It has been influenced greatly at various times by other countries,
especially Italy and France, but in its many masterpieces it has a
flavour of the soil, a local colouring that is all its own. Even when
Spanish authors have borrowed most freely they have usually succeeded in
casting their own individuality over their “honourable kind of
thieving.” Who has a more individual genius than Juan Ruiz, the merry
Archpriest of Hita? Yet it has been shown that his debt to French,
Latin, and other authors is very considerable. In this form of
borrowing--practised by Shakespeare--which is not a direct imitation but
a loan of bricks to make them marble, there is in fact a high
originality. The phrase in which the merits of the Marqués de Santillana
have been summed up might be applied to the whole of Spanish literature:
when it ceases to imitate it is inimitable. Santillana’s mountain
songs--his _serranillas_ are scented as it were with the thyme of the
Castilian hills, whereas his sonnets in the Italian manner are
colourless and artificial.
Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly speaks of “that forcible realistic touch, that
alert vision, that intense impression of the thing seen and accurately
observed which give to Spanish literature its peculiar stamp of
authenticity.” The clear atmosphere of Spain, in which distant mountains
seem to be close at hand, is also the atmosphere of Spanish literature.
The Spaniard may have little subtlety of insight or critical judgment,
but he has a directness of vision that has manifested itself in bigotry,
brutality, and cynical satire, as well as in keen humour,
straight-forwardness, and dignity of character. The realism which has
produced the terrible Christs of the Cathedrals, with their long human
hair and life-like wounds, or the polychrome statues of Spanish carvers,
with a presentation of pain on the human face in all and more than all
its horror--this realism may be due either to a hatred of all that is
false and factitious or to a lack of sensibility, an inability to
sympathize without a harsh shock, a thrill of terrified awe. What would
the Greeks have said to these tortured features, these agonizing brows
and flowing wounds? It is as false art to perpetuate in wood or stone
the agony of a few culminating moments as it is to picture a face
laughing or yawning, from whose perpetually open mouth we will soon turn
with a laugh or a yawn. This realism has found a less harsh expression
in Spanish literature, as in the sane and brilliant art of Velázquez.
The brutality occasionally makes itself felt, as in some of Quevedo’s
bitter writings, but most often the spirit is nobler and more human. In
the twelfth-century “Poema del Cid” all the figures stand out in
wonderful clearness, from the Cid himself to the nine years’ old child
at Burgos, who tells the Cid that they dare not open their doors to him
for fear of the King’s edict. And the events of the poem are brought to
pass before our eyes with a joyful zest and rapidity and a stamp of
truth that are worthy of Homer. We see the Cid ride with a hundred
chosen knights across the Bridge of Alcántara and up Toledo’s narrow
streets. We see him knocking at the gate of San Pedro de Cardeña to bid
farewell to his wife Doña Jimena, and the abbot, who was saying Mass for
the return of dawn, running out with lights and torches to welcome “him
who was born in happy hour.” We see him again in battle as the pennants
rise and fall, we hear “the sword’s griding screech” and the trampling
of the horses at which the earth trembles. In “Celestina,” the long
prose drama of the end of the fifteenth century, we have the same truth
to life, though in very different scenes. Here it is not knights and
battles, but common people of the street--the old hag Celestina, or
Calisto’s servants--that are drawn with a master hand.
“Celestina” gives some inkling of the picaresque novels to come, of
which the flower and cream is “Lazarillo de Tormes” (1554 is the date of
our earliest edition), to be followed by “Guzmán de Alfarache,” “El
Buscón,” and a long posterity in Spain, France, and England. This is no
tale of true love like the “Celestina,” but of gnawing hunger and of the
ingenious efforts of Lazarillo to procure himself bread. His successive
masters, the blind beggar, the miserly priest, the penniless Castilian
gentleman, the rascally seller of Papal bulls, are sketched in the
autobiography of their servant Lazarillo, with the keen eye of famine,
and are unforgettable, as is Lazarillo himself, whose name has become
the common name in Spain for a blind man’s guide, just as Victor Hugo’s
immortal Gavroche gave his name to the Paris _gamin_. It is, in fact, a
masterpiece of seven short chapters, lively in every sentence, of a
direct and biting humour, perhaps the most graphic story ever penned. A
few terse phrases throw a scene or a character into amazingly high
relief, and the picture is as fresh and living to-day as when it first
appeared three and a half centuries ago. No other country and no other
language could have produced a piece of realism so cynically bare, so
completely charming. It has the caustic pithiness of Spanish proverbs,
the bitter flavour of harsh Iberia. It belongs to life rather than to
literature, but life portrayed with the restraint and force of a
consummate art. It was early translated into English as “The Marvelus
Dedes and the Lyf of Lazaro de Tormes.” The authorship of “Lazarillo”
has been ascribed to this man and to that, and there has been great
argument about it and about, without the least degree of certainty. The
name of Hurtado de Mendoza is frequently to be found upon the
title-page. Born in 1503, he was alive when the novel appeared; he was
an author; he could write in trenchant, nay, in scurrilous style, as his
letters concerning the Pope show--he calls him an old rascal, _vellaco_;
but these are hardly conclusive proofs. Whoever the author, the work
still reigns supreme, though many may have thought with Ginés de
Pasamonte in “Don Quixote” that it would be an evil moment for
“Lazarillo” when their memoirs appeared. Half a century after
“Lazarillo” the same faithfulness to picaresque reality, with a broader
outlook and a more universal sympathy, is to be found in the “Novelas
Ejemplares” of Cervantes. Rinconete and Cortadillo, the eponymous heroes
of one of his best-known stories, are closely related to Lazarillo; they
are in fact the Lazarillos of the South of Spain. On the realism of “Don
Quixote” it is unnecessary to lay stress. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly,
referring to its immediate triumph, says: “To contemporary readers the
charm of ‘Don Quixote’ lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and
realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite
sympathy and its persuasive humour. There was no question, then, as to
whether ‘Don Quixote’ was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was
crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his
companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don
Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the
grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich of Quintanar; the goatherds
seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering;
the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight
procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting
dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together
like beads on an iron chain; all these are observed and presented with
masterly precision of detail.”[94]
In spite of Censors and Inquisitors Spanish literature was free and
outspoken, for it portrayed life as it was. If it shows devotion to
Church and King it is because these were deeply-rooted national
convictions. But the priests sometimes meet with less respect. The Cid
threatens to make of the Pope’s vestments trappings for his horse, and
we have seen that Hurtado de Mendoza, the King of Spain’s ambassador in
Rome, speaks of his Holiness in terms that call to mind Benvenuto
Cellini’s passionate outbursts. We have seen, too, the unflattered
portraits of priest and pardon-seller in “Lazarillo de Tormes.”
Cervantes, who “respects and adores the Church as a Catholic and
faithful Christian,” does not fail to thrust fun at the fat _alforjas_,
the well-provisioned saddle-bags of the _señores clérigos_, “who rarely
allow themselves to fare ill,” and he deals more sternly with the
household priests who “govern princes’ houses, and, not being of
princely birth themselves, are unable to guide the conduct of those who
are,” and who “in trying to teach those they govern to be narrow and
limited make them miserable.” He gives us the picture of the false
pilgrims who travel through the length and breadth of Spain, “and there
is not a village in which they do not receive meat and drink and at
least a _real_ in money, and at the end of their journey they leave the
country with a treasure of over a hundred ducats,” and he even allows
himself to wonder why Ginés de Pasamonte’s clever monkey has not been
arraigned before the gentlemen of the Inquisition.
There are in Spanish literature occasional signs of a distorted
imagination, a restless longing to materialize the invisible, which is
not a fanciful dreaming, but rather a kind of super-realism, a strained
and persistent effort to attain a tangible perfection--the spirit which
in some Spanish buildings has added ornament to ornament till the result
is a rich magnificence in an infinity of details but hideousness as a
whole. One form of this we have in such works as Quevedo’s “Sueños,”
another, the Churrigueresque, in the later style of Góngora. On the
other hand, we have the great Spanish mystics in their sincerity,
reflected in the exquisite simplicity of their style, one of the noblest
glories of the literature of their country. Yet they, too, as has often
been pointed out, were pre-eminently practical; Luis de León, for
instance, energetic head of the Augustinian Order; Santa Teresa, the
wise, untiring administrator. Their writings have the fiery transparency
of Pascal, and all the clear and vivid precision of military writers of
many countries, in whose case, as in that of so large a number of
Spaniards, “the lance has not blunted the pen.”[95] The mystics rise to
noble heights of sublimity, but the virtue of their writing is that it
is to the point, with no vague rhetoric; and no advocate could surpass
the lucidity with which Luis de León conducted his own defence before
the Inquisition.
Perhaps the weakest side of Spanish literature is its deficiency in
critical insight. Few, indeed, are the Spanish authors of whom it might
be said, as Ticknor said long ago of Luis de León, that there is
scarcely a line of their poetry that is not exquisite. Espronceda’s
undeniable genius, for instance, shatters itself on that unwieldy
fragment “El Diablo Mundo.” Excessive facility of composition has been
the stumbling-block of the authors as it has been the stumbling-block of
the orators of Spain. Hardly a speaker in the Spanish _Cortes_ is ever
at a loss for words to give expression to his ideas or to conceal the
lack of them. Each, as Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,”
is one
“That hath a mint of phrases in his brain,
One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.”
Even so marvellous an orator as Emilio Castelar was at times carried
away by the magnificent eloquence that flowed unfailingly from his lips.
In the same way Lope de Vega could throw off a play in a few days. Over
2000 plays and _autos_ are ascribed to him, and in the 450 that remain
his most ardent admirers confess that there are arid tracts. And,
ordinarily, this copiousness has been a fault, telling against Spanish
literature, and it continues to be a fault: Señor Blasco Ibáñez writes
his brilliant novels in evident haste; Señor Perez Galdós has entered
on the fifth series of ten of his “Episodios Nacionales,” and his other
novels and plays are very numerous. Such wealth of production could not
but be harmful to critical judgment. In the nineteenth century Spain
produced one or two excellent critics, especially Larra and _Clarín_,
the pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, author of “La Regenta,” one of the most
striking psychological novels of the century. Generally, however, if
German literary criticism is circular and, however illuminating the
by-paths of its learning, wanders round the point without ever quite
touching it, Spanish literary criticism is superficial, and either veils
the point in a polite mesh of words, or is prevented by this very
rhetoric from seeing the point at all. Even Valera, who so carefully
limned his own prose, and whose verse, though not inspired, is always
delicate and polished, was far from being a good critic. He praised
effusively works that at best deserved silence, and this insincerity in
literary matters is, it is to be feared, a common weakness in Spain.
The characteristic of Spanish literature that unites it in a special
bond of sympathy with English literature is its large store of humour.
It meets us in the “Poema del Cid,” in the character of the Cid, and in
the quick detection of the ludicrous; the poems of the Archpriest of
Hita are full of merriment and of humorous portrayal of character; the
humour of the Archpriest reappears in “Lazarillo de Tormes,” but without
his jovial gaiety; with Quevedo its vein becomes cruelly satirical.
Humour did not desert Luis de León when ill and solitary in the dark
Valladolid prison of the Inquisition; and it is to be found in a large
majority of Spanish authors, being but another side of their direct,
unclouded observation. In the most humorous of all books, even Don
Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, is constrained to laugh: at
the sight of Sancho, we read, his melancholy was not strong enough to
prevent him from joining in his laughter--and the whole world laughs
with, not at him.
It is because Spanish literature is intensely national that it has so
universal an interest, and in its most recent phase, the novel, it has a
local character that is full of charm. José María de Pereda, for
instance, scarcely ever left his native Cantabrian province. He wrote of
the places and people that he understood and loved. Yet no one who has
read his great novels, “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” or “Sotileza,” or
“Peñas Arriba,” will contend that they are provincial, or that their
interest is merely local.[96] His characters are universal, and Pereda
is another instance of the truth that he who digs a little land deep
reaps a better reward than he who works shallowly over a wide extent. So
Señor Blasco Ibáñez is read with most delight when he cultivates his own
garden--the city and province of Valencia.
XVII
THE POEM OF THE CID
1.--A PRIMITIVE MASTERPIECE
The national hero of Spain has been presented in many guises, but is
nowhere more intensely Spanish than in the “Poema del Cid.” Here are no
marvellous events and miracles, no journeyings out of Spain to Paris and
Rome; everything occurs naturally and simply in Spanish surroundings,
and this the first great masterpiece of Spanish letters has a strong
flavour of the soil. After winning a “victory marvellous and great” over
the Moors in Spain, the Cid says, “I give thanks to God who is Master of
the world; I was in want before, now I am rich, for I have goods and
land and gold and honour.... Moors and Christians live in great fear of
me. There, inland in Morocco, where the Mosques are, they look to have
some night an inroad from me. It is but their fear, for I think not of
it. I shall not go to seek them, in Valencia shall I be.” The Cid is
chivalrous, brave, magnanimous, simple, with a strong sense of humour
and love of fair-play. With simple good faith the poet sees no need to
explain or excuse actions of his hero that may seem blameworthy to a
later age, such as the deceit practised upon the two Jews. Though not
historical, the poem has an air of truth and sincerity deeply
impressive. It was probably composed in the middle of the twelfth
century, not much more than fifty years after the Cid’s death in 1099.
It has been attributed to the beginning of the thirteenth century, but
intrinsic evidence warrants the earlier date. The language is more
archaic than that of thirteenth-century writers. Traces of the Latin
chrysalis appear. “To-morrow morning” is _cras á la mañana_, half Latin
and half Spanish, and “each” in the same way is _quiscadauno_, while the
word _huebos_, which frequently occurs in the sense of _menester_, is
but the Latin _opus_ thinly disguised. The poem, as it has come down to
us incomplete, has nearly four thousand verses. It is written in long
assonant lines of unequal number of syllables. “The poet,” as Tomas
Antonio Sánchez, who first edited the “Poema del Cid” in 1779, remarks,
“thought nothing of giving two or three syllables more to a line as his
sentence might require,” and lines of eleven and lines of eighteen
syllables occur indifferently. From beginning to end the story moves on
without flagging; the style is so rapid and direct that it carries the
reader with it. There is a joy and freshness in the narrative that have
rarely been surpassed.[97] These events may not have happened, or may
have happened differently, but that matters little, since, owing to the
skill of the unknown poet, they stand out with a vividness that imprints
them indelibly on the mind of the reader and proves that nothing is so
real as that which has not happened. Who can forget, for instance, the
arrival of King Alfonso and the Cid at Toledo, when the King passes on
into the town, but the Cid remains on the further side of the Tagus, in
the castle of San Serván (now a beautiful ruin with two Moorish windows
still left, and surrounded by dwarf-asphodels in spring). He says to the
King: “I with mine will rest in San Serván; this evening will my
followers arrive. I will hold vigil in that holy place; to-morrow
morning I will enter the city.” Here he and his followers “said matins
and prime until the dawn,” and next day they enter Toledo, the Cid
splendidly attired and accompanied by a hundred knights, riding across
the bridge of Alcántara and up the steep and narrow street to the Court
or Parliament.[98] Every detail of his dress is given, purple and gold
and silver. But fresh and quaintly vivid details are frequent in the
poem. When the counts of Carrión have outraged and abandoned their
wives the poet pauses to exclaim, “What good fortune were the Cid
Campeador to appear.” Félez Muñoz, on finding the Cid’s daughters almost
at the point of death, brings them water in his hat: “new it was and
fresh, and he had brought it from Valencia.” Mass is said “at half
cock-crow, before the dawn.” The Moor Abengalvon upbraids the treachery
of his guests in planning his murder as follows: “Tell me what have I
done to you, Counts of Carrión? I serving you without guile, and you
took counsel for my death, _Hyo sirviendovos sin art, E vos conseiastes
para mi muert_.” Nothing could be more spontaneous and direct. With
equal directness honest Pero Bermuez calls one of the Counts of Carrión
“a tongue without hands,” “a mouth without truth,” and we read of Asur
González, who “would breakfast before he went to prayer,” that “purple
he came for he had breakfasted, and reckless was his speech.” The
account of the battle is well known: “they clasp their shields before
their breasts, they lower their lances with their banners, they bow
their faces over the saddles, they went to smite them with bold hearts.
With loud voice calls he who was born in happy hour, ‘Strike them,
knights, for the love of charity. I am Ruy Diaz, the Cid Campeador of
Bibar.’ All strike in the group where is Pero Bermuez. Three hundred
lances are there, all with their banners. A Moor apiece they killed at a
single blow, and as they turned about they kill as many more. There
would you see many lances rise and fall, many a shield pierced and
riddled, many a breastplate broken through, many white banners come out
red with blood, many good steeds go without a rider. The Moors call on
Mahomet, the Christians on St. James. In a short space a thousand and
three hundred of the Moors are slain.” No version can give an idea of
the vigour of the original. But it is not only battle scenes that are
treated forcibly and thrown into high relief. We may take the arrival of
the Cid at San Pedro de Cardeña as an example of the amazing vividness
given to more quiet episodes: “The cocks are crowing and the dawn is
trying to break, when the good Campeador arrived at San Pedro. The Abbot
Don Sancho, servant of the Creator, was saying Matins for the return of
dawn. And Doña Jimena, with five noble ladies, was praying St. Peter and
the Creator: ‘O Thou who guidest all, be with my Cid the Campeador.’ He
was calling at the gate and they heard the summons. Heavens! how glad
was the Abbot Don Sancho! With lights and with candles they ran into the
courtyard. With such joy they receive him who was born in happy hour. ‘I
thank God, my Cid,’ said the Abbot Don Sancho, ‘since I see you here,
accept my hospitality.’”
II. VALENCIA DEL CID.
The poem opens abruptly with the exile of the Cid from Castille. He
rides to his house at Burgos but finds all closed against him. Only a
nine-year-old girl is found to tell him that “last night came the King’s
letter. We dare not open or receive you, else would we lose our goods
and houses, and moreover the eyes of our heads.”