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.’
[SN: _Pastorals and short stories._]
The mere bulk of the Spanish stories was great, but it is subject to
many deductions before we can disentangle the permanently important
part. Pastorals, for instance, were much written in Spain, and one, the
_Diana_[37] of Jorge de Montemayor (1520?-1561?), is excellent in its
insipid kind. But they were and could be only echoes of Sannazzaro. In
estimating the literature of any nation we can afford to pass over what
it has only taken from a neighbour with a notice that the imitation
was made. The merit of creating the type, be it great or little,
belongs to the original. Even when an imitator is himself widely read,
as was the case with Montemayor, he is but carrying on the work of the
first master. Short stories, again, were popular enough in Spain; but
to a large extent they, too, were imitations. The _Patrañuelo_--‘The
Story-Teller’--of Juan de Timoneda, or the _Cigarrales de Toledo_
of Tirso de Molina, are full of the matter of the _Fabliaux_ and
the Italian _Novelli_.[38] What the Spaniard did which was also a
contribution to the literature of Europe was done neither in the
pastoral nor in the short story, but in the long tale of heroic or
of vulgar adventure. His are the _Libros de Caballerías_--‘Books of
Knightly Deeds’ which are the parents of the true modern romance; and
the _Novelas de Pícaros_, or, ‘Tales of Rogues,’ the counterpart, and
even perhaps a little the burlesque of the first, are the ancestors
of all the line which comes through _Gil Blas_. Then his was _Don
Quixote_, which belongs to no class, but is at once universal and a
thing standing by itself, a burlesque of the _Libros de Caballerías_
which grew into a sadly humorous picture of human delusion, and was
also an expression of the genius of Miguel de Cervantes.
The books of Chivalry, or of Knightly Deeds, which is perhaps the
more accurate translation of the Spanish plural _Caballerías_, like
the Romances, cannot be said to belong to the literature of the
Renaissance. They were a survival of the Middle Ages, the direct
successors of the _Romans d’Aventures_, which had sprung from the
_Chansons de Gestes_.
The Arthurian stories of Lancelot and of Merlin were known to the
Spaniards, and had an enduring popularity by the side of their own
Tales of Chivalry. There is even one book belonging in essential to the
school which certainly preceded the _Amadis_. This is the Valencian
_Tirant lo Blanch_, written in Catalan, of which the first three books
are the work of Juan Martorell, and the fourth was added by Mosen
Juan de Galbá, at the request of a lady, Isabel de Loriz. It was
printed in Valencia in 1490, was translated into Spanish, though with
suppressions, and had the rather curious fortune to be published in a
French version in 1737 by a gentleman whose own name was not unworthy
of a _Libro de Caballerías_, A. C. P. Tubières de Grimoard de Pestels
de Levi, Count of Caylus.
Here it is, perhaps, but fair to warn the reader of the extreme
difficulty of making more than a slight acquaintance with these once
widely read tales. Popularity and neglect have alike been fatal to
them. They were thumbed to pieces while they were liked, and thrown
aside as worthless when the fashion had changed. Single copies alone
remain of some, as, for instance, the curious ‘Don Florindo, he of
the Strange Adventure,’ of which Don Pascual de Gayangos gives a long
analysis. Even Don Pascual had never seen the Spanish original of the
once renowned _Palmerin of England_. Southey was compelled to make
up his _Palmerin_ by correcting Anthony Munday’s translation from a
French version. Surviving copies are scattered in the public libraries,
and it is probable that nobody has seen them all. So we must speak
with a certain reserve concerning them, but yet with a tolerably
well-founded conviction that what one has not seen does not differ in
material respects from what has come in one’s way.
[SN: _The_ Libros de Caballerías.]
It is not the matter of these tales, but the spirit, which attaches
them to the Middle Ages. Knights and damsels errant, dwarfs, dragons,
giants, and enchanters were not neglected by the poets of the Italian
Renaissance, but they were dealt with in gaiety, and more than half in
mockery. But the _Libros de Caballerías_ are very serious. Chivalry
was not to their authors an old dream, but a still living standard of
conduct, and they carried on the tradition of the Middle Ages with
absolute sincerity.
[SN: _The_ Amadis of Gaul.]
When the _Libros de Caballerías_ are described as the direct
descendants of the _Romans d’Aventures_, it must be understood that
this does not imply that the actual story had its origin out of Spain.
We cannot say stories, because there is in reality only one, which
was constantly rewritten, with changes which in the majority of cases
hardly go beyond the names. There is one parent story closely imitated
by the others, and that is the _Amadis of Gaul_.[39] The honour of
the first invention has been claimed by the French, on the general
ground that their influence in Spain and Portugal was great, and
that therefore they must not only have carried the taste for tales
of chivalrous adventure beyond the Pyrenees, but have created all
the stories and personages. But the French Amadis has been lost, and
though that may be his only defect, it suffices to leave us entitled
to doubt whether he ever existed, except in the patriotic French
literary imagination. What is certain is that Amadis was a popular
hero of romance with the Castilians and Portuguese before the end of
the fourteenth century. It also appears to be put beyond doubt that
a version of the story was written by Vasco de Lobeira, a Portuguese
gentleman who died in 1403. Whether it was the first, or was a version
of a Castilian original, or whether the French, who were then very
numerous both in Castile and Portugal, and had an undeniable influence
on the poetry of both countries, and more especially of the second,
did not at least inspire Vasco de Lobeira, are questions which can be
debated for ever by national vanity, without settlement. The _Amadis
of Gaul_, which belongs to literature, and not to the inane region of
suppositions, disputes, and lost manuscripts, is the work of Garcia
Ordoñez de Montalvo, of Medina del Campo in Leon. It was announced
as an adaptation from the Portuguese. As the manuscript of Vasco de
Lobeira was lost in the destruction of the Duke of Arveiro’s library in
the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, we cannot tell how far Montalvo
followed, or improved upon, or did not improve upon, his original.
Indeed, in the absence of a Portuguese manuscript, it is impossible
to be sure that the Spanish author did not adopt the common device of
presenting his work as a translation, when in fact it was wholly his
own. It is certainly strange, considering the immense popularity of the
_Amadis of Gaul_ all over Europe, that the Portuguese did not vindicate
their right to him by publishing Vasco de Lobeira, since the manuscript
was known to exist, and to be accessible in the library of a great
noble.
Be all that as it may, we are on firm ground when we come to the proved
facts concerning the actual writing of the Spanish _Amadis_. It belongs
to the years between 1492 and 1504. The first known edition, that of
Rome, is dated 1519; but it is unlikely, though not impossible, that
there had not been a Spanish predecessor. There is a known edition of
the first of the rival _Palmerin_ series, which is dated 1511. What is
beyond doubt is that its popularity was immediate and widespread. Spain
produced twelve editions in fifty years. It was translated in French
and Italian with immense acceptance. One of the best known stories of
lost labour and disappointment in literature is that Bernardo Tasso,
the father of Torquato, founded a considerable reputation on the fact
that he had undertaken to make the _Amadis_ the foundation of an epic,
which reputation endured until the appearance of the poem.
As if in direct imitation of the mediæval custom, Amadis was made the
founder of a family. Montalvo gave the world the deeds of his son
Esplandian in 1526, and from another hand came in the same year his
nephew, Florisando, and then a long line, reaching to the twelfth
book. The succession in France was even longer, for it reached the
twenty-fourth. Beside the house of Amadis, there arose and flourished
the distinguished family known as the Palmerines. The first two of
this series, the _Primaleon_ and the _Palmerin de Oliva_, are said to
have been the work of a lady of “Augustobriga, a town in Portugal.”
But her name and very existence are uncertain, while neither of the
places called Augustobriga in the time of the Roman dominion in the
Peninsula is in Portugal. The most famous of this line, the _Palmerin
of England_, was for long attributed to a Portuguese, Francisco de
Moraes, who after a rather distinguished public career was murdered
at Evora in 1572; but it was probably the work of a Spaniard, Luis
Hurtado of Toledo. It was the confusing habit of the authors of these
tales to call them the fifth, or sixth, or other, “book” of _Amadis_,
or of _Primaleon_. Sometimes rival fifths or sixths appeared, and
translators did not follow the Spanish numeration. Hence much trouble
to the faithful historian. Yet the family history can be followed with
tolerable accuracy. Don Pascual de Gayangos has been at the pains to
make a regular pedigree for both, showing the main lines and collateral
branches. It is a satisfaction to be able to state with confidence
that the lady Flérida, daughter of Palmerin de Oliva, married Don
Duardos (Edward), son of Frederick, King of England, and of a sister
of Melèadus, King of Scotland, and that Palmerin of England was their
son. He again married Polinarda, and was the father of Don Duardos
de Bretaña II., who was the father of Don Clarisel. The _Palmerin_
series, by the way, is much less rich than the _Amadis_ in those
superb names which are not the least of the pleasures of the Tales
of Chivalry. It rarely rises to the height of Cadragante, or Manete
the Measured, or Angriote de Estravaus, and never to the level of the
Queen Pintiquinestra, or the Giant Famongomadan, whom Cervantes had
in his mind when he imagined Brandabarbaran de Boliche. The stories
independent of these two series are numerous, though less numerous
than the reader who has not looked into the matter may suppose. Their
names--and that is all which survives of some--will be found in their
proper places in the lists of Don Pascual de Gayangos.
It will be seen that much of this work is either anonymous, or is
attributed on vague evidence to authors of whom the name only is known.
The chief exception is the Feliciano de Silva at whose style Cervantes
laughed. It happens that something is known of Feliciano, and that it
is to his honour. He was page to the sixth Duke of Medina Sidonia, and
he saved the Duchess from being drowned in the Guadalquivir at the risk
of his own life; which, it will be allowed, was an action not unworthy
of the author of _Libros de Caballerías_. He wrote the _Lisuarte de
Grecia_, the _Amadis de Grecia_, and several others, including the
_Florisel de Niquea_. Feliciano was an industrious man of letters,
who would have been a useful collaborator with, and fairly successful
imitator of, Dumas, had time and chance suited. He adulterated his
tales of knightly deeds by imitations of the pastoral model, and his
style certainly laid him open to the ridicule of Cervantes. Yet it is
not more pompous and mechanical than our own Lyly, and is better than
the manner of some of the _Novelas de Pícaros_.
[SN: _Influence and character of these Tales._]
None of the commonplaces in the history of literature are better
established than these: that the _Libros de Caballerías_ were tiresome
and absurd; that they appeared in immense numbers, and flooded out all
better and more wholesome reading; and that they were killed by _Don
Quixote_. Yet there are probably not three worse founded commonplaces.
That these books can be tedious, and that the worst of them can be
very tedious, is true. But none are more long-winded than the _Golden
Epistles_, which had an equally great popularity, or than some
well-accepted reading of any generation is apt to look to later times,
when fashion has changed. They were certainly neither more tiresome nor
more essentially absurd than the _Novela de Pícaros_. Their number was
not very great. The whole body is not nearly as numerous as the yearly
output of novels to-day in England; and even when their inordinate
length is allowed for, their total bulk is not greater, though they
were written during a century. As for their supposed predominance, it
must be remembered that the great time of the _Libros de Caballerías_
was also the time of the “learned poetry” of Spain, of the growth of
the drama, of most of the _romances_, and of some of the best work of
the historians and the mystic writers. That _Don Quixote_ destroyed
them may seem to be a truth too firmly established to be shaken, and
yet the contrary proposition, that it was the waning popularity of the
Tales of Knightly Deeds which made _Don Quixote_ possible, is on the
whole more consistent with fact. They had been less and less written
for a generation before Cervantes produced his famous First Part. The
_Novela de Pícaros_ was taking their place. Readers were predisposed to
find them laughable, and therefore enjoyed the burlesque. Cervantes’
own half-humorous boast has been taken too seriously. The ridicule
of the _Libros de Caballerías_ is the least valuable part of _Don
Quixote_, and is not in itself better than much satire which has yet
failed to destroy things more deserving of destruction than the family
of _Amadis_.
Neither the popularity nor the decline of the _Libros de Caballerías_
was in the least unintelligible. These books supplied the Spaniards
with stories of fighting and adventure in a fighting adventurous time,
when the taste for reading, or at least hearing others read, was
spreading, and when the theatre--the only possible rival--was still
in its feeble beginnings. And what they gave was not only suited to
the time but not inferior to what came after. The English reader who
wishes to put it to the test has an easy way open to him. Let him take
the adaptations which Southey made of _Amadis of Gaul_, or _Palmerin
of England_, and compare them, not with Sir Walter Scott, who showed
what a great genius could do with a motive not unlike that of the
_Libros de Caballerías_; not with _Gil Blas_, which shows what genius
could do with the machinery of the _Novela de Pícaros_; not with _Don
Quixote_, which is for all time,--but with an English version of the
_Guzman de Alfarache_, the book which first firmly established the
_gusto picaresco_ at the very close of the sixteenth century. He will
find much repetition (though Southey, who made one or two notable
additions, has suppressed largely) in both, but in the _Guzman_ it is
endless sordid roguery, in which there is no general human truth, and
in place of it a mechanical exaggeration of a temporary form of Spanish
vagabondage, while in the _Amadis_ or _Palmerin_ it is something not
unlike the noble fancies of the Arthurian legend.
[SN: _The real cause of their decline._]
The decline of the _Libros de Caballerías_ is easily accounted for.
They ended by wearying the world with monotony, and the increasing
extravagance of incident and language, which was their one resource
for avoiding monotony. The Spaniard’s tendency to repeat stock types
in the same kind of action was visible here as elsewhere. The _Amadis_
gave the pattern, and it was followed. A hero who is the son of a king,
and is also a model of knightly prowess and virtues, with a brother in
arms who, while no less valiant, is decidedly less virtuous, are the
chief figures. Amadis, the Beltenebros--the lovely dark man--is the
pink of loyalty to his peerless Oriana, who is the fairest and most
loving of women. Galaor is gay and volatile, light of love, but loyal
in friendship. Amadis is born out of wedlock, and left to fortune by
his mother, or for some other reason brought up far away from the
throne which is lawfully his, and fights his way to his crown without
ever failing for an instant in his devotion to Oriana. Galaor helps
him, and loves what ladies he meets on the road. Amadis breathes out
his mistress’s name as he lays his lance in rest, Galaor throws a
defiant jest in front of him; Amadis has the gift of tears, but Galaor
laughs in the jaws of death, laughs in fact at everything except the
honour of a gentleman--and on that he smiles. It is a brotherhood
between Sir Charles Grandison and Mercutio. Combats, giants, fairy
ladies, enchanters good and bad, make up the matter of the story. If
it is essentially unwholesome, so is the Round Table legend; and if it
is necessarily absurd, so is the _Faërie Queen_. But when it had been
done once in _Amadis_, and for a second time in _Palmerin_, it was
done for good. To take the machinery of the _Libros de Caballerías_,
and put a new spirit into it, which, as Cervantes saw, was possible,
was not given to any Spaniard. All they could do was to repeat, and
then endeavour to hide the repetition by multiplying everything on a
fixed scale. The giants grew bigger, the sword-cuts more terrific,
the combats more numerous, the monsters more hideous, the exalted
sentiments swelled till they were less credible than the giants. The
fine Castilian of Garcia Ordoñez was tortured into the absurdities
which bad writers think to be style. The _Libros de Caballerías_, which
had been a natural survival, and revival, of the Middle Ages in the
early sixteenth century, were unnatural at its close. _Don Quixote_
did but hasten their end. They would have perished in any case before
the _Novelas de Pícaros_, which in turn ran much the same course, and
were extinguished without the intervention of satire. That the taste
of the time was tending away from the higher forms of romance is shown
by the little following found for the _Civil Wars of Granada_ by Ginés
Perez de Hita, of whom little or nothing is known.[40] This book, of
which the first part was published in 1598 and the second in 1604, is
the original source of all the stories of the Zegries and Abencerrages.
It gave the Spaniards a model for the historical novel proper, but
though it was popular at the time--so popular that it was taken for
real history--Perez de Hita founded no school. The Spanish character
was becoming too impoverished for a large and poetic romance. What
imagination there was, was becoming concentrated in the theatre before
withering entirely.
[SN: _Character of the_ Novelas de Pícaros.]
The fate of the _Novelas de Pícaros_ is one of the most curious in
literature. But for them, and their popularity outside of Spain, there
could not well have been any Gil Blas, and without him the history of
modern prose fiction must have been very different. Yet apart from
the example they set, and the machinery they supplied, their worth
is small. We find in them the same monotony of type and incident as
in the _comedia_ and the _Libros de Caballerías_, while they have
neither the fine theatrical qualities of the first (which was, we may
allow, inevitable) nor the manly spirit of the second. Poetry, heroic
sentiment, or deep religious feeling we could not expect from what only
professed to deal with the common and animal side of life. But they do
not give what might have compensated for these things, average sensual
human nature, acting credibly and drawn with humour. Their fun--and
they strained at jocularity--is of the kind which delights to pull
the chair from below you when you are about to sit down, and laughs
consumedly at your bruises. To make the jest complete you must be old,
ugly, sickly, and very poor. There is no laugh in the _Novelas de
Pícaros_, only at their best a loud hard guffaw, and when they do not
rise to that, a perpetual forced giggle. Truth to life is as far from
them as from the _Libros de Caballerías_, but the two are on opposite
sides. In mere tediousness they equal the heroic absurdity, for--and
this is not their least offensive feature--they are obtrusively
didactic. The larger half of the _Guzman de Alfarache_ is composed of
preachment of an incredibly platitudinous order. Boredom for boredom,
the endless combats of the knight-errant are better. And withal we find
the same childish effort to attain originality by mere exaggeration.
The _Lazarillo de Tormés_ forces the tone of the _Celestina_, _Guzman
de Alfarache_ advances, more particularly in bulk, beyond _Lazarillo_,
_Marcos de Obregon_ improves on _Guzman_, and so it goes on to the
grinning and sardonic brutality of Quevedo’s _Pablo de Segovia_ and the
jerking capers of _Don Gregorio Guadaña_. This last is the work of an
exiled Spanish Jew, Enriquez Gomez (_f._ 1638-1660). Imagine Villon’s
_Ballade des Pendus_ without the verse, without the pathos, spun out in
prose, growing ever more affected through endless repetitions of sordid
incident, and you have the _Novela de Pícaros_.[41]
[SN: _The_ Celestina.]
Yet they started from what might well have been the beginning of
better. The _Celestina_ had a certain truth to life in its really
valuable parts, and it did not strive to amuse with mere callous
practical joking.[42] This curious dialogue story was written
perhaps before, or it may be about, the time of the conquest of
Granada--1492--and both the identity of its author and its date of
publication are obscure. It is divided into twenty-one so-called acts,
of which the first is very long and the others are very short. Fernando
Rojas of Montalvan, by whom it was published, says that the first act
was the work of Rodrigo Cota of Toledo, a Jew, the known author of
some tolerable verses in the style of the Court school; and that he
himself finished it at the request of friends. This account has been
disputed by the criticism which delights in disputing the attribution
of everything to everybody. It is neither supported by internal, nor
contradicted by external, evidence. The literary importance of the
tale is not affected by it in the least. There are two elements in the
_Celestina_. It contains a love-story of the headlong southern order,
sudden and violent in action, inflated, and frequently insufferably
pedantic in expression, withal somewhat commonplace. With this, and
subservient to this, there is a background, a subordinate, busy,
scheming world of procuresses, prostitutes, dishonest servants,
male and female, and bullies, which is amazingly vivid. Celestina,
whose name has replaced the pompous original title of the story,
_Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibœa_, is the ancestress of the two
characters of similar trade in _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_. She had many
forerunners in mediæval literature, in and out of Spain. But she has
never been surpassed in vividness of portraiture, while her household
of loose women and bullies, with their intrigues and jealousies, their
hangers-on, and their arts of temptation, is drawn with no less truth
than gusto. The quality of their talk is admirable, and the personages
are not described from the outside, or presented to us as puppet types,
but allowed to manifest themselves, and to grow, with a convincing
reality rare indeed in Spanish literature.
Though the popularity of the _Celestina_, not only in Spain but
abroad, was great, it did not produce any marked effect on Spanish
literature until a generation had passed. It was adapted on the stage,
but there it left few traces except on the racy dialogue of the prose
_entremeses_. The poetic form of the Spanish comedy did not, and even
perhaps could not, adapt itself to the alert naturalistic tone of the
_Celestina_, and the subjects of the plays grew ever more romantic
and more remote from the vulgar world. But this answered too well
to a natural taste of the Spaniards to remain without a following.
[SN: _The_ Lazarillo de Tormés.] Its first real successor (apart
from _rifacimentos_ or mere echoes, of which there were several) was
the _Vida de Lazarillo de Tormés; sus Fortunas y Adversidades_,[43]
attributed on very dubious evidence to the famous Diego Hurtado de
Mendoza, and with not much greater probability to Fray Juan de Ortega,
of the Order of St. Jerome. The date of its composition is uncertain.
The first known edition is of 1553, but it may have been read in
manuscript before that. In the _Lazarillo_ we have the _Novela de
Pícaros_ already complete, differing only from those which were to
come after in the greater simplicity of its style and in freshness.
The hero is a poor boy of Tormés, in the neighbourhood of Salamanca,
none too honest by nature, and made perfectly unscrupulous by a life
of dependence on harsh, or poverty-stricken, masters. The story tells
how he passes from one service to another, generally after playing some
more or less ferocious trick on his employer. It is a scheme which
affords a good opening for satirical sketches of life, and the author,
whoever he was, clearly adopted it for that among other reasons.
Lazarillo’s master, the poor cavalier who keeps up a show of living
like a gentleman while in fact he is starving at home--too proud either
to work or beg, but not too proud to cherish schemes of entrapping a
wife with a dowry, and not spirited enough to serve as a soldier--was
no doubt a familiar figure in Spain, and he became a stock puppet of
the _Novelas de gusto Pícaresco_. Another scene of real, though not
peculiarly Spanish, satire deals with a dishonest seller of pardons and
his sham miracles. The Reformation had imposed limits on the freedom
of orthodox writers to deal with the sins, or even absurdities, of
churchmen, and this passage was suppressed, as of bad example, by the
Inquisition. The majority of the figures are, however, less satirical
than grotesque. We find in the _Lazarillo_, though not to the extent
which afterwards become common, the love of dwelling on starvation,
poverty, and physical infirmities as if they were things amusing
in themselves. But this is less the case than in its successors,
and being nearly the first, or even the actual first, in the fully
developed form, it has a certain freshness. It has the merit of being
short, and leaves its hero dishonourably married, with a promise of a
continuation, which was never written by the author.
[SN: _Guzman de Alfarache._]
Putting aside spurious “second parts” of the _Lazarillo_, the next
event in the advance--we cannot say the development--of the _Novela
de Pícaros_ is the publication of the _Guzman de Alfarache_ of Mateo
Aleman, a Sevillian of whose birth, life, and death nothing certain
is known. This book, appearing just as the _Libros de Caballerías_
were dying of exhaustion, set the example to a swarm of followers. Yet
it was itself but an imitation of _Lazarillo_, greatly enlarged, and
over-burdened with what Le Sage, who translated it, most justly called
“superfluous moral reflections.” The second title of the book, _La
Atalaya de la Vida_--‘The Beacon of Life’ indicates Aleman’s didactic
intention, which even without it is obtrusive. But a beacon of life, to
be other than a useless blaze, must be set to warn us off real dangers
in real life: it must flame with satire on possible human errors. The
satire of Aleman is akin to Marston’s, and Marston’s many followers
among ourselves,--it is a loud bullying shout at mere basenesses made
incredible by being abstracted from average human nature, and kneaded
into dummies. Celestina, besides being an impudent, greedy servant of
vice, is also a woman with humour and an amusing tongue. Her household
are the scum of the earth, but they are human scum, with a capacity
for enjoying themselves as men and women without dragging their humour
of vice in, when no cause sets it in motion. They can laugh and cry,
like and dislike, as other human beings do. But the personages of Mateo
Aleman are grinning puppets, galvanised to imitate the gestures of
greed, cowardice, mendacity, and cruelty, abstracted from humanity.
Then, they are set to play a wild fantasia _in vacuo_. What is true of
Mateo Aleman applies equally to his followers.
[SN: _Followers of Mateo Aleman._]
A brief outline must suffice for his successors. A spurious second
part of _Guzman de Alfarache_ was published in 1603, written, as it
would seem by one Marti, a Valencian, who assumed the noble name of
Luxan. This, by the way, is one proof among many that the _Libros de
Caballerías_ were not the prevailing taste of readers when Cervantes
published his first part of _Don Quixote_ in 1605, or else it would
have suggested itself to nobody to trade on the popularity of _Guzman_.
In 1605 Aleman wrote a second part, in which he victimises the
plagiarist in a fashion afterwards followed by Cervantes when provoked
in the same fashion. In the same year came out the _Pícara Justina_ of
Andreas Perez, a Dominican who wrote under the name of Francisco Lopez
de Ubeda, with a she rogue as heroine, with exactly the same spirit and
machinery, and an identical didactic purpose, but written in a tortured
style. Vicente Espinel (?1551-?1630), who was otherwise notable for
adding the fifth string to the guitar and as a verse-writer, published
_El Escudero_ (_i.e._, Squire) _Marcos de Obregon_ in 1618. This
squire is of the class of the Biscayan whom Don Quixote overthrew, an
elderly man who waited on ladies--the forerunner of the footman with
the gold-headed stick, familiar to ourselves till very recent times.
He has led the usual life. The _Marcos de Obregon_ had the honour of
contributing a few incidents to Le Sage. The soul of Pedro Garcia is
not taken from the introduction, but put in place of what Espinel had
written. In the Spanish story two students find a tombstone on which
are written the words “Unio, unio,” a pun on pearl and union. One sees
nothing in the riddle, and goes on. The other digs and finds--the
skeletons of the lovers of Antequera, who threw themselves together
from a precipice to escape capture by the Moors. Here we see what Le
Sage did with the framework supplied him by the Spaniards. He took what
was only Spanish, and made it universal. We can all laugh over the bag
of coin which was the soul of Pedro Garcia, but who understands the
story of the Spanish lovers without a commentary? After _Marcos de
Obregon_ there follow mainly repetitions.
[SN: _Quevedo._]
An exception must, however, be made for the _Gran Tacaño_--‘The Great
Sharper,’ Paul of Segovia, by Quevedo.[44] Don Francisco Gomez de
Quevedo y Villegas, Señor de la Torre de Juan Abad (1580-1645), was
a very typical Spaniard of those who came from “the mountain,” and
lived an agitated life in the Spain of the seventeenth century. He
served under the once famous Duke of Osuna, viceroy of Sicily and
Naples, was implicated in the mysterious conspiracy against Venice,
and finally suffered from the hostility of the Count Duke of Olivares.
In literature he is still the shadow of a great name as poet, scholar,
and satirist. Among his countrymen his memory is still popular as the
hero of innumerable stories of much the same kind as those told in
Scotland of Buchanan, and in France of Rabelais. For his sake _Pablo
de Segovia_ may be mentioned, and also because it is the _Novela
de Pícaros_ as the Spaniards wrote it, stripped of the last rag of
whatever could disguise its essential hard brutality. If you can gloat
over starvation--if the hangman expatiating joyfully over halters and
lashes seems a pleasant spectacle to you--if blows, falls, disease,
hunger, dirt, and every form of suffering, told with a loud callous
laugh, and utterly unrelieved, seem to you worth reading about, then
_Pablo de Segovia_ is much at your service. But Quevedo did other than
this. Some of his satiric verse has life, and if not gaiety, still a
species of bitter jocularity; and moreover, he gave a new employment
to the _gusto picaresco_ in his _Visions_. These once world-renowned
satires are composed of such matter as the vices of lawyers, doctors,
police-officers, unfaithful wives, complacent husbands, &c. To those
who wish to master the Castilian language in all its resources they are
invaluable, and it is in itself so fine that we can endure much to gain
access to its treasures. But it is possible to gain a quite accurate
understanding of Quevedo by reading the translation and amplification
of his _Visions_ by our own Sir Roger L’Estrange. Then, just in order
to see where this spirit and this method lead, it is not a waste of
time to go on to Ned Ward. There was something very congenial to
the Restoration in the Spanish _gusto picaresco_, and that is its
sufficient condemnation. Yet it did supply Le Sage with what he might
not have been able to elaborate for himself, and thereby it contributed
to the gaiety and the wisdom of nations.
[SN: _Cervantes._]
That the name of Miguel de Cervantes towers above all others in Spanish
literature is a commonplace. Montesquieu’s jest, that Spain has
produced but one good book, which was written to prove the absurdity
of all the others, is only the flippant statement of the truth that
the one Spanish book which the world has taken to itself is _Don
Quixote_. What else the Spaniards have done in literature may have
its own beauty and interest. It may even have affected the literature
of other nations. The Spanish drama did something to form the purely
theatrical skill of the playwright, and the _Novela de Pícaros_ gave a
framework for the prose story of common life. Yet the plays of Lope or
of Calderon, the tales of Aleman, Espinel, and others, are essentially
Spanish, and Spanish of one time. It is only in touches here and there
that we find in them, behind their native vesture, any touch of what
is human and universal. Even when they dealt with what was common to
them with other peoples, the emotions of piety and devotion, they gave
them their own colour, their own purely Spanish flavour. There is no
_Imitation of Christ_, no _Pilgrim’s Progress_, in their religious
writing. But _Don Quixote_ is so little purely Spanish that its
influence has been mainly felt abroad, that it has been, and is, loved
by many who have neither heard nor wish to hear of the literature lying
round it.
[SN: _His life._]
The life of Cervantes has been made so familiar that the details need
only be briefly mentioned here.[45] It is within the knowledge of all
who take any interest in him at all that he was by descent a gentleman
of an ancient house. His own branch of it had become poor. He was
born, probably on some day in October 1547, at Alcalá de Henares,
a town lying to the east of Madrid, and the seat of the university
founded by Cardinal Jimenez. It does not appear that Cervantes ever
attended the university, or received more than the trifling schooling
which fell to the lot of Shakespeare also. _Mar, Iglesia, y casa de
rey_--the sea (_i.e._, adventure in America), the Church, and the
king’s service--were the three careers open to a gentleman at a time
when trade, medicine, and even the law, were plebeian. Cervantes
began life in the household of a great Italian ecclesiastic, Cardinal
Acquaviva, in one of those positions of domestic service about men of
high position which were then, in all countries, filled by gentlemen
of small or no fortune. From 1571 to 1575 he served as a soldier under
Don John of Austria, and received that wound in the left hand at the
battle of Lepanto in which he took a noble pride. From 1575 to 1580 he
was a prisoner in Algiers. After his release in 1580 till his death
in 1616--for thirty-six long years full of misfortune--he led the
struggling life of a Spanish gentleman who had no fortune, no interest,
no command of the arts which ingratiate a dependent with a superior.
At the very end he may have enjoyed some measure of comparative ease,
but few men of letters have been poorer. Most men of his class were
no richer than himself,--for Spain was a very poor country, and mere
poverty was deprived of its worst sting when men ranked by birth and
not by their possessions. No want of means could cause a noble to
be other than the social superior of the merely rich man, while the
Church had been only too successful in investing poverty with a certain
sanctity. Yet though there were alleviations, the lot of Cervantes was
a hard one, embittered by disappointments and imprisonments, which
seem to have been chiefly due to the clumsy brutality of the Spanish
judicial system. All this he bore with that dignity in misfortune which
is one of the finest features in the character of the Spaniard, and
with a cheerful courage all his own. Everything known of his life shows
that he possessed two of the finest qualities which can support a man
in a life of hardship--pride and a sweet temper.
[SN: _His work._]
The written work of Cervantes is divided in a way not unexampled in
literature, but nowhere seen to the same extent except in the case of
Prevost, a far smaller, but a real, genius. If he had left nothing but
_Don Quixote_, his place in literature would be what it is. If he had
not written his one masterpiece, he would have passed unnoticed; and
there would have been no reason why he should have been remembered,
unless it were with Bermudez and Virues, as one of the forerunners of
Lope who made vague, ill-directed experiments in the childhood of
Spanish dramatic literature. Even the _Novelas Ejemplares_, though
they possess a greater measure of his qualities than any part of his
literary inheritance, other than _Don Quixote_ and his _entremeses_,
are mainly interesting because they are his. Other Spaniards did
such things as well as he, or better, but none have approached _Don
Quixote_. The difference is not in degree, it is in kind.
[SN: _The minor things._]
We may, then, pass rapidly over the minor things. It is to be noted
that his natural inclination was not towards letters, but to arms.
When a mere boy he did, indeed, write some verses on the death of
Isabelle of Valois, the wife of Philip II., but they were school
exercises written at the instigation of his master, Juan Lopez de
Hoyos, and published by him. Like Sir Walter Scott, he believed in the
greater nobility of the life of action, and more particularly in the
superiority of the “noble profession of arms.” If he could have had
his choice it would have been to serve the king, and more especially
to serve him in the reconquest of Northern Africa from the Mahometans.
He was driven to write by mere necessity, and the want of what he
would fain have had. During his captivity in Algiers he made plays for
the amusement of his fellow-prisoners. After his release, when he was
again employed as a soldier in the conquest of Portugal, in 1580 he
wrote his unfinished pastoral, the _Galatea_. He was married in 1584,
and established in Madrid. At this period he wrote many plays, now
lost, and two which have survived. The _Trato de Argel_, or ‘Life in
Algiers,’ has some biographical interest, and some general value as
a picture of the pirate stronghold, but is valuable on these grounds
only. The _Numancia_ belongs to the class of works describable in the
good sense as curious. It is a long dialogued poem divided into scenes
and acts, on the siege of Numantia by Scipio, and is not without a
certain grandiose force. As a play it shows that the Spanish drama
had not found its way, and that Cervantes was not to be its guide. It
struggles between imitation of the mystery, vague efforts to follow
an ill-understood classic model, and attempt to strike a new and
native path which the author could nowhere find. Then comes a long
interval, during which Lope was sweeping all rivals from the stage, and
Cervantes, in his own phrase, was buried “in the silence of oblivion.”
He was struggling for mere subsistence, working as a clerk under the
Commissary of the Indian fleet, collecting rents for the Knights of
St John, and finally, as it would seem, supporting himself, his wife,
a natural daughter born to him in Portugal before his marriage, and a
sister, by the trade of _escribiente_ at Valladolid. The _escribiente_,
still a recognised workman in Spain, writes letters for those who
cannot write for themselves.
He never quite lost his connection with literature. A few commendatory
verses in the books of friends, and other slight traces, remain to show
that in the intervals of the work by which he lived he endeavoured to
keep a place among the poets and dramatists of the time. During these
years he wrote the first part of _Don Quixote_. It appeared in 1605,
but, according to the usual practice, had been shown to friends in
manuscript. His last years were spent in Madrid. How he lived must
remain a mystery. The _Don Quixote_ was popular, but copyrights were
then not lucrative, even if they could be said to exist. He again
tried the stage, and was again unsuccessful. In 1613 he published the
_Novelas Ejemplares_, a collection of short stories, partly on the
picaresque, partly on an Italian, model. During the following year he
brought out the _Voyage to Parnassus_, a verse review of the poets of
his time, a common form of literary exercise, and not a good specimen
of its kind. In 1614 he was provoked by the false second part of _Don
Quixote_. This was a form of literary meanness from which Mateo Aleman
had already suffered, but Cervantes had particular cause to be angry.
The continuer of _Guzman de Alfarache_ appears to have been only an
impudent plagiarist, but the writer who continued _Don Quixote_ was
obviously animated by personal hostility. He descended to a grovelling
sneer at Cervantes’ wounded hand. It has been guessed that this is
another chapter in the miserable history of the quarrels of authors.
Avellaneda, as the author of the false second part called himself, is
supposed to have acted on the instigation of Lope de Vega, who is known
to have had no friendly feelings for Cervantes. The trick, which was
as clumsy as it was spiteful, probably hastened the appearance of the
genuine second part. It undoubtedly had some influence on the form,
for it induced Cervantes to alter the course of the story, in order
to make the two as unlike as possible. Perhaps it decided the author
to kill the hero lest another should murder him. The second part was
printed in 1615. Cervantes died in the next year. Cheerful and hopeful
to the end, even when “his foot was in stirrup” for the last journey,
he had prepared his _Persiles y Sigismunda_ for the press before he
died. This was meant to be a model of what a tale of adventure might
be, and was written with more care in the formal and mechanical parts
than he gave to _Don Quixote_; but, like almost all he is known to have
done with deliberate literary intentions, it is dull and lifeless.
[SN: _Don Quixote._]
There is a difficulty in speaking of _Don Quixote_. One has to come
after Fielding and Scott, Heine, Thackeray, and Sainte-Beuve, not
to mention many others hardly less illustrious. These are great
names, and it may seem that after they have spoken there is nothing
left to say. The first duty which this position imposes is not to
endeavour deliberately to be different, in the vain hope of attaining
originality. But the cloud of witnesses who might be summoned to prove
the enduring interest of _Don Quixote_ is itself a part of the critical
history of the book, and a tribute to its solitary place in Spanish
literature. The ascetic and so-called mystic writers had their day
of influence among us in the seventeenth century. Crashaw alone is
enough to prove that here, and in a certain section of English life
and literature, Santa Teresa and Juan de la Cruz were living forces.
Quevedo had his day, and the _Novela de Pícaros_ their following.
During the romantic movement, the dramatists were much in men’s mouths.
But in each case the Spaniard remained only for a time. Calderon once
had his place in Lord Tennyson’s _Palace of Art_, but he fell out, and
that has been the fate of all things Spanish in literature. They have
given an indication, have been used--and forgotten, or they have been
welcomed as strange, mysterious, probably beautiful, and then silently
dropped as too exclusively Spanish, too entirely belonging to a long
past century. But _Don Quixote_ has been always with us since Shelton’s
translation of the first part appeared in 1612. This of itself is proof
enough that there is something in _Don Quixote_ which is absent from
other Spanish work, whether his own or that of other men.
No words need be wasted in controverting the guesses of those who
wish to account for the greatness of a great piece of literature by
some hidden quality not literary. They have ranged from the fantastic
supposition that Cervantes was ridiculing Charles V. down to the
amazing notion that he was attacking the Church. Nor need much respect
be shown to the truth that _Don Quixote_ was meant to make fun of the
books of chivalry. This would be self-evident even if Cervantes had
not said so. It may be that this was all he meant, and then he builded
better than he knew. The work of burlesque, though often necessary,
and, when decently done, amusing, is essentially of the lower order.
In this case it was not necessary, for the _Libros de Caballerías_
were already dying out before the sordid rivalry of the _Novelas de
Pícaros_. It was the less necessary, because it was no reform. The
Spain of the _Libros de Caballerías_ was the Spain of Santa Teresa
and Luis de Leon, of the great scholars of the stamp of Francisco
Sanchez El Brocense, of Diego de Mendoza, of Cortés and Pizarro and
Mondragon--the Spain which Brantôme saw, “brave, bravache et vallereuse
et de belles paroles proférées à l’improviste.” It was a better country
than that in which the Count Duke of Olivares had to complain that
he could find “no men.” The follies of the _Libros de Caballerías_
were a small matter. It was not a small matter that a nation should
replace _Amadis of Gaul_ by _Paul of Segovia_, should pass from the
lofty romantic spirit of Garcia Ordoñes to the _carcajada_--the coarse,
braying, animal, and loveless guffaw of Quevedo.
In so far as Cervantes forwarded that change he did evil and not
good. He did help to laugh Spain’s chivalry away. But in truth it was
dying, and the change would have come without him. He is great in
literature, because while consciously doing a very small, unnecessary,
and partially harmful thing, he created a masterpiece of that rare and
fine faculty which while thinking in jest still feels in earnest (the
definition of what is, it may be, undefinable is taken from Miss Anne
Evans), and which we call humour. Elsewhere in Spanish literature we
find a type fixed and unvarying, or even a mere puppet, met through
a succession of events, and moved about by them. In _Don Quixote_ we
have two characters acting on one another, and producing the story from
within. And these two characters are types of immortal truth--the one a
gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of good faculty, for whom a slight
madness has made the whole world fantastic; the other an average human
being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere coward, and ignorant,
yet not unkindly, nor incapable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what
his limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his greed. The
continual collisions of these two with the real world make the story
of _Don Quixote_. Cervantes had a fine inventive power, the adventures
are numerous and varied, yet the charm lies not in the incidents, but
in the reality and the sympathetic quality of the persons. We have
no grinning world of masks made according to a formula. The country
gentlemen, priests, barbers, shepherds, innkeepers, tavern wenches,
lady’s-maids, domestic curates, nobles, and officials are living human
beings, true to the Spain of the day no doubt, but also true to the
humanity which endures for ever, and therefore intelligible to all
times. In the midst is honest greedy Sancho with his peering eyes, so
shrewd, and withal so capable of folly, the critic, and also the dupe
of the half-crazed dreamer, by whom he rides, and will ride, as long as
humanity endures, in this book, and under every varying outward form in
the real earth. As for Don Quixote, is he not the elder brother of Sir
Roger de Coverley, of Matthew Bramble, of Parson Adams, of Bradwardine,
of Colonel Newcome, and Mr Chucks, the brave, gentle, not over-clever,
men we love all the more because we laugh at them very tenderly?[46]
FOOTNOTES:
[37] There is a pretty and not uncommon edition of the _Diana_
published at Madrid by Villalpando in 1795.
[38] The _Patrañuelo_ is reprinted by Ochoa in his _Tesoro de
Novelistas Españoles_, Paris, 1847, vol. i. He also gives one story
from Tirso de Molina--_The Three Deceived Husbands_. It is a _fabliau_.
A _Cigarral_ was the name given to a country villa near Toledo.
[39] _Libros de Caballerías_ in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, with
an exhaustive introduction by Don Pascual de Gayangos, vol. xl.
[40] The _Guerras Civiles de Granada_ is in vol. iii. of the
_Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_.
[41] See _Novelistas anteriores a Cervantes_ and _Novelistas
posteriores a Cervantes_ in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. iii.
and xviii.
[42] For the history of the _Celestina_ see Mr Fitz Maurice Kelly’s
introduction to the reprint of Mabbe’s excellent version in Mr Henley’s
Tudor Translations.
[43] The early history of the book, with an account of the doubts which
prevail as to its authorship, will be found in the _Vie de Lazarillo de
Tormés_. A new translation by M. A. Morel Fatio. Paris, 1886.
[44] Quevedo’s works are in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_; but the
desirable edition is that of Sancha, Madrid, 1791, in eleven pretty
volumes. A translation of ‘The Sharper’ was published in London in
1892, admirably illustrated by the Spanish draughtsman known as Daniel
Vierge.
[45] The main authority for the life of Cervantes is still the
_Biography_ by Don Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, published by the
Spanish Academy in 1819. The memory of Cervantes has undergone the
misfortune of becoming the object of a cult to the persons calling
themselves Cervantistas, who have made it an excuse for infinite
scribbling. A few new facts of no importance have been discovered, but
Navarrete’s _Vida_ remains the real authority.
[46] The fame and the excellence of _Le Diable Boiteux_ of Le Sage
entitle the author of _El Diablo Cojuelo_ to notice in this chapter.
Luis Velez de Guevara (1572 or 1574-1644) of Ecija was a fertile
dramatist. His _Diablo Cojuelo_, published in 1641, supplied the
starting-point, and the matter but not the form, of the two first
chapters of _Le Diable Boiteux_. There is nothing answering to the
famous “Après cela on nous réconcilia; nous nous embrassâmes; depuis
ce temps là nous sommes ennemis mortels.” The matter of the _Diablo
Cojuelo_ is akin to the _Visions_ of Quevedo, and the style is very
idiomatic.