CHAPTER X

THE AGE OF FELIPE IV. AND CARLOS THE BEWITCHED

1621-1700

The reign of Felipe IV. opens with as fair a promise of achievement

as any in history. At Madrid, in the third and fourth decades of the

seventeenth century, the court of the Grand Monarque was anticipated

and perhaps outdone. We are inclined to think of Felipe as Velázquez

has presented him, on his "Cordobese barb, the proud king of

horses, and the fittest horse for a king"; and to recall the praise

which William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, lavished on his

horsemanship:—"The great King of Spain, deceased, did not only love it

and understand it, but was absolutely the best horseman in all Spain."

Yet is it a mistake to suppose him a mere hunter. Art and letters

were his constant care; nor was he without a touch of individual

accomplishment. He was not content with instructing his Ministers to

buy every good picture offered in foreign markets: his own sketches

show that he had profited by seeing Velázquez at work. It is no small

point in his favour to have divined at a glance the genius of the

unknown Sevillan master, and to have appointed him—scarcely out of his

teens—court-painter. He likewise collated the artist, Alonso Cano,

to a canonry at Granada, and, when the chapter protested that Cano had

small Latin and less Greek, the King's reply was honourable to his

taste and spirit:—"With a stroke of the pen I can make canons like

you by the score; but Alonso Cano is a miracle of God." He would even

stay the course of justice to protect an artist. Thus, when Velázquez's

master, the half-mad Herrera, was charged with coining, the monarch

intervened with the remark: "Remember his _St. Hermengild_." Music

becalmed the King's fever, and the plays at the Buen Retiro vied with

the masques of Whitehall. His antechambers were thronged with men of

genius. Lope de Vega still survived, his glory waxing daily, though

the best part of his life's work was finished. Vélez de Guevara was

the royal chamberlain; Góngora, the court chaplain, hated, envied,

and admired, was the dreaded chief of a combative poetic school; his

disciple, Villamediana, struck terror with his vitriolic epigrams,

his rancorous tongue; the aged Mariana represented the best tradition

of Spanish history; Bartolomé de Argensola was official chronicler of

Aragón; Tirso de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcón, and Rojas Zorrilla filled the

theatres with their brilliant and ingenious fancies; the incorruptible

satirist, Quevedo, was private secretary to the King; the boyish

Calderón was growing into repute and royal favour.

Of the Aragonese playwright, Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, we have

already spoken in a previous chapter. His brother, BARTOLOMÉ LEONARDO

DE ARGENSOLA (1562-1631), took orders, and, through the influence of

the Duque de Villahermosa, was named rector of the town whence his

patron took his title. His earliest work, the _Conquista de las Islas

Molucas_ (1609), written by order of the Conde de Lemos, is uncritical

in conception and design; but the matter of its primitive, romantic,

and even sentimental legends derives fresh charm from the author's apt

and polished narrative. In 1611 he and his brother accompanied Lemos

to Naples, thereby stirring the anger of Cervantes, who had hoped to

be among the Viceroy's suite, as appears from a passage in the _Viaje

del Parnaso_, which roundly insinuates that the Argensolas were a

pair of intriguers. The disappointment was natural; yet posterity is

even grateful for it, since a transfer to Naples would certainly have

lost us the second _Don Quixote_. Doubtless the Argensolas, who were

of Italian descent, were better fitted than Cervantes for commerce

with Italian affairs, and Bartolomé made friends on all sides in

Naples as in Rome. On his brother's death in 1613, he became official

chronicler of Aragón, and, in 1631, published a sequel to _Zurita_,

the _Anales de Aragón_, which deals so minutely with the events of the

years 1516-20 as to become wearisome, despite all Argensola's grace of

manner. The _Rimas_ of the two brothers, published posthumously in 1634

by Lupercio's son, Gabriel Leonardo de Albión, was stamped with the

approval of the dictator, Lope de Vega, who declared that the authors

"had come from Aragón to reform among our poets the Castilian language,

which is suffering from new horrible phrases, more puzzling than

enlightening."

This is an overstatement of a truth, due to Lope's aversion from

Gongorism in all its shapes. Horace is the model of the Argensolas,

whose renderings of the two odes _Ibam forte via sacra_ and _Beatus

ille_ are among the happiest of versions. Their sobriety of thought

is austere, and their classic correctness of diction is in curious

contrast with the daring innovations of their time. Lupercio has a

polite, humorous fancy, which shows through Mr. Gibson's translation of

a well-known sonnet:—

"_I must confess, Don John, on due inspection,

That dame Elvira's charming red and white,

Though fair they seem, are only hers by right,

In that her money purchased their perfection;

But thou must grant as well, on calm reflection,

That her sweet lie hath such a lustre bright,

As fairly puts to shame the paler light,

And honest beauty of a true complexion!

And yet no wonder I distracted go

With such deceit, when 'tis within our ken

That nature blinds us with the self-same spell;

For that blue heaven above that charms us so,

Is neither heaven nor blue! Sad pity then

That so much beauty is not truth as well._"

Lupercio's manifold interests in politics, in history, and in the

theatre left him little time for poetry, and a large proportion of his

verses were destroyed after his death; still, partially represented

as he is, the pretty wit, the pure idiom, and elegant form of his

lyrical pieces vindicate his title to rank among Castilian poets of the

second order. As for Bartolomé, he resembles his brother in natural

faculty, but his fibre is stronger. A hard, dogmatic spirit, a bigot

in his reverence for convention, an idolater of Terence, with a stern,

patriotic hatred of novelties, he was regarded as the standard-bearer

of the anti-Gongorists. Too deeply ingrained a doctrinaire to court

popularity, he was content with the applause of a literary clique, and

had practically no influence on his age. Yet his precept was valuable,

and his practice, always sound, reaches real excellence in such devout

numbers as his _Sonnet to Providence_.

Much meritorious academic verse is found in the works of other

contemporary writers, though most rivals lapse into errors of

taste and faults of expression from which the younger Argensola is

honourably free. But no great leader is formed in the school of prudent

correctness, and by temperament, as well as by training, the Rector

of Villahermosa was unfit to cope with so virile and so combative a

genius as LUIS DE ARGOTE Y GÓNGORA (1561-1627), the ideal chief of an

aggressive movement. Son of Francisco de Argote, Corregidor of Córdoba,

and of Leonora de Góngora, he adopted his mother's name, partly because

of its nobility and partly because of its euphony. In his sixteenth

year Góngora left his native Córdoba to read law at Salamanca, with a

view to following his father's profession; but his studies were never

serious, and, though he took his bachelor's degree, he gave most of his

time to fencing and to dancing. To the consternation of his family, he

abandoned law and announced himself as a professional poet. So early

as 1585 Cervantes names him in the _Canto de Calíope_ as a rare and

matchless genius—_raro ingenio sin segundo_—and, though flattery from

Cervantes is too indiscriminating to mean much, the mention at least

implies that Góngora's promise was already recognised. Few details of

his career are with us, though rumour tells of platonic love-passages

with a lady of Valencia, Luisa de Cardona, who finally entered a

convent in Toledo. His repute as a poet, aided by his mother's

connection with the ducal house of Almodóvar, won for him a lay canonry

in 1590, and this increase of means enabled him to visit the capital,

where he was instantly hailed as a wit and as a brilliant poet. His

fame had hitherto been local; with the publication of his verses in

Espinosa's _Flores de Poetas_. _ilustres_ (1605), it passed through

the whole of Spain. In the same year, or at latest in 1606, Góngora

was ordained priest. His private life was always exemplary, and this,

together with his natural harshness, perhaps explains his intolerance

for the foibles of Cervantes and of Lope. When the favourite, the Duque

de Lerma, fell from power, Góngora attached himself to Sandoval, who

nominated him to a small prebend at Toledo. As chaplain to the King,

the poet's circle of friends enlarged, and his literary influence grew

correspondingly. In 1626 he had a cerebral attack, during which the

physicians of the Queen attended him. The story that he died insane is

a gross exaggeration: he lingered on a year, having lost his memory,

died of apoplexy at Córdoba on May 23, 1627, and is buried in the St.

Bartholomew Chapel of the cathedral.

An _entremés_ entitled _La destrucción de Troya_, a play called _Las

Firmezas de Isabela_ (written in collaboration with his brother,

Juan de Argote), and a fragment, the _Comedia Venatoria_, remain to

show that Góngora wrote for the stage. Whether he was ever played

is doubtful, and, in any case, his gift is not dramatic. He was so

curiously careless of his writings that he never troubled to print or

even to keep copies of them, and a remark which he let fall during his

last illness goes to show his artistic dissatisfaction:—"Just as I was

beginning to know something of the first letters in my alphabet does

God call me to Himself: His will be done!" His poems circulated mostly

in manuscript copies, which underwent so many changes that the author

often knew not his own work when it returned to his hands; and, but for

the piety of Juan López de Vicuña, Góngora might be for us the shadow

of a great name. López de Vicuña spent twenty years in collecting his

scattered verse, which he published in the very year of the poet's

death, under the resounding title of _Works in Verse of the Spanish

Homer_. A later and better edition was produced by Gonzalo de Hoces y

Córdoba (1633).

Góngora began with the lofty ode, as a strict observer of literary

tradition, a reverent imitator of Herrera's heroics. His earliest

essays are not very easy to distinguish from those of his

contemporaries, save that his tone is nobler and that his execution

is more conscientious. He was a craftsman from the outset, and his

technical equipment is singularly complete. So far was he from showing

any freakish originality, that he is open to the reproach of undue

devotion to his masters. His thought is theirs as much as are his

method, his form, his ornament, his ingenuity. An example of his early

style is his _Ode to the Armada_, of which we may quote a stanza from

Churton's translation:—

"_O Island, once so Catholic, so strong,

Fortress of Faith, now Heresy's foul shrine,

Camp of train'd war, and Wisdom's sacred school;

The time hath been, such majesty was thine,

The lustre of thy crown was first in song.

Now the dull weeds that spring by Stygian pool

Were fitting wreath for thee. Land of the rule

Of Arthurs, Edwards, Henries! Where are they?

Their Mother where, rejoicing in their sway,

Firm in the strength of Faith? To lasting shame

Condemn'd, through guilty blame

Of her who rules thee now.

O hateful Queen, so hard of heart and brow,

Wanton by turns, and cruel, fierce, and lewd,

Thou distaff on the throne, true virtue's bane,

Wolf-like in every mood,

May Heaven's just flame on thy false tresses rain!_"

This is excellent of its kind, and among all Herrera's imitators none

comes so near to him as Góngora in lyrical melody, in fine workmanship,

in a certain clear distinction of utterance. Yet already there are

hints of qualities destined to bear down their owner. Not content with

simple patriotism, with denunciation of schism and infidelity, Góngora

foreshadows his future self as a very master of gibes and sneers. The

note of altisonance, already emphatic in Herrera, is still more forced

in the young Córdoban poet, who adds a taste for far-fetched conceits

and extravagant metaphor, assuredly not learned in the Sevillan

school. Rejecting experiments in the stately ode, he for many years

continued his practice in another province of verse, and by rigorous

discipline he learned to excel in virtue of his fine simplicity, his

graceful imagery, and his urbane wit. It should seem that intellectual

self-denial cost him little, for his transformations are among the most

complete in literary history. Consider, for instance, the interval

between the emphatic dignity of his Armada ode and the charming fancy,

the distinguished cynicism of _Love in Reason_, as Archdeacon Churton

gives it:—

"_I love thee, but let love be free:

I do not ask, I would not learn,

What scores of rival hearts for thee

Are breaking or in anguish burn._

_You die to tell, but leave untold,

The story of your Red-Cross Knight,

Who proffer'd mountain-heaps of gold

If he for you might ride and fight;_

_Or how the jolly soldier gay

Would wear your colours, all and some;

But you disdain'd their trumpet's bray,

And would not hear their tuck of drum._

_We love; but 'tis the simplest case:

The faith on which our hands have met

Is fix'd, as wax on deeds of grace,

To hold as grace, but not as debt._

_For well I wot that nowadays

Love's conquering bow is soonest bent

By him whose valiant hand displays

The largest roll of yearly rent...._

_So let us follow in the fashion,

Let love be gentle, mild, and cool:

For these are not the days of passion,

But calculation's sober rule._

_Your grace will cheer me like the sun;

But I can live content in shades.

Take me: you'll find when all is done,

Plain truth, and fewer serenades._"

Even in translation the humorous amenity is not altogether lost,

though no version can reproduce the technical perfection of the

original. For refined wit and brilliant effect Góngora has seldom

been exceeded; yet his fighter pieces failed to bring him the renown

and the high promotion which he expected. He feigned to despise

popularity, declaring that he "desired to do something that would not

be for the general"; but none was keener than he in courting applause

on any terms. He would dazzle and surprise, if he could not enchant,

his public, and forthwith he set to founding the school which bears

the name of _culteranismo_. We do not know precisely when he first

practised in this vein; but it seems certain that he was anticipated

by a young soldier, Luis de Carrillo y Sotomayor (1583-1610), whose

posthumous verses were published by his brother at Madrid in 1611.

Carrillo had served in Italy, where he came under the spell of Giovanni

Battista Marino, then at the height of his influence; and the _Obras_

of Carrillo contain the first intimations of the new manner. Many of

Carrillo's poems are admirable for their verbal melody, his eclogues

being distinguished for simple sincerity of sentiment and expression.

But these passed almost unnoticed, for Carrillo was only doing well

what Lope de Vega was doing better; and in fact it seems likely that

the merits of the dead soldier-poet were unjustly overlooked by a

generation which was content with two editions of his works.

He found, however, a passionate admirer in Góngora, who perceived in

such work as Carrillo's _Sonnet to the Patience of his Jealous Hope_

the possibilities of a revolution. When Carrillo writes of "the proud

sea bathing the blind forehead of the deaf sky," he is merely setting

down a tasteless conceit, which gains nothing by a forced inversion

of phrase; but, as it happened, conceit of this sort was a novelty in

Spain, and Góngora, who had already shown a tendency to preciosity

in Espinosa's collection, resolved to develop Carrillo's innovation.

Few questions are more debated and less understood than this of

Gongorism. So good a critic as Karl Hillebrand gives forth this strange

utterance:—"Not only Italian and German Marinists were imitators of

Spanish Gongorists: even your English Euphuism of Shakespeare's time

had its origin in the _culteranismo_ of Spain." One hardly likes to

accuse Hillebrand of writing nonsense, but he certainly comes near,

perilously near it in this case. Lyly's _Euphues_ was published in

1579, while Góngora was still a student at Salamanca, and Shakespeare

died nearly twelve years before a line of Góngora's later poems was in

print. Spanish scholars, indeed, disclaim responsibility for Euphuism

in any shape. They refuse to admit that Lord Berners' or North's

translations of Guevara could have produced the effects ascribed to

them; and they argue with much reason that Gongorism is but the local

form of a disease which attacked all Europe. However that may be, there

can exist no possible connection between English Euphuism and Spanish

Gongorism, save such as comes from a common Italian origin. Gongorism

derives directly from the Marinism propagated in Spain by Carrillo,

though it must be confessed that Marino's extravagances pale beside

those of Góngora.

This, in fact, is no more than we should expect, for Marino's conceits

were, so to say, almost natural to him, while Góngora's are a pure

effect of affectation. He wilfully got rid of his natural directness,

and gave himself to cultivating artificial antithesis, violent

inversions of words and phrases, exaggerated metaphors piled upon sense

tropes devoid of meaning. Other poets appealed to the vulgar: he would

charm the cultivated—_los cultos_. Hence the name _culteranismo_.[26]

At the same time it is fair to say that he has been blamed for more

crimes than he ever committed. Ticknor, more than most critics, loses

his head whenever he mentions Góngora's name, and holds the Spaniard

up to ridicule by printing a literal translation of his more daring

flights. Thus he chooses a passage from the first of the _Soledades_,

and asserts that Góngora sings the praise of "a maiden so beautiful,

that she might parch up Norway with her two suns, and bleach Ethiopia

with her two hands." Perhaps no poet that ever lived would survive the

test of such bald, literal rendering as this, and a much more exact

notion of the Spanish is afforded by Churton:—

"_Her twin-born sun-bright eyes

Might turn to summer Norway's wintry skies;

And the white wonder of her snowy hand

Blanch with surprise the sons of Ethiopian land._"

Another sonnet on Luis de Bavia's _Historia Pontifical_ is presented

in this fashion:—"This poem which Bavia has now offered to the world,

if not tied up in numbers, yet is filed down into a good arrangement,

and licked into shape by learning; is a cultivated history, whose

grey-headed style, though not metrical, is combed out, and robs three

pilots of the sacred bark from time, and rescues them from oblivion.

But the pen that thus immortalises the heavenly turnkeys on the bronzes

of its history is not a pen, but the key of ages. It opens to their

names, not the gates of failing memory, which stamps shadows on masses

of foam, but those of immortality." This, again, is translation of a

kind—of a kind very current among fourth-form boys, and, perpetrated

by such an excellent scholar as Ticknor, is to be accepted as

intentional caricature of the original. Once more the loyal Churton

shall elucidate his author:—

"_This offering to the world by Bavia brought

Is poesy, by numbers unconfined;

Such order guides the master's march of mind,

Such skill refines the rich-drawn ore of thought.

The style, the matter, gray experience taught,

Art's rules adorn'd what metre might not bind:

The tale hath baffled time, that thief unkind,

And from Oblivion's bonds with toil hath brought_

_Three helmsmen of the sacred barque; the pen,

That so these heavenly wardens doth enhance,—

No pen, but rather key of Fame's proud dome,

Opening her everlasting doors to men,—

Is no poor drudge recording things of chance,

Which paints her shadowy forms on trembling foam._"

Still, when all allowance is made, it must be confessed that Góngora

excels in hiding his meanings. By many his worst faults were extolled

as beauties, and there was formed a school of disciples who agreed with

Le Sage's Fabrice in holding the master for "le plus beau génie que

l'Espagne ait jamais produit." But Góngora was not to conquer without

a struggle. One illustrious writer was an early convert: Cervantes

proclaimed himself an admirer of the _Polifemo_, which is among the

most difficult of Góngora's works. Pedro de Valencia, one of Spain's

best humanists, was the first to denounce Góngora's transpositions,

licentious metaphors, and verbal inventions as manifested in the

_Soledades_ (Solitary Musings), round which the controversy raged

hottest. Within twenty-five years of Góngora's death the first

_Soledad_ found an English translator in the person of Thomas Stanley

(1651), who renders in this fashion:—

"_'Twas now the blooming season of the year,

And in disguise Europa's ravisher

(His brow arm'd with a crescent, with such beams

Encompast as the sun unclouded streams

The sparkling glory of the zodiac!) led

His numerous herd along the azure mead.

When he, whose right to beauty might remove

The youth of Ida from the cup of Jove,

Shipwreck't, repuls'd, and absent, did complain

Of his hard fate and mistress's disdain;

With such sad sweetness that the winds, and sea,

In sighs and murmurs kept him company....

By this time night begun t'ungild the skies,

Hills from the sea, seas from the hills arise,

Confusedly unequal; when once more

The unhappy youth invested in the poor

Remains of his late shipwreck, through sharp briars

And dusky shades up the high rock aspires.

The steep ascent scarce to be reach'd by aid

Of wings he climbs, less weary than afraid.

At last he gains the top; so strong and high

As scaling dreaded not, nor battery,

An equal judge the difference to decide

'Twixt the mute load and ever-sounding tide.

His steps now move secur'd; a glimmering light

(The Pharos of some cottage) takes his sight._"

And so on in passages where the darkness grows denser at every line.

"C'est l'obscurité qui en fait tout le mérite," as Fabrice observes

when Gil Blas fails to understand his friend's sonnet.

Valencia's protest was followed by another from the Sevillan, Juan de

Jáuregui, whose preface to his _Rimas_ (1618) is a literary manifesto

against those poems "which only contain an embellishment of words,

being phantoms without soul or body." Jáuregui returned to the

attack in his _Discurso poético_ (1623), a more formal and elaborate

indictment of the whole Gongoristic movement. This treatise, of

which only one copy is known to exist, has been reprinted with some

curtailments by Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo in his _Historia de las Ideas

Estéticas en España_. It deserves study no less for its sound doctrine

than for the admirable style of the writer, whose courtesy of tone

makes him an exception among the polemists of his time. As Jáuregui

represents the opposition of the Seville group, so Manuel Faria y

Sousa, the editor of the _Lusiadas_, speaks in the name of Portugal.

Faria y Sousa's theory of poetics is the simplest possible: there is

but one great poet in the world, and his name is Camões. Faria y Sousa

transforms the _Lusiadas_ into a dull allegory, where Mars typifies St.

Peter; he writes down Tasso as "common, trivial, not worth mentioning,

poor in knowledge and invention"; and, in accordance with these

principles, he accuses Góngora of being no allegorist, and protests

that to rank him with Camões is to compare "Marsyas to Apollo, a fly to

an eagle."

A more formidable opponent for the Gongorists was Lope de Vega, who

was himself accused of obscurity and affectation. Bouhours, in his

_Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit_ (1687), tells

that the Bishop of Belley, Jean-Pierre Camus, meeting Lope in Madrid,

cross-examined him as to the meaning of one of his sonnets. With his

usual good-nature, the poet listened, and "ayant leû et releû plusieurs

fois son sonnet, avoua sincèrement qu'il ne l'entendoit pas luy

mesme." It must have irked his inclination to take the field against

Góngora, for whom he had a strong personal liking:—"He is a man whom

I must esteem and love, accepting from him with humility what I can

understand, and admiring with veneration what I cannot understand." Yet

he loved truth (as he understood it) more than he loved Socrates. "You

can make a _culto_ poet in twenty-four hours: a few inversions, four

formulas, six Latin words, or emphatic phrases—and the trick is done,"

he writes in his _Respuesta_; and he follows up this plain speaking

with a burlesque sonnet.

Of Faria y Sousa and his like, Góngora made small account: he fastened

upon Lope as his victim, pursuing him with unsleeping vindictiveness.

There is something pathetic in the Dictator's endeavours to soften

his persecutor's heart. He courts Góngora with polite flatteries in

print; he dedicates to Góngora the play, _Amor secreto_; he writes

Góngora a private letter to remove a wrong impression given by one

Mendoza; he repeats Góngora's witty sayings to his intimates; he makes

personal overtures to Góngora at literary gatherings; and, if Góngora

be not positively rude, Lope reports the fact to the Duque de Sessa as

a personal triumph:—"_Está más humano conmigo, que le debo de haber

pareçido más ombre de bien de lo que él me ymaginava_" ("He is gentler

with me, and I must seem to him a better fellow than he thought").

Despite all his ingratiating arts, Lope failed to conciliate his foe,

who rightly regarded him as the chief obstacle in _culteranismo's_

road. The relentless riddlemonger lost no opportunity of ridiculing

Lope and his court in such a sonnet as the following, which Churton

Englishes with undisguised gusto:—

"_Dear Geese, whose haunt is where weak waters flow,

From rude Castilian well-head, cheap supply,

That keeps your flowery Vega never dry,

True Vega, smooth, but somewhat flat and low;

Go; dabble, play, and cackle as ye go

Down that old stream of gray antiquity;

And blame the waves of nobler harmony,

Where birds, whose gentle grace you cannot know,

Are sailing. Attic wit and Roman skill

Are theirs; no swans that die in feeble song,

But nursed to life by Heliconian rill,

Where Wisdom breathes in Music. Cease your wrong,

Flock of the troubled pool: your vain endeavour

Will doom you else to duck and dive for ever._"

The warfare was carried on with singular ferocity, the careless Lope

offering openings at every turn. "Remove those nineteen castles from

your shield," sang Góngora, deriding Lope's foible in blazoning his

descent. The amour with Marta Nevares Santoyo was the subject of

obscene lampoons innumerable. A passage in the _Filomena_ volume

arabesques the story of Perseus and Andromeda with a complimentary

allusion to an anonymous poet whose name Lope withheld: "so as not to

cause annoyance." Góngora's copy of the _Filomena_ exists with this

holograph annotation on the margin:—"If you mean yourself, Lopillo,

then you are an idiot without art or judgment." Yet, despite a hundred

brutal personalities, Lope went his way unheeding, and on Góngora's

death he penned a most brilliant sonnet in praise of that "swan of

Betis," for whom his affection had never changed.

Góngora lived long enough to know that he had triumphed. Tirso de

Molina and Calderón, with most of the younger dramatists, show the

_culto_ influence in many plays; Jáuregui forgot his own principles,

and accepted the new mode; even Lope himself, in passages of his later

writings, yielded to preciosity. Quevedo began by quoting Epictetus's

aphorism:—_Scholasticum esse animal quod ab omnibus irridetur_. And

he renders the Latin in his own free style:—"The _culto_ brute is a

general laughing-stock." But the "_culto_ brute" smiled to see Quevedo

given over to _conceptismo_, an affectation not less disastrous in

effect than Góngora's own. Meanwhile enthusiastic champions declared

for the Córdoban master. Martín de Ángulo y Pulgar published his

_Epístolas satisfactorias_ (1635) in answer to the censures of the

learned Francisco de Cascales; Pellicer preached the Gongoristic

gospel in his _Lecciones solemnes_ (1630); the _Defence of the Fable

of Pyramus and Thisbe_ fills a quarto by Cristóbal de Salazar Mardones

(1636); García de Salcedo Coronel's huge commentaries (1636-46) are

perhaps, more obscure than anything in his author's text; and, so far

away as Peru, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Rector of Cuzco, published

an _Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora, Príncipe de los

Poetas Lyricos de España_ (1694). There came a day when, as Salazar y

Torres informs us, the _Polifemo_ and the _Soledades_ were recited on

Speech-Day by the boys in Jesuit schools.

It took Spain a hundred years to rid her veins of the Gongoristic

poison, and Gongorism has now become, in Spain itself, a synonym for

all that is bad in literature. Undoubtedly Góngora did an infinite

deal of mischief: his tricks of transposition were too easily learned

by those hordes of imitators who see nothing but the obvious, and his

verbal audacities were reproduced by men without a tithe of his taste

and execution. And yet, though it be an unpopular thing to confess,

one has a secret sympathy with him in his campaign. Lope de Vega and

Cervantes are as unlike as two men may be; but they are twins in their

slapdash methods, in their indifference to exquisiteness of form. Their

fatal facility is common to their brethren: threadbare phrase, accepted

without thought and repeated without heed, is, as often as not, the

curse of the best Spanish work. It was, perhaps, not altogether love

of notoriety which seduced Góngora into Carrillo's ways. He had, as

his earliest work proves, a sounder method than his fellows and a

purer artistic conscience. No trace of carelessness is visible in his

juvenile poems, written in an obscurity which knew no encouragement. It

is just to believe that his late ambition was not all self-seeking, and

that he aspired to renew, or rather to enlarge, the poetic diction of

his country.

The aim was excellent, and, if Góngora finally failed, he failed partly

because his disciples burlesqued his theories, and partly because he

strove to make words serve instead of ideas. That his endeavour was

praiseworthy in itself is as certain as that he came at last to regard

his principles as almost sacred. He doubtless found some pleasure in

astounding and annoying the burgess; but he aimed at something beyond

making readers marvel. And though he failed to impose his doctrines

permanently, it is by no means certain that he laboured in vain. If

any later Spaniard has worked in the conscious spirit of the artist,

seeking to avoid the commonplace, to express high thoughts in terms

of beauty—though he knows it not, he owes a debt to Góngora, whose

hatred of the commonplace made Castilian richer. The _Soledades_ and

the _Polifemo_ have passed away, but many of the words and phrases for

which Góngora was censured are now in constant use; and, _culteranismo_

apart, Góngora ranks among the best lyrists of his land. Cascales,

who was at once his friend and his opponent, said that there were two

Góngoras—one an angel of light, the other an angel of darkness; and

the saying was true in so far as it implied that in all circumstances

his air of distinction never quits him. Still the earlier Góngora is

the better, and before we leave him we should quote, as an example of

that first happy manner, inimitable in its grace and humour, Churton's

not too unsuccessful version of _The Country Bachelor's Complaint_:—

"_Time was, ere Love play'd tricks with me,

I lived at ease, a simple squire,

And sang my praise-song, fancy free,

At matins in the village quire...._

_I rambled by the mountain side,

Down sylvan glades where streamlets pass

Unnumber'd, glancing as they glide

Like crystal serpents through the grass...._

_And there the state I ruled from far,

And bade the winds to blow for me,

In succour to our ships of war,

That plough'd the Briton's rebel sea;_

_Oft boasting how the might of Spain

The world's old columns far outran,

And Hercules must come again,

And plant his barriers in Japan...._

_'Twas on St. Luke's soft, quiet day,

A vision to my sight was borne,

Fair as the blooming almond spray,

Blue-eyed, with tresses like the morn...._

_Ah! then I saw what love could do,

The power that bids us fall or rise,

That wounds the firm heart through and through,

And strikes, like Cæsar, at men's eyes._

_I saw how dupes, that fain would run,

Are caught, their breath and courage spent,

Chased by a foe they cannot shun,

Swift as Inquisitor on scent...._

_Yet I've a trick to cheat Love's search,

And refuge find too long delay'd;

I'll take the vows of Holy Church,

And seek some reverend cloister's shade._"

Among Góngora's followers none is better known than Juan de Tassis y

Peralta, the second CONDE DE VILLAMEDIANA (1582-1622), whose ancestors

came from Bergamo. His great-grandfather, Juan Bautista de Tassis,

entered the service of Carlos Quinto; his grandfather, Raimundo de

Tassis, was the first of his race to live in Spain, where he married

into the illustrious family of Acuña; his father, Juan de Tassis y

Acuña, rose to be Ambassador in Paris and Special Envoy in London.

Villamediana's tutors were two well-known men of letters: Bartolomé

Jiménez Patón, author of _Mercurius Trismegistus_, and Tribaldos

de Toledo, whom we already know as editor of Figueroa and Mendoza.

After a short stay at Salamanca, Villamediana was appointed to the

King's household, and in 1601 married Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda,

grand-daughter in the fifth generation of Santillana. His reputation

as a gambler was of the worst, and his winning thirty thousand gold

ducats at a sitting led to his expulsion from court in 1608. He joined

the army in Italy, returned to Spain in 1617, and at once launched

into epigrams and satires against all and sundry. The court favourites

were his special mark—Lerma, Osuna, Uceda, Rodrigo Calderón. In 1618

he was again banished, but returned in 1621 as Lord-in-Waiting to the

Queen, Isabel de Bourbon, daughter of Henry of Navarre. At her request

Villamediana wrote a masque, _La Gloria de Niquea_, in which the Queen

acted on April 8, 1622, before Lord Bristol. If report speak truly,

the performance led him to his death. When the second act opened, an

overturned lamp set the theatre ablaze, and as Villamediana seized the

Queen in his arms, and carried her out of danger, scandal declared the

fire to be his doing, and gave him out as the Queen's lover. There

is a well-known story that Felipe IV., stealing up behind the Queen

one day, placed his hands on her eyes; whereon "Be quiet, Count,"

she said, and so unwittingly doomed Villamediana. The tale is even

too well known. Brantôme had already told it in _Les Dames galantes_

before Felipe was born, and it really dates from the sixth century.

Even so, Villamediana's admiration for the Queen was openly expressed.

He appeared at a tournament covered with silver _reales_, and used

the motto, "_Mis amores son reales_" (My love is royal). The King's

confessor, Baltasar de Zúñiga, warned him that his life was in danger,

and Villamediana laughed in his face. It was no joke, for he had

contrived to make more dangerous enemies in four months than any other

man has made in a lifetime. On August 21, 1622, as he was alighting

from his coach, a stranger ran him through the body; "_¡Jesús! esto

es hecho!_" ("My God! done for!") said Villamediana, and fell dead.

The word was passed round that the assassin, Ignacio Méndez, should go

free; tongues that had hitherto wagged were still. It is almost certain

that the murder was done by the King's order. If it were so, Felipe IV.

had more spirit at seventeen than he ever showed afterwards.

Villamediana had many of Góngora's qualities: his courage, his wit, his

sense of form, his preciosity. In his _Fábula de Faetón_, as in his

_Fábula de la Fénix_, he outdoes his master in eccentricity and verbal

foppery: fish become "swimming birds of the cerulean seat," water is

"liquid nutriment," time "gnaws statues and digests the marble"; and by

hyperbaton and word-juggling he proves himself as _culto_ as he can.

But it is fair to say that when it pleases him he is as simple and

direct as the early Góngora. It must suffice here to quote Churton's

rendering of a sonnet on the proposed marriage of the Infanta Doña

María to the Prince of Wales:—

"_By Heresy upborne, that giantess

Whose pride heaven's battlements in fancy scales,

With Villiers his proud Admiral, Charles of Wales

To Mary's heavenly sphere would boldly press.

A heretic he is, he must confess

Heaven's light ne'er led his knighthood's roving sails;

But the bright cause his error countervails,

And heavenly beauty pleads for love's excess.

So now the lamb with cub of wolf must mate;

The dove must take the raven to her nest;

Our palace, like the old ark, must shelter all:

Confusion, as of Babylon the Great,

Is round us, and the faith of Spain, oppress'd

By fine State-reason, trembles to its fall._"

This expresses—much more clearly than the _Gloria de Niquea_—the true

feeling of Góngora and his circle towards Steenie and Baby Charles.

Less nervous and energetic, but not less fantastic than Villamediana's

worst extravagances, are the _Obras póstumas divinas y humanas_ (1641)

of HORTENSIO FÉLIX PARAVICINO Y ARTEAGA (1580-1633), whose praises were

sung by Lope:—

"_Divine Hortensio, whose exalted strain,

Sweet, pure, and witty, censure cannot wound,

The Cyril and the Chrysostom of Spain._"

The divine Hortensio was court-preacher to Felipe IV., and enchanted

his congregations by preaching in the _culto_ style. His verses

exaggerate Góngora's worst faults, and are disfigured by fulsome

flattery of his leader, before whom, as he says, he is dumb with

admiration. As thus:—"May my offering in gracious cloud, in equal

wealth of fragrance, bestrew thine altars." Paravicino, whose works

were published under the name of Arteaga, was a powerful centre

of Gongoristic influence, and did more than most men to force

_culteranismo_ into fashion. In sermons, poems, and a masque entitled

_Gridonia_, he never ceases to spread the plague, which lasted for

a century, attacking writers as far apart as Ambrosio Roca y Serna

(whose _Luz del Alma_ appeared in 1623), and Agustín de Salazar, the

author of the _Cítara de Apolo_ (1677).

Meanwhile a few held out against the mode. The Sevillan, Juan de

Arguijo (? d. 1629), continued the tradition of Herrera, writing in

Italian measures with a smoothness of versification and a dignified

correctness which drew applause from one camp and hissing from the

other. His townsman, JUAN DE JÁUREGUI Y AGUILAR (? 1570-1650), came

into notice with his version of Tasso's _Aminta_ (1607), one of the

best translations ever made, deserving of the high praise which

Cervantes bestows on it and on Cristóbal de Figueroa's rendering of the

_Pastor Fido_:—"They make us doubt which is the translation and which

the original." In his _Aminta_, as in his original poems, Jáuregui's

style is a model of purity and refinement, as might be expected from

the _Discurso poético_ launched later against Góngora; but the tide

was too strong for him. His _Orfeo_ (1624) shows signs of wavering,

and in his translation, the _Farsalia_, which was not published till

1684, he is almost as extreme a Gongorist as the worst. Still it

should be remembered that Lucan also was a Córdoban, practising early

Gongorism at Nero's court, and a translator is prone to reproduce the

defects of his original. Jáuregui has some points of resemblance with

Rossetti, was a famous artist in his day, and is said, on the strength

of a dubious passage in the prologue to the _Novelas_, to have painted

Cervantes.

ESTEBAN MANUEL DE VILLEGAS (1596-1669) shows rare poetic qualities in

his _Eróticas ó Amatorias_ (1617), in which he announces himself as

the rising sun. _Sicut sol matutinus_ is printed on his title-page,

where those waning stars, Lope, Calderón, and Quevedo, are also

supplied with a prophetic motto: _Me surgente, quid istæ?_ His

imitations of Anacreon and Catullus are done with amazing gusto,

all the more wonderful when we remember that his "sweet songs and

suave delights" were written at fourteen, retouched and published at

twenty. But Villegas is one of the great disappointments of Castilian

literature: he married in 1626, deserted verse for law, and ended life

a poor, embittered attorney. The Sevillan canon and royal librarian,

FRANCISCO DE RIOJA (? 1586-1659), follows the example of Herrera,

his sonnets and _silvas_ being distinguished for their correct form

and their philosophic melancholy. But Rioja has been unlucky. One

poem, entitled _Las Ruinas de Itálica_, has won for him a very great

reputation; and yet, in fact, as Fernández-Guerra y Orbe has proved,

the _Ruinas_ is due to Rodrigo Caro (1573-1647), the archæologist who

wrote the _Memorial de Utrera_ and the _Antigüedades de Sevilla_.

Adolfo de Castro goes further, ascribing the _Epístola moral á Fabio_

to Pedro Fernández de Andrado, author of the _Libro de la Gineta_. Thus

despoiled of two admirable pieces, Rioja is less important than he

seemed thirty years since; yet, even so, he ranks, with the Príncipe de

Esquilache (1581-1658) and the Conde de Rebolledo (1597-1676), among

the sounder influences of his time.

The Segovian poet, Alonso de Ledesma Buitrago (1552-1623), founded the

school of _conceptismo_ with its metaphysical conceits, philosophic

paradoxes, and sententious moralisings, as of a Seneca gone mad. His

_Conceptos espirituales_ and _Juegos de la Noche Buena_ (1611) lead up

to the allegorical gibberish of his _Monstruo Imaginado_ (1615), and to

the perverted ingenuity of Alonso de Bonilla's _Nuevo Jardín de Flores

divinas_ (1617). _Conceptismo_ was no less an evil than _culteranismo_,

but it was less likely to spread: the latter played with words, the

former with ideas. A bizarre vocabulary was enough for a man to pass as

_culto_; the _conceptista_ must be equipped with various learning, and

must have a smattering of philosophy. Under such chiefs as Ledesma and

Bonilla the new mania must have died; but _conceptismo_ was in the air,

and, as Carrillo seduced Góngora, so Ledesma captured FRANCIS GÓMEZ

DE QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS (1580-1645): (it should be said, however, that

Quevedo nowhere mentions Ledesma by name). Like Lope, like Calderón,

Quevedo was a highlander. His family boasted the punning motto:—"I am

he who stopped—_el que vedó_—the Moors' advance." His father (who

died early) and mother both held posts at court. At Alcalá de Henares,

from 1596 onwards, Quevedo took honours in theology, law, French,

Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew. He is also said to have studied

medicine; and certainly he hated Sangrado as Dickens hated Bumble. When

scarcely out of his teens he corresponded with Justus Lipsius, who

hailed him as _μέγα κῦδος Ἱβήρων_, and at Madrid he speedily became

the talk of the town. Strange stories were told of him: that he had

pinked his man at Alcalá, that he ran Captain Rodríguez through the

body rather than yield him the wall, that he put an escaped panther to

the sword, that he disarmed the famous fencing-master, Pacheco Narváez.

This last tale is true, and is curious in view of Quevedo's physical

defects. His reply to Vicencio Valerio in _Su Espada por Santiago_ is

well known:—"He says I hobble, and can't see. I should lie from head

to foot if I denied it: my eyes and my gait would contradict me."

For all his short sight and clubbed feet, he was ever too ready with

his rapier. On Maundy Thursday, 1611, he witnessed a scuffle between

a man and woman during Tenebræ in St. Martin's Church. He intervened,

the argument was continued outside, swords were crossed, and Quevedo's

opponent fell mortally wounded. As the man was a noble, Quevedo

prudently escaped from possible consequences to Sicily. He returned to

his estate, La Torre de Juan Abad, in 1612, but soon wearied of country

life, and was sent on diplomatic missions to Genoa, Milan, Venice, and

Rome. On Osuna's promotion to Naples, Quevedo became Finance Minister,

proving himself a capable administrator. In 1618 he meddled in the

Spanish plot which forms the motive of Otway's _Venice Preserved_, and,

disguised as a beggar, escaped from the bravos told off to murder him.

His public career ended at this time, for his subsequent appointment

as Felipe IV.'s secretary was merely nominal. In 1627 he shared in a

furious polemic. Santa Teresa was canonised in 1622, and, at the joint

instance of Carmelites and Jesuits, was made co-patron of Spain with

Santiago. The Papal Bull (July 31, 1627) divided Spain into two camps.

Quevedo, who was of the Order of Santiago—"red with the blood of the

brave"—took up the cudgels for St. James, was branded a "hypocritical

blackguard" by one party, and was extolled by the other as the "Captain

of Combat," "the Ensign of the Apostle." He shamed Pope, King,

Olivares, the religious, and half the laity, and the Bull was withdrawn

(June 28, 1630). The victory cost him a year's exile, and when Olivares

offered him the embassy at Genoa, he refused it, on the ground that he

did not wish to have his mouth thus closed. After his unlucky marriage

to Esperanza de Mendoza, widow of Juan Fernández de Heredia, he began a

campaign against the royal favourite. Olivares' turn came in December

1639, when the King found by his plate a copy of verses urging him to

cease his extravagance and to dismiss his incapable ministers. Quevedo

was—perhaps rightly—suspected of writing these lines, was arrested

at midnight, and was whisked away, half dressed, to the monastery of

St. Mark in León. For four years he was imprisoned in a cell below

the level of the river, and, when released after Olivares' fall in

1643, his health was broken. A flash of his old humour appears in

his reply to the priest who begged him to arrange for music at his

funeral:—"Nay, let them pay that hear it."

As a prose writer he began with a _Life of St. Thomas of Villanueva_

(1620), and ended with a _Life of St. Paul the Apostle_ (1644).

These, and his other moralisings—_Virtue Militant_, the _Cradle and

the Tomb_—call for no notice here. The _Política de Dios_ (1618) is

apparently an abstract plea for absolutism; in fact, it exposes the

weakness of Spanish administration just as the _Marcus Brutus_ (1644)

is a vehicle for opinions on contemporary politics. Learned and acute,

these treatises show Quevedo's concern for his country's future, and a

passage in his sixty-eighth sonnet forecasts the future of the Spanish

colonies:—"'Tis likelier far, O Spain! that what thou alone didst take

from all, all will take from thee alone"—

"_Y es más facil! oh España ¡en muchas modas

Que lo que á todos les quitaste sola,

Te puedan á tí sola quitar todos._"

The prophecy is just being fulfilled, and the chief interest

of Quevedo's prose treatises lies in their _conceptismo_—the

flashy epigram, the pompous paradox, the strained antithesis, the

hairsplitting and refining in and out of season. It was vain for

Quevedo to edit Luis de León and Torre as a protest against Gongorism,

for in his own practice he substituted one affectation for another.

The true and simpler Quevedo is to be sought elsewhere. His picaresque

_Historia de la Vida del Buscón_, best known by its unauthorised

title, _El Gran Tacaño_ (The Prime Scoundrel), though not published

till 1626, was probably written soon after 1608. Pablo, son of a

barber and a loose woman, follows a rich schoolfellow to Alcalá, where

he shines in every kind of devilry. Thence he passes into a gang of

thieves, is imprisoned, lives as a sham cripple, an actor, a bravo, and

finally—his author being weary of him—emigrates to America. There

is no attempt at creating character, no vulgar obtrusion of Alemán's

moralising tone: such amusement as the novel contains is afforded by

the invention of heartless incident and the acrid rendering of villany.

The harsh jeering, the intense brutality, the unsympathetic wit and art

of the _Buscón_, make it one of the cleverest books in the world, as it

is one of the cruellest and coarsest in its misanthropic enjoyment of

baseness and pain. No less characteristic of Quevedo are his _Sueños_

(Visions), printed in 1627. These fantastic pieces are really five in

number, though most collections print seven or eight; for the _Infierno

Enmendado_ (Hell Reformed) is not a vision, but is rather a sequel to

the _Política de Dios_; the _Casa de Locos de Amor_ is probably the

work of Quevedo's friend, Lorenzo van der Hammen; and the _Fortuna con

Seso_ was not written till 1635. Quevedo himself calls the _Sueño de

la Muerte_ (Vision of Death) the fifth and last of the series. Satire

in Lucian's manner had already been introduced into Spanish literature

by Valdés in the _Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón_, in the _Crotalón_

(which most authorities ascribe to Cristóbal de Villalón), and in the

_Coloquio de los Perros_. In witty observation and ridicule of whole

sections of society, Quevedo almost vies with Cervantes, though his

unfeeling cynicism gives his work an individual flavour. His lost poets

are doomed to hear each other's verses for eternity, his statesmen

jostle bandits, doctors and murderers end their careers as brethren,

comic men dwell in an inferno apart lest their jokes should damp hell's

fires,—grim jests which may be read in Roger L'Estrange's spirited

amplification.

Quevedo's serious poems suffer from the _conceptismo_ which disfigures

his ambitious prose; his wit, his complete knowledge of low life, his

mastery of language show to greater advantage in his picaroon ballads

and exercises in lighter verse. His freedom of tone has brought upon

him an undeserved reputation for obscenity; the fact being that lewd,

timorous fellows have fathered their indecencies upon him. A passage

from his _Last Will of Don Quixote_ may be cited, as Mr. Gibson gives

it, to illustrate his natural method:—

"_Up and answered Sancho Panza;

List to what he said or sung,

With an accent rough and ready

And a forty-parson tongue:

''Tis not reason, good my master,

When thou goest forth, I wis,

To account to thy Creator,

Thou shouldst utter stuff like this;

As trustees, name thou the Curate

Who confesseth thee betimes,

And Per Anton, our good Provost,

And the goat-herd Gaffer Grimes;

Make clean sweep of the Esplandians,

Who have dinned us with their clatter;

Call thou in a ghostly hermit,

Who may aid thee in the matter.'

'Well thou speakest,' up and answered

Don Quixote, nowise dumb;

'Hie thee to the Rock of Dolour,

Bid Beltenebros to come!_'"

Overpraised and overblamed, Quevedo attempted too much. He had it

in him to be a poet, or a theologian, or a stoic philosopher, or

a critic, or a satirist, or a statesman: he insisted on being all

of these together, and he has paid the penalty. Though he never

fails ignominiously, he rarely achieves a genuine success, and

the bulk of his writing is now neglected because of its local and

ephemeral interest. Yet he deserves honour as the most widely-gifted

Spaniard of his time, as a strong and honest man in a corrupt age,

and as a brilliant writer whose hatred of the commonplace beguiled

him into adopting a dull innovation. It is not likely that his

numerous inedited lyrics will do more than increase our knowledge of

Góngora's and Montalbán's failings; but the two plays promised by Sr.

Menéndez y Pelayo—_Cómo ha de ser el Privado_ and _Pero Vázquez de

Escamilla_—cannot but reveal a new aspect of a many-sided genius.

Quevedo was not, however, known as a dramatist to the same extent as

the Valencian, GUILLÉN DE CASTRO Y BELLVIS (1569-1631), an erratic

soldier who has achieved renown in and out of Spain. Castro is

sometimes credited with the _Prodigio de los Montes_, whence Calderón

derived his _Mágico Prodigioso_, but the _Prodigio_ is almost certainly

by Lope. Castro's fame rests on his _Mocedades del Cid_ (The Cid's

First Exploits), a dramatic adaptation of national tradition in Lope's

manner. Ximena, daughter of Lozano, loves Rodrigo before the action

begins, and, on Lozano's death by Rodrigo's hand, her passion and

her duty are in conflict. Rodrigo's victories against the Moors help

to expiate his crime: on a false rumour of his death, Ximena avows

her love for him, and patriotism combines with inclination to yield a

dramatic ending. Corneille, treating Castro's play with the freedom of

a man of genius, founded the French school of tragedy; but not all his

changes are improvements. By limiting the time of action he needlessly

emphasises the difficulty of the situation. Castro's device is sounder

when he prolongs the space which shall diminish Ximena's filial grief

and increase her admiration of the Cid. The strife between love and

honour exists already in the Spanish, and Corneille's merit lies in

his suppression of Castro's superfluous third act, in his magnificent

rhetoric, beside which the Spaniard's simplicity seems weak. But though

Castro wrote no masterpiece, he begot one based upon his original

conception, and some of Corneille's most admired tirades are but

amplified translations.

Less remarkable as a playwright than as a novelist, the lawyer, LUIS

VÉLEZ DE GUEVARA (1570-1643); is reputed to have written no fewer than

four hundred pieces for the stage. Of these, eighty survive, mostly on

historic themes, which—as in _El Valor no tiene Edad_—are treated

with tiresome extravagance; but the most difficult critics have found

praise for _Más pesa el Rey que la Sangre_ (King First, Blood Second).

The story is that, in the thirteenth century, Guzmán the Good held

Tarifa for King Sancho; the rebel Infante, Don Juan, called upon him

to surrender under pain of his son's death; for answer, Guzmán threw

his dagger over the battlement, and saw the boy murdered before his

eyes. Rarely has the old Castilian tradition of loyalty to the King

been presented with more picturesque force, and few scenes in any

dramatic literature surpass that last one on the raising of the siege,

when Guzmán points to his child's corpse. Vélez de Guevara collaborated

with Rojas Zorrilla and Mira de Amescua in _The Devil's Suit against

the Priest of Madrilejos_, a play in which a lunatic girl saves her

life by pleading demoniacal possession. The idea is characteristic of

Guevara's uncanny invention; but the Inquisition frowned upon stage

representatives of exorcism, and, though the author's orthodoxy was

not questioned, the play was withdrawn. He is best remembered for his

satire _El Diablo Cojuelo_ (1641), which describes observations taken

during a flight through the air by a student who releases the Lame

Devil from a flask, and is repaid by glimpses of life in courts and

slums and stews. Le Sage, in his _Diable Boiteux_, has greatly improved

upon the first conception; but the original is of excellent humour,

and the style is as idiomatic as the best Castilian can be. Felipe IV.

is said to have smiled only three times in his life—twice at quips by

Guevara, who was his chamberlain.

Of all Lope's imitators the most undisguised is the son of the King's

bookseller, Doctor JUAN PÉREZ DE MONTALBÁN (1602-38), who became a

priest of the Congregation of St. Peter in 1625. His father was plain

Juan Pérez (as who should say John Smith), and the son was cruelly

bantered for his airs and graces:—"Put Doctor in front and Montalbán

behind, and plebeian Pérez shines an aristocrat." It was rumoured that

his _Orfeo_ (1624), written to compete with Jáuregui, was really Lope's

work, given by the patriarch to start his favourite in life. The story

is probably false, for the verse lacks Lope's ease and grace; but the

_Orfeo_ won Montalbán a name, and—there is no such luck for modern

minor poets—in 1625 a Peruvian merchant expressed his admiration by

settling a pension on the young priest. Montalbán lived in closest

intimacy with Lope, who taught his young admirer stagecraft, and helped

him with introductions to managers. Unluckily he sought to rival his

master in fecundity as well as in method, and the effort broke him.

He is often credited with writing the _Tribunal of Just Vengeance_, a

work which describes Quevedo as "Master of Error, Doctor of Impudence,

Licentiate of Buffoonery, Bachelor of Filth, Professor of Vice, and

Archdevil of Mankind." Quevedo, on his side, had a grievance, inasmuch

as Pérez, the bookseller, had pirated the _Buscón_. He prophesied that

Montalbán would die a lunatic, and, in fact, his words came true.

Pellicer credits Montalbán with literary theories of his own, but they

are mere repetitions of Lope's precepts in the _Arte Nuevo_. Like his

master, Montalbán has a keen eye for a situation, for the dramatic

value of a popular story, as he shows in his _Amantes de Teruel_, those

eternal types of constancy; but he writes too hurriedly, with more

ambition than power, is infected with _culteranismo_, and, though he

apes Lope with superficial success in his secular plays, fails utterly

when he attempts the sacred drama. His own age thought most highly of

_No hay Vida como la Honra_, one of the first pieces to have a "run" on

the Spanish stage; but the _Amantes_ is his best work, and its vigorous

dialogue may still be read with emotion.

These lovers of Teruel were also staged by a man of genius whose

pseudonym has completely overshadowed his family name of Gabriel

Téllez. The career of TIRSO DE MOLINA (1571-1648) is often dismissed

in six lines packed with errors; but the publication of Sr. Cotarelo

y Mori's study has made such summary treatment impossible in the

future. Writers whose imagination does service for research have

invented the fables that Tirso led a scandalous, stormy life, and that

the repentant sinner took orders in middle age. These legends are

baseless, and are conceived on the theory that Tirso's outspoken plays

imply a deep knowledge of human nature's weak side and of the shadiest

picaresque corners. It appears to be forgotten that Tirso spent years

in the confessional: no bad position for the study of frailty. It

seems certain that he was born at Madrid, and that he studied at

Alcalá is clear from Matías de los Reyes' dedication of _El Agravio

agraviado_. The date of his profession is not known; but he is named as

a Mercedarian monk and as "a comic poet" by the actor-manager, Andrés

de Claramonte y Corroy, in his _Letanía moral_, written before 1610,

though not printed till 1613. His holograph of _Santa Juana_ is dated

in 1613 from Toledo, where he also wrote his _Cigarrales_. Passages in

_La Gallega Mari Hernández_ imply a residence in Galicia. That he lived

in Seville, and visited the island of Santo Domingo, is certain, though

the dates are not known. In 1619 he was Superior of the Mercedarian

convent at Trujillo, an appointment which implies that he was a monk of

long standing. In 1620 Lope dedicated to him _Lo Fingido verdadero_,

and in the same year Tirso returned the compliment by dedicating his

_Villana de Vallecas_ to Lope. Though he competed in 1622 at the Madrid

feasts in honour of St. Isidore, he failed to receive even honourable

mention. Ten years later he became official chronicler of his order,

and showed his opinion of his predecessor, Alonso Remón—with whom he

has been confounded, even by Cervantes—by rewriting Remón's history.

In 1634 he was made _Definidor General_ for Castile, and his name

reappears as licenser of books, or in legal documents. He died on March

21, 1648, being then Prior at Soria, renowned as a preacher of most

tranquil, virtuous life, the very opposite of what ignorant fancy has

feigned of him. He is known to have written plays so recently as 1638,

for the holograph of his _Quinas de Portugal_ bears that date; but the

preface to the _Deleitar Aprovechado_ shows that his popularity was on

the wane in 1635. His last years were given to writing a _Genealogía

del Conde de Sástago_ and the chronicle of the Mercedarian Order.

Tirso's earliest printed volume is his _Cigarrales de Toledo_ (1621 or

1624), so called from a local Toledan word for a summer country-house

set down in an orchard. The book is a collection of tales and verse,

supposed to be recited during five days of festivity which have

followed a wedding. Tirso, indeed, announces stories and verse which

shall last twenty days; yet he breaks off at the fifth, announcing a

Second Part, which never appeared. Critics profess to find in Tirso's

tales some traces of Cervantes, who is praised in the text as the

"Spanish Boccaccio": the influence of the Italian Boccaccio is far

more obvious throughout, and—save for a tinge of Gongorism—_Los

Tres Maridos burlados_ might well pass as a splendid adaptation from

the _Decamerone_. Still, even in the _Cigarrales_ the born playwright

asserts himself in _Cómo han de ser los Amigos_, in _El Celoso

prudente_, and in one of Tirso's most brilliant pieces, _El Vergonzoso

en Palacio_. A second collection entitled _Deleitar Aprovechado_

(Business with Profit), issued in 1635, contains three pious tales

of no great merit, and several _autos_, one of which—_El Colmenero

divino_—is Tirso's best attempt at religious drama.

Essentially a dramatist, he is to be but partially studied in his

theatre, of which the first part appeared in 1627, the third in 1634,

the second and fourth in 1635, and the fifth in 1637. A famous play is

the _Condenado por Desconfiado_ (The Doubter Damned), of which some

would deprive Tirso; yet the treatment is specially characteristic of

him. Paulo, who has left the world for a hermitage, prays for light

as to his future salvation, dreams that his sins exceed his merits,

and is urged by the devil to go to Naples to seek out Enrico, whose

ending will be like his own. Paulo obeys, discovers Enrico to be a

rook and bully, and in despair takes to a bandit's life. Meanwhile

Enrico shows a hint of virtue by refusing to slay an old man whose

appearance reminds the bully of his own father, and kills the master

who taunted him with flinching from a bargain. He escapes to where

Paulo and his gang are hidden. Garbed as a hermit, Paulo vainly exhorts

Enrico to confess, though the criminal finally repents, and is seen by

Pedrisco—Paulo's servant—passing to heaven. Duped by the devil, Paulo

refuses to believe Pedrisco's story, and dies damned through his own

distrust and pride. The substance of this play, which is contrived with

abounding skill and theological knowledge, is the old conflict between

free-will and predestination. Some would ascribe the play to Lope,

because the pastoral scenes are in his manner, but the notion that Lope

would publish under Tirso's name is untenable. Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo

will not be suspected of a prejudice against Lope; and he avers, in so

many words, that the only playwright in Spain with enough theology

to write the _Condenado_ was Tirso, who, had he written nothing else,

would rank among the greatest Spanish dramatists.

The piece which has won Tirso immortality is his _Burlador de Sevilla

y Convidado de Piedra_ (The Seville Mocker and the Stone Guest), first

printed at Barcelona in 1630 as the seventh of _Twelve New Plays by

Lope de Vega Carpio, and other Authors_; and the omission of the

_Burlador_ from all authorised editions has led critics of authority

to question Tirso's authorship.[27] The discovery in 1878 of a new

version caused Manuel de la Revilla to declare that the play was by

Calderón, on the ground that Calderón's name is on the title-page,

and that Calderón never trespassed on other men's property. This

is an overstatement: to mention but a few instances, Calderón's _Á

Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza_ is re-arranged from Tirso's _Celoso

prudente_; his _Secreto á Voces_ from Tirso's _Amar por Arte mayor_,

while the second act of Calderón's _Cabellos de Absalón_ is lifted,

almost word for word, from the third act of Tirso's _Venganza de

Tamar_. On the whole, then, Tirso may be taken as the creator of Don

Juan. No analysis is needed of a play with which Mozart, the most

Athenian of musicians, has familiarised mankind; nor is translation

possible in the present corrupt state of the text. Whether or not there

existed an historic Don Juan at Plasencia or at Seville is doubtful,

for folklorists have found the story as far away from Spain as Iceland

is; but it is Tirso's glory to have so treated it that the world has

accepted it as a purely Spanish conception. The _Festin de Pierre_

(1659) by Dorimond, the _Fils Criminel_ (1660) of De Villiers, the

_Dom Juan_ (1665) of Molière, the _Nouveau Festin de Pierre_ (1670)

of Rosimond, and the arrangement of Thomas Corneille, are but pale

reflections of the Spanish type which passes onward from Shadwell's

_Libertine_ (1676) till it reaches the hands of Byron and Zorrilla and

Barbey d'Aurévilly and Flaubert (whose posthumous sketch comes closer

back to the original). Of these later artists not one has succeeded in

matching the patrician dignity, the infernal, iniquitous valour of the

original. To have created a universal type, to have imposed a character

upon the world, to have outlived all rivalry, to have achieved in words

what Mozart alone has expressed in music, is to rank among the great

creators of all time.

If Tirso excelled in sombre force, he was likewise a master in the

lighter comedy of _El Vergonzoso en Palacio_, where Mireno, the Shy

Man at Court, is rendered with rare sympathetic delicacy, and in the

farcical intrigue of _Don Gil de las Calzas verdes_ (Don Gil of the

Green Breeches), where the changes of Juana to Elvira or to Don Gil

are such examples of subtle, gay ingenuity as delight and bewilder

the reader no less than the comic trio of the _Villana de Vallecas_,

or the picture of unctuous hypocrisy in _Marta la piadosa_. Tirso's

fate was to be forgotten, not merely by the public, but by the very

dramatists who used his themes; and, as in Lope's case, the neglect is

partly due to the rarity of his editions. Yet, even so, his eclipse

is unaccountable, for his various gifts are hard to match in any

literature. He has not the disconcerting cleverness of Lope, nor has he

Lope's infinite variety of resource; moreover, his natural frankness

has won him a name for indecency. Yet has he imagination, passion,

individual vision, knowledge of dramatic effect. He could create

character, and his women, if less noble, are more real than Lope's own

in their frank emotion and seductive abandonment. At whiles his diction

tends to Gongorism, as when—in _El Amor y la Amistad_—a personage,

at sight of a mountain, babbles of "the lofty daring of the snow,

the pyramid of diamond"; but this is exceptional, and his hostility

to _culteranismo_ inspired Góngora to write more than one stinging

epigram. Tirso had not Lope's matchless facility, and, considering

the maturity of the Spanish genius, it is strange that he should have

written no play before 1606 or 1608. Moreover, he composed by fits and

starts in moments snatched from duty, and, beginning late, he ended

early. Even in these circumstances he could boast in 1621 that he

had produced three hundred plays—a number afterwards raised to four

hundred. Only some eighty survive: in other words, four-fifths of his

theatre has vanished, and the loss is surely great for those who would

fain know every aspect of his genius. But enough remains to justify his

high position, and his fame, like Lope's, grows from day to day.

Of such dramatists as the courtly Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza (?

1590-1644), and the festive Luis Belmonte y Bermúdez (1587-? 1650)

mere mention must suffice: the former's _Querer por sólo querer_ may

be read in an excellent version made by Sir Richard Fanshawe during

his imprisonment "by Oliver, after the Battail of Worcester." Antonio

Mira de Amescua (? 1578-1640), chaplain of Felipe IV., mingled the

human with the divine, was praised by all contemporaries from Cervantes

onwards, had the right lyrical note, and, if his plays were collected,

might prove himself worthy of his dramatic fame; as it is, he is best

known as a playwright from whom Calderón, Moreto, and Corneille have

borrowed themes. A more original talent is shown by JUAN RUIZ DE

ALARCÓN (? 1581-1639), whose father was administrator of the Tlacho

mines in Mexico. Ruiz de Alarcón left Mexico for Spain in 1600, and

studied at Salamanca for five years; he returned to America in 1608 in

the hope of being elected to a University chair, but the deformity—a

hunched back—with which he was taunted his life long was against

him, and he made for Spain in 1611. He entered the household of the

Marqués de Salinas, wrote some laudatory _décimas_ for the _Desengaño

de la Fortuna_ in 1612, and next year produced his first play, the

_Semejante de sí mismo_, founded, like Tirso's _Celosa de sí misma_,

on the _Curious Impertinent_. It was no great success, but it made him

known and hated. He was far too ready to attack others, being himself

most vulnerable. Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa, who had jeered at

Cervantes for "writing prologues and dedications when at death's door,"

spoke for others besides himself when he lampooned Alarcón as "an ape

in man's guise, an impudent hunchback, a ludicrous deformity." Tirso

befriended the Mexican, while Mendoza, Lope, Quevedo, and the rest

scourged him mercilessly; and when his _Antecristo_ (which Voltaire

used in _Mahomet_) was played, a band of rioters ruined the performance

by squirting oil on the spectators and firing squibs in the pit. Yet

the women always crowded the house when his name was in the bill, and

they made his fortune by contriving that his play, _Siempre ayuda la

Verdad_—probably written in collaboration with Tirso—should be given

at court in 1623. Three years later he was named Member of Council for

the Indies. His collected pieces were published in 1628 and 1634.

Ruiz de Alarcón was never popular in the sense that Lope and Calderón

were popular; still, he had his successes, and no Spanish dramatist

is better reading. Compared with his rivals he was sterile, for the

total of his plays is less than thirty, even if we accept all the

doubtful pieces ascribed to him. Lope excels him in invention, Tirso

in force and fun, Calderón in charm; Ruiz de Alarcón is less intensely

national than these, and the very individuality—the _extrañeza_—which

Montalbán noted with perplexity, makes him almost better appreciated

abroad than at home. Corneille has based French tragedy upon Guillén de

Castro's _Mocedades del Cid_; French comedy is scarcely less influenced

by his adaptation of the _Menteur_ from Ruiz de Alarcón's _Verdad

Sospechosa_ (Truth Suspected). García has lied all his life, lies to

his father, his friends, his betrothed, lies to himself, and defeats

his own purpose by his ingenuity. He would speak the truth if he could,

but he has no talent that way. Why trouble with truth when lying comes

easier? His father, Beltrán, perceives that the miser enjoys money,

that murder slakes vengeance, that the drunkard grows glorious with

wine; but his son's failing is beyond him. The noble Philistine has

not the artist's soul, and cannot understand why García should lie for

lying's sake, against his own interest. Throughout the play Ruiz de

Alarcón is never once at fault, and the gay ingenuity with which he

enforces the old moral, that honesty is the best policy, is equalled

by his masterly creation of character. Ethics are his preoccupation;

yet, though almost all his plays seek to enforce a lesson, he nowhere

descends to pulpiteering or merges the dramatist in the teacher. While

in _Las Paredes Oyen_ (Walls have Ears) and in _El Examen de Maridos_

(Husbands Proved) the triumph of the _Verdad Sospechosa_ is repeated,

the more national play is admirably exampled in _El Tejedor de Segovia_

(The Weaver of Segovia) and _Ganar Amigos_ (How to Win Friends).

There are greater Spanish playwrights than Ruiz de Alarcón: there is

none whose work is of such even excellence. In so early a piece as the

_Cueva de Salamanca_, though there is manifest technical inexperience,

the mere writing is almost as good as in _La Verdad Sospechosa_.

The very infertility at which contemporaries mocked is balanced by

equality of execution. Lope and Calderón have written better pieces,

and many worse: no line that Ruiz de Alarcón published is unworthy

of him. While his contemporaries were content to improvise at ease,

he sat aloof, never joining in the race for money and applause, but

filing with a scrupulous conscience to such effect that all his work

endures. His chief titles to fame are his power of creating character

and his high ethical aim. But he has other merits scarcely less rare:

his versification is of extreme finish, and his spirited dialogue,

free from any tinge of Gongorism, is a triumph of fine idiom over

perverse influences which led men of greater natural endowment astray.

His taste, indeed, is almost unerring, and it goes to form that sober

dignity, that individual tone, that uncommon counterpoise of faculties

which place him below—and a little apart from—the two or three best

Spanish dramatists.

If there be an exotic element in the quality of Ruiz de Alarcón's

distinction as in his frugal dramatic method, the _españolismo_ of the

land is incarnate in the genius of PEDRO CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA HENAO

DE LA BARREDA Y RIAÑO (1600-1681), the most representative Spaniard of

the seventeenth century. His father was Secretary to the Treasury, and,

on this side, Calderón was a highlander, like Santillana, Lope, and

Quevedo; he inherited a strain of Flemish blood through his mother, who

claimed descent from the De Mons of Hainault. He was educated at the

Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid, and fond biographers declare that

he studied civil and canon law at Salamanca; this is mere assertion,

unsupported by any proof. Though he is said to have written a play,

_El Carro del Cielo_, at thirteen, he was not very precocious for a

Spaniard, his first authentic appearances being made at the Feast of

St. Isidore in 1620 and 1622. On the latter occasion he won the third

prize, and was praised by the good-natured Lope as one "who in his

tender years earns the laurels which time commonly awards to grey

hairs." His Boswell, Vera Tasis, reports that he served in Milan and

Flanders from 1625 to 1635; but there must be an error of date, for in

1629 he is found at Madrid drawing his sword upon the actor, Pedro de

Villegas, who had treacherously stabbed Calderón's brother, and who

fled for sanctuary to the Trinitarian Church. The Gongorist preacher,

Paravicino, referred to the matter in public; Calderón replied by

scoffing at "sermons of Barbary," and was sent to gaol for insulting

the cloth. Pellicer signals another outburst in 1640, when the

dramatist whipped out his sword at rehearsal and came off second best.

These are pleasing incidents in a career of sombre respectability,

though one half fears that the second is fiction. In 1637 Calderón

was promoted to the Order of Santiago, and in 1640 he served with his

brother knights against the Catalan rebels, hastily finishing his

_Certamen de Amor y Celos_ (Strife of Love and Jealousy) so as to

share in the campaign. He was sent to Madrid on some military mission

in 1641; received from the artillery fund a monthly pension of thirty

gold crowns; was ordained priest in 1651; was made chaplain of the New

Kings at Toledo in 1653; became honorary chaplain to Felipe IV. in

1663, when he joined the Congregation of St. Peter, which elected him

its Superior in 1666. On taking orders, Calderón's intention was to

forsake the secular stage, but he yielded to the King's command, and,

so late as 1680, celebrated Carlos II.'s wedding with Marie Louise de

Bourbon. "He died singing, as they say of the swan," wrote Solís to

Alonso Carnero. When death took him he was busied with an _auto_, which

was finished by Melchor de León—a fit ending to a happy, blameless

life.

Calderón's prose writings are small in volume and in importance. The

description (written under the name of his colleague, Lorenzo Ramírez

de Prado) of the entry into Madrid of Felipe IV.'s second queen is

an official performance. More interest attaches to a treatise on the

dignity of painting, first printed in the fourth volume of Francisco

Mariano Nifo's _Cajón de Sastre literato_ (1781):—"Painting," says

Calderón, "is the art of arts, dominating all others and using them as

handmaids." He had an admirable gift of appreciation, and he proves it

by rescuing from the oblivion of the _Cancionero General_ such a ballad

as Escribá's, which he quotes in _Manos Blancas no ofenden_, and again

in _El Mayor Monstruo de los Celos_. Churton's version of the song is

not unhappy:—

"_Come, death, ere step or sound I hear,

Unknown the hour, unfelt the pain;

Lest the wild joy to feel thee near,

Should thrill me back to life again._

_Come, sudden as the lightning-ray,

When skies are calm and air is still;

E'en from the silence of its way,

More sure to strike where'er it will._

_Such let thy secret coming be,

Lest warning make thy summons vain,

And joy to find myself with thee

Call back life's ebbing tide again._"

A great lyric poet, his lyrics are mostly included in his plays.

One ballad, supposed to be a description of himself, written at a

lady's request, is often quoted, and has been well Englished by Mr.

Norman MacColl; it is, however, unauthentic, being due to a Sevillan

contemporary, Carlos Cepeda y Guzmán.[28] The earliest play printed

with Calderón's name is _El Astrólogo fingido_ (1632), and from 1633

onwards collected editions of his works were published; but he had no

personal concern in these issues, which so presented him that, as he

protested, he could not recognise himself. Though he printed a volume

of _autos_ in 1676, he was so indifferent as to the fate of his secular

plays that he never troubled to collect them. Luckily, in 1680 he drew

up a list of his pieces for the Duque de Veragua, the descendant of

Columbus, and upon this foundation Vera Tasis constructed a posthumous

edition in nine volumes. Roughly speaking, we possess one hundred and

twenty formal plays, and some seventy _autos_, with a few _entremeses_

of no great account.

Calderón has been fortunate in death as in life; for though his

vogue never quite equalled that of his great predecessor, Lope, it

proved far more enduring. From Lope's death to the close of the

seventeenth century, Calderón was chief of the Spanish stage; and,

though he underwent a temporary eclipse in the eighteenth century, his

sovereignty was restored in the nineteenth by the enthusiasm of the

German Romantics. He has suffered more than most from the indiscretion

of admirers. When Sismondi pronounced him simply a clever playwright,

"the poet of the Inquisition," he was no further from the truth than

the extravagant Friedrich Schlegel, who proclaimed that "in this great

and divine master the enigma of life is not merely expressed, but

solved": thus placing him above Shakespeare, who (so raved the German)

only stated life's riddle without attempting a solution. James the

First once said to the ambassador whom Ben Jonson called "Old Æsop

Gondomar":—"I know not how, but it seems to be the trade of a Spaniard

to talk rodomontade." It was no less the trade of the German Romantic,

who mistook lyrism for scenic presentation. Nor were the Germans alone

in their enthusiasm. Shelley met with Calderón's ideal dramas, read

them "with inexpressible wonder and delight," and was tempted "to throw

over their perfect and glowing forms the grey veil of my own words."

The famous speech of the Spirit replying, in the _Mágico Prodigioso_,

to Cyprian's question, "Who art thou, and whence comest thou?" has

become familiar to every reader of English literature:—

"_Since thou desirest, I will then unveil

Myself to thee;—for in myself I am

A world of happiness and misery;

This I have lost, and that I must lament

For ever. In my attributes I stood

So high and so heroically great,

In lineage so supreme, and with a genius

Which penetrated with a glance the world

Beneath my feet, that was by my high merit.

A King—whom I may call the King of kings,

Because all others tremble in their pride

Before the terrors of his countenance—

In his high palace roofed with brightest gems

Of living light—call them the stars of heaven—

Named me his counsellor. But the high praise

Stung me with pride and envy, and I rose

In mighty competition, to ascend

His seat, and place my foot triumphantly

Upon his subject thrones. Chastised, I know

The depth to which ambition falls: too mad

Was the attempt, and yet more mad were now

Repentance of the irrevocable deed;

Therefore I close this ruin with the glory

Of not to be subdued, before the shame

Of reconciling me with him who reigns

By coward cession. Nor was I alone,

Nor am I now, nor shall I be alone;

And there was hope, and there may still be hope,

For many suffrages among his vassals

Hailed me their lord and king, and many still

Are mine, and many more shall be.

Thus vanquished, though in fact victorious,

I left his seat of empire._"

This "grey veil" serves but to heighten the noble poetic quality which

turned a cooler head than Shelley's. Goethe was moved to tears, and,

though towards the end he perceived the mischief wrought in Germany

by the uncritical idolatry of Calderón, he never ceased to admire

the only Spanish poet that he really knew. And in our time men like

Schack and Schmidt have dedicated their lives to the propagation of

the Calderonian gospel. Some part of the poet's fame is due to his

translators, some also to the fact that for a long time there was

no rival in the field. To the rest of Europe he has stood for Spain.

Readers could not divine (and in default of editions they could not

contrive to learn) that Calderón, great as he is, comes far short

of Lope's freshness, force, and invention, far short of Tirso's

creative power and impressive conception. But Spaniards know better

than to give him the highest place among their dramatic gods. He is

too brilliant to be set aside as a mere follower of Lope's, for he

rises to heights of poetry which Lope never reached; yet it is simple

history that he did but develop the seed which Lope planted. He made

no attempt—and there he showed good judgment—to reform the Spanish

drama; he was content to work upon the old ways, borrowing hints from

his predecessors, and, in a lazy mood, incorporating entire scenes.

If we are to believe Viguier and Philarète Chasles, he went so far as

to annex Corneille's _Heraclius_ (1647), and publish it in 1664 as

_En esta vida todo es verdad y todo es mentira_ (In this Life All's

True and All's False); but, as he knew no French, the chances are that

both plays derive from a common source—Mira de Amescua's _Rueda de

la fortuna_ (1614). In attempts to create character he almost always

fails, and when he succeeds—as in _El Alcalde de Zalamea_—he succeeds

by brilliantly retouching Lope's first sketch. Goethe hit Calderón's

weak spot with the remark that his characters are as alike as bullets

or leaden soldiers cast in the same mould; and the constant lyrical

interruptions go to show that he knew his own strength. Others might

match and overcome him as a playwright: there was none to approach

him in such magnificent lyrism as he allots to Justina in _El Mágico

Prodigioso_—to be quoted here in FitzGerald's rendering:—

"_Who that in his hour of glory

Walks the kingdom of the rose,

And misapprehends the story

Which through all the garden blows;

Which the southern air who brings

It touches, and the leafy strings

Lightly to the touch respond;

And nightingale to nightingale

Answering a bough beyond...._

_Lo! the golden Girasolé,

That to him by whom she burns,

Over heaven slowly, slowly,

As he travels, ever turns,

And beneath the wat'ry main

When he sinks, would follow fain,

Follow fain from west to east,

And then from east to west again...._

_So for her who having lighted

In another heart the fire,

Then shall leave it unrequited

In its ashes to expire:

After her that sacrifice

Through the garden burns and cries,

In the sultry, breathing air,

In the flowers that turn and stare...._"

Such songs as these are, perhaps, better to read than to hear, and

Calderón is careful to supply a more popular interest. This he finds

in three sentiments which are still most characteristic of the Spanish

temperament: personal loyalty to the King, absolute devotion to the

Church, and the "point of honour." Through good report and evil,

Spain has held by the three principles which have made and undone

her. These three sources of inspiration find their highest expression

in the theatre of Calderón. A favourite with Felipe IV., a courtly

poet, if ever one there were, he becomes the mouthpiece of a nation

when he deifies the King in the _Príncipe Constante_, in _La Banda y

la Flor_ (The Scarf and the Flower), in _Guárdate de la Agua mansa_

(Beware of Still Water), and in a score of plays. Ticknor speaks of

"Calderón's flattery of the great": he overlooks the social condition

implied in the title of Rojas Zorrilla's famous play, _Del Rey abajo

Ninguno_ (Nobody, under the King). A titular aristocracy, shorn of all

power, counted for less than a foreigner can conceive in a land where

half the population was noble, and the reverence which was centred on

the person of the Lord's anointed evolved into a profound devotion,

a fantastic passion as exaggerated as anything in _Amadís_. A Church

which had inspired the seven-hundred-years' battle against the Moors,

which had produced miracles of holiness and of genius like Santa Teresa

and San Juan de la Cruz, which had stemmed the flood of the Reformation

and rolled it back from the Pyrenees, was regarded as the one moral

authority, the sole possible form of religion, and as the symbol of

Latin unity under Spain's headship.

The "point of honour"—the vengeance wrought by husbands, fathers,

and brothers in the cases of women found in dubious circumstances—is

harder to explain, or, at least, to justify; yet even this was a

perverted outcome of chivalresque ideals, very acceptable to men who

esteemed life more cheaply than their neighbours. Calderón's treatment

of such a situation may be followed in FitzGerald's version of _El

Pintor de su Deshonra_. The husband, who has slain his wife and her

lover, confronts her father and friends:—

Prince.

"_Whoever dares

Molest him, answers it to me. Open the door.

But what is this?_ [Belardo unlocks the door.

Juan (coming out).

_A picture

Done by the Painter of his own Dishonour,

In blood.

I am Don Juan Roca. Such revenge

As each would have of me now let him take

As far as our life holds—Don Pedro, who

Gave me that lovely creature for a bride,

And I return him a bloody corpse;

Don Luis, who beholds his bosom's son

Slain by his bosom friend; and you, my lord,

Who, for your favours, might expect a piece

In some far other style than this.

Deal with me as you list; 'twill be a mercy

To swell this complement of death with mine;

For all I had to do is done, and life

Is worse than nothing now._

Prince.

_Get you to horse

And leave the wind behind you._

Luis.

_Nay, my lord;

Whom should he fly from? Not from me at least,

Who lov'd his honour as my own, and would

Myself have help'd him in a just revenge

Ev'n on an only son._

Pedro.

_I cannot speak,

But I bow down these miserable grey hairs

To other arbitrament than the sword,

Ev'n to your Highness' justice._

Prince.

_Be it so.

Meanwhile—_

Juan.

_Meanwhile, my lord, let me depart;

Free, if you will, or not. But let me go,

Nor wound these fathers with the sight of me,

Who has cut off the blossom of their age—

Yea, and his own, more miserable than them all.

They know me: that I am a gentleman,

Not cruel, nor without what seem'd due cause

Put on this bloody business of my honour;

Which having done, I will be answerable

Here and elsewhere, to all for all._

Prince.

_Depart

In peace._

Juan.

_In peace! Come, Leonelo._"

Similar motives are used by Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, both

priests and grey-beards; but the effect is more emphatic in Calderón,

and so early as 1683 his "immorality" was severely censured on the

occasion of Manuel de Guerra y Ribera's eulogistic _aprobación_.

In this matter, as in most others, he is satisfied to follow and

to exaggerate an existing convention. His heroes are untouched by

Othello's sublime jealousy: they kill their victims in cold blood as

something due to the self-respect of gentlemen placed in an absurd

position. He rehandles the theme in _Á Secreto Agravio Secreta

Venganza_ and in _El Médico de su Honra_; but the right emotion is

rarely felt by the reader, since Calderón himself is seldom fired by

real passion, and writes his scene as a splendid exercise in literature.

His genius is most visible in his _autos sacramentales_, a dramatic

form peculiar to Spain. The word _auto_ is first applied to any and

every play; then, the meaning becoming narrower, an _auto_ is a

religious play, resembling the mediæval Mysteries (Gil Vicente's _Auto

de San Martinho_ is probably the earliest piece of this type). Finally,

a far more special sense is developed, and an _auto sacramental_

comes to mean a dramatised exposition of the Mystery of the Blessed

Eucharist, to be played in the open on Corpus Christi Day. The Dutch

traveller, Frans van Aarssens van Sommelsdijk, has left an account

of the spectacle as he saw it when Calderón was in his prime. Borne

in procession through the city, the Host was followed by sovereigns,

courtiers, and the multitude, with artificial giants and pasteboard

monsters—_tarascas_—at their head. Fifers, bandsmen, dancers of

decorous measures accompanied the train to the cathedral. In the

afternoon the assembly met in the public square, and the _auto_ was

played before the King, who sat beneath a canopy, the richer public,

which lined the balconies, and the general, which filled the road.

Even for an educated Protestant nothing is easier than to confound an

_auto sacramental_ with a _comedia devota_ or a _comedia de santos_:

thus Bouterwek, in his _History_, and Longfellow, in his _Outre-Mer_,

have mistaken the _Devoción de la Cruz_ for an _auto_. The distinction

is radical. The true _auto_ has no secondary interest, has no mundane

personages: its one subject is the Eucharistic Mystery exposed by

allegorical characters. Denis Florence M'Carthy's version of _Los

Encantos de la Culpa_ (The Sorceries of Sin) enables English readers to

judge the _genre_ for themselves:—

Sin.

"_... Smell, come here, and with thy sense

Test this bread, this substance,—tell me

Is it bread or flesh?_

The Smell.

_Its smell

Is the smell of bread._

Sin.

_Taste, enter;

Try it thou._

The Taste.

_Its taste

Is plainly that of bread._

Sin.

_Touch, come; why tremble?

Say what's this thou touchest._

The Touch.

_Bread._

Sin.

_Sight, declare what thou discernest

In this object._

The Sight.

_Bread alone._

Sin.

_Hearing, thou, too, break in pieces

This material, which, as flesh,

Faith proclaims, and penance preacheth;

Let the fraction by its noise

Of their error undeceive them:

Say, is it so?_

The Hearing.

_Ungrateful Sin,

Though the noise in truth resembles

That of bread when broken, yet

Faith and Penance teach us better.

It is flesh, and what they call it

I believe: that Faith asserteth

Aught, is proof enough thereof._

The Understanding.

_This one reason brings contentment

Unto me._

Penance.

_O man, why linger,

Now that Hearing hath firm fetter'd

To the Faith thy Understanding?

Quick, regain the saving vessel

Of the sovereign Church, and leave

Sin's so highly sweet excesses.

Thou, Ulysses, Circe's slave,

Fly this false and fleeting revel,

Since, how great her power may be,

Greater is the power of Heaven,

And the true Jove's mightier magic

Will thy virtuous purpose strengthen._

The Man.

_Yes, thou'rt right, O Understanding;

Lead in safety hence my senses._

All.

_Let us to our ship; for here

All is shadowy and unsettled."_

As a writer of _autos_ Calderón is supreme. Lope, who outshines him

at so many points, is far less dexterous than his successor when

he attempts the sacramental play. This kind of drama would almost

seem created for the greater glory of Calderón. The personages

of his worldly plays, and even of his _comedias devotas_, tend

to become personifications of revenge, love, pride, charity, and

the rest. His set pieces are disfigured by want of humour and by

over-refinement—faults which turn to virtues in the _autos_, where

abstractions are wedded to the noblest poetry, where the Beyond is

brought down to earth, and where doctrinal subtleties are embellished

with miraculous ingenuity. To assert that Calderón is incomparably

great in the _autos_ is to imply some censure of his art in his

secular dramas. The monotony and artifice of his sacramental plays

might be thought inherent to the species, were not these two notes

characteristic of his whole theatre. Nor is it an explanation to say

that much writing of _autos_ had affected his general methods; for

not merely are the secular plays more numerous—they are also mostly

earlier than the _autos_, whose real defects are a lack of dramatic

interest, an appeal to a taste so local and so temporary that they are

now as extinct in Spain as are masques in England. Still the passing

fashions which produced _Comus_ in the north, and the _Encantos de la

Culpa_ or the _Cena de Baltasar_ in the south, are justified to all

lovers of great poetry. The _autos_ lingered on the stage till 1765,

but their genuine inspiration ended with Calderón, who, in all but a

literal sense, may be held for their creator.

Lope de Vega is the greatest of Spanish dramatists; Calderón is amongst

those who most nearly approach him. Lope incarnates the genius of a

nation; Calderón expresses the genius of an age. He is a Spaniard to

the marrow, but a Spaniard of the seventeenth century—a courtier

with a turn for _culteranismo_, averse from the picaresque contrasts

which lend variety to Lope's scene and to Tirso's. His interpretation

of existence is so idealised that his stage becomes in some sort the

apotheosis of his century. His characters are not so much men and

women, as allegorical types of men and women as Calderón conceived

them. It is not real life that he reveals, for he regarded realism as

ignoble and unclean: he offers in its place a brilliant pageant of

abstract emotions. He is not a universal dramatist: he ranks with the

greatest writers for the Spanish stage, inasmuch as he is the greatest

poet using the dramatic form. And, leaving aside his anachronisms and

jumblings of mythology, he is a scrupulous artist, careful of his

literary form and of his construction. The finished execution of his

best passages is so irresistible that FitzGerald declared Isabel's

characteristic speech in the _Alcalde de Zalamea_ to be "worthy of the

Greek Antigone":—"Oh, never, never might the light of day arise and

show me to myself in my shame! O fleeting morning star, mightest thou

never yield to the dawn that even now presses on thine azure skirts!

And thou, great Orb of all, do thou stay down in the cold ocean foam;

let Night for once advance her trembling empire into thine! For once

assert thy voluntary power to hear and pity human misery and prayer,

nor hasten up to proclaim the vilest deed that Heaven, in revenge on

man, has written on his guilty annals. Alas! even as I speak, thou

liftest thy bright, inexorable face above the hills." Contrast with

this impassioned lament (a little toned down in FitzGerald's version)

the aphoristic wisdom of Pedro Crespo's counsel to his son in the same

play:—"Thou com'st of honourable if of humble stock; bear both in

mind, so as neither to be daunted from trying to rise, nor puffed up so

as to be sure to fall. How many have done away the memory of a defect

by carrying themselves modestly, while others, again, have gotten a

blemish only by being too proud of being born without one. There is a

just humility that will maintain thine own dignity, and yet make thee

insensible to many a rub that galls the proud spirit. Be courteous in

thy manner, and liberal of thy purse; for 'tis the hand to the bonnet,

and in the pocket, that makes friends in this world, of which to gain

one good, all the gold the sun breeds in India, or the universal sea

sucks down, were a cheap purchase. Speak no evil of women; I tell thee

the meanest of them deserves our respect; for of women do we not all

come? Quarrel with no one but with good cause.... I trust in God to

live to see thee home again with honour and advancement on thy back."

Had Calderón always maintained this level, he would be classed with

the first masters of all ages and all countries. His blood, his

faith, his environment were limitations which prevented his becoming

a world-poet; his majesty, his devout lyrism, his decorative fantasy

suffice to place him in the foremost file of national poets. But he

was not so national that foreign adaptors left him untouched: thus

D'Ouville annexed the _Dama Duende_ under the title of _L'Esprit

follet_, which reappears as Killigrew's _Parson's Wedding_; thus

Dryden's _Evening's Love_ is Calderón done from Corneille's French;

thus Wycherley's _Gentleman Dancing Master_ derives from _El Maestro de

danzar_. Yet, though Calderón's plots may be conveyed, his substance

cannot be denationalised, being, as he is, the sublimest Catholic

poet, as Catholicism and poetry were understood by the Spaniards of

the seventeenth century: a local genius of intensely local savour,

exercising his dramatic in local forms.

Archbishop Trench has suggested that in the three great theatres of the

world the best period covers little more than a century, and he proves

his thesis by a reference to dates. Æschylus was born B.C. 525, and

Euripides died B.C. 406: Marlowe was born in 1564, and Shirley died in

1666: Lope was born in 1562, and Calderón died in 1681. With Calderón

the heroic age of the Spanish theatre reached a splendid close.

He chanced to outlive his Toledan contemporary, FRANCISCO DE ROJAS

ZORRILLA (1607-? 1661), from whose _Traición busca el Castigo_ Le Sage

has arranged his _Traître puni_, and Vanbrugh his _False Friend_. A

courtly poet, and a Commander of the Order of Santiago, Rojas Zorrilla

collaborated with fashionable writers like Vélez de Guevara, Mira de

Amescua, and Calderón, of whom he is accounted a disciple, though his

one great tragedy has real individual power. His two volumes of plays

(1640, 1645) reveal him as a most ingenious dramatist, who carries

the "point of honour" further than Calderón in his best known play,

_Del Rey abajo ninguno_, a characteristically Spanish piece. García

de Castañar, apparently a peasant living near Toledo, subscribes so

generously to the funds for the expedition to Algeciras that King

Alfonso XI. resolves to visit him in disguise. García gets wind of

this, and receives his guests honourably, mistaking Mendo for Alfonso.

Mendo conceives a passion for Blanca, García's wife, and is discovered

by the husband at Blanca's door. As the King is inviolate for a

subject, García resolves to slay Blanca, who escapes to court. García

is summoned by the King, finds his mistake, settles matters by slaying

Mendo in the palace, and explains to his sovereign (and his audience)

that _none under the King_ can affront him with impunity. Rojas

Zorrilla's style occasionally inclines to _culteranismo_; but this is

an obvious concession to popular taste, his true manner being direct

and energetic. His clever construction and witty dialogue are best

studied in _Lo que son Mujeres_ (What Women are) and in _Entre Bobos

anda el Juego_ (The Boobies' Sport).

A very notable talent is that of AGUSTÍN MORETO Y CAVAÑA (1618-69),

whose popularity as a writer of cloak-and-sword plays is only less than

Lope's. In 1639 Moreto graduated as a licentiate in arts at Alcalá de

Henares. Thence he made his way to Madrid, where he found a protector

in Calderón. He published a volume of plays in 1654, and is believed to

have taken orders three years later. Moreto is not a great inventor,

but so far as concerns stagecraft he is above all contemporaries. In

_El Desdén con el Desdén_ (Scorn for Scorn) he borrows Lope's _Milagros

del Desprecio_ (Scorn works Wonders), and it is fair to say that the

_rifacimento_ excels the original at every point. Diana, daughter of

the Conde de Barcelona, mocks at marriage: her father surrounds her

with the neighbouring gallants, among whom is the Conde de Urgel.

Urgel's affected coolness piques the lady into a resolve to captivate

him, and she so far succeeds as to lead him to avow his love for her:

he escapes rejection by feigning that his declaration was a jest,

and the dramatic solution is brought about by Diana's surrender. The

plot is ordered with consummate skill, the dialogue is of the gayest

humour, the characters more life-like than any but Alarcón's; and

as evidence of the playwright's tact, it is enough to say that when

Molière, in his _Princesse d'Élide_, strove to repeat Moreto's exploit

he met with ignominious disaster. In the delicacy of touch with which

Moreto handles a humorous situation he is almost unrivalled; and in the

broader spirit of farce, his _graciosos_—comic characters, generally

body-servants to the heroes—are admirable for natural force and for

gusts of spontaneous wit. In _El lindo Don Diego_ he has fixed the type

of the fop convinced that he is irresistible, and the presentation

of fatuity which leads Don Diego into marriage with a serving-wench

(whom he mistakes for a countess) is among the few masterpieces of high

comedy. Moreto's historical plays are of less universal interest; in

this kind, _El Rico Hombre de Alcalá_ is a powerful and sympathetic

picture of Pedro the Cruel—the strong man doing justice on the noble,

Tello García—from the standpoint of the Spanish populace, which

has ever respected _el Rey justiciero_. In his later years Moreto

betook him to the _comedia devota_; his _San Francisco de Sena_ is

extravagantly and almost ludicrously devout, as in the scenes where

Francisco wagers his eyes, loses, is struck blind, and repents on

recovering his sight. The devout play was not Moreto's calling: in his

first and best manner, as a master of the lighter, gayer comedy, he

holds his own against all Spain.

Among the followers of Calderón are Antonio Cuello (d. 1652), who is

reported to have collaborated with Felipe IV. in _El Conde de Essex_;

Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón (fl. 1664), whose _Perfecta Casada_ is a

good piece of work; Juan Matos Fragoso (? 1614-92), who borrowed and

plagiarised with successful audacity; but these, with many others,

are mere imitators, and the Spanish theatre declines lower and lower,

till in the hands of Carlos II.'s favourite, Francisco Antonio Bances

Candamo (1662-1704), it reaches its nadir. The last good playwright of

the classic age is ANTONIO DE SOLÍS Y RIVADENEIRA (1610-86), who, by

the accident of his long life, lends a ray of renown to the deplorable

reign of Carlos II. His dramas are excellent in construction and

phrasing, and his _Amor al uso_ was popular in France through Thomas

Corneille's adaptation.

But his title to fame rests, not on verse, but on prose. His _Historia

de la Conquista de Méjico_ (1684) is a most distinguished performance,

even if we compare it with Mariana's. Seeing that Solís lived through

the worst periods of Gongorism, his style is a marvel of purity,

though a difficult critic might well condemn its cloying suavity.

Still, his work has never been displaced since its first appearance,

for it deals with a very picturesque period, is eloquent and clear,

and is almost excessively patriotic in tone and spirit. Gibbon, in his

sixty-second chapter, mentions "an Aragonese history which I have read

with pleasure"—the _Expedición de los catalanes y aragoneses contra

turcos y griegos_ by Francisco de Moncada, Conde de Osuna (1586-1635).

"He never quotes his authorities," adds Gibbon; and, in fact, Moncada

mostly translates from Ramón Muntaner's Catalan _Crónica_, though he

translates in excellent fashion. Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584-1648)

writes with force and ease in his uncritical _Corona Gótica_, and in

his more interesting literary review, the _República literaria_; his

freedom from Gongorism is explained by the fact that he passed most

of his life out of Spain. The Portuguese, FRANCISCO MANUEL DE MELO

(1611-66), is ill represented by his _Historia de los Movimientos,

Separación y Guerra de Cataluña_ (1645), where he is given over to both

Gongorism and _conceptismo_: in his native tongue—as in his _Apologos

Dialogaes_—he writes with simplicity, strength, and wit. Melo's life

was unlucky: when he was not being shipwrecked, he was in jail on

suspicion of being a murderer; and being out of jail, he was exiled

to Brazil. His reward is posthumous: both Portuguese and Spaniards

hold him for a classic, and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo even compares him to

Quevedo.

Another man of Portuguese birth has won immortality outside of

literature; yet there is ground for thinking that DIEGO RODRÍGUEZ

DE SILVA Y VELÁZQUEZ (1599-1660) had the sense for language as for

paint. His _Memoria de las Pinturas_ (1658) exists in an unique

copy published at Rome under the name of his pupil, Juan de Alfaro,

though its substance is unscrupulously embodied in Francisco de

los Santos' _Descripción Breve_ of the Escorial. Formally, it is

a catalogue; substantially, it expresses the artist's judgment on

his great predecessors. Thus, of Paolo Veronese's _Wedding Feast_

he writes:—"There are admirable heads, and almost all of them seem

portraits. Not that of the Virgin: she has more reserve, more divinity:

though very beautiful, she corresponds fittingly to the age of Christ,

who is beside her—a point which most artists overlook, for they

paint Christ as a man, and His Mother as a girl." The great realist

speaks once more in describing Veronese's _Purification_:—"The Virgin

kneels ... holding on a white cloth the Child—naked, beautiful, and

tender—with a restlessness so suited to his age that He seems more

a piece of living flesh than something painted." And, in the same

spirit, he writes of Tintoretto's _Washing of the Feet_:—"It is hard

to believe that one is looking at a painting. Such is the truth of

colour, such the exactness of perspective, that one might think to go

in and walk on the pavement, tessellated with stones of divers colours,

which, diminishing in size, make the room seem larger, and lead you to

believe that there is atmosphere between each figure. The table, seats

(and a dog which is worked in) are truth, not paint.... Once for all,

any picture placed beside it looks like something expressed in terms of

colour, and this seems all the truer." Strangely enough, this writing

of Velázquez is ignored by most, perhaps by all, of his biographers;

yet it deserves a passing reference as a model of energetic expression

in a time when most professional men of letters were Gongorists or

_conceptistas_.

A certain directness of style is found in Gerónimo de Alcalá Yañez y

Ribera's _Alonso, Mozo de muchos Amos_ (1625), in Alonso de Castillo

Solórzano's _Garduña de Seville_ (the Seville Weasel, 1634), in the

_Siglo Pitagórico_ (1644) of the Segovian Jew, Antonio Enríquez Gómez,

and in the half-true, half-invented _Vida y Hechos de Estebanillo

González_ (1646)—all picaresque tales, clever, amusing, and

improper, on the approved pattern. But the pest of preciosity spread

to fiction, is conspicuous in the _Español Gerardo_ of Gonzalo de

Céspedes y Meneses, and steadily degenerates till it becomes arrant

nonsense in the _Varios Efectos de Amor_ (1641) of Alonso de Alcalá y

Herrera—five stories, in each of which one of the vowels is omitted.

Alcalá, however, had neither talent nor influence. The Aragonese

Jesuit, BALTASAR GRACIÁN (1601-58), had both, and his vogue is proved

by numerous editions, by translations, by such references as that

in the _Entretiens_ of Bouhours, who proclaims him "_le sublime_."

Addison thrice mentions him with respect in the _Spectator_, and it

is suggested that Rycaut's rendering of the _Criticón_ may have given

Defoe the idea of Man Friday. In the present century Schopenhauer vowed

that the _Criticón_ was "one of the best books in the world," and Sir

Mountstuart Grant Duff, taking his cue from Schopenhauer, has extolled

Gracián with some vehemence.

Gracián seems to have been indifferent to popularity, and his works,

published somewhat against his will by his friend, Vincencio Juan de

Lastanosa, were mostly issued under the name of Lorenzo Gracián. His

first work was _El Héroe_ (1630), an ideal rendering of the Happy

Warrior, as _El Discreto_ (1647) is the ideal of the Politic Courtier;

more important than either is the _Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio_ (1642),

a _conceptista_ Art of Rhetoric, of singular learning, subtlety, and

catholic taste. The three parts of the _Criticón_, which appeared

between 1650 and 1653, correspond to "the spring of childhood," "the

summer of youth," and "the autumn of manhood." In this allegory of life

the shipwrecked Critilo meets the wild man Andrenio, who finally learns

Spanish and reveals his soul to Critilo, whom he accompanies to Spain,

where he communes with both allegorical figures and real personages

on all manner of philosophic questions. The general tone of the

_Criticón_ goes far towards explaining Schopenhauer's admiration; for

the Spaniard is no less a woman-hater, is no less bitter, sarcastic,

denunciatory, and pessimistic than the German. Gracián, to use his own

phrase, "flaunts his unhappiness as a trophy" in phrases whose laboured

ingenuity begins by impressing, and ends by fatiguing, the reader.

It is difficult to believe that Gracián's attitude towards life is more

than a pose; but the pose is dignified, and he puts the pessimistic

case with vigour and skill. His _Oráculo Manual ó Arte de Prudencia_

(1653), a reduction of his gospel to the form of maxims, has found

admirers (and even an excellent translator in the person of Mr.

Joseph Jacobs). The reflection is always acute, and seems at whiles

to anticipate the thought of La Rochefoucauld—doubtless because

both drew from common sources; but though the doctrine and spirit

be almost identical, Gracián nowhere approaches La Rochefoucauld's

metallic brilliancy and concise perfection. He is not content to

deliver his maxim, and have done with it: he adds—so to say—elaborate

postscripts and epigrammatic amplifications, which debase the maxim

to a platitude. Mr. John Morley's remark, that "some of his aphorisms

give a neat turn to a commonplace," is scarcely too severe. Yet one

cannot choose but think that Gracián was superior to his work. He had

it in him to be as good a writer as he was a keen observer, and in

many passages, when he casts his affectations from him, his expression

is as lucid and as strong as may be; but he would posture, would be

paradoxical to avoid being trite, would bewilder with his conceit and

learning, would try to pack more meaning into words than words will

carry. No man ever wrote with more care and scruple, with more ambition

to excel according to the formulæ of a fashionable school, with more

scorn for Gongorism and all its work. Still, though he avoided the

offence of obscure language, he sinned most grievously by obscurity of

thought, and he is now forgotten by all but students, who look upon him

as a chief among the wrong-headed, misguided _conceptistas_.

A last faint breath of mysticism is found in the _Tratado de la

Hermosura de Dios_ (1641) by the Jesuit, Juan Eusebio Nieremberg

(1590-1658), whose prose, though elegant and relatively pure, lacks the

majesty of Luis de León's and the persuasiveness of Granada's. More

familiar in style, the letters of Felipe IV.'s friend, María Coronel

y Arana (1602-65), known in religion as Sor MARÍA DE JESÚS DE ÁGREDA,

may still be read with pleasure. Professed at sixteen, she was elected

abbess of her convent at twenty-five, and her _Mística Ciudad de Dios_

has gone through innumerable editions in almost all languages; her

_Correspondencia con Felipe IV._ extends over twenty-two years, from

1643 onwards, and is as remarkable for its profound piety as for its

sound appreciation of public affairs. The common interest of King and

nun began with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which both

desired to have defined as an article of faith; domestic and foreign

politics come under discussion later, and it soon becomes plain that

the nun is the man. While Felipe IV. weakly laments that "the Cortes

are seeking places, taking no more notice of the insurrection than

if the enemy were at the Philippines," Sor María de Jesús strives to

steady him, to lend him something of her own strong will, by urging

him to "be a King," "to do his duty." There is a curious reference to

the passing of Cromwell—"the enemy of our faith and kingdom, the only

person whose death I ever desired, or ever prayed to God for." Her

practical advice fell on deaf ears, and when she died, no man seemed

left in Spain to realise that the country was slowly bleeding to death,

becoming a cypher in politics, in art, in letters.

One single ecclesiastic rises above his fellows during the ruinous

reign of Carlos the Bewitched, and his renown is greater out of Spain

than in it. MIGUEL DE MOLINOS (1627-97), the founder of Quietism, was a

native of Muniesa, near Zaragoza; was educated by the Jesuits; and held

a living at Valencia. He journeyed to Rome in 1665, won vast esteem as

a confessor, and there, in 1675, published his famous _Spiritual Guide_

in Italian. Mr. Shorthouse, an English apostle of Quietism, mentions a

Spanish rendering which "won such popularity in his native country that

some are still found who declare that the Spanish version is earlier

than the Italian." It is almost certain that Molinos wrote in Spanish,

and to judge by the translations, he must have written with admirable

force. But, as a matter of fact, no Spanish version was ever popular

in Spain, for the reason that none has ever existed. This is not the

place to discuss the personal character of Molinos, who stands accused

of grave crimes; nor to weigh the value of his teaching, nor to follow

its importation into France by Mme. de la Mothe Guyon; nor to look into

the controversy which wrecked Fénelon's career. Still it should be

noted as characteristic of Carlos II.'s reign, that a book by one of

his subjects was influencing all Europe without any man in Spain being

aware of it.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] According to Lope de Vega, the word _culteranismo_ was invented by

Jiménez Patón, Villamediana's tutor.

[27] See M. Farinelli's learned study, _Don Giovanni: Note critiche_

(Torino, 1896), pp. 37-39.

[28] Cp. Mr. Norman MacColl's _Select Plays of Calderón_ (London,

1888), pp. xxvi.-xxx., and Gallardo's _Ensayo de una Biblioteca

Española_ (Madrid, 1866), vol. ii. col. 367, 368.