical authorities of his time, and, adding a great number of original epigrams quite as good as those he translated, made a collection that fills two volumes, the last of which was printed in 1682, after its author’s death.[22]

But though he wrote more good epigrams, and in a greater variety of forms, than any other individual Spaniard, he did not, perhaps, write the best or the most national; for a few of those that still remain anonymous, and a still smaller number by Rebolledo, seem to claim this distinction. Of the sort of wit frequently affected in these slight compositions the following is an example:—

Fair lady, when your beads you take,

I never doubt you pray;

Perhaps for my poor murdered sake,

Perhaps for yours, that slay.[23]

Rebolledo was sometimes happier than he is in this epigram, though rarely more national.

Didactic poetry in unsettled and uncertain forms appeared early in Spain, and took, from time to time, the air both of moral philosophy and of religious instruction. Specimens of it in the old long-line stanza are found from the age of Berceo to that of the chancellor Ayala; few, indeed, in number, but sufficiently marked in character to show their purpose. Later, examples become more numerous, and present themselves in forms somewhat improved. Several such occur in the Cancioneros, among the best of which are Ludueña’s “Rules for Good-Breeding”; “The Complaint of Fortune,” in imitation of Bias, by Diego de San Pedro; and the “Coplas” of Don Juan Manuel of Portugal, on the Seven Deadly Sins;—all of them authors known at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. Boscan’s poem on his own Conversion, that of Silvestre on “Self-knowledge,” that of Castilla on “The Virtues,” and that of Juan de Mendoza on “A Happy Life,” continue the series through the reign of Charles the Fifth, but without materially advancing its claims or its character.[24]

In the age of Philip the Second, the didactic, like most of the other branches of Spanish poetry, spreads out more broadly. Francisco de Guzman’s “Opinions of Wise Men,” and especially his dull allegory of “Moral Triumphs,” in imitation of Petrarch, are, for their length, the most important of the different didactic poems which that period produced.[25] But more characteristic than either is the deeply religious letter of Francisco de Aldana to Montano, in 1573; and much more beautiful and touching than either is one written at about the same time by Juan Rufo to his infant son, filled with gentle affection and wise counsels.

Neither should a call made by Aldana, in the name of military glory, to Philip himself, urging him to defend the suffering Church, be overlooked. It breathes the very spirit of its subject, and may well be put in direct contrast with the earnest and sad persuasions to peace by Virues, who was yet a soldier by profession, and with Cantorál’s winning invitation to the quietness of a country life. Some of the religious poetry of Diego de Morillo and Pedro de Salas, in the next reigns, with several of the wise epistles of the Argensolas, Artieda, and Mesa, should be added; but they are all comparatively short poems, except those by Morillo on the Words of Christ upon the Cross, which extend to several hundred lines on each word, and which, though disfigured by antithesis and exaggeration, are strongly marked specimens of the Catholic didactic spirit.

In the mean time, and in the midst of this group,—partly because the way had been already prepared for it by the publication, in 1591, of a good translation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry” by Espinel, and partly from other causes,[26]—we have, at last, a proper didactic poem, or rather an attempt at one. It is by Juan de la Cueva, who in 1605 wrote in terza rima three epistles, which he entitled “Egemplar Poético,” and which constitute the oldest formal and original effort of the kind in the Spanish language. Regarded as a whole, they are, indeed, far from being a complete Art of Poetry, and in some parts they are injudicious and inconsequent; but they not unfrequently contain passages of acute criticism in flowing verse, and they have, besides, the merit of nationality in their tone. In all respects, they are better than an absurd didactic poem, by the same author, on “The Inventors of Things,” which he wrote three years later, and which shows, as he showed elsewhere, that he adventured in too many departments.[27]

Pablo de Céspedes, a sculptor and painter of the same period,—now better known as a man of learning and a poet,—came nearer to success than Cueva. He was born in 1538, at Córdova, and died there, a minor canon of its magnificent cathedral, at the age of seventy; but he spent a part of his life in Italy and at Seville, and devoted much of his leisure to letters. Among other works, he began a poem, in ottava rima, on “The Art of Painting.” Whether it was ever finished is uncertain; but all we possess of it is a series of fragments, amounting, when taken together, to six or seven hundred lines, which were inserted in a prose treatise on the same subject by his friend Francisco Pacheco, and printed above forty years after their author’s death. They are, however, such as to make us regret that we have received no more. Their versification is excellent, and their poetical energy and compactness are uniform. Perhaps the best passage that has been preserved is the description of a horse,—the animal of whose race the poet’s native city has always been proud,—and of which, it is evident, a single noble individual was pictured before his mind as he wrote. But other portions show much talent,—perhaps more than this does; especially one in which he explains the modes of acquiring practical skill in his art, and that more poetical one in which he discusses color.[28]

But the poems of Cueva and Céspedes were not printed till long after the death of their authors; and none of their contemporaries was inspired by like influences. The best that was done in didactic poetry, at about the same time, was the slight, but pleasant, sort of defence of his own irregularities produced by Lope de Vega, under the name of “The New Art of Writing Plays”; and the best, written later in the century, were the “Selvas,” as he called them, or poems in irregular verse, by Count Rebolledo, on the Arts of War and Civil Government, which date from 1652, but which are little more than rhymed prose. A long poem in ten cantos, and in the old quintilla verse, by Trapeza, published in 1612, and entitled “The Cross,” because it is a sort of exposition of all the theological virtues attributed to that holy emblem, is too dull to be noticed, even if it were more strictly didactic in its form.[29]

Some other kindred attempts should, however, be remembered, of which the oldest, made in the spirit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout Europe, were in the form called “Emblems,” or explanations in verse for hieroglyphical devices. The most successful of these were probably the Emblems of Daza, in 1549, imitated from the more famous Latin ones of Alciatus; and those of Covarrubias, published originally in Spanish by their author in 1591, and afterwards translated by him into Latin;—both of them curious specimens of this peculiar style of composition, and as agreeable, perhaps, as any which the age of Emblems produced.[30]

The other form was that in which the didactic runs into the descriptive. Of this the most poetical example in Spanish is by Dicastillo, a Carthusian monk, at Saragossa, who published, in 1637, under the auspices of his friend Mencos, a long poetical correspondence, intended to teach the vanity of human things, and the happiness and merit to be found in a life of penitential seclusion. The parts that relate to the author himself are sometimes touching; but the rest is of very unequal worth,—the better portions being devoted to a description of the grand and sombre monastery of which he was an inmate, and of the observances to which his life there was devoted.[31] Castilian verse, however, did not often take a descriptive character, except when it appeared in the form of eclogues and idyls; and even then it is almost always marked by an ingenuity and brilliancy far from the healthy tone inspired by a sincere love of what is grand or beautiful in nature;—a remark which finds ample illustration in the poems devoted to the Spanish conquests in America, where the marvellous tropical vegetation of the valleys through which the wild adventurers wound their way, and the snow-capped volcanoes that crowned the sierras above their heads, seem to have failed alike to stir their imaginations or overawe their courage.[32]

But except these irregular varieties of didactic poetry, we have, for the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nothing to add to what we have already noticed, beyond a repetition of the old forms of epistles and silvas, which so frequently occur in the works of Castillejo, Ledesma, Lope de Vega, Jauregui, Zarate, and their contemporaries. Nor could we reasonably expect more. Neither the popular character of Spanish poetry, nor the severe nature of the Spanish ecclesiastical and political constitutions of government, was favorable to the development of this particular form of verse, or likely to tolerate it on any important subject. Didactic poetry remained, therefore, at the end of the period, as it was at the beginning, one of the feeblest and least successful departments of the national literature.[33]

CHAPTER XXXII.

Ballad Poetry cultivated: Sepúlveda, Fuentes, Timoneda, Padilla, Cueva, Hita, Hidalgo, Valdivielso, Lope de Vega, Arellano, Roca y Serna, Esquilache, Mendoza, Quevedo. — Romanceros of more Popular Ballads: The Twelve Peers, the Cid, and others. — Great Number of Writers of Ballads.

The collection and publication of the popular ballads of the country in the Cancioneros and Romanceros, in the sixteenth century, attracted to them a kind and degree of attention they had failed to receive during the long period in which they had been floating about among the unrecorded traditions of the common people. There was so much that was beautiful in them, so much that appealed successfully to the best recollections of all classes, so much directly connected with the great periods of the national glory, that the minds of all were stirred by them, as soon as they appeared in a permanent form, and they became, at once, favorites of the more cultivated portion of the people, as they had always been of the humble hearts that gave them birth. The natural consequence followed;—they were imitated;—and not merely by poets who occasionally wrote in this among other forms of verse, but by persons who composed them in large numbers and published them by volumes.[34]

The first of these persons was Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, whose Ballad-book can be traced back to 1551, the very year after the appearance, at Saragossa, of the earliest collection of popular and anonymous ballads, gathered from the memories of the people. The attempt of Sepúlveda was made in the right direction; for he founded it almost entirely on the old Castilian Chronicles, and appealed, as they did, to popular tradition and the national feelings for his support. In his Preface, he says, that his ballads “ought to be more savory than many others, because not only are they true and drawn from the truest histories he could find, but written in the Castilian measure and in the tone of the old ballads, which,” he adds, “is now in fashion. They were taken,” he declares, “literally from the Chronicle which was compiled by the most serene king Don Alfonso; the same who, for his good letters and royal desires, and great learning in all branches of knowledge, was called ‘The Wise.’” In fact, more than three fourths of this curious volume consist of ballads taken from the “General Chronicle of Spain,” often employing its very words, and always imbued with its spirit. The rest is made up chiefly of ballads founded on sacred and ancient history, or on mythological and other stories of an imaginary nature.

But, unfortunately, Sepúlveda was not truly a poet, and therefore, though he sought his subjects in good sources and seldom failed to select them well, he yet failed to give any more of a poetical coloring to his ballads than he found in the old chronicles he followed. He was, however, successful as far as the general favor was concerned; for not only was his entire work reprinted at least four times, but the separate ballads in it constantly reappear in the old collections[35] that were, from time to time, published to meet the popular demand.

Quite as characteristic of the period is a small selection of ballads printed for the first time in 1564. It was made by some person of distinction, who sent it to Alonso de Fuentes, with a request that he would furnish it with all needful explanations in prose. This he did; but the original collector died before it was published. Of the forty ballads of which it consists, ten are on subjects from the Bible; ten from Roman history; ten from other portions of ancient history; and the remainder from the history of Spain, coming down to the fall of Granada. We are not told where they were obtained, and none of them has much value;—the great merit of the whole, in the eyes of those who were concerned in their publication, consisting, no doubt, in the wearisome historical and moral commentary by which each is followed.

Fuentes, however, who intimates that the task was hardly worthy of his position, may have had a better taste in such things than the person who employed him; for, in a prefatory epistle, he gives us, of his own accord, the following ballad, evidently very old, if not very spirited, which he attributes to Alfonso the Wise. But it is no otherwise the work of that monarch than that all but the last stanzas are taken from the remarkable letter he wrote on the disastrous position of his affairs in 1280, when, by the rebellion of his son and the desertion of the higher ecclesiastics of his kingdom, he was reduced, in his old age, to misery and despair,—a letter already cited, and more poetical than the ballad founded on it.

I left my land, I left my home,

To serve my God against his foes;

Nor deemed, that, in so short a space,

My fortunes could in ruin close.

For two short months were hardly sped,

And April was but gone, and May,

When Castile’s towers and Castile’s towns

From my fair realm were rent away.

And they that should have counselled peace

Between the father and his son,

My bishops and my lordly priests,

Forgetting what they should have done,—

Not by contrivance deep and dark,

Not silent, like the secret thief,

But trumpet-tongued, rebellion raised,

And filled my house with guilt and grief.

Then, since my blood denies my cause,

And since my friends desert and flee,—

Since they are gone, who should have stood

Between the guilty blow and me,—

To thee I bend, my Saviour Lord,

To thee, the Virgin Mother, bow,

For your support and gracious help

Pouring my daily, nightly vow:

For your compassion now is all

My child’s rebellious power hath left

To soothe the piercing, piercing woes

That leave me here of hope bereft.

And since before his cruel might

My friends have all in terror fled,

Do thou, Almighty Father, thou,

Protect my unprotected head.

But I have heard in former days

The story of another king,

Who—fled from and betrayed like me—

Resolved all fears away to fling,

And launch upon the wide, wide sea,

And find adventurous fortune there,

Or perish in its rolling waves,

The victim of his brave despair.

This ancient monarch far and near—

Old Apollonius—was known:

I’ll follow where he sought his fate,

And where he found it find my own.[36]

Juan de Timoneda, partly bookseller and partly poet,—the friend of Lope de Rueda, and, like him, the author of farces acted in the public squares of Valencia,—was, both from his occupations and tastes, a person who would naturally understand the general poetical feeling and wants of his time. In consequence of this, probably, he published, in 1573, a collection of ballads, entitled “The Rose,” consisting, in no small degree, of his own compositions, but containing, also, some by other and older poets. Taken together, they constitute a volume of nearly seven hundred pages, divided into “The Rose of Love”; “The Spanish Rose”; “The Gentile Rose,” so called, because its subjects are heathen; and “The Royal Rose,” which is on the fates and fortunes of princes;—the whole being followed by about a hundred pages of popular, miscellaneous verse, rustic songs, and fanciful glosses.

The best parts of this large collection are the ballads gathered by its author from popular tradition, most of which were soon published in other Romanceros, with the variations their origin necessarily involved. The poorest parts are those written by himself,—such as the last division, which is entirely his own, and is not superior to the similar ballads in Sepúlveda and Fuentes. As a collection, however, it is important; because it shows how true the Spanish people remained to their old traditions, and how constantly they claimed to have the best portions of their history repeated to them in the old forms to which they had so long been accustomed. In another point of view, also, it is of consequence. It furnishes ballads on the early heroes of Spain, some of which are needed to fill up two or three of the best among their traditional stories, while others come down, with similar accounts of later heroes, to the end of the Moorish wars.[37]

In 1583, the series of such popular works was still further continued by Pedro de Padilla, who published a Romancero containing sixty-three long ballads of his own,—about half of them taken from uncertain traditions, or from fables like those of Ariosto, and the others from the known history of Spain, which they follow down through the times of Charles the Fifth and the Flemish wars of Philip the Second. The Italian measures several times intrude, where they can produce only an awkward and incongruous effect; and the rest of the volume, not devoted to ballads,—except fifty villancicos, which are full of the old popular spirit,—is composed of poems in the Italian manner, that add nothing to its value.[38]

Juan de la Cueva, finding the old national subjects thus seized upon by his predecessors, resorted, it would seem, from necessity, to the histories of Greece and Rome for his materials, and in 1587 published a volume containing above a hundred ballads, which he divided into ten books, placing nine of them under the protection of the nine Muses, and the other under that of Apollo. Their poetical merit is inconsiderable. The best are a few whose subjects are drawn from the old Castilian Chronicle, like that on the sad story of Doña Teresa, who, after being wedded against her will to the Moorish king of Toledo, was miraculously permitted to take refuge in a convent, rather than consummate her hated marriage with an infidel. Two ballads, however, in which the author gives an account of himself and of his literary undertakings, are more curious;—the latter containing an amusing account of some of the bad poets of his time.[39]

The publication of the first part of “The Civil Wars of Granada,” by Hita, in 1595, containing about sixty ballads, some of them very old, and several of great poetical merit, increased, no doubt, the impulse which the frequent appearance of volumes of popular anonymous ballads continued to give to Spanish poetry in this attractive form.[40] This is yet more apparent in the new direction taken by ballad-writing, which from this time began to select particular subjects and address itself to separate classes of readers. Thus, in 1609, we have a volume of ballads in the dialect of the rogues, written in the very spirit of the vagabonds it represents, and collected by some one who concealed himself under the name of Juan Hidalgo;[41]—while in 1612, at the other extreme of the cycle, Valdivielso, the fashionable ecclesiastic, printed a large “Spiritual Ballad-book,” whose ballads are all on religious subjects, and all intended to promote habits of devotion.[42] In 1614 and 1622, Lope de Vega, always a lover of such poetry, gave to the religious world a collection of similar devout ballads, often reprinted afterwards;[43] and in 1629 and 1634, he contributed materials to two other collections of the same character,—the first anonymous, and entitled “A Bouquet of Divine Flowers”; and the other by Luis de Arellano, which, under the name of “Counsels for the Dying,” contains thirty ballads, several of which are by the principal poets of the time.[44]

Others, like Roca y Serna, wrote large numbers of ballads, but did not print them separately.[45] Those of the Prince Esquilache, some of which are excellent, amount to nearly three hundred. Antonio de Mendoza wrote about two hundred; and perhaps as many, in every possible variety of character, are scattered through the works of Quevedo; so that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, there can be no doubt that large and successful efforts had been made by the known authors of the period to continue the old ballad spirit by free contributions, both in separate volumes and in masses of ballads inserted among their other published works.

Meantime the old spirit itself had not been lost. The ballad-book known originally under the name of “Flor de Romances,” which we have already traced in its individual parts to five small volumes,—published between 1593 and 1597, in such widely different portions of Spain, that its materials were gathered from the soil of nearly the whole country,—continued to be valued, and was reprinted and enlarged, under the name of “El Romancero General,” four times; till, with the Ballad-book of 1550-1555, it comprehended nearly all the old ballads that had been preserved by tradition, together with not a few by Lope de Vega, Góngora, and other living authors. Out of these two vast storehouses, and from such other sources as could still yield suitable materials, smaller and more popular ballad-books were now selected and published. One appeared at Barcelona in 1582, and was reprinted there in 1602 and 1696, taken in a considerable degree from the collection of 1550, but containing, besides, ballads not found elsewhere, and among the rest, several on the history of the triple league and on the death of Philip the Second.[46] A ballad-book for “The Twelve Peers,” and their marvellous achievements, published for the first time in 1608, has continued to be a favorite ever since;[47] and four years afterwards appeared “The Ballad-Book of the Cid,” which has been printed and reprinted again and again, at home and abroad, down to our own times.[48] These were followed, in 1623, by the “Primavera,” or Spring of Ballads, by Perez, of which a second part was collected and published by Segura in 1629, comprehending together nearly three hundred;—most, but not all, of them known before, and many of them of great beauty.[49] And other ballad-books of the same sort, as well as these, continued to be printed in cheap forms for popular use till the old Castilian culture disappeared with the decay of the old national character.

But during the long period of a century and a half when this kind of poetry prevailed so widely in Spain, the ballads were not left to the formal Romanceros, whether anonymous, like the largest, or by known authors, like those of Sepúlveda and Cueva, nor even to persons who wrote them in great numbers and printed them in a separate department of their collected works, as did Prince Esquilache. On the contrary, between 1550 and 1700, hardly a Spanish poet can be found through whose works they are not scattered with such profusion, that the number of popular ballads that could be collected from them would, if brought together, greatly exceed in amount all that are found in the ballad-books proper. Many of the ballads which thus occur either separately or in small groups are picturesque and beautiful in the same way the elder ones are, though rarely to the same degree. Silvestre, Montemayor, Espinel, Castillejo, and, above all of his time, Lopez de Maldonado, wrote them with success, towards the end of the sixteenth century.[50] A little later, those of Góngora are admirable. Indeed, his more simple, childlike ballads, and those in which a gay, mischievous spirit is made to conceal a genuine tenderness, are unlike almost any of their class found elsewhere, and can hardly be surpassed.[51] But Góngora afterwards introduced the same affected and false style into this form of his poetry that he did into the rest, and was followed, with constantly increasing absurdities, by Arteaga, Pantaleon, Villamediana, Coronel, and the rest of his imitators, whose ballads are generally worse than any thing else they wrote, because, from the very simplicity and truth required by the proper nature of such compositions, they less tolerate an appearance of affectation.

Cervantes, who was Góngora’s contemporary, tells us that he composed vast numbers which are now lost; and, from his own opinion of them, we have no reason to regret their fate. Lope’s, on the contrary, which he preserved with a care for his own reputation that was not at all characteristic of Cervantes, are still numerous and often excellent; especially those that relate to himself and his loves, some of the best of which seem to have been produced at Valencia and Lisbon.[52] At the same time and later, good ballads were written by Quevedo, who descended even to the style of the rogues in their composition; by Bernarda de Fereira, a nun in the romantic convent of Buzaco, in Portugal; by Rebolledo, the diplomatist; and perhaps, though with some hesitation, we should add, by Solís, the historian.[53] Indeed, wherever we turn, in the Spanish poetry of this period, we find ballads in all their varieties of tone and character,—often by authors otherwise little known, like Alarcon, who, in the end of the sixteenth century, wrote excellent devout ballads,[54] or Diego de la Chica, who is remembered only for a single satirical one, preserved by Espinosa in the beginning of the seventeenth;[55]—but we always find them in the works of those poets of note who desired to stand well with the mass of their countrymen.

Nor could it be otherwise;—for ballads, in the seventeenth century, had become the delight of the whole Spanish people. The soldier solaced himself with them in his tent, and the muleteer amidst the sierras; the maiden danced to them on the green, and the lover sang them for his serenade; they entered into the low orgies of thieves and vagabonds, into the sumptuous entertainments of the luxurious nobility, and into the holiday services of the Church; the blind beggar chanted them to gather alms, and the puppet-showman gave them in recitative to explain his exhibition; they were a part of the very foundation of the theatre, both secular and religious, and the theatre carried them everywhere, and added everywhere to their effect and authority. No poetry of modern times has been so widely spread through all classes of society, and none has so entered into the national character. The ballads, in fact, seem to have been found on every spot of Spanish soil. They seem to have filled the very air that men breathed.[56]

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Romantic Fiction. — Change of Manners produces a Change of the Fictions founded upon them. — Pastoral Romance and its Origin: Montemayor and his Diana, with its Continuations by Perez and Polo: Lo Frasso, Montalvo, Cervantes, Enciso, Bovadilla, Bernardo de la Vega, Lope de Vega, Balbuena, Figueroa, Adorno, Botelho, Quintana, Corral, Saavedra. — Characteristics of Pastoral Fiction.

The romances of chivalry, like the institutions on which they were founded, lingered long in Spain. Their grave fictions were suited to the air of the stern old castles with which the Moorish contest had studded large portions of the country, while their general tone harmonized no less happily with the stately manners which the spirit of knighthood had helped to impress on the higher classes of society, from the mountains of Biscay to the shores of the Mediterranean. Their influence, therefore, was great; and, as one natural result of its long continuance, other and better forms of prose fiction were discountenanced in Spain, or appeared later than they might have done under different circumstances;—a fact to which Cervantes alludes, when, even at the opening of the seventeenth century, he complains that Spanish books of the latter character were still rarely to be found.[57]

Fifty years, however, before that period, signs of a coming change are perceptible. The magnificent successes of Charles the Fifth had already filled the minds of men with a spirit of adventure very different from that of Amadis and his descendants, though sometimes hardly less wild and extravagant. The cruel wars unceasingly kept up with the Barbary powers, and the miseries of the thousands of captives who returned from Africa, to amaze their countrymen with tragical stories of their own trials and those of their fellow-sufferers, were full of that bitter romance of real life which outruns all fiction. Manners, too,—the old, formal, knightly manners of the nobility,—were beginning to be modified by intercourse with the rest of the world, and especially with Italy, then the most refined and least military country of Christendom; so that romantic fiction—the department of elegant literature, which, above every other, depends on the state of society—was naturally modified in Spain by the great changes going on in the external relations and general culture of the kingdom. Of this state of things, and of its workings in the new forms of fiction produced by it, we shall find frequent proofs as we advance.

The first form, however, in which a change in the national taste manifested itself with well-defined success—that of prose pastorals—is perhaps not one which would have been anticipated even by the more sagacious; though, when we now look back upon its history, we can easily discover some of the foundations on which it was originally built.

From the Middle Ages the occupations of a shepherd’s life had prevailed in Spain and Portugal to a greater extent than elsewhere in Europe;[58] and, probably in consequence of this circumstance, eclogues and bucolics were early known in the poetry of both countries, and became connected in both with the origin of the popular drama. On the other hand, the military spirit of such a civilization as existed in Spain down to the sixteenth century may have gladly turned away from such a monotonous exaggeration of its own character as is found in the romances of chivalry, and sought refreshment and repose in the peace and simplicity of a fabulous Arcadia. At least, these are the two obvious circumstances in the condition and culture of Spain, that favored the appearance of so singular a form of fiction as that of prose pastorals, though how much influence either exercised it may now be impossible to determine.

On one point, however, we are not left in doubt. We know whence the impulse came that called forth such a work for the first time in Castilian literature, and when it appeared there. It was Sannazaro,—a Neapolitan gentleman, whose family had been carried from Spain to Naples by the political revolutions of the preceding century,—who is the true father of the modern prose pastoral, which, from him, passed directly to Spain, and, during a long period of success in that country, never entirely lost the character its author had originally impressed upon it. His “Arcadia”—written, probably, without any reference to the Greek pastoral of Longus, but hardly without a knowledge of the “Ameto” of Boccaccio and the Eclogues of Bembo—was first published entire, at Naples, in 1504.[59] It is a genuine pastoral romance in prose and verse, in which, with a slight connecting narrative, and under the disguise of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses, Sannazaro relates adventures that really occurred to him and to some of his friends;—he himself appearing under the name of Sincero, who is its principal personage. Such a work, of course, is somewhat fantastic from its very nature; but the fiction of Sannazaro was written in the purest and most graceful Italian, and had a great success;—a success which, perhaps, from the Spanish connections of his family, was early extended to Spain. At any rate, Spain was the first foreign country where the Arcadia was imitated, and was afterwards the only one where such works appeared in large numbers, and established a lasting influence.

It is singular, however, that, like the romances of chivalry, pastoral romance was first introduced into Spain by a Portuguese,—by George of Montemayor, a native of the town of that name, near Coimbra. When he was born we are not told; probably it was before 1520. In his youth he was a soldier; but later, from his skill in music, he became attached to the travelling chapel of the prince of Spain, afterwards Philip the Second, and thus enjoyed an opportunity of visiting foreign countries, especially Italy and Flanders. But his mind was little cultivated by study. He knew no Latin, which even those of the humblest literary attainments were wont to acquire, in the age when he lived; so that his success is due to his own genius and to the promptings of that passion which gave its color to his life. Probably he left Spain from disappointment in love; probably, too, he perished in a duel at Turin, in 1561. But we know nothing more of him with any tolerable certainty.[60]

His “Diana Enamorada,” the chief of his works, was first printed at Valencia, in 1542.[61] It is written in good Castilian, like his poetry, which is published separately, though, like that, with some intermixture of his native Portuguese;[62] and it contains, as he tells us, stories of adventures which really occurred.[63] We know, too, that, under the name of Sereno, he was himself its hero; and Lope de Vega adds, that Diana, its heroine, was a lady of Valencia de Don Juan, a town near the city of Leon.[64] Montemayor’s purpose, therefore, like that of Sannazaro, is to give, in the forms of a pastoral romance, an account of some events in his own life and in the lives of a few of his friends. To effect this, he brings together on the banks of the Ezla, at the foot of the mountains of Leon, a number of shepherds and shepherdesses, who relate their respective stories through seven books of prose, intermingled with verse. But the two principal personages, Sereno and Diana, who are introduced at first as lovers, are separated by magic; and the romance is brought to an abrupt conclusion, little conformable to all the previous intimations, by the marriage of Diana to Delio, the unworthy rival of Sereno.

On first reading the Diana of Montemayor, it is not easy to understand it. The separate stories of which it is composed are so involved with each other, and so inartificially united, that we are constantly losing the thread of the principal narration;—a difficulty which is much increased by the mixture of true and false geography, heathenism, magic, Christianity, and all the various contradictory impossibilities that naturally follow an attempt to place in the heart of Spain, and near one of its best-known cities, a poetical Arcadia, that never existed anywhere. The Diana, however, better merits the name of a romance than the Arcadia, which served for its model. Its principal fiction is ampler and more ingeniously constructed. Its episodes are more interesting. Much of it is warm with the tenderness of a disappointed attachment, which, no doubt, caused the whole to be written. Some of the poetry is beautiful, especially the lyric poetry; and if its prose style is not so pure as that of Sannazaro, it is still to be remarked for its grace and richness. Notwithstanding its many defects, therefore, the Diana is not without an interest for us even at this remote period, when the whole class of fictions to which it belongs is discountenanced and almost forgotten; and we feel that only poetical justice was done to it when it was saved, by the good taste of the curate, in the destruction of Don Quixote’s library.

The Diana, as has been intimated, was left unfinished by its author; but in 1564, three years after his death, Alonso Perez, a physician of Salamanca, to whom Montemayor, before he finally left Spain, had communicated his plan for completing it, published a second part, which opens in the enchanted palace of Felicia, where the first ends, and gives us the adventures and stories of several shepherds and shepherdesses, not introduced before, as well as a continuation of the original fiction. But this second part, like the first, fails to complete the romance. It advances no farther than to the death of Delio, the husband of Diana,—which, according to the purpose of Montemayor, was to have been followed by her union with Sereno, her first and true lover,—and then stops abruptly, with the promise of yet a third part, which never appeared. Nor was it, probably, demanded with any earnestness; for the second, protracted through seven books, and considerably longer than its predecessor, is much inferior to it in merit. It lacks, in all its many stories, the tenderness which the disappointment of Montemayor had given to the first portion of the work; and, what perhaps is of no less consequence in this kind of composition, the prose is heavy and monotonous, and the verse worse.[65]

But this unfortunate attempt was not the only consequence of Montemayor’s success. The same year with that in which the work of Perez was published, another continuation appeared at Valencia, by Gaspar Gil Polo, a gentleman of that city, who was a Professor of Greek in its University.[66] The Diana of Polo has the merit of being shorter than either of its predecessors. It is divided into five books, and contains an account of the falsehood and death of Delio, and the marriage of Diana to Sereno, whom she finds when she is seeking the husband who had basely abandoned her for another shepherdess. Several episodes and much pastoral poetry of different kinds are skilfully inserted; but though the original plan of Montemayor seems to be completed, the book ends with the promise of a still further continuation, which, though the author lived nearly thirty years after he made it, seems never to have been written.[67] His work, however, was successful. Its prose has always found favor, and so have some portions of its verse; especially the cancion of Nerea in the third book, and several of the shorter poems in the last.[68]

The “Ten Books of Fortune and Love,” by Antonio de Lo Frasso, a Sardinian and a soldier, published in 1573, is the next Spanish romance of the same class with the Diana; but it is without merit, and was forgotten soon after it appeared.[69] Nine years later, in 1582, a better one was published,—the “Fílida,”—which passed early through five editions, and is still valued and read.[70] Its author, Luis Galvez de Montalvo, was born in Guadalaxara, a town near Alcalá, the birthplace of Cervantes; and, perhaps from this circumstance, they soon became acquainted, for they were long friends, and often praised each other in their respective works.[71] They seem, however, to have had very different characters; for, instead of the life of adventure led by Cervantes, Montalvo attached himself to the great family of Infantado, descended from the Marquis of Santillana, and passed most of his life as a sort of idle courtier and retainer in their ducal halls, near the place of his nativity. Subsequently he went to Italy, where he translated and published, in 1587, “The Tears of Saint Peter,” by Tansillo, and had begun a translation of the “Jerusalem Delivered” of Tasso, when he was cut off in the midst of his labors by an accidental death, in Sicily, about the year 1591.[72]

His “Fílida,” in seven parts, was written while he was attached to the Duke of Infantado; for he announces himself on the title-page as “a gentleman and a courtier,” and, in his Dedication to one of the family, says that “his greatest labor is to live idle, contented, and honored as one of the servants of their house.” The romance contains, as was usual in such works, the adventures of living and known personages, among whom were Montalvo himself, Cervantes, and the nobleman to whom it is dedicated. But the tone of pastoral life is not better preserved than it is in the other fictions of the same class. Indeed, in the sixth part, there is a most inappropriate critical discussion on the merits of the two schools of Spanish poetry then contending for fashionable mastery; and in the seventh is a courtly festival, with running at the ring, in which the shepherds appear on horseback with lances and armorial bearings, like knights. The prose style of the whole is pure and good; and among the poems with which it abounds, a few in the old Spanish measure may be selected that are nearly, if not quite, equal to the similar poems of Montemayor.

Cervantes, too, as we have already noticed, was led by the spirit of the times, rather, perhaps, than by his own taste, to begin—as an offering to the lady of his love—the “Galatea,” of which the first six books, published in 1584, were all that ever appeared.[73] This was followed, in 1586, by “Truth for the Jealous”; again a romance in six books, and, like the last, unfinished. It was written by Bartolomé Lopez de Enciso, of whom we know from himself that he was a young man when he wrote it, and that it was his purpose to publish a second part, of which, however, nothing more was heard. Nor can we regret that he failed to fulfil his promise. His fictions, which are occupied chiefly with the nymphs and shepherds of the Tagus, are among the most confused and unmeaning that have ever been attempted. His scene is laid, from its opening, in the days of the most ancient Greek mythology; but the Genius of Spain, in the fifth book, carries the same shepherds who thus figure in the first to a magnificent temple, and shows them the statues of Charles the Fifth, of Philip the Second, and even of Philip the Third, who was not yet on the throne;—thus confounding the earliest times of classical antiquity with an age which, at the end of the sixteenth century, was yet to come. Other inconsequences follow, in great numbers, as matters of course, while nothing in either the prose or the poetry is of value enough to compensate for the absurdities in the story. Indeed, few portions of Spanish literature show any thing more stiff and wearisome than the long declamations and discussions in this dull fiction.[74]

Another pastoral romance in six books, entitled “The Nymphs of the Henares,” by Bernardo Gonzalez de Bovadilla, was printed in 1587. The author, who was a native of the Canary Islands, confesses that he has placed the scene of his story on the banks of the Henares without having ever seen them; but both he and his romance have long since been forgotten. So has “The Shepherds of Iberia,” in four books, by Bernardo de la Vega, supposed to have been a native of Madrid, and certainly a canon of Tucuman, in Peru, whose ill-written story appeared in 1591. But that these, and all that preceded them, enjoyed for a time the public favor is made plain by the fact, that they are all found in the library of Don Quixote, and that three of them receive high praise from Cervantes;—much higher than has been confirmed by the decision of subsequent generations.[75]

Some time, however, elapsed before another came to continue the series, except the “Arcadia” of Lope de Vega, which, though written long before, was not printed till 1598.[76] At last, “The Age of Gold,” by Bernardo de Balbuena, appeared. Its author, born on the vine-clad declivities of the Val de Peñas, in 1568, early accompanied his family to Mexico, where he was educated, and where, when only seventeen years old, he was already known as a poet. Once, at least, he visited his native country, and perhaps oftener; but he seems to have spent most of his life, either in Jamaica, where he enjoyed an ecclesiastical benefice, or in Puerto Rico, of which he was afterwards bishop, and where he died in 1627.

Of the manners of the New World, however, or of its magnificent scenery, his “Age of Gold in the Woods of Eriphile” shows no trace. It was printed at Madrid, in 1608, and might have been written, if its author had never been in any other city. But it is not without merit. The poetry with which it abounds is generally of the Italian school, but is much better than can be found in most of these doubtful romances; and its prose, though sometimes affected, is oftener sweet and flowing. Probably nothing in the nine eclogues—as its divisions are unsuitably called—is connected with either the history or the scandal of the times; and if this be the case, we have, perhaps, an explanation of the fact that it was less regarded by those contemporary with its publication than were similar works of inferior merit. But whatever may have been the cause, it was long overlooked; no second edition of it being demanded till 1821, when it received the rare honor of being published anew by the Spanish Academy.[77]

The very next year after the first appearance of “The Age of Gold,” Christóval Suarez de Figueroa, a native of Valladolid, a jurist and a soldier, published his “Constant Amaryllis, in Four Discourses,” crowded, like all its predecessors, with short poems, and, like most of them, claiming to tell a tale not a little of which was true.[78] Its author, who lived a great deal in Italy, was already known by an excellent translation of Guarini’s “Pastor Fido,”[79] and published, at different times afterwards, several original works which enjoyed much reputation.[80]

But he seems to have been a man of an unkind and unfaithful character. In a curious account of his own life which appeared in his “Traveller,” he speaks harshly and insidiously of many of his contemporaries; and towards Cervantes—who had just died, after praising every body most generously during his whole life—he is absolutely malignant.[81] His last work is dated in 1621, and this is the last fact we know in relation to him. His “Amaryllis,” which, as he intimates, was composed to please a person of great consideration, did not satisfy its author.[82] It is, however, written in an easy and tolerably pure style; and though it contains formal and wearisome discussions, like that in the first part on Poetry, and awkward machinery, such as a vision of Venus and her court in the second, it is the only one of his works that has been reprinted or much read within the last century.

A few pastoral romances appeared in Spain after the Amaryllis, but none of so much merit, and none that enjoyed any considerable degree of favor. Espinel Adorno;[83] Botelho, a Portuguese;[84] Quintana, who assumed the name of Cuevas;[85] Corral;[86] and Saavedra,[87] close up the series;—the last bringing us down to just about a century from the first appearance of such fictions in the time of Montemayor, and all of them infected with the false taste of the period. Taken together, they leave no doubt that pastoral romance was the first substitute in Spain for the romances of chivalry, and that it inherited no small degree of their popularity. Most of the works we have noticed were several times reprinted, and the “Diana” of Montemayor, the first and best of them all, was probably more read in Spain during the sixteenth century than any Spanish work of amusement except the “Celestina.”

All this seems remarkable and strange, when we consider only the absurdities and inconsequences with which such fictions necessarily abound. But there is another side to the question, which should not be overlooked. Pastoral romance, after all, has its foundation in one of the truest and deepest principles of our common nature,—that love of rural beauty, of rural peace, in short, of whatever goes to constitute a country life, as distinguished from the constrained life of a city, which few are too dull to feel, and fewer still so artificial as wholly to reject. It has, therefore, prevailed more or less in all modern countries, as we may see in Italy, from the success that followed Sannazaro; in France, from the “Astrea” of Durfé; and in England, from the “Arcadia” of Sir Philip Sidney;—the two latter being pastoral romances of enormous length, compared with any in Spanish; and the very last enjoying for above a century a popularity which may well be compared with that of the “Diana” of Montemayor, if, indeed, it did not equal it.[88]

No doubt, in Spain, as elsewhere, the incongruities of such fictions were soon perceived. Even some of those who most indulged in them showed that it was not entirely from a misapprehension of their nature. Cervantes, who died regretting that he should leave his “Galatea” unfinished, still makes himself merry more than once in his “Don Quixote” with all such fancies; and, in his “Colloquy of the Dogs,” permits one of them, who had been in shepherd service, to satirize the false exhibition of life in the best pastorals of his time, not forgetting his own among the rest.[89] Lope de Vega, too, though he published his “Arcadia” under circumstances which show that he set a permanent value upon its gentle tales, could still, in a play where shepherds are introduced, make one of them—who found a real life among flocks and herds in rough weather much less agreeable than the life he had read of in the pastorals—say, when suffering in a storm,—

And I should like just now to see those men

Who write such books about a shepherd’s life,

Where all is spring and flowers and trees and brooks.[90]

Still, neither Cervantes, nor Lope, nor any body else in their time, thought seriously of discountenancing pastoral fictions. On the contrary, there was in their very style—which was generally an imitation of the Italian, that gave birth to them all—something attractive to a cultivated Castilian ear, at a time when the school of Garcilasso was at the height of its popularity and favor. Besides this, the real events they recorded, and the love-stories of persons in high life that they were known to conceal, made them sometimes riddles and sometimes masquerades, which engaged the curiosity of those who moved in the circles either of their authors or of their heroes and heroines.[91] But more than all, the glimpses they afforded of nature and truth—such genuine and deep tenderness as is shown by Montemayor, and such graceful descriptions of natural scenery as abound in Balbuena—were, no doubt, refreshing in a state of society stiff and formal as was that at the Spanish court in the times of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, and in the midst of a culture more founded on military virtues and the spirit of knighthood than any other of modern times. As long, therefore, as this state of things continued, pastoral fictions and fancies, filled with the dreams of a poetical Arcadia, enjoyed a degree of favor in Spain which they never enjoyed anywhere else. But when this disappeared, they disappeared with it.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Romances in the Style of Rogues. — State of Manners that produced them. — Mendoza’s Lazarillo de Tormes. — Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache, with the Spurious Continuation of it by Sayavedra and the True One by Aleman. — Perez. — Espinel and his Marcos de Obregon. — Yañez. — Quevedo. — Solorzano. — Enriquez Gomez. — Estevanillo Gonzalez.

The next form of prose fiction produced in Spain, and the one which, from its greater truth, has enjoyed a more permanent regard than the last, is found in those stories that have commonly gone under the name of “tales in the gusto picaresco,” or tales in the style of rogues. Taken as a class, they constitute a singular exhibition of character, and are, in fact, as separate and national in their air as any thing in the whole body of modern literature.

Their origin is obvious, and the more so from what is most singular in their character. They sprang directly from the condition of some portions of society in Spain when they appeared;—a condition, it should be added, which has existed there ever since, and contributed to preserve for the stories that bear its impress no little of the favor they have always enjoyed. Before speaking of them in detail, we must, therefore, notice the peculiar circumstances of the country, and the peculiar state of manners that gave them birth.

The wars of the opposing races and religions, that had constituted so much of the business of life, and so long engrossed the thoughts of men, in Spain, had, indeed, nearly ceased from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. But the state of character they had produced in the Spanish people had by no means ceased with them. On the contrary, it had been kept in the freshest activity by those vast enterprises which Charles the Fifth had pushed forward in Italy, France, and Germany, with such success, that the Spanish nation, always marked by a sanguine enthusiasm, had become fully persuaded that it was destined to achieve an empire which, covering the whole of the New World and whatever was most desirable in the Old, should surpass in glory and power the empire of the Cæsars in the days of its palmiest supremacy.

This magnificent result was a matter of such general faith, that men often felt a desire to contribute their personal exertions to accomplish it. Not only the high nobility of Spain, therefore, but all cavaliers and men of honor who sought distinction, saw, with the exception of places in the civil administration of affairs or in the Church, no road open before them on which they were so much tempted to enter as that of military enterprise. Laborious occupation in the business of common life and practical and productive industry were, in consequence, discountenanced, or held in contempt, while the armies were thronged, and multitudes of gentlemen and men of culture, like Cervantes and Lope de Vega, gladly served in them as simple soldiers.

But large as were the armies of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, all who desired it could not be soldiers. Many persons of decent condition, therefore, remained idle, because they found no occupation which was not deemed below their rank in society; while others, having made an experiment of military life sufficient to disgust them with its hardships, returned home unfitted for every thing else. These two sorts of persons formed a class of idlers that hung loose upon society in the principal cities of Spain, thriving at best by flattery and low intrigue, and sometimes driven for subsistence to crime. Their number was by no means small. They were known and marked wherever they went; and their characters, represented with much spirit, and often with great faithfulness, are still to be recognized in the proud, starving cavaliers of Mendoza and Quevedo, who stalk about the streets upon adventure, or crowd the antechamber of the minister, and weary his patience with their abject supplications for the meanest places it is in his power to bestow.

But there was yet another body of persons in Spain, nearly akin to the last in spirit, though differing from them in their original position, who figure no less in this peculiar form of fiction. They were the active, the shrewd, and the unscrupulous of the lower portions of society;—men who were able to perceive that the resources and power of the country, with all the advantages they desired to reach, were already in possession of an aristocratic caste, who looked to them for nothing but a sincere and faithful loyalty. During a long period,—the period of danger and trouble at home,—the fidelity of this class had been complete and unhesitating; bringing with it little feeling of wrong, and perhaps no sense of degradation; for such men, in such times, claimed from their superiors only protection, and, receiving this, asked for nothing else.

At last, however, other prospects opened upon them. Peace came gradually, as the Moors were driven out; and with it came a sense of independence and personal rights, which sometimes expressed itself in social restlessness, as in the frequent troubles at the universities; and sometimes, as in the wars of the Comuneros, in open rebellion. Contemporary, too, with these upward struggles of the masses of the people, which were always successfully rebuked and repressed, came the conquests in America, pouring such floods of wealth as the world had never before seen upon a country that had for ages been one of the poorest and most suffering in Europe. The easily got treasure—which was at first only in the hands of military adventurers or of those who had obtained grants of office and territory in the New World—was scattered as lightly as it was won. The shrewd and unprincipled of the less favored classes, therefore, soon learned to gather round its possessors, as they came home with their tempting burdens, and found ready means to profit by the golden shower that fell on all sides, with a profusion which carried an unhealthy action through every division of society. Little, however, could be obtained by men so humble and in a position so false, except by the arts of cunning and flattery. Cunning and flattery, therefore, were soon called forth among them in great abundance. The wealth of the Indies was a rich compost, that brought up parasites and rogues with other noxious weeds; and Paul, the son of a barber, and nephew of a hangman; Cortadillo, a young thief, whose father was a village tailor; and Little Lazarus, who could never settle his genealogy to his own satisfaction, became, in the literature of their country, the permanent representatives of their class;—a class well known under the degrading name of the Catariberas,[92] or the gayer one of Pícaros.

The first instance of a fiction founded on this state of things was, as we have already seen, the “Lazarillo de Tórmes” of Mendoza, which was published as early as 1554; a bold, unfinished sketch of the life of a rogue, from the very lowest condition in society. This was followed, forty-five years afterwards, by the “Guzman de Alfarache” of Mateo Aleman, the most ample portraiture of the class to which it belongs that is to be found in Spanish literature. What induced Aleman to write it we do not know. Indeed, we know little about him, except that he was a native of Seville, and wrote three or four other works of less consequence than this tale; that he was long employed in the treasury department of the government, and subjected to a vexatious suit at law in consequence of it; and that at last, retiring of his own choice to private life, he visited Mexico in 1609, and devoted the remainder of his days, either there or in Spain, to letters.[93] He may, at some period, have been a soldier; for one of his friends, in a eulogium prefixed to the second part of “Guzman de Alfarache,” sums up his character by saying that “never soldier had a poorer purse or a richer heart, or a life more unquiet and full of trouble, than his was; and all because he accounted it a greater honor to be a poor philosopher than a rich flatterer.”

But whatever he may have been, or whatever he may have suffered, his claims to be remembered are now centred in his “Guzman de Alfarache.” As it has reached us, it is divided into two parts, the first of which was published at Madrid, in 1599. Its hero, who supposed himself to be the son of a decayed and not very reputable Genoese merchant established at Seville, escapes, as a boy, from his mother, after his father’s ruin and death, and plunges into the world upon adventure. He soon finds himself at Madrid, though not till he has passed through the hands of the officers of justice; and there undergoes all sorts of suffering, serving as a scullion to a cook, and as a ragged errand-boy to whomsoever would employ him; until, seizing a good opportunity, he steals a large sum of money that had been intrusted to him, and escapes to Toledo, where he sets up for a gentleman. But there he becomes, in his turn, the victim of a cunning like his own; and, finding his money nearly gone, enlists for the Italian wars. His star is now on the wane. At Barcelona, he again turns sharper and thief. At Genoa and Rome, he sinks to the lowest conditions of a street beggar. But a cardinal picks him up in the last city and makes him his page; a place in which, but for his bold frauds and tricks, he might long have thriven, and which at last he leaves in great distress, from losses at play, and enters the service of the French ambassador.

Here the first part ends. It was very successful; falling in with the vices and humors of the times, just as the loose court of Philip the Third, and the corrupting influences of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma, came to offer a sort of carnival to folly and vice, after the hypocrisy and constraints of the last dark years of Philip the Second. The Guzman, therefore, within a twelve-month after it appeared, passed through three editions; and, in less than six years, through twenty-six, besides being translated into French and Italian.[94] It was imitated, too, in a second part by some unknown person, probably by Juan Marti, a Valencian advocate, who disguised himself under the name of Mateo Luxan de Sayavedra, and published in 1603 what he boldly called a continuation of the Guzman.[95] But it was a base attempt, which, though not without literary merit, brought upon its author the just reproaches of Aleman, who intimates that his own manuscripts had been improperly used in its composition, and the just sarcasm of Aleman’s friend, Luis de Valdes, who exposed the meanness of the whole fraud.

In 1605, the genuine second part appeared.[96] It begins with the life of Guzman in the house of the French ambassador at Rome, where he serves in some of the most dishonorable employments to which the great of that period degraded their mercenary dependants. But his own follies and crimes drive him away from a place for which he seems to have been in most respects well fitted, and he goes to Siena. At this point in his story, it seems to have occurred to Aleman to attack the Sayavedra who had endeavoured to impose upon the world with a false second part of the Guzman. He therefore introduces a person who is made thus to describe himself:—

“He told me,” says Guzman, who always writes in the style of autobiography, “he told me, that he was an Andalusian, born in Seville, my own native city, Sayavedra by name, with papers to show that he belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished families among us. Who would suspect fraud under such a fair outside? And yet it was all a lie. He was a Valencian. I do not give his true name, for good reasons; but what with his flowing Castilian, his good looks, and his agreeable manners, it was impossible for me to suspect that he was a thief, a sponge, and a cheat, who had dressed himself up in peacock’s feathers only to obtain by falsehood such an entrance into my apartments that he could rob me of whatever he liked.”[97]

This personage, his history and adventures, fill too large a space in the second part of the Guzman; for when once Aleman had seized him, he seemed not to tire of inflicting punishment so soon as the reader does of witnessing it. Sayavedra robs and cheats Guzman early in this portion of the story; but afterwards accompanies him, in an equivocal capacity, through Milan, Bologna, and Genoa, to Spain, where, partly perhaps to get rid of him, and partly perhaps, as Cervantes did afterwards in the case of Don Quixote and Avellaneda, in order to end his story and prevent his enemy from continuing it any further, Aleman brings his victim’s life to an end.

The remainder of the book is filled with the adventures of Guzman himself, which are as wild and various as possible. He becomes a merchant at Madrid, and cheats his creditors by a fraudulent bankruptcy. He marries, but his wife dies soon; and then he begins, as a student at Alcalá, to prepare himself for the Church;—a consummation of wickedness which is prevented only by his marriage a second time. His second wife, however, leaves him at Seville, where he had established himself, and elopes with a lover to Italy. After this, he is reduced again to abject poverty; and, unable to live with his old, wretched, and shameless mother, he becomes major-domo to a lady of fortune, robs her, and is sent to the galleys, where he has the good luck to reveal a conspiracy and is rewarded with his freedom and a full pardon.

With this announcement the second part abruptly ends, not without promising a third, which was never published, though the author, in his Preface, says it was already written. The work, therefore, as it has come to us, is imperfect. But it was not, on that account, the less favored and admired. On the contrary, it was translated and printed all over Europe, in French, in Italian, in German, in Portuguese, in English, in Dutch, and even in Latin; a rare success, whose secret lies partly in the age when the Guzman appeared, and still more in the power and talent of the author.[98] The long moralizing discourses with which it abounds, written in a pure Castilian style, with much quaintness and point, were then admired, and saved it from censures which it could otherwise hardly have failed to encounter. These are, no doubt, the passages that led Ben Jonson to speak of it as

“The Spanish Proteus, which, though writ

But in one tongue, was formed with the world’s wit,

And hath the noblest mark of a good booke,

That an ill man doth not securely looke

Upon it; but will loathe or let it passe,

As a deformed face doth a true glasse.”[99]

This, however, is not its real, or at least not its main character. The Guzman is chiefly curious and interesting because it shows us, in the costume of the times, the life of an ingenious, Machiavellian rogue, who is never at a loss for an expedient; who always treats himself and speaks of himself as an honest and respectable man; and who sometimes goes to mass and says his prayers just before he enters on an extraordinary scheme of roguery, as if on purpose to bring it out in more striking and brilliant relief. So far from being a moral book, therefore, it is a very immoral one, and Le Sage spoke in the spirit of its author, when, in the next century, undertaking to give a new French version of it, he boasted that he “had purged it of its superfluous moral reflections.”[100]

It has, naturally, a considerable number of episodes. That of Sayavedra has already been noticed, as occupying a space in the work disproportionate to every thing but the anger of its author. Another—the story of Osmyn and Daraxa, which occurs early—is a pleasing specimen of those half-Moorish, half-Christian fictions that are so characteristic a portion of Spanish literature.[101] And yet another, which is placed in Spain and in the time of the Great Constable, Alvaro de Luna, is, after all, an Italian tale of Masuccio, used subsequently by Beaumont and Fletcher in “The Little French Lawyer.”[102] But, on the whole, the attention of the reader is fairly kept either upon the hero or upon the long discussions in which the hero indulges himself, and in which he draws striking, though not unfrequently exaggerated and burlesque, sketches of all classes of society in Spain, as they successively pass in review before him. At first, Aleman thought of calling his work “A Beacon-light of Life.” The name would not have been inappropriate, and it is the qualities implied under it—the sagacity, the knowledge of life and character, and the acuteness of its reflections on men and manners—that have preserved for it somewhat of its original popularity down to our own times.

In 1605 another story of the same class appeared, the “Pícara Justina,” or the Crafty Justina,—again a seeming autobiography, and again a fiction of very doubtful morality. It was written by a Dominican monk, Andreas Perez of Leon, who was known, both before and after its appearance, as the author of works of Christian devotion, and who had so far a sense of the incongruity of the Pícara Justina with his religious position, that he printed it under the assumed name of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda. He claims to have written it when he was a student at the University of Alcalá, but admits, that, after the appearance of the “Guzman de Alfarache,” he made large additions to it. It is, however, in truth, a mere imitation, and a very poor one, of Aleman. The first book is filled with a tedious, rambling account of Justina’s ancestors, who are barbers and puppet-showmen; and the rest consists of her own life, brought down to the time of her first marriage, marked by few adventures, and ending with an intimation, that, at the time of writing it, she had already been married yet twice more; that she was then the wife of Guzman de Alfarache; and that she should continue her memoirs still further, in case the public should care to hear more about her.

The Justina discovers little power of invention in the incidents, which are few and not interesting. Indeed, the author himself declares that nearly all of them were actual occurrences within his own experience; and this circumstance, together with the meagre “improvements,” as they are called,—or warnings against the follies and guilt of the heroine, with which each chapter ends,—is regarded by him as a sufficient justification for publishing a work whose tendency is obviously mischievous. Nor is the style better than the incidents. There is a constant effort to say witty and brilliant things; but it is rarely successful; and besides this, there is an affectation of new words and singular phrases which do not belong to the genius and analogies of the language, and which have caused at least one Spanish critic to regard Perez as the first author who left the sober and dignified style of the elder times, and, from mere caprice, undertook to invent a new one.[103]

But though the “Pícara Justina” proved a failure, the overwhelming popularity of “Guzman de Alfarache,” when added to that of “Lazarillo,” rendered this form of fiction so generally welcome in Spain, that it made its way into the ductile drama, and into the style of the shorter tales, as we have already seen when treating of Lope de Vega and Cervantes, and as we shall see hereafter when we come to speak of Salas Barbadillo and Francisco de Santos. Meantime, however, the “Escudero Marcos de Obregon” appeared; a work which has, on many accounts, attracted attention, and which deserves to be remembered, as the best of its kind in Spanish literature, except “Lazarillo” and “Guzman.”

It was written by Vicente Espinel, who was born about 1540, at Ronda, a romantic town, boldly built in the mountain range that stretches through the southwestern portion of the kingdom of Granada, and picturesquely described by himself in one of the most striking of his poems.[104] He was educated at Salamanca, and, when Lope de Vega appeared as a poet before the public, Espinel was already so far advanced in his own career, that the young aspirant for public favor submitted his verses to the critical skill of his elder friend;[105]—a favor which Lope afterwards returned by praises in “The Laurel of Apollo,” more heart-felt and effective than he has usually given in that indiscriminate eulogium of the poets of his time.[106]

What was the course of Espinel’s life we do not know. It has generally been supposed that many of its events are related in his “Marcos de Obregon”; but though this is probable, and though some parts of that story are evidently true, yet many others are as evidently fictions, so that, on the whole, we are bound to regard it as a romance, and not as an autobiography. We know, however, that Espinel’s life in Italy was much like that of his hero; that he was a soldier in Flanders; that he wrote Latin verses; that he published a volume of Castilian poetry in 1591; and that he was a chaplain in Ronda, though he lived much in Madrid, and at last died there. He was regarded as the author of the form of verse called sometimes décimas, and sometimes, after himself, Espinelas; and he is said to have added a fifth string to the guitar, which soon led to the invention of the sixth, and thus completed that truly national instrument.[107] He died, according to Antonio, in 1634; but according to Lope de Vega, he was not alive in 1630. All accounts, however, represent him as having survived his ninetieth year,[108] and as having passed the latter part of his life in poverty and in unfriendly relations with Cervantes;—a fact the more observable, because both of them enjoyed pensions from the same distinguished ecclesiastic, the kindly old Archbishop of Toledo.[109]

The “Escudero Marcos de Obregon” was first published in 1618, and therefore appeared in the old age of its author.[110] He presents his hero, at once, as a person already past the middle years of life; one of the esquires of dames, who, at that period, were personages of humbler pretensions and graver character than those who, with the same title, had followed the men-at-arms of old.[111] The story of Marcos, however, though it opens upon us, at first, with scenes later in his life, soon returns to his youth, and nearly the whole volume is made up of his own account of his adventures, as he related them to a hermit whom he had known when he was a soldier in Flanders and Italy, and at whose cell he was now accidentally detained by a storm and flood, while on an excursion from Madrid.

In many particulars, his history resembles that of his predecessor, Guzman de Alfarache. It is the story of a youth who left his father’s house to seek his fortune; became first a student and afterwards a soldier; visited Italy; was a captive in Algiers; travelled over a large part of Spain; and after going through a great variety of dangers and trials, intrigues, follies, and crimes, sits down quietly in his old age to give an account of them all, with an air as grave and self-satisfied as if the greater part of them had not been of the most discreditable character. It contains a moderate number of wearisome, well-written moral reflections, intended to render its record of tricks, frauds, and crimes more savory to the reader by contrast; but though it falls below both the “Guzman de Alfarache” and the “Lazarillo” in the beauty and spirit of its style, it has more life in its action than either of them, and the series of its events is carried on with greater rapidity, and brought to a more regular conclusion.[112]

Ten years later, another romance of the same sort appeared. It was by Yañez y Rivera, a physician of Segovia; who, as if on purpose to show the variety of his talent, published two works on ascetic devotion, as well as this picaresque romance; all of them remote from the cares and studies of his regular profession. He calls his story “Alonso, the Servant of Many Masters”; and the name is a sort of index to its contents. For it is a history of the adventures of its hero, Alonso, in the service, first of a military officer, then of a sacristan, and afterwards of a gentleman, of a lawyer, and of not a few others, who happened to be willing to employ him; and it is, in fact, neither more nor less than a satire on the different orders and conditions of society, as he studies them all in the houses of his different masters. It is evidently written with experience of the world, and its Castilian style is good; but something of its spirit is diminished by the circumstance, that it is thrown into the form of a dialogue. When Yañez published the first part, in 1624, he said that he had already been a practising physician twenty-six years, and that he should print nothing more, unless it related to the profession he followed. His success, however, with his Alonso was too tempting. He printed, in 1626, a second part of it, containing his hero’s adventures among the Gypsies and in Algerine captivity, and died in 1632.[113]

Quevedo’s “Paul the Sharper,” which we have already noticed, was published the year after Yañez had completed his story, and did much to extend the favor with which works of this sort were received. Castillo Solorzano, therefore, well known at the time as a writer of popular tales and dramas, ventured to follow him, but with less good-fortune. His “Teresa, the Child of Tricks,” was published in 1632, and was succeeded immediately by “The Graduate in Frauds,” of which a continuation appeared in 1634, under the whimsical title of “The Seville Weasel, or a Hook to catch Purses.” This last, which is an account of the adventures of the Graduate’s daughter, proved, though it was never finished, the most popular of Solorzano’s works, and has not only been often reprinted, but was early translated into French, and gained a reputation in Europe generally. All three, however, are less strictly picaresque tales than the similar fictions that had preceded them;—not that they are wanting in coarse sketches of life and caricatures as broad as any in Guzman, but that romantic tales, ballads, and even farces, or parts of dramas, are introduced, showing that this form of romance was becoming mingled with others more poetical, if not more true to the condition of manners and society at the time.[114]

Another proof of this change is to be found in “The Pythagoric Age” of Enriquez Gomez, first published in 1644; a book of little value, which takes the old doctrine of transmigration as the means of introducing a succession of pictures to serve as subjects for its satire. It begins with a poem in irregular verse, describing the existence of the soul, first in the body of an ambitious man; then in that of a slanderer and informer, a coquette, a minister of state, and a favorite; and it ends with similar sketches, half in poetry and half in prose, of a knight, a schemer, and others. But in the middle of the book is “The Life of Don Gregorio Guadaña,” in prose, which is a tale in direct imitation of Quevedo and Aleman, sometimes as free and coarse as theirs are, but generally not offending against the proprieties of life; and occasionally, as in the scenes during a journey and in the town of Carmona, pleasant and interesting, because it evidently gives us sketches from the author’s own experience. Like the rest of its class, it is most successful when it deals with such realities, and least so when it wanders off into the regions of poetry and fiction.[115]

But the work which most plainly shows the condition of social life that produced all these tales, if not the work that best exhibits their character, is “The Life of Estevanillo Gonzalez,” first printed in 1646. It is the autobiography of a buffoon, who was long in the service of Ottavio Piccolomini, the great general of the Thirty Years’ war; but it is an autobiography so full of fiction, that Le Sage, sixty years after its appearance, easily changed it into a mere romance, which has continued to be republished as such with his works ever since.[116]

Both in the original and in the French translation, it is called “The Life and Achievements of Estevanillo Gonzalez, the Good-natured Fellow,” and gives an account of his travels all over Europe, and of his adventures as courier, cook, and valet of the different distinguished masters whom he at different times served, from the king of Poland down to the Duke of Ossuna. Nothing can exceed the coolness with which he exhibits himself as a liar by profession, a constitutional coward, and an accomplished cheat, whenever he can thus render his story more amusing;—but then, on the other hand, he is not without learning, writes gay verses, and gives us sketches of his times and of the great men to whom he was successively attached, that are any thing but dull. His life, indeed, would be worth reading, if it were only to compare his account of the battle of Nordlingen with that in De Foe’s “Cavalier,” and his drawing of Ottavio Piccolomini with the stately portrait of the same personage in Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” Its faults, on the other hand, are a vain display of his knowledge; occasional attempts at grandeur and eloquence of style, which never succeed; and numberless intolerable puns. But it shows distinctly, what we have already noticed, that the whole class of fictions to which it belongs had its foundation in the manners and society of Spain at the period when they appeared, and that to this they owed, not only their success at home, in the age of Philip the Third and Philip the Fourth, but that success abroad which subsequently produced the Gil Blas of Le Sage,—an imitation more brilliant than any of the originals it followed.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Serious and Historical Romances. — Juan de Flores, Reinoso, Luzindaro, Contreras, Hita and the Wars of Granada, Flegetonte, Noydens, Céspedes, Cervantes, Lamarca, Valladares, Texada, Lozano. — Failure of this Form of Fiction in Spain.

It was inevitable that grave fiction suited to the changed times should appear in Spain, as well as fiction founded on the satire of prevalent manners. But there were obstacles in its way, and it came late. The old chronicles, so full of the same romantic spirit, and the more interesting because they were sometimes built up out of the older and longer-loved ballads; the old ballads themselves, still oftener made out of the chronicles; the romances of chivalry, which had not yet lost a popularity that, at the present day, seems nearly incredible;—all contributed, in their respective proportions, to satisfy the demand for books of amusement, and to repress the appearance and limit the success of serious and historical fiction. But it was inevitable that it should come, even if it should win little favor.

We have already noticed the attempts to introduce it, made in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, by Diego de San Pedro and his imitator, the anonymous author of “The Question of Love.” Others followed, in the reign of Charles the Fifth. The story, that very imperfectly connects the discussions between Aurelio and Isabella, on the inquiry, whether man gives more occasion for sin to woman, or woman to man, is one of them. It is a slight and meagre fiction, by Juan de Mores, which dates as far back as 1521, and which, in an early English translation, was at one time thought to have furnished hints for Shakspeare’s “Tempest.”[117] “The Loves of Clareo and Florisea,” published in 1552, by Nuñez de Reinoso, at Venice, where he then lived, is another;—a fiction partly allegorical, partly sentimental, and partly in the manner of the romances of chivalry, but of no value for the invention of its incidents, and of very little for its style.[118] The story of “Luzindaro and Medusina,” printed as early as 1553, which, in the midst of enchantments and allegories, preserves the tone and air of a series of complaints against love, and ends tragically with the death of Luzindaro, is yet a third of these crude attempts;[119]—all of which are of consequence only because they led the way to better things. But excepting these and two or three more trifles of the same kind, and of even less value, the reign of Charles the Fifth, so far as grave fiction was concerned, was entirely given up to the romances of chivalry.[120]

In the reign of Philip the Second, when the literature of the country began to develop itself on all sides, serious romances appeared in better forms, or at least with higher pretensions and attributes. Two instances of attempts in new directions, and with more considerable success, present themselves at once.

The first was by Hierónimo de Contreras, and bears the affected title of “A Thicket of Adventures.” It was published in 1573, and is the story of Luzuman, a gentleman of Seville, who had been bred from childhood in great intimacy with Arboleda, a lady of equal condition with himself; but when, as he grows up, this intimacy ripens into love, the lady rejects his suit, on the ground that she prefers a religious life. The refusal is gentle and tender; but he is so disheartened by it, that he secretly leaves his home in sorrow and mortification, and goes to Italy, where he meets with abundance of adventures, and travels through the whole peninsula, down to Naples. Wearied with this mode of life, he then embarks for Spain, but on his passage is taken by a corsair and carried to Algiers. There he remains in cruel slavery for five years. His master then gives him his freedom, and he returns to his home as secretly as he left it; but finding that Arboleda had taken the veil, and that the society to which he belonged had forgotten him, and had closed over the place he had once filled, he avoids making himself known to any body, and retires to a hermitage, with the purpose of ending his days in devotion.[121]

The whole story, somewhat solemnly divided into seven books, is dull, from want both of sufficient variety in the details, and of sufficient spirit in the style. But it is of some importance, because it is the first in a class of fictions, afterwards numerous, which—relying on the curiosity then felt in Spain about Italy, as a country full of Spaniards enjoying luxuries and refinements not yet known at home, and about Algiers, crowded with thousands of other Spaniards suffering the most severe forms of captivity—trusted, for no small part of their interest, to the accounts they gave of their heroes as adventurers in Italy, and as slaves on the coast of Barbary. Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and several more among the most popular authors of the seventeenth century, are among the writers of fictions like these.

The other form of grave fiction, which appeared in the time of Philip the Second, was the proper historical romance; and the earliest specimen of it, except such unsuccessful and slight attempts as we have already noticed, is to be found in “The Civil Wars of Granada,” by Ginés Perez de Hita. The author of this striking book was an inhabitant of Murcia, and, from the little he tells us of himself, must not only have been familiar with the wild mountains and rich valleys of the neighbouring kingdom of Granada, but must have had an intimate personal acquaintance with many of the old Moorish families that still lingered in the homes of their fathers, repeating the traditions of their ancient glory and its disastrous overthrow. Perhaps these circumstances led him to the choice of a subject for his romance. Certainly they furnished him with its best materials; for the story he relates is founded on the fall of Granada, regarded rather from within, amidst the feuds of the Moors themselves, than, as we are accustomed to consider it, from the Christian portion of Spain, gradually gathered in military array outside of its walls.

He begins his story by seeking a safe basis for it in the origin and history of the kingdom of Granada, according to the best authorities within his reach. This part of his work is formal and dry, and shows how imperfect were the notions, at the time he lived, of what an historical romance should be. But as he advances and enters upon the main subject he had proposed to himself, his tone changes. We are, indeed, still surrounded with personages that are familiar to us, like the heroic Muza on one side and the Master of Calatrava on the other; we are present with Boabdil, the last of the long line of Moorish sovereigns, as he carries on a fierce war against his own father in the midst of the city, and with Ferdinand and his knights, as they lay waste all the kingdom without. But to these historical figures are added the more imaginative and fabulous sketches of the Zegris and Abencerrages, Reduan, Abenamar, and Gazul, as full of knightly virtues as any of the Christian cavaliers opposed to them; and of Haja, Zayda, and Fatima, as fair and winning as the dames whom Isabella had brought with her to Santa Fé to cheer on the conquest.

But while he is thus mingling the creations of his own fancy with the facts of history, Hita has been particularly skilful in giving to the whole the manners and coloring of the time. He shows us a luxurious empire tottering to its fall, and yet, while the streets of its capital are filled with war-cries and blood, its princes and nobles abate not one jot of their accustomed revelry and riot. Marriage festivals and midnight dances in the Alhambra, and gorgeous tournaments and games in presence of the court, alternate with duels and feuds between the two great preponderating families that are destroying the state, and with skirmishes and single combats against the advancing Christians. Then come the cruel accusation of the Sultana by the false Zegris, and her defence in arms by both Moors and Christians; the atrocious murder of his sister Morayma by Boabdil, who suddenly breaks out with all the jealous violence of an Oriental despot; and the mournful and scandalous spectacle of three kings contending daily for empire in the squares and palaces of a city destined in a few short weeks to fall into the hands of the enemy that already surrounded its walls.

Much of this, of course, is fiction, so far as the details are concerned; but it is not a fiction false to the spirit of the real events on which it is founded. When, therefore, we approach the end of the story, we come again without violence upon historical ground as true as that on which it opened, though almost as wild and romantic as any of the tales of feuds or festivals through which we have been led to it. In this way, the temporary captivity of Boabdil and his cowardly submission, the siege and surrender of Alhama and Malaga, and the fall of Granada, are brought before us neither unexpectedly nor in a manner out of keeping with what had preceded them; and the story ends, if not with a regular catastrophe, which such materials might easily have furnished, at least with a tale in the tone of all the rest,—that which records the sad fate of Don Alonso de Aguilar. It should be added, that not a few of the finest of the old Spanish ballads are scattered through the work, furnishing materials for the story, rich and appropriate in themselves, and giving an air of reality to the events described, that could hardly have been given to them by any thing else.

This first part, as it is commonly called, of the Wars of Granada was written between 1589 and 1595.[122] It claims to be a translation from the Arabic of a Moor of Granada, and, in the last chapter, Hita gives a circumstantial account of the way in which he obtained it from Africa, where, as he would have us believe, it had been carried in the dispersion of the Moorish race. But though it is not unlikely, that, in his wanderings through the kingdom of Granada, he may have obtained Arabic materials for parts of his story, and though, in the last century, it was more than once attempted to make out an Arabic origin for the whole of it,[123] still his account, upon the face of it, is not at all probable; besides which, he repeatedly appeals to the chronicles of Garibay and Moncayo as authorities for his statements, and gives to the main current of his work—especially in such passages as the conversion of the Sultana—a Christian air, which does not permit us to suppose that any but a Christian could have written it. Notwithstanding his denial, therefore, we must give to Hita the honor of being the true author of one of the most attractive books in the prose literature of Spain; a book written in a pure, rich, and picturesque style, which seems in some respects to be in advance of the age, and in all to be worthy of the best models of the best period.

In 1604, he published the second part, on a subject nearly connected with the first. Seventy-seven years after the conquest of Granada, the Moors of that kingdom, unable any longer to bear the oppressions to which they were subjected by the rigorous government of Philip the Second, took refuge in the bold range of the Alpuxarras, on the coast of the Mediterranean, and there, electing a king, broke out into open rebellion. They maintained themselves bravely in their mountain fastnesses nearly four years, and were not finally defeated till three armies had been sent against them; the last of which was commanded by no less a general than Don John of Austria. Hita served through the whole of this war; and the second part of his romance contains its history. Much of what he relates is true; and, indeed, of much he had been an eye-witness, as we can see in his accounts of the atrocities committed in the villages of Felix and Huescar, as well as in all the details of the siege of Galera and the death and funeral honors of Luis de Quijada. But other portions, like the imprisonment of Albexari, with his love for Almanzora, and the jealousies and conspiracy of Benalguacil, must be chiefly or wholly drawn from his own imagination. The most interesting part is the story of Tuzani, which he relates with great minuteness, and which he declares he received from Tuzani himself and other persons concerned in it;—a wild tale of Oriental passion, which, as we have seen, Calderon made the subject of one of his most powerful and characteristic dramas.

If the rest of the second division of Hita’s romance had been like this story, it might have been worthy of the first. But it is not. The ballads with which it is diversified, and which are probably all his own, are much inferior in merit to the older ballads he had inserted before; and his narrative is given in a much less rich and glowing style. Perhaps Hita felt the want of the old Moorish traditions that had before inspired him, or perhaps he found himself awkwardly constrained when dealing with facts too recent and notorious to be manageable for the purposes of fiction. But whatever may have been the cause of its inferiority, the fact is plain. His second part, regarded as genuine history, is not to be compared with the account of the same events by Diego de Mendoza; while, regarded as a romance, he had already far surpassed it himself.[124]

The path, however, which Hita by these two works had opened for historical fiction amidst the old traditions and picturesque manners of the Moors, tempting as it may now seem, did not, in his time, seem so to others. His own romance, it is true, was often reprinted and much read. But, from the nature of his subject, he showed the Moorish character on its favorable side, and even went so far as to express his horror at the cruelties inflicted by his countrymen on their hated enemies, and his sense of the injustice done to the vanquished by the bad faith that kept neither the promises of Ferdinand and Isabella nor those of Don John.[125] Such sympathy with the infidel enemy that had so long held Spain in fee was not according to the spirit of the times. Only five years after Hita had published his account of the rebellion of the Alpuxarras, the remainder of the Moors against whom he had there fought were violently expelled from Spain by Philip the Third, amidst the rejoicings of the whole Spanish people; few even of the most humane spirits looking upon the sufferings they thus inflicted as any thing but the just retributions of an offended Heaven.

Of course, while this was the state of feeling throughout the nation, it was not to be expected that works of fiction representing the Moors in romantic and attractive colors, and filled with adventures drawn from their traditions, should find favor in Spain. A century later, indeed, a third part of the Wars of Granada—whether written by Hita or somebody else we are not told—was licensed for the press, though never published;[126] and, in France, Madame de Scudéri soon began, in “The Almahide,” a series of fictions on this foundation, that has been continued down, through the “Gonsalve de Cordoue” of Florian, to “The Abencerrage” of Chateaubriand, without giving any token that it is likely soon to cease.[127] But in Spain it struck no root, and had no success.

Perhaps other circumstances, besides a national feeling of unwillingness that romantic fiction should occupy the debatable ground between the Moors and the Christians, contributed to check its progress in Spain. Perhaps the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, destroying, by its ridicule, the only form of romance much known or regarded at the time, was not without an effect on the other forms, by exciting a prejudice against all grave prose works of invention, and still more by furnishing a substitute much more amusing than they could aspire to be. But whether this were so or not, attacks on all of them followed in the same spirit. “The Cryselia of Lidaceli,” which appeared in 1609,—and which, as well as a dull prose satire on the fantastic Academies then in fashion, bears the name of Captain Flegetonte,—assails freely whatever of prose fiction had till then enjoyed regard in Spain, whether the pastoral, the historical, or the chivalrous.[128] Its attack, however, was so ineffectual, as to show only the tendency of opinion to discourage romance-writing in Spain;—a tendency yet more apparent a little later, not only in some of the best ascetic writers of the seventeenth century, but in such works as “The Moral History of the God Momus,” by Noydens, published in 1666, which, as its author tells us distinctly in the Prologue, was intended to drive out of society all novels and books of adventure whose subject was love.[129]

Still, serious romance was written in Spain during the whole of the seventeenth century, and written in several varieties of form and tone, though with no real success. Thus, Gonzalo de Céspedes, a native of Madrid, and author of several other works, published the first part of his “Gerardo” in 1615, and the second in 1617. He calls it a Tragic Poem, and divides it into discourses instead of chapters. But it is, in fact, a prose romance, consisting of a series of slightly connected adventures in the life of its hero, Gerardo, and episodes of the adventures of different persons more or less associated with him; in all which, amidst much that is sentimental and romantic, there is more that is tragic than is common in such Spanish stories. It was several times reprinted, and was succeeded, in 1626, by his “Various Fortunes of the Soldier Píndaro,” a similar work, but less interesting, and perhaps, on that account, never finished according to the original purpose of its author. Both, however, show a power of invention which is hardly to be found in works of the same class produced so early, either in France or England, and both make pretensions to style, though rather in their lighter than in their more serious portions.[130]

Again in 1617,—the same year, it will be recollected, in which the “Persiles and Sigismunda” of Cervantes appeared,—Francisco Loubayssin de Lamarca, a Biscayan by birth, published his “Tragicomic History of Don Enrique de Castro”; in which known facts and fanciful adventures are mingled in the wildest confusion. The scene is carried back, by means of the story of the hero’s uncle, who has become a hermit in his old age, to the Italian wars of Charles the Eighth of France, and forward, in the person of the hero himself, to the conquest of Chili by the Spaniards; covering meanwhile any intermediate space that seems convenient to its author’s purposes. As an historical novel, it is an entire failure.[131]

A similar remark may be made on another work published in 1625, which takes in part the guise of imaginary travels, and is called “The History of Two Faithful Friends”; a story founded on the supposed adventures of a Frenchman and a Spaniard in Persia, and consisting chiefly of incredible accounts of their intrigues with Persian ladies of rank. Much of it is given in the shape of a correspondence, and it ends with the promise of a continuation, which never appeared.[132]

Many, indeed, of the works of fiction begun in Spain, during the seventeenth century, remained, like the Two Faithful Friends, unfinished, from want of encouragement and popularity; while others that were written were never published at all.[133] One of these last, called “The Fortunate Knight,” by Juan Valladares de Valdelomar, of Córdova, was quite prepared for the press in 1617, and is still extant in the original manuscript, with the proper licenses for printing and the autograph approbation of Lope de Vega. It is an historical novel, divided into forty-five “Adventures”; and the hero, like many others of his class, is a soldier in Italy, and a captive in Africa; serving first under Don John of Austria, and afterwards under Sebastian of Portugal. How much of it is true is uncertain. Regular dates are given for many of its events, some of which can be verified; but it is full of poetry and poetical fancies, and several of the stories, like that of the loves of the knight himself and the fair Mayorinda, must have been taken from the author’s imagination. Still, in the Prologue, all books of fiction are treated with contempt, as if the whole class were so little favored, that it was discreditable to avow the intention of publishing another, even at the moment of doing it. In the style of its prose, the Fortunate Knight is as good as other similar works of the same period; but the poems with which it is crowded, to the number of about a hundred and fifty, are of less merit.[134]

The discouragement just alluded to, whether proceeding from the ridicule thrown on long works of fiction by Cervantes, or from the watchfulness of the ecclesiastical authorities, or from both causes combined, was probably one of the reasons that led persons writing serious romances to seek new directions and unwonted forms in their composition; sometimes going as far as possible from the truth of fact, and sometimes coming down almost to plain history. Two instances of such deviations from the beaten paths—probably the only examples in their time of the class to which each belonged—should be noticed, for their singularity, if not for their literary merit.

The first is by Cosmé de Texada, and is called “The Marvellous Lion.” It was originally published in 1636, and consists of the history of “the great Lion Auricrino,” his wonderful adventures, and, at last, his marriage with Crisaura, his lady-love. It is divided into fifty-four Apologues, which might rather have been called chapters; and if, instead of the names of animals given to its personages, it had such poetical names as usually occur in romantic fiction, it would—except where it involves satirical sketches of the follies of the times—be a mere love-romance, neither more unnatural nor more extravagant than many of its fellows.

Such as it is, however, it did not entirely satisfy its author. The early portions had been written in his youth, while he was a student in theology at Salamanca; and when, somewhat later, he resumed his task, and brought it to a regular conclusion, he was already far advanced in the composition of another romance still more grave and spiritualized and still farther removed from the realities of life. This more carefully matured fiction is called “Understanding and Truth, the Philosophical Lovers”; and all its personages are allegorical, filling up, with their dreams and trials, a shadowy picture of human life, from the creation to the general judgment. How long Texada was employed about this cold and unsatisfactory allegory, we are not told; but it was not published till 1673, nearly forty years after it was begun, and then it was given to the public by his brother as a posthumous work, with the inappropriate title of “The Second Part of the Marvellous Lion.” Neither romance had a living interest capable of insuring it a permanent success, but both are written in a purer style than was common in such works at the same period, and the first of them occasionally attacks the faults of the contemporary literature with spirit and good-humor.[135]

Quite different from both of them, “The New Kings of Toledo,” by Christóval Lozano, introduces only real personages, and contains little but the facts of known history and old tradition, slightly embellished by the spirit of romance. Its author was attached to the metropolitan cathedral of Toledo, and, with Calderon, served in the chapel set apart for the burial of the New Kings, as the monarchs of Castile were called from the time of Henry of Trastamara, who there established for himself a cemetery, separate from that in which the race ending with the dishonored Don Pedro had been entombed.

The pious chaplain, who was thus called to pray daily for the souls of the line of sovereigns that had constituted the house of Trastamara, determined to illustrate their memories by a romantic history; and, beginning with the old national traditions of the origin of Toledo, the cave of Hercules, the marriage of Charlemagne with a Moorish princess whom he converted, and the refusal of a Christian princess to marry a Moor whom she could not convert, he gives us an account of the building of the chapel, and the adventures of the kings who sleep under its altars, down as late as the death of Henry the Third, in 1406. From internal evidence, it was written at the end of the reign of Philip the Fourth, when Spanish prose had lost much both of its purity and of its dignity; but Lozano, though not free from the affectations of his age, wrote so much more simply than his contemporaries generally did, and his story, though little indebted to his own invention, was yet found so attractive, that, in about half a century, eleven editions of it were published, and it obtained for itself a place in Spanish literature which it has never entirely lost.[136]

After all, however, the serious and historical fictions produced in Spain, that merit the name of full-length romances, were, from the first, few in number, and, with the exception of Hita’s “Civil Wars of Granada,” deserved little favor. Subsequent to the reign of Philip the Fourth, they almost disappeared for above a century; and even at the end of that period, they occurred rarely, and obtained little regard.[137]

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Tales. — Villegas, Timoneda, Cervantes, Hidalgo, Figueroa, Barbadillo, Eslava, Agreda, Liñan y Verdugo, Lope de Vega, Salazar, Lugo, Camerino, Tellez, Montalvan, Reyes, Peralta, Céspedes, Moya, Anaya, Mariana de Carbajal, María de Zayas, Mata, Castillo, Lozano, Solorzano, Alonso de Alcalá, Villalpando, Prado, Robles, Guevara, Polo, Garcia, Santos. — Great Number of Tales. — General Remarks on all the Forms of Spanish Fiction.

Short stories or tales were more successful in Spain, during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth, than any other form of prose fiction, and were produced in greater numbers. They seem, indeed, to have sprung afresh, and with great vigor, from the prevailing national tastes and manners, not at all connected with the tales of Oriental origin, that had been introduced above two hundred years earlier by Don Juan Manuel, and little affected by the brilliant Italian school, of which Boccaccio was the head; but showing rather, in the hues they borrowed from the longer contemporary pastoral, satirical, and historical romances, how truly they belonged to the spirit of their own times, and to the state of society in which they appeared. We turn to them, therefore, with more than common interest.

The oldest Spanish tales of the sixteenth century, that deserve to be noticed, are two that are found in a small volume of the works of Antonio de Villegas, somewhat conceitedly called “El Inventario,” and prepared for the press about 1550, though not published till 1565.[138] The first of them is entitled “Absence and Solitude,” a pastoral consisting of about equal portions of prose and poetry, and is as affected and in as bad taste as the ampler fictions of the class to which it belongs. The other—“The Story of Narvaez”—is much better. It is the Spanish version of a romantic adventure that really occurred on the frontiers of Granada, in the days when knighthood was in its glory among Moors as well as among Christians. Its principal incidents are as follows.

Rodrigo de Narvaez, Alcayde of Alora, a fortress on the Spanish border, grows weary of a life of inaction, from which he had been for some time suffering, and goes out one night with a few followers, in mere wantonness, to seek adventures. Of course they soon find what, in such a spirit, they seek. Abindarraez, a noble Moor, belonging to the persecuted and exiled family of the Abencerrages, comes well mounted and well armed along the path they are watching, and sings cheerily through the stillness of the night,—

In Granada was I born,

In Cartama was I bred;

But in Coyn by Alora

Lives the maiden I would wed.

A fight follows at once, and the gallant young Moor is taken prisoner; but his dejected manner, after a resistance so brave as he had made, surprises his conqueror, who, on inquiry, finds that his captive was on his way that very night to a secret marriage with the lady of his love, daughter of the lord of Coyn, a Moorish fortress near at hand. Immediately on learning this, the Spanish knight, like a true cavalier, releases the young Moor from his present thraldom, on condition that he will voluntarily return in three days and submit himself again to his fate. The noble Moor keeps his word, bringing with him his stolen bride, to whom, by the intervention of the generous Spaniard with the king of Granada, her father is reconciled, and so the tale ends to the honor and content of all the parties who appear in it.

Some passages in it are beautiful, like the first declaration of his love by Abindarraez, as described by himself; and the darkness that, he says, fell upon his very soul, when his lady, the next day, was carried away by her father, “as if,” he adds, “the sun had been suddenly eclipsed over a man wandering amidst wild and precipitous mountains.” His Moorish honor and faith, too, are characteristically and finely expressed, when, on the approach of the time for his return to captivity, he reveals to his bride the pledge he had given, and in reply to her urgent offer to send a rich ransom and break his word, he says, “Surely I may not now fall into so great a fault; for if, when formerly I came to you all alone, I kept truly my pledged faith, my duty to keep it is doubled now that I am yours. Therefore, questionless, I shall return to Alora, and place myself in the Alcayde’s hands; and when I have done what I ought to do, he must also do what to him seems right.”

The original story, as told by the Arabian writers, is found at the end of “The History of the Arabs in Spain,” by Conde, who says it was often repeated by the poets of Granada. But it was too attractive in itself, and too flattering to the character of Spanish knighthood, not to obtain a similar place in Spanish literature. Montemayor, therefore, borrowing it with little ceremony from Villegas, and altering it materially for the worse in point of style, inserted it in the editions of his “Diana” published towards the latter part of his life, though it harmonizes not at all with the pastoral scenery which there surrounds it. Padilla, too, soon afterwards took possession of it, and wrought it into a series of ballads; Lope de Vega founded on it his play of “The Remedy for Misfortune”; and Cervantes introduced it into his “Don Quixote.” On all sides, therefore, traces of it are to be found, but it nowhere presents itself with such grace or to such advantage as it does in the simple tale of Villegas.[139]

Juan de Timoneda, already noticed as one of the founders of the popular theatre in Spain, was also an early writer of Spanish tales. Indeed, as a bookseller who sought to make profit of whatever was agreeable to the general taste, and who wrote and published in this spirit several volumes of ballads, miscellaneous poetry, and farces, it was quite natural he should adventure in the ways of prose fiction, now become so attractive. His first attempt seems to have been in his “Patrañuelo,” or Story-teller, the first part of which appeared in 1576, but was not continued.[140]

It is a small work, which draws its materials from widely different sources, some of them being found, like the well-known story of Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, in the “Gesta Romanorum,” and some in the Italian masters, like the story of Griselda in Boccaccio, and the one familiar to English readers in the ballad of “King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” which Timoneda probably took from Sacchetti.[141] Three or four—of which the first in the volume is one—had already been used in the construction of dramas by Alonso de la Vega and Lope de Rueda. All of them tend to show, what is proved in other ways, that such popular stories had long been a part of the intellectual amusements of a state of society little dependent on books; and, after floating for centuries up and down through the different countries of Europe,—borne by a general tradition or by the minstrels and Trouveurs,—were about this period first reduced to writing, and then again passed onward from hand to hand, till they were embodied in some form that became permanent. What, therefore, the Novellieri had been doing in Italy for above two hundred years, Timoneda now undertook to do for Spain. The twenty-two tales of his “Patrañuelo” are not, indeed, connected, like those of the “Decamerone,” but he has given them a uniform character by investing them all with his own easy, if not very pure, style; and thus, without anticipating it, sent them out anew to constitute a part of the settled literature of his country, and to draw after them a long train of similar fictions, some of which bear the most eminent names known among those of Spanish prose-writers.

Indeed, the very next is of this high order. It is that of Cervantes, who began by inserting such stories in the first part of his “Don Quixote” in 1605, and, eight years later, produced a collection of them, which he published separately. Of these tales, however, we have already spoken, and will, therefore, now only repeat, that, for originality of invention and happiness of style, they stand at the head of the class to which they belong.[142]

Others followed, of very various character. Hidalgo published, in 1605, an account of the frolics permitted during the last three days of Carnival, in which are many short tales and anecdotes, like the slightest and gayest of the Italian novelle;[143] and Suarez de Figueroa, who was no friend of Cervantes, if he was his follower, inserted other tales of a more romantic tone in his “Traveller,” which he published in 1617.[144] Perhaps, however, no writer of such fictions in the early part of the seventeenth century had more success than Salas Barbadillo, who was born at Madrid, about 1580, and died in 1630.[145] During the last eighteen years of his life, he published not less than twenty different works, all of which, except three or four that are filled with such dramas and poetry as Lope de Vega had made fashionable, consist of popular stories, neither so short as the tales of Timoneda, nor long enough to be accounted regular romances, but all written in a truly national spirit, and in a strongly marked Castilian style.

“The Ingenious Helen, Daughter of Celestina,” which is one of the earliest and most spirited of these fictions, appeared in 1612, and was frequently printed afterwards. It is the story of a courtesan, whose adventures, from the high game she undertakes to play in life, are of the boldest and most desperate kind. She is called the daughter of Celestina, because she is made to deserve that name by her talent and her crimes; but, with instinctive truth, she is at last left to perish by the most disgraceful of all the forms of a Spanish execution, for poisoning an obscure and vulgar lover. One or two minor stories are rather inartificially introduced in the course of the main narrative, and so are a few ballads, which have no value except as they serve to illustrate the ruffian life, as it was called, then to be found in the great cities of Spain. The best parts of the book are those relating to Helen herself and her machinations; and the most striking scenes, and perhaps the most true to the time, are those that occur when she rises to the height of her fortunes by setting up for a saint and imposing on all Seville.[146]

Of course, with such materials and incidents, the Helena takes much of its tone from the stories in the gusto picaresco, or the style of Spanish rogues. Quite opposite to it, therefore, in character and purpose, is “The Perfect Knight,”—a philosophical tale, not without some touch of the romances of chivalry. It is addressed to all the noble youth of the realm, at a time when the Cortes were assembled, and is intended to set the ideal of true knighthood before them, as before an audience the younger part of which might be excited to strive after its attributes and honors. To accomplish this, Barbadillo gives the history of a Spanish cavalier, who, travelling to Italy during the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, the conqueror of Naples, obtains the favor of that monarch, and, after serving him in the highest military and diplomatic posts,—commanding armies in Germany, and mediating between imaginary kings of England and Ireland,—retires to the neighbourhood of Baia and enjoys a serene and religious old age.[147]

Again, “The House of Respectable Amusements” differs from both of the preceding fictions, and exhibits another variety of their author’s very flexible talent. It relates the frolics of four gay students of Salamanca, who, wearied by their course of life at the University, come to Madrid, open a luxurious house, arrange a large hall for exhibitions, and invite the rank and fashion of the city, telling stories for the amusement of their guests, reciting ballads, and acting plays;—all of which constitute the materials that fill the volume. Six tales, however, are really the effective part of it; and the whole is abruptly terminated by the dangerous illness of the most active among the four gay cavaliers who had arranged these Lenten entertainments.[148]

But it is not necessary to examine further the light fictions of Barbadillo. It is enough to say of the rest, that “The Point-Device Knight,” in two parts, is a grotesque story in ridicule of those who pretend to be first in every thing;[149]—that “The Lucky Fool” is what its name implies;[150]—that “Don Diego” consists of the love-adventures, during nine successive nights, of a gentleman who always fails in what he undertakes;[151]—and that all of them, and all Barbadillo’s other productions, are within the range of talent of not a very high order, but uncommonly flexible, and dealing rather with the surface of manners than with the secrets of character which manners serve to hide. His latest work, entitled “Parnassian Crowns and Dishes for the Muses,” consists of a medley of verse and prose, stories and dramas, which were arranged for the press, and licensed in October, 1630; but he died immediately afterwards, and they were not printed till 1635.[152]

During the life of Barbadillo, and probably in some degree from his example and success, such fictions became frequent. “The Winter Evenings” of Antonio de Eslava, published in 1609, belong to this class, but are, indeed, so early in their date, that they may have rather given an impulse to Barbadillo than received one from him.[153] But “The Twelve Moral Tales” of Diego de Agreda, in 1620, belong clearly to his manner,[154] as does also “The Guide and Counsel for Strangers at Court,” published the same year, by Liñan y Verdugo,—a singular series of stories, related by two elderly gentlemen to a young man, in order to warn him against the dangers of a gay life at Madrid.[155] Lope de Vega, as usual, followed where success had already been obtained by others. In 1621, he added a short tale to his “Philomena,” and, a little later, three more to his “Circe”; but he himself thought them a doubtful experiment, and they, in fact, proved an unhappy one.[156] Other persons, however, encouraged by the general favor that evidently waited on light and amusing collections of stories, crowded more earnestly along in the same path;—Salazar, with his “Flowers of Recreation,” in 1622;[157]—Lugo, with his “Novelas,” the same year;[158]—and Camerino, with his “Love Tales,”[159] only a year later;—all the last six works having been produced in three years, and all belonging to the school of Timoneda, as it had been modified by the genius of Cervantes and the practical skill of Salas Barbadillo.

This was popular success; but it was so much in one direction, that its results became a little monotonous. Variety, therefore, was soon demanded; and, being demanded by the voice of fashion, it was soon obtained. The new form, thus introduced, was not, however, a violent change. It was made by a well-known dramatic author, who—taking a hint from the “Decamerone,” already in part adopted by Barbadillo, in his “House of Respectable Amusements”—substituted a theatrical framework to connect his separate stories, instead of the merely narrative one used by Boccaccio and his followers. This fell in, happily, with the passion for the stage which then pervaded all Spain, and it was successful.

The change referred to is first found in the “Cigarrales de Toledo,” published in 1624, by Gabriel Tellez, who, as we have already observed, when he left his convent and came before the public as a secular author, always disguised himself under the name of Tirso de Molina. It is a singular book, and takes its name from a word of Arabic origin peculiar to Toledo; Cigarral signifying there a small country-house in the neighbourhood of the city, resorted to only for recreation and only in the summer season. At one of these houses Tirso supposes a wedding to have happened, under circumstances interesting to a large number of persons, who, wishing in consequence of it to be much together, agreed to hold a series of entertainments at their different houses, in an order to be determined by lot and under the superintendence of one of their company, each of whom, during the single day of his authority, should have supreme control and be responsible for the amusements of the whole party.

The “Cigarrales de Toledo” is an account of these entertainments, consisting of stories that were read or related at them, poetry that was recited, and plays that were acted,—in short, of all that made up the various exhibitions and amusements of the party. Some portions of it are fluent and harmonious beyond the common success of the age; but in general, as in the descriptions and in the poor contrivance of the “Labyrinth,” it is disfigured by conceits and extravagances, belonging to the follies of Gongorism. The work, however, pleased, and Tirso himself prepared another of the same kind, called “Pleasure and Profit,”—graver and more religious in its tone, but of less poetical merit,—which was written in 1632, and printed in 1635. But, though both were well received, neither was finished. The last ends with the promise of a second part, and the first, which undertakes to give an account of the entertainments of twenty days, embraces, in fact, only five.[160]

The style they adopted was soon imitated. Montalvan, who, like his master, never failed to follow the indications of the popular taste, printed, in 1632, his “Para Todos,” or For Everybody, containing the imaginary amusements of a party of literary friends, who agreed to cater for each other during a week, and whose festivities are ended, as those of the “Cigarrales” began, with a wedding. Some of its inventions are very learnedly dull, and it is throughout less well arranged than the account of the entertainments near Toledo, and falls less naturally into a dramatic framework. But it shows its author’s talent. The individual stories are pleasantly told, especially the one called “At the End of the Year One Thousand”; and, as a whole, the “Para Todos” was popular, going through nine editions in less than thirty years, notwithstanding a very severe attack on it by Quevedo.[161] Its popularity, too, had the natural effect of producing imitations, among which, in 1640, appeared, “Para Algunos,”—For a Few,—by Matias de los Reyes;[162] and, somewhat later, “Para Sí,”—For one’s own Self,—by Juan Fernandez y Peralta.[163]

Meantime the succession of separate tales had been actively kept up. Montalvan published eight in 1624, written with more than the usual measure of grace in such Spanish compositions; one of them, “The Disastrous Friendship,” founded on the sufferings of an Algerine captivity, being one of the best in the language, and all of them so successful, that they were printed eleven times in about thirty years.[164] Céspedes y Meneses followed, in 1628, with a series entitled “Rare Histories”;[165]—Moya, at about the same time, published a single whimsical story on “The Fancies of a Fright”; in which he relates a succession of marvellous incidents, that, as he declares, flashed through his own imagination while falling down a precipice in the Sierra Morena;[166]—and Castro y Anaya published, in 1632, five tales called “The Auroras of Diana,” because they are told in the early dawn of each morning, during five successive days, to amuse Diana, a lady who, after a long illness, had fallen into a state of melancholy.[167]

The fair sex, too, entered into the general fashionable competition. Mariana de Carbajal, a native of Granada, and descended from the ancient ducal families of San Carlos and Rivas, published, in 1638, eight tales, pleasing both by their invention and by the simplicity of their style, which she called “Christmas at Madrid,” or “Evening Amusements.”[168] And in 1637 and 1647, María de Zayas, a lady of the court, printed two collections; the first called simply “Tales,” and the last “Saraos,” or Balls; each a series of ten stories within itself, and both connected together by the entertainments of a party of friends at Christmas, and the dances and fêtes at the wedding of two of their number, during the holidays that followed.[169]

Again, slight changes in such fictions were attempted. Mata, in two dull tales, called “The Solitudes of Aurelia,” published in 1637, endeavoured to give them a more religious character;[170] and in 1641, André del Castillo, in six stories misnamed “The Masquerade of Taste,” sought to give them even a lighter tone than the old one.[171] Both found successors. Lozano’s “Solitudes of Life,” which are four stories supposed to be told by a hermit on the wild peaks of the Monserrate, belong to the first class, and, notwithstanding a somewhat affected style, were much praised by Calderon, and went through at least six editions;[172]—while, in the opposite direction, between 1625 and 1640, we have a number of the freest secular tales, by Castillo Solorzano, among which the best are probably “The Alleviations of Cassandra,” and “The Country-House of Laura,” both imitations of Castro’s “Diana.”[173]

In the same way, the succession of short fictions was continued unbroken, until it ceased with the general decay of Spanish literature at the end of the century. Thus we have, in 1641, “The Various Effects of Love and Fortune,” by Alonso de Alcalá; five stories, such as may be imagined from the fact, that, in each of them, one of the five vowels is entirely omitted;[174]—in 1645, “The Warnings, or Experiences, of Jacinto,” by Villalpando, which may have been taken from his own life, since Jacinto was the first of his own names;[175]—in 1663, “The Festivals of Wit and Entertainments of Taste,” by Andres de Prado;[176]—and, in 1666, a series collected from different authors, by Isidro de Robles,[177] and published under the title of “Wonders of Love.” All these, as their names indicate, belong to one school; and although there is an occasional variety in their individual tones, some of them being humorous and others sentimental, and although some of them have their scenes in Spain and others in Italy or Algiers, still, as the purpose of all was only the lightest amusement, they may all be grouped together and characterized in the mass, as of little value, and as falling off in merit the nearer they approach the period when such fictions ceased in the elder Spanish literature.

One more variety in the characteristics of this style of writing in Spain is, however, so distinct from the rest, that it should be separately mentioned,—that which has sometimes been called the Allegorical and Satirical Tale, and which generally took the form of a Vision. It was, probably, suggested by the bold and original “Visions” of Quevedo; and the instance of it most worthy of notice is “The Limping Devil” of Luis Velez de Guevara, which appeared in 1641. It is a short story, founded on the idea that a student releases from his confinement, in a magician’s vial, the Limping Devil, who, in return for this service, carries his liberator through the air, and, unroofing, as it were, the houses of Madrid, during the stillness of the night, shows him the secrets that are passing within. It is divided into ten “Leaps,” as they afterwards spring from place to place in different parts of Spain, in order to pounce on their prey, and it is satirical throughout. Parts of it are very happy; among which may be selected those relating to fashionable life, to the life of rogues, and to that of men of letters, in the large cities of Castile and Andalusia, though these, like the rest, are often disfigured with the bad taste then so common. On the whole, however, it is an amusing fiction,—partly allegorical and partly sketched from living manners,—and is to be placed among the more spirited prose satires in modern literature, both in its original form and in the form given to it by Le Sage, whose rifacimento has carried it, under the name of “Le Diable Boiteux,” wherever letters are known.[178]

Earlier than the appearance of the Limping Devil, however, Polo had written his “Hospital of Incurables,” a direct, but poor, imitation of Quevedo; and in 1647, under an assumed name, he published his “University of Love, or School for Selfishness,” a satire against mercenary matches, thrown into the shape of a vision of the University of Love, where the fair sex are brought up in the arts of profitable intrigue, and receive degrees according to their progress.[179] It is, in general, an ill-managed allegory, filled with bad puns and worse verse; but there is one passage so characteristic of Spanish wit in this form of fiction, that it may be cited as an illustration of the entire class to which it belongs.

“‘That young creature whom you see there,’ said the God of Love, as he led me on, ‘is the chief captain of my war, the one that has brought most soldiers to my feet and enlisted most men under my banners. The elderly person that is leading her along by the hand is her aunt.’ ‘Her aunt, did you say?’ I replied; ‘her aunt? Then there is an end of all my love for her. That word aunt is a counter poison that has disinfected me entirely, and quite healed the wound your well-planted arrow was beginning to make in my heart. For, however much a man may be in love, there can be no doubt an aunt will always be enough to purge him clean of it. Inquisitive, suspicious, envious,—one or the other she cannot fail to be,—and if the niece have the luck to escape, the lover never has; for if she is envious, she wants him for herself; and if she is only suspicious, she still spoils all comfort, so disconcerting every little project, and so disturbing every little nice plan, as to render pleasure itself unsavory,’ ‘Why, what a desperately bad opinion you have of aunts!’ said Love. ‘To be sure I have,’ said I. ‘If the state of innocence in which Adam and Eve were created had nothing else to recommend it, the simple fact that there could have been no aunts in Paradise would have been enough for me. Why, every morning, as soon as I get up, I cross myself and say, “By the sign of the Holy Rood, from all aunts deliver us this day, Good Lord!” And every time I repeat the Paternoster, after “Lead us not into temptation,” I always add,—“nor into the way of aunts either.”’”

The example of Quevedo was, again, followed by Marcos Garcia, who in 1657 published his “Phlegm of Pedro Hernandez,” an imaginary, but popular, personage, whose arms, according to an old Spanish proverb, fell out of their sockets from the mere listlessness of their owner. It is a vision, in which women-servants who spend their lives in active cheating, students pressing vigorously forward to become quacks and pettifoggers, spendthrift soldiers, and similar uneasy, unprincipled persons of other conditions, are contrasted with those who, trusting to a quiet disposition, float noiselessly down the current of life, and succeed without an effort and without knowing how they do it. The general allegory is meagre; but some of the individual sketches are well imagined.[180]

The person, however, who, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, succeeded best in this style of composition, as well as in tales of other kinds, was Francisco Santos, a native of Madrid, who died not far from the year 1700. Between 1663 and 1697, he gave to the world sixteen volumes of different kinds of works for popular amusement;—generally short stories, but some of them encumbered with allegorical personages and tedious moral discussions.[181] The oldest of the series, “Dia y Noche en Madrid,” or, as it may be translated, Life in Madrid, though a mere fiction founded on manners, is divided into what the author terms Eighteen Discourses. It opens, as such Spanish tales are too apt to open, somewhat pompously; the first scene describing with too much elaborateness a procession of three hundred emancipated captives, who enter Madrid praising God and rejoicing at their release from the horrors of Algerine servitude. One of these captives, the hero of the story, falls immediately into the hands of a shrewd and not over-honest servant, named Juanillo, who, having begun the world as a beggar, and risen by cunning so far as to be employed in the capacity of an inferior servant by a fraternity of monks, now undertakes to make the stranger acquainted with the condition of Madrid, serving him as a guide wherever he goes, and interpreting to him whatever is most characteristic of the manners and follies of the capital. Some of the tales and sketches thus introduced are full of life and truth, as, for instance, those relating to the prisons, gaming-houses, and hospitals, and especially one in which a coquette, meeting a poor man at a bull-fight, so dupes him by her blandishments, that she sends him back penniless, at midnight, to his despairing wife and children, who, anxious and without food, have been waiting from the early morning to have him return with their dinner. This little volume, several parts of which have been freely used by Le Sage, ends with an account of the captive’s adventures in Italy, in Spain, and in Algiers, given by himself in a truly national tone, and with fluency and spirit.[182]

“Periquillo”—another of these collections of sketches and tales, less well written than the last, except in the merely narrative portions—contains an account of a foundling, who, after the ruin and death of a pious couple that first picked him up at their door on a Christmas morning, begins the world for himself as the leader of a blind beggar. From this condition, which, in such Spanish stories, always seems to be regarded as the lowest possible in society, he rises to be the servant of a cavalier, who proves to be a mysterious robber, and after escaping from whom he falls into the hands of yet worse persons, and is apprehended under circumstances that remind us of the story of Doña Mencia in “Gil Blas.” He, however, vindicates his innocence, and, being released from the fangs of justice, returns, weary of the world, to his first home, where he leads an ascetic life; makes long, pedantic discourses on virtue to his admiring townsmen; and proves, in fact, a sort of humble philosopher, growing constantly more and more devout till the account of him ends at last with a prayer. The whole is interesting among Spanish works of fiction, because it is evidently written both in imitation of the picaresque novels and in opposition to them; since Periquillo, from the lowest origin, gets on by neither roguery nor cleverness, but by honesty and good faith; and, instead of rising in the world and becoming rich and courtly, settles patiently down into a village hermit, or a sort of poor Christian Diogenes. No doubt, he has neither the wit nor the cunning of Lazarillo; but that he should venture to encounter that shrewd little beggar in any way makes Periquillo, at once, a personage of some consequence.[183]

Yet one more of the works of Santos should be noticed; an allegorical tale, called “Truth on the Rack, or the Cid come to Life again.” Its general story is, that Truth, in the form of a fair woman, is placed on the rack, surrounded by the Cid and other forms, that rise from the earth about the scaffold on which she is tormented. There she is forced to give an account of things as they really exist, or have existed, and to discourse concerning shadowy multitudes, who pass, in sight of the company that surrounds her, over what seems to be a long bridge. The whole is, therefore, a satire in the form of a vision, but its character is consistently sustained only at the beginning and the end. The Cid, however, is much the same personage throughout,—bold, rough, and free-spoken. He is heartily dissatisfied with every thing he finds on earth, especially with the popular traditions and ballads about himself, and goes back to his grave well pleased to escape from such a world, “which,” he says, “if they would give it to me to live in, I would not accept.”[184]

Other works of Santos, like “The Devil let loose, or Truths of the other World dreamed about in this,” and “The Live Man and the Dead One,” are of the same sort with the last;[185] while yet others run even more to allegory, like his “Tarascas de Madrid,”[186] and his “Gigantones,”[187] suggested by the huge and unsightly forms led about to amuse or to frighten the multitude in the annual processions of the Corpus Christi;—the satirical interpretation he gives to them being, that worse monsters than the Tarascas might be seen every day in Madrid by those who could distinguish the sin and folly that always thronged the streets of that luxurious capital. But though such satires were successful when they first appeared, they have long since ceased to be so; partly because they abound in allusions to local circumstances now known only to the curiosity of antiquarians, and partly because, in all respects, they depict a state of society and manners of which hardly a vestige remains.

Santos is the last of the writers of Spanish tales previous to the eighteenth century that needs to be noticed.[188] But though the number we have gone over is large for the length of the period in which they appeared, not a few others might be added. The pastoral romances from the time of Montemayor are full of them;—the “Galatea” of Cervantes, and the “Arcadia” of Lope de Vega, being little more than a series of such stories, slightly bound together by yet another that connects them all. So are, to a certain degree, the picaresque fictions, like “Guzman de Alfarache” and “Marcos de Obregon”;—and so are such serious fictions as “The Wars of Granada” and “The Spanish Gerardo.” The popular drama, too, was near akin to the whole; as we have seen in the case of Timoneda, whose stories, before he produced them as tales, had already been exhibited in the form of farces on the rude stage of the public squares; and in the case of Cervantes, who not only put part of his tale of “The Captive” in “Don Quixote” into his second play of “Life in Algiers,” but constructed his story of “The Liberal Lover” almost wholly out of his earlier play on the same subject. Indeed, Spain, during the period we have gone over, was full of the spirit of this class of fictions,—not only producing them in great numbers, and strongly marked with the popular character, but carrying their tone into the longer romances and upon the stage to a degree quite unknown elsewhere.[189]

The most striking circumstance, however, connected with the history of all romantic fiction in Spain,—whatever form it assumed,—is its early appearance, and its early decay. The story of “Amadis” filled the world with its fame, when no other Spanish prose romance of chivalry was heard of; and, what is singular, though the oldest of its class, it still remains the best-written in any language;—while, on the other hand, the book that overthrew this same Amadis, with all his chivalry, is the “Don Quixote”; again, the oldest and best of all similar works, and one that is still read and admired by thousands who know nothing of the shadowy multitudes it destroyed, except what its great author tells them. The “Conde Lucanor” appeared full half a century earlier than the “Decamerone.” The “Diana” of Montemayor soon eclipsed its Italian prototype in popularity, and, for a time, shone without a successful rival of its class throughout Europe. The picaresque stories, exclusively Spanish from the very first, and the multitudes of tales that followed them with attributes hardly less separate and national, never lose their Spanish air and costume, even in the most successful of their foreign imitations. Taken together, the number of these fictions is very great;—so great, that their mass may well be called enormous. But what is more remarkable than their multitude is the fact, that they were produced when the rest of Europe, with a partial exception in favor of Italy, was not yet awakened to corresponding efforts of the imagination; before Madame de Lafayette had published her “Zayde”; before Sidney’s “Arcadia” had appeared, or D’Urfé’s “Astrea,” or Corneille’s “Cid,” or Le Sage’s “Gil Blas.” In short, they were at the height of their fame, just at the period when the Hôtel de Rambouillet reigned supreme over the taste of France, and when Hardy, following the indications of the public will and the example of his rivals, could do no better than bring out upon the stage of Paris nearly every one of the tales of Cervantes, and many of those of Cervantes’s rivals and contemporaries.[190]

But civilization and manners advanced in the rest of Europe rapidly from this moment, and paused in Spain. Madrid, instead of sending its influences to France, began itself to acknowledge the control of French literature and refinement. The creative spirit, therefore, ceased in Spanish romantic fiction, and, as we shall presently see, a spirit of French imitation took its place.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Eloquence, Forensic and Pulpit. — Luis de Leon. — Luis de Granada. — Paravicino and the School of Bad Taste. — Epistolary Correspondence. — Zurita. — Perez. — Santa Teresa. — Argensola. — Lope de Vega. — Quevedo. — Cascales. — Antonio. — Solís.

We shall hardly look for forensic or deliberative eloquence in Spain. The whole constitution of things there, the political and ecclesiastical institutions of the country, and, perhaps we should add, the very genius of the people, were unfriendly to the growth of a plant like this, which flourishes only in the soil of freedom.