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.
[SN: _Spanish historians._]
It was natural that a very active time of great literary vigour should
be rich in historians. Spanish literature is, indeed, fertile in
historical narratives of contemporary events written by eyewitnesses,
and not less in authoritative narratives, the work of almost
contemporary authors. A people so proud of the present could not be
indifferent to the past. The Spaniard least of all; for he is, in his
own phrase, _linajudo_--proud of his lineage--not less concerned to
show that he had ancestors than to convince the world of his greatness.
Thus the sixteenth century, and the early years of the seventeenth,
saw the production of a very important Spanish historical literature.
It followed the fortunes of the country with curious exactness. Every
great campaign, every great achievement in America during the reign
of Charles V., has been well and amply described. The reign of Philip
II. is equally well recorded by contemporaries, and was the period of
the great general histories of Morales, Zurita, and Mariana. But as
the seventeenth century drew on, there was less and less which the
Spaniard cared to record, till after the revolt of Catalonia and the
separation of Portugal in 1640 we come to a period of entire silence.
The exhaustion of the national genius was felt here as elsewhere. When
the voice of Spanish history was last heard, it was in the conquest of
Mexico by Antonio de Solis--the work of an accomplished man of letters
who looked back over the disasters of his own time to the more glorious
achievement of the past.
[SN: _Historians of particular events._]
Much of the historical writing of the great epoch--the histories of
religious orders, of which there are many, and of towns, of which there
not a few, and genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable--does
not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But it would be a very
pedantic interpretation of the word which would exclude the _Comentario
de la Guerra de Alemaña_[47] of Luis de Ávila y Zuñiga. It is an
account of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an eyewitness
who served the emperor, and attended him in his retirement at Yuste.
The merit of this, and many other books of the same order, lies less in
any beauty of style they possess than in the interest which attaches
to the evidence of capable men who saw great events. Luis de Ávila is
also valuable because he gives expression to that pride and ambition
of the emperor’s Spanish followers, who really dreamt that they were
helping towards the establishment of a universal empire. Another writer
of the same stamp, who lived when the fortune of Spain had reached its
height and was beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a
most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier of the school of
the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of distinction, was ambassador in
England some years before the Armada, and in France during that great
passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and “in religion,”
having lived the full life of a fighting pious Spaniard who could
use both sword and pen. He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low
Countries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the _Theory and
Practice of War_. The commentaries were published in 1592. The treatise
had appeared in 1577. The great subject of the Low Country wars of a
somewhat later period--1588-1599--was also treated by another Spaniard
of the same stamp as Don Bernardino. This was Don Carlos Coloma,
Marquis of Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist (he came on
an embassy to England in the reign of James I.), and man of letters.
Besides his _Guerras de los Paises Bajos_ he made a translation of
Tacitus.
[SN: _Early Historians of the Indies._]
Contemporary with these and less famous authors of commentaries is the
long line of writers usually classed together by the Spaniards as Early
Historians of the Indies.[48] The desire to record what they had seen
and suffered was strong in the _conquistadores_, and a long list might
be made of their names. Only the most famous can be mentioned here.
No more amazing story of shipwreck and misery among savages has ever
been told than in the _Naufragios_ of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. He
was wrecked in Florida, and remained wandering among the native tribes
for ten years, 1527-1537. A power of endurance, wellnigh more than
human, was required to bear up against all he suffered; but he lived
to hold a governorship in the Rio de la Plata, of which also he has
left an account. A much gayer and a more famous book is the account of
the conquest of Mexico written by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the
companions of Cortés, who survived nearly all his brothers in arms,
and died at a great age in Guatemala, on the estate he had won with
his sword. His _True History_ was provoked by the earlier narrative
of Gómara, and was written to vindicate the honour due to himself and
his fellow-adventurers, which he thought had been unduly sacrificed by
the official historian of Cortés. Bernal Diaz is a Spanish Monluc, but
both ruder and more mediæval than the inimitable Gascon. Francisco de
Jerez, Augustin de Zarate, and Pedro Cieza de Leon (the work of the
last-named has only been wholly published in our own time) give the
Peruvian half of that wonderful generation of conquest.
[SN: _General Historians of the Indies._]
Beside these, the actual eyewitnesses of events, are to be put the
general historians of the Indies. The first who published his work
complete was Francisco Lopez de Gómara. He was born in 1510, too
late to share in the conquest, and was, in fact, a man of letters,
who travelled, indeed, but only in Italy. The accident that he was
secretary to Cortés when he had returned for the last time to Spain
probably directed Gómara’s studies. He was accused of knowing nothing
of many parts of his subject except what Cortés had told him, and of
having distorted truth in the interest of his patron. But Gómara wrote
well, and the immense contemporary interest in the subject gave his
_History of the Indies_ and his _Chronicle of New Spain_, which is a
panegyric of Cortés, a great vogue. They first appeared in 1552, 1553,
and 1554. An older man, and a much greater authority, was Gonzalo
Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557), whose _General and Natural
History of the Indies_ was partly published in 1535, before Gómara’s.
But the author kept his work in hand till his death, and appears to
have made corrections and additions to the last.[49] Oviedo was in the
West Indies in official posts for forty years, beginning in 1513, and
was therefore a contemporary of, though not a partaker in, the great
conquests. He is a garrulous writer of no great force of mind, much
more a chronicler than a historian. [SN: _Gómara, Oviedo, Las Casas,
Herrera, the Inca Garcilaso._] There are two general historians of the
Indies of very different value from Oviedo. The first is the Bishop
of Chiapa, the justly famous Bartolomé de las Casas (1474?-1566),
who supplied the critics of his countrymen (most of whom afterwards
showed that they wanted only the opportunity in order to equal the
crimes) with weapons by his famous _Very Brief Account of the Ruin of
the Indies_. This, first printed in 1542, was reprinted with other
tracts written for the honourable purpose of defending the unfortunate
Indians from oppression in 1552, and was made known to all Europe in
translations. The general _History of the Indies_, which he wrote
during his old age, remained unprinted till it was included in the
_Collection of inedited Documents for the History of Spain_ published
by the Spanish Government.[50] Las Casas was a man of a stamp not
unfamiliar to ourselves. His hatred of cruelty was equally vehement
and sincere. In his perfectly genuine horror for the excesses of his
countrymen, which are not to be denied, he sometimes exaggerated and
was sometimes unjust. He was perhaps inevitably emotional in his style,
yet the fact that he had principle and passion and a cause to plead,
gives his book a marked superiority over the mainly chronicle work of
Gómara and Oviedo. Antonio de Herrera (1549-1625) was a very different
man, an official historian--he was historiographer of the Indies--who
served the king as literary advocate, and was supplied with good
information. His _General History of the Deeds of the Castilians in
the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea_ was published in 1601-1615
at Madrid. While compiling this great book, the most valuable part of
his work, Herrera was also engaged in drawing up a _General History
of the World in the time of our Lord the King Philip II._, and other
treatises, which are, in fact, statements on behalf of the Government,
and have in historical literature something like the place of the
yearly summaries in the old _Annual Register_. Herrera’s style was
businesslike, but he can never have been read for the pleasure of
reading him. With these writers may be placed the Inca Garcilaso de
la Vega (1540-1616), an attractive and rather pathetic figure. His
father was one of the _conquistadores_, and his mother belonged to the
sacred Inca race. The son was almost equally proud of his pedigree on
both sides. The Inca Garcilaso, as he is always called, did some other
literary work, including a translation of the once famous _Dialogues on
Love by Leon Hebreo_, an echo of the Florentine Platonists, written in
Italian by the exiled Spanish Jew, Juda Abarbanel, but he is best known
by the _Commentaries on Peru_. In this work, published in two parts in
1609 and 1617, he contrived to reconcile a genuine Christian zeal and
an equally genuine Castilian pride of descent with a tender memory of
his mother’s people. Garcilaso, though weak and garrulous, is touching,
and his commentaries have been the great storehouse of the more poetic
legends told of the Incas.[51]
Though writers who recorded what they had seen, and others who only
recorded what had happened in their time, or near it, cannot be wholly
classed together, yet the authors named above have certain qualities in
common. Of those mentioned here, almost all wrote in a straightforward
manly fashion, with little straining after effect, and a manifest
desire to tell the truth. There is little in them of that overweening
arrogance which has become associated with the character of the
Spaniard. There is no want of pride, which was, indeed, amply justified
by the stories they had to tell, but little of the vanity so common in
the time of Spain’s decadence.
[SN: _Mendoza, Moncada, and Melo._]
The account of the rebellion of the Moriscoes written by Don Diego de
Mendoza supplies a link between the series of histories just named
and the histories which belong wholly to learning and literature. The
subject was contemporary to the author, and members of his family took
an active part in the events; but Don Diego had a literary ambition
which is only too visible. It was plainly his intention to make a
careful copy of Latin models--chiefly Sallust--and in one passage he
slavishly follows the account given by Tacitus of the discovery of
the remains of the legions of Varus, by the soldiers of Germanicus.
But there was an intrinsic force in Diego de Mendoza which saved him
from falling into a mere school exercise, and though the mould of
sentence is too much taken from the Latin, the vocabulary is very pure
Castilian. He protests in one place against the use of the foreign word
_centinela_ for a sentinel, in place of the old Spanish _atalaya_ for
the watch by day, and _escucha_ (listen) for the watch by night. _The
Expedition of the Catalans and Aragonese against the Turks and Greeks_
of Francisco de Moncada, Count of Osona (1635), which Gibbon said he
had read with pleasure, has a great reputation among the Spaniards.
It is certainly a well-written account of the expedition of the Free
Companions who were led by Roger de Flor to serve under the Paleologi
against the Turks, and who, after making themselves intolerable to
their employers, ended by expelling the Dukes of Athens of the house
of Brienne from their duchy, and then held it for the crown of Aragon.
Moncada was a viceroy and general who served with high distinction,
and a very accomplished man of literary tastes; but his narrative,
which is very brief, is mainly a good Castilian version of the Catalan
_Chronicle_ of Ramon Muntaner, and has, in a phrase dear to Mr Hallam,
been praised to the full extent of its merits. It appeared in 1623,
twelve years before the death of the author, who was then viceroy in
Lombardy. A work on the same scale as Moncada’s, which has been praised
much beyond its merits, is the account of the revolt of the Catalans
against Philip IV. in 1640 by Francisco Manuel de Melo. It contains
only the beginning of the war, and though the author seems to promise
a continuation, he never went further. The book was published in 1645.
Melo had a curious literary history. He was a Portuguese in the Spanish
service, and a kinsman of the unfortunate general who lost the battle
of Rocroi. He lived long, wrote much, and it was his fortune to survive
Góngorism. But his _History of the Troubles, Secession, and War of
Catalonia_ was written while he was under a bad literary influence.
Without being exactly “Góngorical,” it is written in a strained,
pretentious, snappy style, which covers a decided poverty of thought.
[SN: _General Histories._]
The great school of Spanish historians has an unbroken descent from
the chronicles of the Middle Ages. It had been the custom of the kings
of Castile from the reign of Alfonso XI. (1350-1369), surnamed the
Implacable, or “he of the Rio Salado,” from the scene of the battle in
which he overthrew the last considerable Moorish invasion of Spain,
to appoint a chronicler. With Florian de Ocampo, who held this post
under Charles V., the chronicler became the “historiographer.” He was
not necessarily a scholar and student of the past, yet he might be if
he so pleased, and the spirit of the time invited him to adopt the
new character. [SN: _Ocampo, Zurita, Morales._] Ocampo himself showed
little faculty, though his intentions were good; but his successor,
Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1581), was a scholar in the fullest sense of
the word. It was his wish to write a real history of Spain, based on
chronicles and records. But he obtained his post late in 1570, and his
work is a fragment ending so early as 1037. Morales was unquestionably
influenced by the example of his friend Gerónimo de Zurita, the
historiographer of the crown of Aragon. The unanimous judgment of
scholars has recognised the right of Zurita to the name of historian,
and even to the honour of being the first of modern historians. His
father had been physician to Ferdinand the Catholic, and he was himself
one of the many secretaries of Philip II. Zurita, who was born in
1512 and died in 1580, was appointed historiographer of Aragon by
the choice of the Cortes in 1548. For a man with the ambition to be
a historian, the position was enviable. It gave him independence, a
right of access to all records; he had a fine story to tell, and as he
had no predecessors, he had no need to spend time in reading the works
of others. Zurita was worthy of his fortune. His _Annals of the Crown
of Aragon_ down to the death of Ferdinand the Catholic, in six folio
volumes, published between 1562 and 1580, has kept its place as a work
of scholarship and criticism.
[SN: _Mariana._]
The great name of Spanish historical literature is that of Juan de
Mariana,[52] the Jesuit, whose name once rang all over Europe for his
defence of regicide in the treatise _De Rege_, written for the benefit
of his pupil, Philip III. But this and his other treatises were written
in Latin, and never translated by himself. His place in Spanish
literature is due to his history. Mariana was of the most humble birth,
for he was a foundling. He was born at Talavera in 1536, and educated
by the Jesuits, in whose college in Sicily he taught for many years;
but his later life was spent in the house of his order at Toledo. His
troubles with his superiors form a not very honourable passage in the
history of the Jesuits. The first purpose of his great work was to
make Europe acquainted with the past of Spain, and he wrote in Latin,
the universal language of scholarship. Twenty of the thirty books
were published in that language in 1572. But, unlike Bacon, Mariana
did not believe that the learned language would outlive the modern
tongues. He was induced to make a Castilian version of his own Latin,
and when doing it he took the freedom which even the most strict critic
will allow to belong to the translator of his own work. He enlarged,
corrected, and amended, till the Castilian history, which appeared
in 1601, was almost a new work. Four editions, further enlarged and
amended, appeared before the author’s death in 1623.
In answering a minute critic, Mariana, with an audacity not perhaps to
be excused, declared that if he had stopped to verify every small fact,
Spain would have waited for ever for a history. This bold avowal of his
indifference to the tithings of mint and anise illustrates sufficiently
the spirit in which he wrote. He was not a historical scholar in the
same sense as Zurita--a minute student of original records--but a man
of great learning and high patriotic spirit, who applied himself to the
making of a work of literature worthy of the past of his country. The
defects of the history are patent, and one of them is a mere matter
of change of fashion. He took Livy for a model, and therefore put
long speeches into the mouths of his personages. This, however, was
a mere literary convention not intended to deceive anybody, and not
likely to mislead the most uncritical reader. It was only a now disused
way of giving what the modern historian would give in comment and
illustration. The same following of Livy led him into including in his
history, and presenting as history, a great deal of what he knew to be
legend, simply because it was picturesque and familiar. Against these
defects, which from the literary point of view are no defects at all,
are to be put a fine style quite uncontaminated by the usual defects of
Spanish prose, a great power of narrative, and then this, that Mariana
gave the history of his country throughout antiquity and the Middle
Ages in a lofty patriotic spirit, which may not interpret and explain
ancient institutions, but does convey to us a sense that we see an
energetic people of fine qualities struggling on to high destinies.
[SN: _The decadence._]
The fall from Mariana to any of his contemporaries or successors is
great. The _Cisma de Inglaterra_--‘The English Schism’--by Pedro de
Ribadeneyra (1527-1611), enjoys the reputation of being a well-written
account of the great movement by which the English Church vindicated
its independence of the see of Rome, told from the point of view of a
Spanish Jesuit. Prudencio de Sandoval, a distinguished churchman and
one of the historiographers of the Crown, continued the general history
of Morales, and then added to Mariana a life of Charles V., which is
of about the same length as the Jesuit’s whole history. Sandoval shows
what the reign of the great emperor looked like to a learned Spaniard
of the later sixteenth century, but it has no great force and no merit
of style.[53]
Other names might be added--Bartolomé de Argensola’s _History of the
Moluccas_ (1609), the work of a pure man of letters who wrote to
please his patron, and the _History of the Goths_ of the diplomatist
Saavedra-Fajardo, published at Munster in 1649--but they could swell a
list to little purpose. All these writers had the good fortune to write
before the invasion of Góngorism, except Saavedra-Fajardo, who escaped
it by residence abroad. [SN: _Solis._] Antonio de Solis (1610-1686)
had the honour of resisting the plague. If the second-rate men of a
literature could be dealt with at any length in our limits, Solis would
be an interesting figure to dwell on. He was an accomplished man, who
did very creditable work both as poet and dramatist, but in the schools
of other and more original writers. There are few more melancholy lives
among the biographies of men of letters. In spite of reputation and
success, he was always poor. Although he held the post of _Cronista
Mayor_ of the Indies in the latter part of his life, he died in utter
poverty, leaving “his soul to be the heir of his body”--that is, giving
orders that his few belongings should be sold to pay for masses. In the
general bankruptcy of Spain his salary was probably not paid. A sense
of duty rather than an inclination to the task may be supposed to have
led him to undertake the writing of a book which has always remained
very dear to the Spaniards. This is _The Conquest of Mexico_, published
by the help of a friend in 1684.[54] The excellence of the style was
recognised from the first, and has preserved the reputation of the
book. Yet it wants the rude life of the contemporary narratives, and
the understanding of, or at least strenuous effort to understand, the
native side, which is to be found in Mr Prescott. Flowing and eloquent
as Solis is, he is also somewhat nerveless. Perhaps our knowledge of
the fact that he stood on the very verge of the time when the voice
of literature in Spain was to be silenced altogether makes the reader
predisposed to find something in him of the signs of exhaustion. He
closes the time when the Spaniards wrote for themselves, and also wrote
well.
[SN: _Miscellaneous writers._]
Before closing this survey of the great period of Castilian literature
by a notice, which must necessarily be brief, of one intensely national
body of writers, some words must be said about the large class of
authors of miscellaneous books belonging to the first half of the
seventeenth century. The press was active in those years. Unfortunately
it was an age of oddity and extravagance. [SN: _Gracian and the
prevalence of Góngorism._] Its dominating figure is that Baltasar
Gracian (1601-1658) to whom the admiration of Sir M. Grant Duff
among ourselves, and the whim, if not the cynicism, of Schopenhauer
among the Germans, have given a limited revival of popularity in our
own time. He was an Aragonese Jesuit, who published his books under
the name of his brother Lorenzo. Gracian is not uninteresting as a
finished example of all that bad taste and pretentiousness can do to
make a man of some, though by no means considerable, faculty quite
worthless. It was his chosen function to be the critic, prophet,
and populariser of Góngorism. He wrote a treatise to expound the
whole secret of the detestable art of saying everything in the least
natural and perspicuous manner possible.[55] This _Agudeza y Arte
de Ingenios_--‘Wit and the Wits’ Art’--was not written till he had
published a book on _The Hero_ to show that he had every right to speak
with authority. Gracian was otherwise a copious writer. His _Criticon_,
translated into English under the name of _The Spanish Critic_, by Paul
Rycaut in 1681, about thirty years after it appeared, is an allegory of
life, shown by the adventures of a shipwrecked Spaniard and a “natural
man,” whom he finds on the island of St Helena. It may have helped
Swift by showing him how not to write _Gulliver’s Travels_. The work
which has been revived of late by the freak of Schopenhauer is the
_Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia_--‘Hand (or Pocket) Oracle and
Art of Prudence.’ It is a collection of maxims. Mr Morley went to the
extreme limit of good nature when he said that Gracian sometimes gives
a neat turn to a commonplace. As a rule, his maxims are examples of
all that maxims ought not to be--long, obscure by dint of straining
after epigrammatic force, and in substance of platitude all compact. We
soon find that we are dealing with a “haberdasher of small wares,” who
is endeavouring to impose himself upon us as wise by dint of a short
obscure manner and a made-up face of gravity.
Gracian is worth singling out, not for his merits, but because he so
thoroughly typified a something in the Spaniard which, oddly mixed with
his real humour and sound sense, gives him a leaning to the theatrical
in the worst sense of the word. When Shakespeare drew Don Adriano de
Armado, the fantastical Spaniard, he was not laughing at random at
the foreigner. And this side of the people was never more conspicuous
than in the middle seventeenth century. It came out everywhere, from
serious treatises on politics down to the fencing-book of the egregious
Don Luis de Narvaez de Pacheco. It was not that Spain wanted for able
men. Diego de Saavedra-Fajardo, the author of the history of the Goths,
and of a curious book of emblems called _Empresas Politicas_, or ‘The
Idea of a Political Christian Prince’; Vera y Figueroa, the author
of _The Ambassador_; Suarez de Figueroa, who wrote the miscellaneous
critical dialogues called _El Pasagero_--‘The Traveller,’--were none
of them insignificant men, but there was a perpetual straining after
sententious gravity in them, an effort to look wiser than life, an
attempt to get better bread than could be made out of wheat. They
helped to give Europe the old idea of the rigid sententious Spaniard
which is so strangely unlike the real man. But it was the time of the
frozen court etiquette of the Hapsburg dynasty, and of grave peremptory
manners in public, covering an extraordinary relaxation of morals, and
an unabashed taste for mere horseplay in private. These writers gave
the literary expression of the artificial Spain of the seventeenth
century. It adds to the piquancy of the contrast that at a time when
Spain was marching resolutely, and with her eyes open, to ruin, by
accumulating fault upon fault, the political writers named here, and
others, abounded in good sense. To take a single example. Among the
emblems of Saavedra-Fajardo is one representing a globe supported
between the sterns of two warships, with the motto “His Polis.” In the
Essay the Spanish diplomatist sets out the whole doctrine, so familiar
in our own days as that of “sea-power,” with great force. Yet this was
written, a melancholy example of useless wisdom, when his country was
destroying its last chance of maintaining a navy, by bleeding itself
nearly to death in the wars of Germany for the purpose of vindicating
the claims of the house of Hapsburg.
Here may be mentioned, a little out of his date, but hardly out of his
place, for it is difficult to say where he ought to be classed, the
_Viage Entretenido_, or ‘Amusing Voyage,’ of Agustin de Roxas or Rojas.
He was a very busy miscellaneous writer, who led a strange roaming
life as a soldier, strolling actor, and in some sense _pícaro_. The
_Viage Entretenido_ is the only part of his work which survives. It
is a rather incoherent autobiography, swollen out by specimens of the
_loas_ he wrote for his fellow-actors. The historical value of the book
is considerable, for Roxas gives a very full account of the theatrical
life of his time, and is the standard authority for the early history
of the Spanish stage. The literary merits of the book are not small,
for, consciously or unconsciously he takes, and keeps, the tone of the
true artistic Bohemian, the wandering _enfant sans souci_ to whom the
hardships of his life, long tramping journeys, hunger, poverty, rags,
and spasms of furious hard work are endurable because they give him
intervals of reckless idleness, and save him from what he especially
hates, which is orderly industry. The _Viage Entretenido_ was the
model of Scarron’s _Voyage Comique_. It appeared perhaps in 1603, but
certainly very early in the seventeenth century.[56]
[SN: _The Mystics._]
A survey of Spanish literature of the great epoch cannot end more
appropriately than with the writers who by common consent are called
the Mystics. The term has become established in use, and there would be
pedantry in rejecting it. Yet it is far from being accurately applied.
What is, properly speaking, called Mysticism is not congenial to the
Spaniard, and was inevitably odious to the Inquisition. A train of
religious thought which led infallibly to trust in the “Inner Light,”
to the contempt for dogma, to indifference to the hierarchy, and to the
preference for emotional piety over morality of conduct, could not but
be suspect to a body which existed for the purpose of maintaining the
authority of the Church. One Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos, did indeed
show himself a true mystic, and was the father of the “Quietism” of the
later seventeenth century. But Molinos lived in Italy, did not address
his countrymen, and found his following mainly in France. There were a
few _alumbrados_, as the Spaniards called them--“Illuminati”--in Spain,
as there were a few Protestants; but they were exceptions, and examples
of mere personal eccentricity. The Inquisition had the sincere support
of the nation in stamping out both. When it went too far and condemned
what the Spaniards did not dislike, as when, for instance, the _Guia
de Pecadores_--‘The Guide for Sinners’--of Luis de Granada was put in
the Index, the Inquisition was forced to reverse its decision. But it
had the approval of the country in its efforts to suppress teaching
which had a dangerous tendency to arrive at the doctrine that, when
the soul of the believer is united in ecstatic devotion with God, the
sins of the flesh are no sins at all. The common-sense of the Spaniard,
which was never more conspicuous than in the greatest of his orthodox
mystics, Santa Teresa, left him in no doubt as to the real meaning
of such teaching as that. The stern handling it received from the
Inquisition had his sincere approval. [SN: _Spanish mysticism._] The
mysticism of the Spaniards consisted wholly in a certain Platonism or
Neo-Platonism, in the doctrine which can be sufficiently well learnt
in Spenser’s _Hymne of Heavenly Love_. This might have lent itself to
the extreme of Quietism or Antinomianism, but it was restrained by
the sense of the necessity for active virtue, which was strong in the
Spaniard, and was the result of the Church’s teaching that there is no
salvation without works.
It is not, however, the doctrine of the mystics, but their importance,
and the literary quality of their work, which concern us here. As
regards their position in the country, and their influence with all
ranks of Spaniards, there can be no question. It was shown not only
by the deference of the austere Philip II. to Santa Teresa, but by
the docility of his grandson, Philip IV.--a very different and a
very pleasure-loving man--to Maria de Jesus de Ágreda, a woman far
inferior in intellect and force of character to the reformer of the
Carmelites.[57] To their work we may apply the expression, very
Platonist and old, which Diego de Estella uses of the soul in his _Very
Devout Meditations on the Love of God_. “Da vida,” he says, and “es la
forma del cuerpo”--“It gives life, and is the form of the body.”
“For soul is form, and doth the body make,”
as the same truth stands in Spenser’s hymn. The intense religious
spirit of the Spaniards gives their work life, and is the form of their
body. All the best of this side, if one ought not to say this basis, of
their character has gone into the “mystic” works. [SN: _The influence
of the Inquisition on Spanish religious literature._] The Spaniard has
not been a great preacher. Part of the explanation of this, on the face
of it, rather surprising fact, is no doubt to be found in saying that
if the Inquisition had listened to every denunciation of a preacher,
nobody would have been found to risk going into a pulpit. For, while
denying that the Holy Office was felt to be oppressive by the majority
of Spaniards, there can be no doubt that its yoke was heavy on the
neck of individuals--even of the most orthodox. The persecution of
Luis de Granada, who as a Dominican, and therefore as a member of
the order which controlled the Inquisition, might have been supposed
to be sure of the most favourable treatment, is an example of the
vigilance exercised over all who even approached religious questions.
Luis de Leon incurred an imprisonment of five years on accusations
brought by envious rivals at Salamanca, and too favourably received
by the jealousy of the Dominicans, who were hostile to him as an
Augustinian.[58] Santa Teresa was sequestered by the Inquisition at
Seville. Her disciple, Juan de la Cruz, who helped her in the reform
of the Carmelites, was imprisoned for a year, and only released by the
intrepid exertions of the saint and the use of the royal authority. It
was dangerous to speak without much thought and care. So the Spaniards,
who might have given their country what the great Caroline divines
gave to English and Bossuet to French literature, preferred to confine
themselves to writing, where they could weigh every word and subject
their work to the revision of superiors.
The bulk of the Spanish mystic, religious, and ascetic writings is
enormous. By far the greater part of them have fallen dead to the
Spaniards themselves. They have never been made the subject of an
exhaustive study by any native scholar.[59]
[SN: _Malon de Chaide._]
The great names among the Spanish mystics of the golden time of
their literature are those of Malon de Chaide, Juan de Ávila, Luis
de Granada, Luis de Leon, Santa Teresa, and San Juan de la Cruz--and
of these Santa Teresa alone is a living force. It is difficult to
understand what sense the word mystic bore to the first person who
applied it to Pedro Malon de Chaide (?1530----?). He was of the Order
of St Augustine, and was a master of a fine-flowing, rather unctuous
style. The work by which he is known in Spanish literature is _The
Treatise of the Conversion of the Glorious Mary Magdalen_. It was
written for a young lady who had resolved to take the vows, but was
not published till many years later. Malon de Chaide was one of those
who denounced the evil influence of the books of chivalry; but his
own style is very often--at least to our modern taste--more fit for
a romance than a book of devotion. He wrote verse--and well. It must
be read with a constant recollection that it was not written for us,
but in a time when the application of the language of _The Song of
Solomon_ to devotion was justified by the all but universal belief
in the allegorical character of the poem. In this practice, of which
we have well-known examples of our own, Malon de Chaide never went
to the extreme reached by Juan de la Cruz. [SN: _Juan de Ávila._]
The venerable master Juan de Ávila (1502-1569), known as the Apostle
of Andalucia, an older man than Malon de Chaide, was also much less
the fashionable divine. The most famous of his many works is _The
Spiritual Treatise_ on the verse _Audi, filia_--“Hearken, O daughter,
and consider,” &c. It was at first only a letter of advice written for
a lady, Sancha Carrillo, who had resolved to take the vows, but Ávila
added to it largely, and in its final form it is a complete guide for
those who wish to lead the religious life, whether in a monastery or
in the century. It is not, perhaps, a book to be recommended to those
who cannot read with the eyes of a Spanish Roman Catholic, or at least
with as much critical faculty as will enable them to understand, and
to allow for, that point of view. The style of Juan de Ávila, though
verbose in the weaker passages, has an ardent eloquence at times, and
has always a large share of the religious quality of unction.
[SN: _Luis de Granada._]
Luis de Granada (1504-1588) and Luis de Leon (1527-1601) were
contemporaries, younger men than Juan de Ávila, and to some extent his
followers. _The Guide for Sinners_ of the first, and the _Perfecta
Casada_ of the second, have remained more or less popular books of
devotion. At least they are reprinted among the Spaniards. _The Guide
for Sinners_ was translated and read all over Europe. Granada’s _Book
of Prayer and Meditation_ on “the principal mysteries of our faith”
was hardly less famous. He had both the qualities and the defects
of the style of his master. [SN: _Luis de Leon._] Luis de Leon was
probably the greatest of the mystics in intrinsic force of intellect
and in learning, besides being master of a far more manly style than
any of them. He was also a man of independent intrepid character, and
it may be that the fear with which the Inquisition regarded him was
largely inspired by his strictures on the ignorance of the clergy and
their flocks. Inquiry and knowledge were dreaded at a time when the
Protestants were using them as instruments against the Church. The
_Perfecta Casada_ was written for a lady, Doña Maria Varela Osorio.
These writers, it will be seen, worked much for women. It was the
age of the directors as distinguished from the old confessors. Pious
people, and more especially women, who wished to lead a religious life,
and had been taught that it was necessary not only to do but to believe
what was right, were anxious for the constant guidance of a teacher
who must be both orthodox and learned. Santa Teresa insisted greatly
on this. The treatise is a long comment on the passage of Scripture
which will suggest itself to everybody as fit for the purpose--the last
chapter of Proverbs, beginning at the tenth verse. But the allegorical
meaning is more insisted on than the plain sense of the words, and the
_Perfecta Casada_ is a treatise on doctrine. Luis de Leon wrote much
else, including an exposition of the _Names of Christ_ and of _The Book
of Job_.
[SN: _Santa Teresa._]
The greatest name among the Spanish mystics, and one of the greatest
in all religious history, is that of Teresa de Zepeda y Ahumada, who
called herself “in religion” Teresa de Jesus. She was born of a noble
family of Ávila in Old Castile in 1515, and died in 1582. We are
not directly concerned here with her religious life, her reform of
the Carmelites, or her doctrine, which indeed was not original. The
inspiring motive of Santa Teresa was her desire to save the souls of
the Lutheran heretics, not by preaching to them, but by so reforming
her own order, the Carmelites, that they should return to their
original purity, and prove an effective instrument for the Church. Her
literary work may be divided into two parts. One contains the different
treatises she wrote by the order of her superiors, who probably began
by wishing to test her orthodoxy, and who ended by revering her as
one inspired. Then there are her many letters, written to all ranks
of her contemporaries, from the king down to the nuns of her houses.
In both Santa Teresa wrote the same Castilian--the language as it was
spoken by the nobles, not learned, indeed, but not wholly uneducated,
who belonged to “the kidney of Castile,” and had not been affected by
the Italianate style of the Court. Her own great character is stamped
on every line. Nobody ever showed less of the merely emotional saintly
character, “Meandering about, capricious, melodious, weak, at the
will of devout whim mainly!” Her letters, which are not only the most
attractive part of her writing but even the most valuable, show her not
only as a great saint but as a great lady, with a very acute mind, a
fine wit, and an abounding good sense.
[SN: _Juan de la Cruz._]
Santa Teresa’s disciple and colleague in the reform of the Carmelites,
Juan de la Cruz, whose family name was Yepes (1542-1591), not unjustly
named the Ecstatic Doctor, was emphatically a saint of the “melodious”
order. His emotional--not to say gushing--style has been, and is, much
admired by the Spaniards. To us it seems that nobody stands in greater
need of being judged by the widest interpretation of the text, “To the
pure all things are pure.” There is an amatory warmth of language, an
application to religion of erotic images in Juan de la Cruz, which,
considered in itself, and apart from what justified it at the time, is
nauseous. A quite sufficient example will be found in the much-quoted
verses in his _Ascent of Mount Carmel_, which begin, “En una noche
escura.” Yet Juan de la Cruz wrote eloquently in his emotional way, and
his verse is beautiful.
[SN: _Decadence of the Mystic writers._]
These are but a very few names from among the Spanish mystic, moral,
and ascetic writers, but it would only be a very full history of
Spanish religious literature which would deal with Jerónimo Gracian
(not to be confounded with Baltasar), with Juan de Jesus Maria, or
Eusebio Nieremberg. As the seventeenth century drew on there was
continually less thought in Spanish religious literature and more
emotion, while that emotion had an increasing tendency to abound in the
amatory images of Juan de la Cruz.[60]
FOOTNOTES:
[47] This and most of the other works mentioned here will be found
in the two volumes of _Historiadores de Sucesos Particulares_ in the
_Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. xxi. and xxviii.
[48] The _Historiadores Primitevos de Indias_ fill two volumes--xxii.
and xxvi.--in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_.
[49] The standard edition of the _Historia General y Natural de las
Indias, islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano_, is that in four volumes
folio, edited by Don Amador de los Rios for the Academy of History in
1851-1855.
[50] _Coleccion de Documentos inéditos para la Historia de España_,
vols. lxii.-lxvi.
[51] The commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso were early translated into
English, and have been reprinted by the Hakluyt Society.
[52] The works of Mariana are in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols.
xxx. and xxxi.; but it is much more pleasant to read his history in the
edition of Ibarra, 1780, 2 vols. folio, beautifully printed.
[53] There is not, I think, any modern edition of Sandoval, whose life
of Charles V. first appeared in 1604-1606, since the second edition of
Antwerp, 1681. It was translated and abridged in 1703 by Captain John
Stevens, an indefatigable hack to whom we are indebted for many bad
versions of Spanish originals.
[54] A very finely printed edition of _The Conquest of Mexico_,
unfortunately disfigured by silly plates, was published at Madrid by
Sancha in 1783.
[55] Part of Gracian is in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. lxv.
A translation of the _Oráculo Manual_ has been included in _The Golden
Treasury_.
[56] _El Viage Entretenido de Agustin de Roxas._ Madrid, 1793.
[57] For this rather unexpected side to the character of Philip IV.,
and strange feature of the Spanish life of the time, see _Cartas de las
Venerable Madre Sor Maria de Agreda y del Señor Rey Don Felipe IV._ Don
Francisco Silvela. Madrid, 1885.
[58] For this example of the Inquisition at work see the papers of his
case in vols. x. and xi. of the _Documentos inéditos_.
[59] My own obligation is mainly to M. Paul Rousselot’s _Mystiques
Espagnols_, Paris, 1867, which the Spaniards have found it easier to
call insufficient than to displace.
[60] All the writers mentioned here will be found in the _Tesoro de
Escritores Místicos Españoles_ of Ochoa. Paris, _n.d._