Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_) and ^{} encloses
superscripted material.
Sidenotes are identified as: [SN: text of sidenote].
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
Periods of European Literature
EDITED BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY
VI. THE LATER RENAISSANCE
* * * * *
PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE.
EDITED BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY.
“_The criticism which alone can much help us for the future is a
criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual
purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working
to a common result._”
--MATTHEW ARNOLD.
In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. Price 5s. net each.
The DARK AGES Professor W. P. KER.
The FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE
AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY THE EDITOR.
The FOURTEENTH CENTURY F. J. SNELL.
The TRANSITION PERIOD G. GREGORY SMITH.
The EARLIER RENAISSANCE
The LATER RENAISSANCE DAVID HANNAY.
The FIRST HALF OF 17TH CENTURY
The AUGUSTAN AGES OLIVER ELTON.
The MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY J. HEPBURN MILLAR.
The ROMANTIC REVOLT Professor C. E. VAUGHAN.
The ROMANTIC TRIUMPH T. S. OMOND.
The LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY THE EDITOR.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE
BY DAVID HANNAY
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCVIII
_All Rights reserved_
PREFACE.
The general rules by which this series is governed have been fully
stated by the Editor in the first published volume, _The Flourishing
of Romance and the Rise of Allegory_. It will therefore not be
necessary for me to do more than endeavour to justify the particular
application of them in this book. Mr Saintsbury has fully recognised
the magnitude of the task which has to be overcome by the writer who
should undertake to display “intimate and equal knowledge of all the
branches of European Literature at any given time.” Nobody could be
more conscious of his insufficiency to attain to any such standard of
knowledge than I have had occasion to become in the course of executing
the part of the plan intrusted to me. Though I hope my work has not
been shirked, I still cannot venture to boast of “intimate and equal
knowledge” of all the great bulk of literature produced during the
later sixteenth century. Happily so much as this is not required. Some
ignorance of--or at least some want of familiarity with--the less
important, is permitted where the writer is “thoroughly acquainted
with the literature which happened to be of greatest prominence in the
special period.” I must leave others to decide how far my handling
of the Spanish, English, and French portions of the subject can be
held to excuse my less intimate familiarity with the Italian and
Portuguese. The all but unbroken silence of Germany during this period
made it unnecessary to take account of it. Modern Dutch and modern
Scandinavian literature had hardly begun; such Scottish poets as Scott
and Montgomerie are older than their age. These and other things, on
the principles of the series, fall into the previous or the next volume.
Although the reasons for the course taken with the literature of Spain
are given in the text, they may be repeated here by way of preliminary
excuse. It has been decided to treat the Spaniards as an example of the
overlapping necessary to the satisfactory carrying out of a series in
periods. I have begun with them earlier than with others, have ended
with them later, and have as far as space permitted treated them as
a whole. For this there is what appears to me to be a sound critical
reason. Although Spain undoubtedly belongs to Europe, yet there is in
her something which is not quite European. The Spaniards, though they
have always been, and are, vigorous and interesting, have a certain
similarity to some oriental races. This is not the place for an essay
on the Spanish national character. The comparison is only mentioned as
a justification for pointing out that, like some oriental races, the
Spaniards have had one great period of energy. At no time have they
been weak, and to-day they can still show a power of resistance and
a tenacity of will which promise that if ever the intellect of the
nation revives, they will again play a great part in the world. But
it is none the less a matter of fact that, except during their one
flowering time, they have not been what can be called great. From the
fifteenth century till well into the seventeenth, those defects in the
national character, which have kept the Spaniards stationary and rather
anarchical, were in abeyance. The qualities of the race were seen at
work on a vast stage, doing wonderful things in war, colonisation, art,
and letters. Yet the very reason that the Spaniard was then exercising
his faculties to the full extent to which they would go, gives a
complete unity to his Golden Age. It cannot be divided in any other
than a purely arbitrary way. England and France were destined to grow
and develop after the Later Renaissance. Tasso and Bruno were the last
voices of a great Italian time. But Spain suspended the anarchy of her
middle ages at the end of the fifteenth century, gathered force, burst
upon the world with the violence of a Turkish invasion, flourished
for a space, and then sank exhausted at the end of a hundred and fifty
years.
It may be thought that too little attention has been paid to the
Portuguese. I will not venture to assert that the criticism is ill
founded. Still I shall plead by way of excuse that what the lesser
Peninsular nation did in literature was hardly sufficiently original
to deserve fuller notice in a general survey of a very fertile period.
Sà de Miranda and his contemporaries, even Camoens and his follower
Corte-Real, were after all little more than adapters of Italian forms.
They were doing in kindred language what was also being done by the
Spanish “learned poets.” In Camoens there was no doubt a decided
superiority of accomplishment, but the others seem to me to have been
inferior to Garcilaso, Luis de Leon, or Hernan de Herrera. And this
“learned poetry” is in itself the least valuable part of the literature
of the Peninsula. In what is original and important, the share of
the Portuguese is dubious or null. They have a doubtful right to the
_Libros de Caballerías_. They have a very insignificant share in the
stage, and no part in the _Novelas de Pícaros_. Barros and the other
historians were men of the same class as the Spaniards Oviedo or
Gómara. For these reasons, I have thought it consistent with the scheme
of the book to treat them as very subordinate.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
The unity of Spanish literature--Limits of treatment--A
prevailing characteristic--The division into native
and imitative--The inheritance from the fifteenth
century--Spanish verse--The _Cancioneros_--The romances--The
_Romanceros_--The quality of this poetry--Spain and
Italy--The _Diálogo de la Lengua_--Prose of the early
sixteenth century--The influence of the Inquisition 1
CHAPTER II. THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS.
The starting-point of the classic school--The natural
influence of Italy--Prevalence of the classic school--Its
aristocratic spirit--What was imitated from the
Italians--Its technique and matter--Artificiality of the
work of the school--Boscan--Garcilaso--Their immediate
followers--The schools of Salamanca and Seville--Góngora and
Góngorism--The epics--The _Araucana_--The _Lusiads_ 30
CHAPTER III. THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
The national character of the Spanish drama--The first
beginnings of the religious plays--The starting-point of
the secular play--Bartolomé de Torres Naharro--Lope de
Rueda--Lope de Vega’s life--His influence on the drama--The
conditions of the work--Contemporaries and followers of
Lope--Calderon--Calderon’s school 60
CHAPTER IV. FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
The prevailing quality of the Spanish drama--Typical
examples--_La Dama Melindrosa_--_El Tejedor de
Segovia_--_El Condenado por Desconfiado_--The plays on
“honour”--_A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza_--The _Auto
Sacramental_--the _loa_--The _Verdadero Dios Pan_--_Los Dos
Habladores_ 91
CHAPTER V. SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE.
Pastorals and short stories--The original work of the
Spaniard--The _Libros de Caballerías_--The _Amadis
of Gaul_--Followers of _Amadis of Gaul_--Influence
and character of these tales--The real cause of
their decline--The character of the _Novelas
de Pícaros_--The _Celestina_--_Lazarillo de
Tormés_--_Guzman de Alfarache_--The followers of Mateo
Aleman--Quevedo--Cervantes--His life--His work--The minor
things--_Don Quixote_ 124
CHAPTER VI. SPAIN--HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND THE
MYSTICS.
Spanish historians--Histories of particular events--Early
historians of the Indies--General historians of the
Indies--Gómara, Oviedo, Las Casas, Herrera, the
Inca Garcilaso--Mendoza, Moncada, and Melo--General
histories--Ocampo, Zurita, Morales--Mariana--The
decadence--Solis--Miscellaneous writers--Gracian and
the prevalence of Góngorism--The mystics--Spanish
mysticism--The influence of the Inquisition on Spanish
religious literature--Malon de Chaide--Juan de Ávila--Luis
de Granada--Luis de Leon--Santa Teresa--Juan de la
Cruz--Decadence of the mystic writers 157
CHAPTER VII. ELIZABETHAN POETRY.
The starting-point--Italian influence--The opposition to
rhyme--Excuses for this--Its little effect--Poetry of
first half of Elizabeth’s reign--Spenser--Order of his
work--His metre--Character of his poetry--Sir P. Sidney--The
_Apologie for Poetrie_--His sonnets and lyrics--Watson--The
Sonneteers--Other lyric poetry--The collections and
song-books--The historical poems--Fitz-Geoffrey
and Markham--Warner--Daniel--Drayton--The satiric
poets--Lodge--Hall--Marston--Donne 185
CHAPTER VIII. THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS.
The first plays--Resistance to classic influence--Advantages
of this--And the limitations--The dramatic
quality--Classic, Spanish, and French drama--Unity in
the English Plays--_Ralph Roister Doister_--_Gammer
Gurton’s Needle_--_Gorboduc_--Formation of the
theatre--Lyly--Greene--Peele--Kyd--Marlowe--Character of
these writers--Shakespeare--Guesses about his life--Order
of his work--Estimates of Shakespeare--Divisions of his
work--The Poems--The Dramas--The reality of Shakespeare’s
characters 223
CHAPTER IX. THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS.
Elizabethan prose--Two schools of writers--Roger
Ascham--His books and style--Webbe and Puttenham--The
sentence--Euphuism--The _Arcadia_--Sidney’s style--Short
stories--Nash’s _Unfortunate Traveller_--Nash and the
pamphleteers--Martin Marprelate--Origin of the Marprelate
Tracts--The _Diotrephes_--Course of the controversy--Its
place in literary history--Hooker--_The Ecclesiastical
Polity_ 259
CHAPTER X. FRANCE. POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE.
The Pléiade--Ronsard--The lesser stars--The _Défense
et Illustration de la Langue Française_--The
work of Ronsard--His place in poetry--Joachim du
Bellay--Remi Belleau--Baïf--Du Bartas--D’Aubigné--The
dramatic work of the Pléiade--Jodelle--Grevin and La
Taille--Montchrestien--The comedy--_La Reconnue_--Causes of
failure of early dramatic literature 290
CHAPTER XI. FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS OF THE LATER SIXTEENTH
CENTURY.
Abundance of later sixteenth-century
prose--A distinction--Sully--Bodin--The
great memoir-writers--Carloix--La
Noue--D’Aubigné--Monluc--Brantôme--The _Satyre
Ménippée_--Its origin--Its authors--Its form and
spirit--Montaigne--His _Essays_--The scepticism of
Montaigne--His style--Charron and Du Vair 326
CHAPTER XII. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
The later Renaissance in Italy--Torquato Tasso--His work--The
_Gerusalemme Liberata_--Giordano Bruno--Literary character
of his work--Giambattista Guarini 352
CHAPTER XIII. CONCLUSION 367
INDEX 379
* * * * *
THE LATER RENAISSANCE.
CHAPTER I. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
THE UNITY OF SPANISH LITERATURE--LIMITS OF TREATMENT--A PREVAILING
CHARACTERISTIC--THE DIVISION INTO NATIVE AND IMITATIVE--THE
INHERITANCE FROM THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY--SPANISH VERSE--THE
“CANCIONEROS”--THE ROMANCES--THE “ROMANCEROS”--THE QUALITY OF THIS
POETRY--SPAIN AND ITALY--THE “DIÁLOGO DE LA LENGUA”--PROSE OF THE
EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY--THE INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION.
[SN: _The unity of Spanish Literature._]
The Literature of Spain, of which the Portuguese is the little
sister, or even at times the echo, stands apart. In this fact lies
the excuse for the division adopted in this volume. There is at first
sight something arbitrary in beginning a survey of Literature of the
later Renaissance with a book written at the close of the fifteenth
century. To carry the story on till the close of the seventeenth may
well appear to be a violation of proportion. The Renaissance even in
Italy was not in its later stages in 1500, and it is far behind us
when we get to the years in which Boileau, Molière, and Racine were
writing in France, while Dryden was the undisputed prince of English
poets and prose-writers. Yet there is good critical reason for making
a wide distinction between the one period of literary greatness of
the Peninsula and those stages in the history of the Literatures of
England, France, or Italy, which belong to the time of the later
Renaissance. It is this--that we cannot, without separating things
which are identical, divide the literature of Spain and Portugal in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The years between the appearance
of the _Shepherd’s Calendar_ and the death of Shakespeare form a period
possessing a character of its own in the history of our poetry, our
prose, and our drama. It is still more emphatically true that French
literature, between the rise of the Pléiade and the death of Mathurin
Regnier, is marked off sharply, both from what had gone before and what
was to follow. But we cannot draw a line anywhere across the Spanish
drama, poetry, or prose story of the great time and say, Here an old
influence ended, here a new one began. We have to deal with the slow
growth, very brief culmination, and sudden extinction of a brilliant
literature, which came late and went early, and which for the short
time that it lasted is one and indivisible. It grew up partly from
native roots, partly under an influence imparted by Italy; attained
its full stature in the early years of the seventeenth century; then
“withered, fell into puerile ravings, and died,” with the close of the
Austrian dynasty.
[SN: _Limits of treatment._]
As, then, the Golden Age of Spain is one, we are justified in taking
it as a whole, even though we appear to violate the harmony of the
arrangement of the series to which this volume belongs. And this
division of the matter imposes an obvious limitation on the treatment
to be adopted. Spanish literature is, in one sense, exceedingly rich.
During the century and a half, or so, of its vigour, it produced a
vast number of books, and the catalogue of its authors is very long.
Don Nicolas Antonio, the industrious compiler of the _Biblioteca
Hispana_, has calculated the number of mystic and ascetic works (of
which some are among the best of Spanish books) at over three thousand.
The fecundity of its theatre is a commonplace; the fluency of its
poets is boundless; the bulk of its prose stories is considerable; its
historians are many, and not a few are good. It is needless to add
that much was written on law, theology, and the arts which has value.
In dealing with all this mass of printed matter in the space at our
disposal, it is clearly necessary to remember the injunction, “il faut
savoir se borner.”
We must, to begin with, leave aside all that is not primarily
literature, except when it can be shown to have influenced that which
is. Again, even in dealing with our proper subject, we must submit to
limits. It is manifestly necessary to omit scores--nay, hundreds--of
minor names. But that is not all. In making a survey of a fertile
literature in a brief space, we are always obliged to go by kinds and
classes rather than by individual writers. But in Spanish literature
this is more especially true.
[SN: _A prevailing characteristic._]
In the course of an introduction to a translation of Shakespeare’s
plays by Señor Clarke, Don Juan Valera (himself the author of stories
both Spanish and good) has made a complaint, which is of the nature
of an unconscious confession. He has lamented that the characters of
Spanish drama are so little known. An artist, so he says, has only
to paint a young man in a picturesque dress on a rope-ladder, with
a beautiful young woman on a balcony above him, and all the world
recognises Romeo and Juliet. If he takes his anecdote from Lope and
Calderon, nobody will be able to guess what it is all about. With less
than his usual good sense, Señor Valera accounts for the obscurity into
which the world has been content to allow the characters and scenes of
the Spanish drama to fall, by the political decadence of his country
at the end of the seventeenth century. Yet the passing away of Spain’s
greatness has not prevented Don Quixote and Sancho from being familiar
to the whole world. If anecdote pictures are to be the test, Cervantes
has no reason to fear the rivalry of the English dramatic poet. There
is less of Spanish pride than of its ugly shadow, Spanish vanity, in
Don Juan Valera’s explanation. The Drama of Spain, brilliant as it was
within its limits, is not universally known, because it does not give
what we find in Cervantes, and in boundless profusion in Shakespeare,
characters true to unchanging human nature, and therefore both true
and interesting to all time. It is mainly a drama of situation, and of
certain stock passions working through personages who are rarely more
than puppets. We may say the same of the prose stories, whether Libros
de Caballerías, or Novelas de Pícaros--Books of Chivalry, or Tales
of Rogues. They all have the same matter and the same stock figures.
They differ only in the degree of dexterity with which the author has
used his material. In the poetry of Spain we see two influences at
work--first, the Italian Renaissance, which ruled the learned poetry
of the school of Garcilaso; and then the native “romance” or ballad
poetry, which held its ground beside the more varied and splendid
metres imitated from abroad. Each of these, within its own bounds, is
very uniform, and the works of each school vary only according to the
writer’s greater or less mastery of what he uses in common with all
others. Such a literature is manifestly best treated by classes and
types. Cervantes, indeed, stands apart. His greatness is not a towering
superiority but a difference of kind. It is as individual as the
greatness of Velasquez in painting.
[SN: _The division into native and imitative._]
These two influences, the foreign and the native, divided Spanish
literature of the Golden Age between them in very different
proportions. To the first is owing the whole body of its learned
poetry, and part of its prose. To the second belong all the “deliveries
of the Spaniard’s self,” as they may be called in a phrase adapted
from Bacon, the prose tale, the ballad, the drama, and the ascetic
works of the so-called mystics. These are the genuine things of Spanish
literature, and in them the Spaniard expressed his own nature. It
was very shrewdly noted by Aarsens van Sommelsdyck, a Hollander who
visited Spain in the later seventeenth century, that however solemn the
Spaniard may be in public, he is easy and jocular enough in private.
He is very susceptible to what is lofty and noble, capable of ecstatic
piety, of a decidedly grandiose loyalty and patriotism, endowed with a
profound sense of his own dignity, which nerves him to bear adversity
well, but which also causes him to be contumaciously impenetrable to
facts when they tell him he must yield or amend his ways. With all
that, and perhaps as a reaction from all that, he can enjoy crude forms
of burlesque, can laugh over hard realistic pictures of the sordid side
of life, and delights in rather cynical judgments of human nature. The
lofty and the low have their representations in his literature, in
forms easily traced back to the middle ages. About the third quarter of
the sixteenth century it might have appeared to a superficial observer
that the native element was overpowered by the foreign. But the triumph
of the “learned” literature was in show, not in reality.
The book already alluded to as marking the starting-point of the Golden
Age is the once famous _Celestina_, a long story in dialogue, of
uncertain authorship and age. It was written at some time between the
conquest of Granada and the end of the fifteenth century. Precision
is in this case of no importance, since the true descendants of the
_Celestina_ were the Picaresque stories. Its first successor was the
_Lazarillo de Tormes_, which, though no doubt written earlier, appeared
in or about 1547. Then at an interval of fifty years came the _Beacon
of Life_--_Atalaya de la Vida_--better known as _Guzman de Alfarache_,
of Mateo Aleman, and from him sprang the great Rogue family. But while
the Picaresque novel was gathering strength, all the more slowly
because it was not an imitation, the classic school of poetry had
blossomed, and was already showing signs of decadence. The drama,
another purely native growth, had risen by degrees alongside the prose
tale, and reached its full development at about the same time. Both are
intrinsically of far greater value than the learned verse. Yet since
their maturity came later, they may be postponed while the story of the
school of Garcilaso is told.
[SN: _The inheritance from the fifteenth century._]
Before entering upon that, it is necessary to say something of the
conditions which the “new poetry” and the influence of the Renaissance
found before them when they began to influence Spain. The fifteenth
century had not been barren of literature. King John II. (1407-1454)
had collected round him a school of Court poets whose chief was Juan
de Mena. Although the last representatives of this school resisted
the innovations of Boscan and Garcilaso as unpatriotic, it was itself
entirely foreign in origin--being, in truth, little more than an echo
of Provençal and early Italian poetry. Juan de Mena, the Prince of
Poets of his time, wrote long allegorical poems in imitation of Dante,
and was perhaps not uninfluenced by the French _rhétoriqueurs_. Indeed
the earlier leaders of the school made no secret of their debt. The
Marquis of Santillana, a contemporary of King John, candidly says, in
a letter to the Constable of Portugal, that he sought the origin of
poetry in the _Gai Saber_ of Provence. The troubadours, when driven
from France, had found refuge in the dominions of Aragon, and had there
given rise to a school of imitators. The connection of Aragon with
Italy was close. Dante found translators, and Petrarch imitators, among
the Catalan poets of Valencia, and from thence their influence spread
to Castile. Juan del Encina, who in 1496 prefixed a brief _Ars Poetica_
to one of those collections of lyric verse called _Cancioneros_,
and who was himself a poet of the Court school, confessed that he
and his brother verse-writers had conveyed largely from the earlier
Italians. Moreover, he made this the main ground of their claim to be
considered poets. It was not till the next century, and until the last
representatives of this school found themselves opposed by the Italian
influence, that they began to claim to be essentially Spanish.
[SN: _Spanish verse._]
What there was of really Spanish in their verse must be allowed to have
been mainly the impoverishment of the original models. The Spaniard has
always been recalcitrant to the shackles imposed by complicated and
artful forms of verse, and there is a natural tendency in him to drift
at all times to his native trochaic assonants of eight syllables.
His language, admirable when properly handled for prose, wants the
variety of melody required for poetry. Impatience of the difficulties
of metre is another name for the want of a due sense of the beauty of
form. Indeed it is not by its form that Spanish literature has been
distinguished. Given, then, a people who had very little faculty for
delicate verse, and a language which wanted both the wealth of the
Italian accent and the flexibility of the French, and it is easy to
see what was likely to be the end of the Provençal and Petrarchian
influence in the Court school. Its poetry, never more than an echo,
sank into mechanical verse-making--mostly in eight-syllabled couplets,
relieved by a broken line of four. The inborn preference of the
Spaniard for loose metres gradually gained the upper hand. No doubt
fine verses may be picked out from the bulk of the writings of the
troubadour school of Castile. The _rhythmus de contemptu mundi_, known
as the _coplas de Manrique_, which has been made known to English
readers by Mr Longfellow, is even noble in its rigid gravity. But
the merit lies not in the melody of the verse, which soon becomes
monotonous. It is in this, that the _coplas_ give us perhaps the finest
expression of one side of the Spaniard. They are full of what he
himself calls in his own untranslatable word _el desengaño_--that is to
say, the melancholy recognition of the hollowness of man’s life, and
“the frailty of all things here”--not in puling self-pity, but in manly
and pious resignation to fate and necessity.
[SN: _The_ Cancioneros.]
This old or troubadour school did not give up the field to the new
Italian influence without a struggle. Its models continued to be
imitated nearly all through the sixteenth century. It was praised
and regretted by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. Boscan and Garcilaso
found an opponent and a critic in Cristobal de Castillejo, a very
fluent verse-writer, a most worthy man, and a loyal servant of the
house of Austria, who died in exile at Vienna in 1556. El buen de
Castillejo--the good Castillejo, as he is commonly called, with
condescending kindness--was an excellent example of the stamp of
critic, more or less common in all times, who judges of poetry
exclusively by his own stop-watch. He condemned Boscan and Garcilaso,
not for writing bad poetry, but for not writing according to what he
considered the orthodox model. The new school not unnaturally retorted
by wholesale condemnation of the old. When Hernan, or Fernan, de
Herrera published his edition of Garcilaso in 1572, he was rebuked for
quoting Juan del Encina in the commentary. A pamphleteer, believed to
have been no less a person than the Admiral of Castile, whose likeness
may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery among the ambassadors who
signed the peace at the beginning of the reign of James I., laughed
at Herrera for quoting as an authority one who had become a name for
a bad poet. This was pedantry as bad as Castillejo’s, and represented
an opinion never generally accepted by the Spaniards. They continued
to read the collections of ancient verse called _Cancioneros_, even
when the new school was at the height of its vigour. The _Cancioneros
Generales_ of Hernan del Castillo, the great storehouse of the poetry
of the fifteenth century, was reprinted, with some changes, no less
than nine times between 1511 and 1573. The extreme rarity of copies of
these numerous editions proves that they must have been well thumbed to
pieces by admiring readers. Yet they constitute no inconsiderable body
of literature. The modern reprint issued (unfortunately only to its own
members) by the Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles is in two weighty
volumes.
[SN: _The romances._]
In this _Cancionero_ there are two elements, destined to very different
fates. Hernan del Castillo included eighteen _romances_ in his
collection, and they reappeared in subsequent editions. The importance
of this word in Spanish literature seems to call for some definition of
its scope. The word “romance” bore originally in Spanish exactly the
same meaning as in other tongues descended from the Latin. It was the
vernacular, and to write _en romance_ was to write Castilian, Galician,
or Catalan. “Ni romance ni romano”--neither Romance nor Roman--is a
phrase bearing more or less the meaning of our “neither rhyme nor
reason.” But little by little, by use and wont, it came about the end
of the sixteenth century to be applied exclusively to the form of
verse dearest and most native to the Spaniard, the already mentioned
trochaic eight-syllable assonant metre. As the ancient ballads are
mainly, though not exclusively, written in this form, they are called
_romances_. Yet to write _romances_ does not necessarily mean to write
ballads, but only to write in that metre, whether in the dialogue of a
play or in long narrative poems, or for any other purpose.
The assonant metre, as is well known, is not peculiar to Spain. It may
well have been imported into Castile from France by those churchmen
to whom the country owes so much of its architecture, what learning
it had, and its civilisation when it began to revive from the merely
martial barbarism produced by the Moorish conquest. But if the Spaniard
did indeed take the assonant metre from his French teachers, he soon
subjected it to that process which all forms of verse are apt to
undergo in his hands. He released it from shackles, and gave it a
freedom amounting to licence. The _romance_ is a loose-flowing rhythm,
in which the rhyme is made by the last accented vowel. Sometimes the
same vowel is used line after line until it is exhausted. More commonly
the assonant comes in alternate lines. As a rule there is no division
into stanzas, but the verse runs on till the speech is ended, or the
tale is told. To this there are, however, exceptions, and the _romance_
is divided into _redondillas_--that is, roundels or staves of four
lines, assonanced either alternately, or the first with the fourth
and the second with the third, or into _quintillas_ of five lines,
with an assonant in three. The recalcitrance of the Spaniard to all
limitations in verse-making has caused him to give a very wide range
indeed to the assonant. The vowel _u_ is allowed to rhyme with _o_,
and _i_ with _e_, though they have a very different sound and force.
The Spaniard, again, allows a diphthong to be assonant to a vowel,
although he pronounces both the vowels in his diphthongs. It will be
seen that such verse as this can be written with extreme facility.
Indeed it is a byword in Spain that nothing is easier than to write
_romances_--badly. The difficulty, in fact, is to avoid writing them
in prose; and it is no small one, when the ear of a people finds a
rhyme in so faint a similarity of sound, and in a language in which
the accent is at once so pronounced and as little varied. It is not,
I trust, superfluous to add that in Castilian, which we call Spanish,
there is a marked accent in the last syllable of words ending in a
consonant, on the penult of words ending in a vowel, while a limited
number of words are _esdrujulo_--that is, accented on the antepenult.
The addition of a syllable to form the plural, or of the adverbial
termination _mente_, does not alter the place of the accent. These
rules, though nowise severe, are not rigidly followed. Not infrequently
the assonant rhyme falls into the full or consonant rhyme, while the
_liesse_ or stave formed on one vowel, and its equivalents, is broken
by a line corresponding to nothing. Even the rule requiring the use of
eight syllables is applied with restrictions,--an accented syllable
at the end counts as two, while two unaccented syllables rank only as
one. It must be acknowledged that this metre is unsatisfactory to an
ear attuned to the melody of English poetry. In our language it renders
hardly a tinkle. When we have become accustomed to it in Castilian--and
until we do it tantalises with a sense of something wanting--its
highest virtue seems to be that it keeps the voice of the speaker in a
chanted recitative. It is more akin to numbered prose than to verse.
However incomplete the _romance_ may seem to us, to the Spaniard it
is dear. When _romances_ were not being well written in Spain, it was
because nothing was being written well. The metre not only held its
ground against the court poetry of the fifteenth century, but prevailed
against the new Italian influence. Here as in other fields the Spaniard
was very tenacious of the things of Spain. To find a parallel to
what happened in Spain we must do more than suppose that the Pléiade
in France, or Spenser and his successors in England, had failed to
overcome the already existing literary schools. It was as if the ballad
metres had won a place even on the stage. No Spanish Sir Philip Sidney
need have apologised for feeling his heart stirred by those ballads of
the _Cid_, or of the _Infantes de Lara_, which answer to our _Chevy
Chase_. They were strenuously collected, and constantly imitated, all
through the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century. [SN: _The_
Romanceros] So far were they from falling into neglect, that they were
first able to shake the slowly withering poetry of the troubadour
school, and then to fill a long series of collections, known, in the
beginning, as _Cancioneros_, or _Libros_, or _Sylvas de Romances_, but
finally as _Romanceros_. Much bibliographical learning and controversy
has collected about these early editions. Even if I could profess
to be competent to speak on such matters, they would have no proper
place here. From the point of view of the literary historian, the
interesting fact is that at a time when classic, or at least new
influences, born of the Renaissance, were carrying all before them in
France and England, and in Italy had long ago definitively conquered,
the Spaniards did not wholly part with their inheritance from the
Middle Ages.
The few ballads, and fragments of ballads, printed by Hernan del
Castillo in 1511, proved so popular that an editor was tempted to form
a special collection. The place and date of this first ballad-book
proper are both significant.[1] It appeared at Antwerp in or about
1546--that is to say, three years or so after the first edition of
the poems of Boscan and Garcilaso. The editor was one Martin Nucio.
Antwerp, be it observed, was always a great publishing place for
Spanish books, a fact which may be accounted for, not only by the
political connection between Spain and the Low Countries, the number of
Spaniards employed there in various capacities, as soldiers, officials,
or traders, and the then extensive use of their language, but also by
the superiority of the Flemish printers. That same carelessness of form
which is found in the Spaniard’s literature followed him in lesser
arts, where neatness of handling was more necessary than spirit and
creative faculty. He was, at any rate in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, rarely a good engraver, and hardly ever a good printer.
The _Cancionero de Romances_, brought out, it may be, primarily for
the pleasure of the Spaniards scattered over Flanders and Germany, was
soon reprinted in Spain, by one Estéban de Najera, at Saragossa. These
contemporary collections are not quite identical, but essentially the
same. This _Cancionero_, or _Sylva, de Romances_ met with a reception
which proved how strong a hold his indigenous verse had on the
Spaniard. Three editions, with corrections and additions, appeared by
1555. The latest of these was not reprinted until well into the next
century. In the meantime other editors had followed Nucio and Najera.
A _Romancero_ in nine parts appeared at places so far distant from
one another as Valencia, Burgos, Toledo, Alcalá, and Madrid, between
1593 and 1597. This again grew into the great _Romancero General_ of
1604-1614, wherein there are a thousand ballads.
[SN: _The quality of this poetry._]
In so far as this great mass of verse is really an inheritance from the
Middle Ages, it does not belong to the subject of this book. All that
it is necessary to do here is to note the fact that it did survive,
and did continue to exert an influence. But nothing is more doubtful
than the antiquity of the vast majority of the _romances_. The best
judges have given up the attempt to class them by age, and indeed that
must needs be a hopeless task where poems have been preserved by oral
tradition alone, and have therefore been subject to modification by
every succeeding generation. The presence of very ancient words is no
proof of antiquity, since they may be put in by an imitator. Neither
is the mention of comparatively recent events, or of such things as
clocks or articles of commerce only known in later times, of itself
proof that the framework of the ballad was not ancient when it took
its final shape. The _Romances_ were collected very much in the style
of the _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, and we all know with what
facility remains of popular poetry are found when there is a demand for
them, when no critical tests are applied, and when the searchers are
endowed with a faculty for verse-writing. The Moorish ballads have been
called old, and yet nothing is more certain than that they were the
fruits of a literary fashion of the later sixteenth century. The Moor,
like the Red Man, became a picturesque figure only when he ceased to
be dangerous. Another class of the ballads, those called of chivalry,
are full of references showing that the writers were acquainted with
Ariosto, and cannot have been written before the middle of the century
at the earliest. Where the _romance_ is identical in subject with,
and very similar in language to, a passage in the great chronicle of
Alfonso the Wise, or other unquestionably mediæval work preserved in
writing of known antiquity, it may be accepted as ancient. Where that
test cannot be applied, it is safer not to think that the ballad is
older than the sixteenth century. In some cases the inspiration can
be shown to have been French. The subject of the _Molinero de Arcos_,
a popular ballad existing in several versions, was taken from a
well-known French farce, _Le Meunier d’Arleux_.
It is very necessary, when judging this great body of verse, to stand
on our guard against certain besetting fallacies. There is always
a marked tendency in collectors to excuse what is grotesque on the
ground that it is ancient, and to pardon what is bad on the ground
that it is popular. The Spanish ballads have suffered from the too
great zeal with which modern editors have reprinted what was accepted
by the indiscriminate taste of first collectors. Many of the ballads
belong to the class of _romances de ciegos_--_i.e._, “blindmen’s
ballads”--which were doggerel at all times. Others are not above the
level of the poets’ corner of not over-exacting newspapers. Even in
the best, the intention and the first inspiration are commonly far
better than the expression. The Spaniard’s slovenliness of form is
found here as elsewhere. Lockhart, in the preface to his adaptations,
has rebuked the Spaniards for “neglecting old and simpler poets,”
who wrote the romances, in favour of authors “who were at the best
ingenious imitators of classical or Italian models.” He has himself,
however, subjected those he selected for translation into English to
a treatment which conveys a severe and a just critical judgment. A
comparison between his ballads and the originals will show that he
occasionally, though very rarely, weakened a forcible phrase. Now and
again there are signs that his knowledge of Spanish was not deep. He
writes, “So spake the brave Montanez,” as if that had been the name of
the Lord of Butrago, whereas _montanes_ (mountaineer) was a common old
Spanish equivalent for noble, a custom due to the belief that the old
Castilian aristocracy drew its “blue blood,” shown by its grey or blue
eyes, from the Visigoths, who held the mountains of Asturias against
the Moors. The Lord of Butrago was a historical personage, and the head
of the house of Mendoza. But if a few faults of this kind can be found,
there are to be set off against them a hundred passages in which he
has suppressed a redundancy or replaced the purely prosaic original by
poetry. A very good test case is to be found in the last verse of the
Wandering Knight’s song--which stands thus in Lockhart:--
“I ride from land to land,
I sail from sea to sea;
Some day more kind I fate may find,
Some night kiss thee.”
What can be more pretty or more fit? but it is not in the _Cancionero
de Romances_, where the words stand:--
“Andando de Sierra en Sierra
Por orillas de la mar,
Por provar si en mi ventura
Ay lugar donde avadar;
Pero por vos, mi señora,
Todo se ha de comportar.”
“Wandering from hills to hills by the shore of the sea, to try whether
my fortune will give me a ford; but for you, my lady, all things are to
be endured,” is the bald literal meaning, which, though it is at least
as old as 1555, and is simple enough, is also, unfortunately, bathos.
And this is very far from being a solitary example. The result is,
that Lockhart’s ballads give an unduly high estimate of the originals
to those who only know the English _rifacimento_. A reader who refuses
to be enslaved by authority will find that he is constantly compelled
to make allowances for the faults which Lockhart was in the fortunate
position of being able to correct--for redundancies, for lines of mere
prose, for vulgarities, for flat, spiritless endings. He will often
feel that he is reading mere repetitions in a popular form, written by
painfully uninspired authors, whose too frequent use of stock literary
phrases shows that they were far from the simplicity attributed to the
ballad-maker. It is true that poetic feeling, and some poetic matter
in the shape of traditional stories, is to be found in the _romances_,
but, as it were, in solution. Nor is it to be denied that it is to
the honour of a people when it clings to a national form of verse,
and to its own traditions. Yet neither good poetic intention nor the
most respectable patriotism will make inferior execution anything but
inferior even in national ballads. It is unquestionably unjust to
find fault with a body of professedly unlearned writers because they
show the defects of men who have not a severe literary training. But
the claim made for the Spanish _romances_ is that they express the
natural feelings of a poetic people with simplicity: it is quite fair
to answer that the great mass of them belong to a time of high literary
cultivation; that they show signs of being the work of its inferior
writers; that, even at their best, their loose metrical form--far
looser as it is than our own ballad stanza--permitted them to be
written by persons who could not have mastered even doggerel rhyme;
and that they are too often wanting in the direct, simple, passionate
expression by which the rudest genuine poet can force his way to the
realm of poetry.
[SN: _Spain and Italy._]
It was a real, but in all probability an inevitable, misfortune
that the best poetic faculty in Spain during the sixteenth century
neglected the native metre, and turned for inspiration “to the sweet
and stately measures of the Italian poesie.” An Italian influence, as
has been already pointed out, was no new thing in Spain, and as the
sixteenth century drew on it was sure to be felt again. Italy, indeed,
was full of Spaniards. They were numerous at the papal Court, and
the wars for Naples brought them in greatly increased numbers. Until
the close of the fifteenth century those who settled in the southern
kingdom were mainly drawn from Aragon. A great change came with the
reign of Ferdinand the Catholic. He claimed Naples by right of his
inherited crown of Aragon, but he fought for it with the forces, and
the arms, of Castile. Isabel was tenacious of her rights as queen
of the greater kingdom, but she was scrupulous in fulfilling her
wifely duty to comfort her husband. She supported him with her own
subjects. After her death he was regent, except for the short period
during which he was displaced by his worthless son-in-law, Philip
the Handsome. Thus the Castilians came more directly in contact with
Italy and Italian civilisation than they had ever done before. They
abounded as soldiers, as diplomatists, lay and ecclesiastical, and
as administrators. Some among them were sure to feel the artistic and
literary influences of that many-sided time. The way was prepared
in Spain by the alliance between the crowns of Castile and Aragon,
which could not give the country administrative unity, but did give
an internal peace. It was a time of expansion and vigour. Isabel had
favoured learning. Her favourite scholar, Antonio de Lebrija--better
known by the Latinised form of his name as Nebrissensis--drew up
a Castilian grammar and dictionary. The language came rapidly to
maturity, and was in fact full grown at the beginning of the sixteenth
century. This speedy maturity, though perhaps not for the good of
the language in the end, was natural. Castilian, in spite of a large
admixture of Arabic words, is so thoroughly Latin that little was
needed to fit it for literary purposes when once the study of classical
models was seriously begun--much as the art of printing came quickly
to perfection because the early typographers had beautifully executed
manuscripts before them as models.
The early sixteenth century in Spain was not barren in prose-writers,
mostly didactic, and also for the most part imitators of the Italians.
Francisco de Villalobos, of whom little is known except that he was
doctor to Ferdinand the Catholic and the Emperor Charles V., and Fernan
Perez de Oliva of Córdova (1492-1530), are the best remembered of
the class. But the _Problems_ of the first, and the treatise on the
_Dignity of Man_ of the second, are mainly notable as examples of the
growing wish to write Castilian for serious purposes.[2]
[SN: _The Spanish tongue._]
But a more interesting proof of the care the Spaniards were giving to
their language is to be found in the _Diálogo de la Lengua_[3]--_Talk
about our Language_, as it may be freely but not inaccurately
translated. [SN: _The_ Diálogo de la Lengua.] This little book appears
to have been written about, and perhaps a little after, 1530, but was
not printed till Mayans included it in his _Origenes de la Lengua
Castillana_ in the last century. There is strong internal evidence to
show that it was the work of one Juan de Váldes, a Spaniard belonging
to the colony settled in Naples, a Castilian by birth, and a member of
the doubtfully orthodox society collected round Vittoria Colonna. Juan
de Váldes himself is included in the short list of Spanish Protestants,
and his heterodoxy accounts for the length of time during which his
work remained in manuscript. He smelt of the fagot, as the French
phrase has it. All who possess even a slight acquaintance with the
literary habits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are aware
that we must not draw from the fact that work remained in manuscript
the deduction that it was little known. The _Diálogo de la Lengua_
was never quite forgotten. It is in itself somewhat disappointing,
being altogether narrower in scope and less ambitious in aim than
Joachim du Bellay’s _Défense et Illustration de la Langue française_,
published in 1549. Much of it is devoted to nice points in the use of
words, while the scholarly, perhaps also the patriotic, leanings of
Váldes led him to assume the untenable position that the few Greek
colonies on the Mediterranean coast of Spain had spread the use of
their language all over the country before it was displaced by the
Latin. But though the _Diálogo_ is not, like the _Défense_, a great
literary manifesto, and though its learning is at times fantastic, it
has some intrinsic interest, and no small value as a piece of evidence.
That exceedingly difficult literary form the dialogue is very fairly
mastered. The four speakers--two Spaniards and two Italians--who take
part in the conversation have a distinct dramatic reality, and the
tone of talk, familiar, occasionally even witty in form, but serious
in substance, is well maintained. The scheme is that three of a party
of four gentlemen who are spending a day at a villa on the Bay of
Naples join in a friendly conspiracy to draw the fourth, whose name,
by the way, is Váldes, into expounding to them, before they take horse
to return to the city, how a cultivated man ought to speak and write
Castilian. The doctrine of Váldes differs significantly from the lesson
enforced by Joachim du Bellay. He does not call upon his countrymen
to go forth to the conquest of the haughty Greeks and Romans. On the
contrary, it is his contention that although the vocabulary requires
refining, and the grammar needs to be better fixed, the language is
already as fit for every purpose of literature as the Italian, or even
as the classic tongues. With the pride of a genuine Spaniard he seeks
his examples in the _refranes_, the proverbs and proverbial phrases.
He makes free use of the collection formed in the fifteenth century
by the Marquess of Santillana, who gathered the traditional sayings
“from the old women sitting round the hearth.” Váldes may be held to
have given evidence in support of his own belief in the maturity of the
language. The Castilian of the _Diálogo_ has very little in it that is
antiquated, and where it differs from the modern tongue it is in being
more terse and manly. His literary doctrine, which is rather indicated
than expounded, would have commended itself to our Queen Anne men. To
be simple and direct, to avoid affectation, to prefer at all times the
natural and straightforward way of saying what you have to say--that
is the advice of Juan de Váldes. Withal, he has no squeamish dislike
of the common, when, as in the case of his beloved proverbs, it is
also pure Spanish. The principles of Váldes might have been fatal to a
stately and embroidered eloquence (of which Castilian has in any case
no great store), but they would preserve a literature from the affected
folly of Góngorism on the one hand, and from the grey uniformity of
general terms, which was the danger incident to the classic literature
of the eighteenth century.
Váldes, who cited Garcilaso with praise, would not have agreed in many
things with Cristobal de Castillejo, but he would have applauded his
saying that Castilian is friendly to a “cierta clara brevedad”--to a
certain lucid brevity. We shall be better able to judge later whether
the recognition of this truth does not lead directly to agreement with
Mr Borrow, when he says that Spanish Literature is not wholly worthy
of the language. [SN: _The prose of the early sixteenth century._]
Lucid brevity is certainly not the quality to be noted in Spanish
prose-writers of what we may call the time of preparation--the earlier
sixteenth century. The quality may indeed be found in an eminent
degree in the writings of Spaniards who were not men of letters--in
the despatches of Cortes, or in the numerous extant narratives of
soldiers or priests who were eyewitnesses of the wars of Italy, of the
sack of Rome, or of the conquest of America. It would be easy to make
an excellent collection of stories of adventure from their letters,
which would show the masculine force and the savoury quality of
Castilian. But these were men of the sword, or churchmen as adventurous
as they--not men of letters who knew by what devious paths the Muses
should be approached. The prose-writers of this epoch as a class need
not detain us in what must be a brief outline portrait of Spanish
literature. There is, however, one exception in Antonio de Guevara,
the Bishop of Mondoñedo (_d._ 1545), who is best known to us as the
author of the once famous _Golden Epistles_, if only for the sake of
the influence he may have had on Lyly.[4] Guevara wants, indeed, the
quaint graceful fancy, and also the oddity of the English writer; but
it is possible that his sententious antithetical style had some share
in producing euphuism. Guevara is also worth notice as an early, though
not the earliest, example of the pretentiousness and the tendency to
wordy platitude which have been so fatal in Spanish literature. He had
knowledge both of books and the world, and some command of sarcasm.
These qualities were, however, swamped in the “flowing and watery vein”
of his prose style. No writer ever carried the seesaw antithetical
manner to a more provoking extent. To make one phrase balance another
appears to have been his chief aim, and in order to achieve this end
he repeated and amplified. In his own time, when whatever was at once
sound as moralising, learned, and professedly too good for the vulgar
was received with respect, Guevara had a wide popularity both in Spain
and abroad. To-day he is almost unreadable, and for a reason which it
is easy to make clear. It is known that La Fontaine took the subject
of the _Paysan du Danube_ from the _Golden Epistles_ indirectly if not
directly. Spaniards may be found to boast that there is nothing in the
fable which is not in their countrymen. This is partly true, but it is
stated in the wrong way. The accurate version is that there is nothing
in Guevara’s prose which is not in La Fontaine’s verse, but that it
is said in several hundred times as many words, and that the meaning
(not in itself considerable) is smothered in tiresome digressions and
amplifications.
[SN: _The influence of the Inquisition._]
A few words, and they need be very few, on the influence of the
Inquisition seem not out of place in a history of any part of Spanish
life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are even to be
justified by the fact that its oppressive influence has been called on
to account for the withering of the national will and intelligence,
which dried up the very sources of literature. The prevalence of
the destructive affectation called Góngorism has been excused by Mr
Ticknor on the ground that men were driven back on mere playing with
words because the Inquisition made thinking dangerous. But we are
met at once by the problem of the Sufi pipkin. It is hard to tell
which is potter and which is pot. Did the Spanish intellect wither
because the Inquisition wrapped it in over-tight swaddling-clothes?
or did the Spaniard first create and then submit to this repressive
institution because he had little tendency to speculation? To judge
by what went before and by what has come after the Inquisition, the
second reading of the riddle is at least as plausible as the first.
However that may be, it is difficult to see how the Inquisition is to
be made responsible for the carelessness of form and the loquacious
commonplace, which are the main defects of Spanish prose and verse,
while it may fairly claim to have helped to preserve Spanish literature
from one grave fault so visible in parts of our own. The Holy Office,
which allowed Lope de Vega to write _La Esclava de su Galan_, would not
have punished him for writing an _As You Like It_. Since it suffered
Cervantes to create _Don Quixote_, it would not have burnt the author
of a _Novela de Pícaros_, who had made his hero as real as Gil Blas.
The Inquisition was no more responsible for the hasty writing of Lope
than for his undue complacence towards the vices of his patron the
Duke of Sessa. A literature which could produce _La Vida es Sueño_,
_El Condenado por Desconfiado_, and the _Mágico Prodigioso_, had all
the freedom necessary to say the profoundest things on man’s passions
and nature in the noblest style. It was his own too great readiness
to say “This will do,” and not the Inquisition, which prevented Tirso
de Molina from making _La Venganza de Tamar_ as perfect in form
all through as it is in one scene. The Church had no quarrel with
perfection of form. It had, indeed, a quarrel with mere grossness
of expression, and would certainly have frowned on many so-called
comic scenes of our own Elizabethan plays. This was a commendable
fastidiousness of taste not peculiar to the Spanish Church. The
Spaniard may not be always moral, but he has seldom been foul-mouthed.
In this, as in other respects, the Church spoke for the nation; but
it was the effective administrative instrument which could coerce an
offending minority into decency--and that we may surely count to it for
righteousness.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The fullest collection of Spanish ballads is that of Duran in the
_Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_; but the best are in the _Rosa de Romances_
of Wolf and Depping, ed. 1844-1846, with notes by Don A. Alcalá Galiano.
[2] For Villalobos see _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, B. xxxvi. There is
a modern edition of Perez de Oliva. Madrid, 1787.
[3] _Origenes de la Lengua Castillana._ Mayans y Siscar. Madrid, ed. of
1873.
[4] The early editions and translations of Guevara are very numerous.
The passages spoken of in the text will be found in _Biblioteca de
Ribadeneyra_, _Obras de Filósofos_.