The wealth of the period which we here call the Later Renaissance
makes the task of giving the results of a survey of its manifold
activities one of extreme difficulty. It is, indeed, sufficiently easy
to point out the common element of the time--namely, the revival or
the development of the literary genius of Spain, England, and France,
under the influence of the classic models, and of Italy. In Italy
itself the classic impulse had been felt earlier and had borne its
best fruits before the middle of the sixteenth century. The time there
was one of decadence. Tasso and Giordano Bruno are unquestionably,
though in widely different ways, writers of original force. But the
author of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ was a survivor,--one, too, who had
lived into an unhappy time. His weakness of health and character may
have--or rather must have--made him suffer with exaggerated acuteness
from the forces which were weighing on the intellect of Italy. Yet on
that very account he shows only the more clearly the exhaustion of the
race, and the deadening influence of the Roman Catholic revival. As for
Bruno, interesting, and in a way attractive, figure as he is, it is
doubtful whether he can be said to have had any literary influence at
all. His modern fame is even not quite legitimate, since he owes it in
some measure to the circumstances of his death. In his own age he fell
rapidly into obscurity. He also had lived into an unhappy time, though
he bore himself in it very differently from Tasso. Too Italian to
reconcile himself to Calvinism or Lutheranism, too independent in mind
to be an obedient son of the Church, from the moment he was asked for
more than mere outward conformity to ceremonies, he was destined to be
crushed between hammer and anvil in an age of religious strife. There
was no room for independence of mind in Italy, and there was to be none
for long, as the lives of Galileo and of Fra Paolo Sarpi were to show.
It required all the power, and the strong political anti-papal spirit
of Venice, to preserve Fra Paolo. In literature nothing was any longer
quite safe except the more or less elegant presentment of harmless
matter. Tasso did the utmost which it was now allowed to an Italian
poet to achieve. Beyond him there could only be mere echo, as in the
case of Guarini. Beyond Guarini the downward path of Italian literature
led only to the preciosities and affectations of Marini.
The difficulty of summing up and defining becomes really sensible
when an attempt has to be made to estimate the different ways, and
the different degrees, in which the influence of the Renaissance made
itself felt in Spain, England, and France. In all three countries it
met a strong national genius which it could stimulate, but could not
affect in essentials. Garcilaso, Spenser, and Ronsard were all equally
intent on making a new poetry for their countries, and all three
succeeded. Yet they remained respectively a Spaniard, an Englishman,
and a Frenchman, and in their works were as unlike one another as they
were to their common models.
It is, I think, fairly accurate to say that the Renaissance influenced
each of the three Western countries with increasing force in the order
in which they are arranged here. Spain felt it least and France most.
The case is emphatically one for the use of the _distinguo_. When we
wish to measure the influence which one literature has had on another,
it is surely very necessary to keep the form and the spirit well apart.
When only the bulk of what was written, and the bare form, and the mere
language, are allowed for, then it is obvious that the Renaissance did
affect Spain very much. The hendecasyllabic, the prevailing use of the
double rhyme, the _ottava rima_, the _capitolo_, and the _canzone_,
were all taken by the Spaniards with slavish fidelity. The very close
connection between the languages and the peoples may have made this
minute imitation inevitable. Again, it is not to be denied that Italian
had a marked influence on literary Castilian as it was written in the
later sixteenth century. Very strict critics have noted the presence
of Italian constructions in Cervantes. The point is not one on which I
care to speak as having authority, and for two reasons. Experience only
increases my sense of the danger of expressing opinions as to what is
legitimate in a language which is not one’s own--and even in one which
is. Then, too, before a new phrase is condemned for being foreign, we
have to settle the preliminary questions, Was it taken from a sister
tongue or not? Was it superfluous or not? The Spaniard who wishes to
say, “Of two things the one,” &c., and who uses the words “De dos
cosas, una,” is guilty of a Gallicism, and is wrong, because his own
Castilian supplies him with the terser and equally lucid formula, “De
dos, una.” Yet the French original might have been taken with profit,
and very legitimately, if it had been wanted, since it comes from a
kindred tongue, and does no violence to the genius of Spanish. Such a
word as “reliable” is an offence mainly because it is displacing an
excellent equivalent, and because in itself it is a barbarism only to
be excused on the ground of necessity.
Yet while noting that Italian models were profusely imitated in Spain
and Portugal, and that Castilian was perfected as a literary instrument
by Italian influence, we can still maintain that the Renaissance bore
less fruit in the Peninsula than in France or England. By “fruit” we
ought to mean not mere writing, be its mechanical dexterity what it
may, but that combination of form and matter which makes literature,
and which before we can call it “national” must savour of the qualities
of some one race. Now, when we look at the literary activity of the
Peninsula during the Golden Age, we can find very little which will
stand the triple test in matter, form, and national character, and
of which we can yet say that it shows the spirit of the Renaissance.
Portugal can be left aside with the due passing salute to the great
name, and the real, though hardly proportionate, merit of Camoens. What
else we find there[122] is no more than a somewhat weaker version of
the learned poetry of Spain, of which it has to be said that it might
be deducted without reducing the place of Spanish literature in the
world. All men who have written well are entitled to their honour. They
were skilful workmen, and that too in no mean matter. Yet there is a
wide difference between the man of whom we can say that if he had never
taken pen in hand, his form and his matter might yet be found in equal
perfection elsewhere and in foreign tongues, and that other of whom we
are bound to say that if he had remained silent then something would
have been missing which no other race could have supplied. Now, if
Boscan had never taken the advice of Navagiero, if Garcilaso had never
written, if all the learned poets had remained silent, then Spain would
not have shown her capacity to produce men who could handle Italian
metres competently--and yet her place in the literature of the world
would be essentially what it is. The _Celestina_, from which, through
the _Novela de Pícaros_, came Le Sage and Smollett and Dickens,
would remain, and so would the _Amadis of Gaul_, the _romances_, the
_comedia_, _Don Quixote_, the great adventurers, and Santa Teresa--all
in short that makes Spain in literature.
And now, allowing that there was something Spanish which found
adequate expression in the Golden Age, and is also the best of the
national literature, there comes the difficulty, which I dread to find
insuperable, of finding a definition of that something. To say that
there is Spanish quality in _las cosas de España_, and that this is
why they are Spanish, is the explanation of Molière’s doctors. Again,
it is mere reasoning in a circle to begin by taking it for granted
that the learned poets who copied the Italian forms were not truly
Spanish, and that therefore Spain was not in essentials influenced by
the Renaissance. Either form of absurdity is to be avoided. Perhaps
the only way of escape lies in defining what we mean by the spirit
of the Renaissance. Without professing to be equal to so great a
task, it is permissible to assert that there are certain notes which
we describe as of the Renaissance, and to which the Italian, the
Frenchman, or the Englishman gave expression in forms proper to
himself. A love of beauty, a sense of joy, a vehement longing for
strong expressions of individual character and of passion, a delight
in the exercise of a bold, inquisitive intellect--all these, and the
reaction from them, which is a deep melancholy, are the notes of the
Renaissance. In the learned poetry of Spain they are rarely heard. The
commonplaces of form, with here and there a piety and patriotism which
are mediæval and Spanish, are given in their stead. Therefore it is
quite fair to say that the Spaniard was not greatly influenced by the
Renaissance--that there was something in it not congenial to him.
There remains the difficulty of saying exactly what is the Spanish
quality of the true _cosas de España_. Mr Ford, who knew the flavour
well, gave it a name--the _borracha_--which, being interpreted, is
the wine-skin, and the smack it lends to the juice of the grape. The
Spaniards say that there are three natural perfumes, and the first of
them is the smell of the dry earth after rain. The _borracha_, and
the pungent scent of the “dura tellus Iberiæ” when wet, are not to
everybody’s taste. Neither is their equivalent in literature, except
where we find it purified and humanised by the genius of Cervantes.
There has at all times been little love of beauty in the Spaniard, and
not much faculty for ideal perfection of form. His greatest painting
is realistic, the exact forcible rendering of the things seen with the
eye of the flesh, selected, arranged, kept in their proper proportions
in the picture, but rarely imagined. The things seen need not be the
vulgar realities of life only. Velasquez is every whit as real in his
presentment of the frigid dignity of the King, or in the “Lances,” as
he is in the “Spinners” or the “Water-Seller.” Zurbaran’s friars are
perfectly real, and their ecstatic devotion was also _chose vue_. It is
the extent of his range of vision which gives Velasquez his solitary
eminence among Spanish painters. Among their brother artists, the men
of letters, there is the same faculty for seeing and reproducing the
common life, though this must be understood to include that devotion
to the Church which was far from being the least genuine thing in
Spain. All did not see with the same breadth of vision. A Velasquez is
rare. It is comparatively easy to be Zurbaran. As a rule the Spaniard
could express types better than individuals. The jealous husband, the
adventurer, heroic as in _Amadis_, or rascally as in _Lazarillo_, a
rigid ideal of honour, an orthodox pattern of piety, are what the
Spaniard gives us--these, and the stirring action of which they form
a part. He drew from the world he saw around him, and fitted his
materials into a pattern for the stage, or for the story. The _goût
du terroir_, the essentially Spanish _borracha_, is on it all. The
flavour is not delicate. There is little gaiety in the Spaniard, but
instead of it a hard jocularity. He very rarely says the profound
and universally true thing. It would be hard to make a collection of
“beauties” from his literature. In so far as he has helped the general
literature of the world, it has been by supplying a model of machinery
for the play and the prose story. Therefore his literature stands apart
in the modern world. If you are to enjoy it you must be prepared to
be satisfied with the action, the ideal of honour, the enthusiastic
piety which he can give. And to enjoy them you must read them in his
own Castilian. All translation is as the back of the tapestry, but no
original loses more than does the Spaniard when he is divested of his
own language and lets slip the merits of its terse gravity, its varied
picturesque force.
In Spain, then, the Renaissance met something on which it could secure
no hold, something in a sense barbarous, not quite European, and
recalcitrant to all classic influences. In England it met a strong
national genius, but not one which was entirely alien. Sidney, Spenser,
and Marlowe showed the influence of the Renaissance, not as mere
imitators of forms, but as Englishmen, and yet fully. In Shakespeare
it was included with much more. Its love of beauty and its sense of
form were never better expressed than in the lyrics. The difference
between the two nations is profound. The Spaniard either copied the
mere form, or produced what one feels would have come as a natural
growth from the Middle Ages, the _Libro de Caballerías_, the _Novela de
Pícaros_, the _Auto Sacramental_, and even the _comedia_, in which no
trace of the classic influence is to be seen. A drama which is in no
sense classic might have developed from the morality and the farce. As
much might be said of the form of the English drama. Seneca might have
been forgotten, and Tansillo might never have written (without Seneca
he never would have written as he did), as far as the construction
of the English play is concerned. But then much of the Renaissance
spirit did pass into Elizabethan literature. We could not deduct what
it shared with Italy without fatal loss. The genius of Spenser could
perhaps have dispensed with a teacher, but as a matter of fact it did
not. With no model save Chaucer he would yet have been one of the
greatest of poets. He would not have been exactly the poet he was
without Ariosto, Tasso, and Du Bellay. Shakespeare had, of all sons of
Adam, the least need to borrow, and yet without the influence of the
Renaissance we should not have the _Sonnets_, _Venus and Adonis_, _The
Rape of Lucrece_, or many passages in the plays. The English genius, in
fact, accepted and absorbed the Renaissance without losing its native
independence. All the manifestations of its freedom were not equally
admirable. The wild incoherence of the early dramatists is not good in
itself. When we see it at its worst, we are half tempted to wish that
Greene and Marlowe had been more subservient. Yet it was good in so
far as it was a striving after an ideal both national and good. It was
the necessary preparation for Shakespeare and the great things of the
Elizabethan drama. If the time was less mighty in prose than in verse,
yet the germs of all that was to come were in Hooker. He had the secret
of lucid arrangement, the art of dealing with the greatest questions
in his own tongue, and in a form at once unaffected, instantly
intelligible to the average thoughtful man, and yet eloquent where the
occasion required him to rise above the usual level of speech.
The natural aptitude of the French for discipline in literature, and
their tendency to form schools, to set up a doctrine, and to reject all
that is not compatible with it, have never been more strongly shown
than during the Later Renaissance. Other influences were at work. It
would be very rash to say that classic or Italian models had a visible
influence on Carloix’s memoirs of Vielleville, or the commentaries
of Monluc, or even the vast unnamed, or misnamed, compilation of
Brantôme. Yet the Renaissance did, on the whole, dominate France,
though it could not eliminate, or suppress, what was essentially
French. Its intense interest in the life and the character of man was
never better shown than by Montaigne. In poetry the attempt to adapt
the classic and Italian models to French use swept all before it.
Nowhere was the French disposition to find its freedom in the service
of a classic model more clearly seen than in the drama of the Pléiade.
It is true that Jodelle, Garnier, Belleau, Grévin, and the others may
be said to have failed. They did not produce any dramatic literature
which has much more than an interest of curiosity. Yet the later
history of the French stage proves that they were making their efforts
on lines congenial to their nation. The dramatists of the Augustan age
did no more than work in the same spirit, and to the same ends as their
forgotten predecessors, with altered--and but slightly altered--means.
A comparison between the three literatures will go far to explain
their respective fates. For the Spanish there could not well be any
future. A strong national character, unchanging, and so close in the
fibre that it never really admits a foreign influence, could not well
do more than express itself once. The time came when it had said its
say--and nothing then remained except, first mere juggling with words,
and then silence--Góngorism and Decadence. In England and in France
there was the hope, and even the assurance, of far more to come. Though
the Spanish story has been carried beyond the dates allowed for France
and England, there is no unfairness in this sentence. In 1616 Lope had
still much of his best work to do. Quevedo, Calderon, and Góngora were
to come; but the first and second brought nothing, or at least very
little, absolutely new, and the third brought destruction. Lope was
only to do what he had done already. When Shakespeare died in England
and Mathurin Regnier in France, a long succession was to follow them.
Englishmen and Frenchmen had learnt their lesson from the Renaissance,
and were to use their knowledge.
FOOTNOTE:
[122] The names of Corte-Real (1540-1593), P. de Andrade (1576-1660),
Sá de Menezes (----?-1664), may represent this class. Others, with the
classical prose of Vieira and G. de Andrade, which continued the work
of Barros (1496-1570), may be referred to in the next volume.
INDEX.
Acuña, Ferdinand de, 43.
Alarcon, Juan Ruiz de, 83, 93, 102-105.
Aleman, Mateo, 7, 137, 141.
_Amadis of Gaul_, 127 _sq._
Antonio, _Biblioteca Hispana_, 3.
Argensola, Bartolomé de, 48, 170.
Argensola, Lupercio de, 48.
_Arte of English Poesie, The_, 188.
Aubertin, Mr, 57 note, 58 note.
Aubigné, Theodore Agrippa D’, 306-308, 332 _sq._
Ávila, Juan de, 180.
Ávila, Luis de, 158.
Baïf, Jean Antoine de, 293, 301.
_Barons’ War, The_, 210.
Bartas, Du, 303-306.
Bellay, Joachim du, 24, 293 _sq._, 298-300.
Belleau, Remi, 293, 300.
Bertaut, Jean, 299.
_Biblioteca de Aribau_ or _de Ribadeneyra_, 40 note.
Bodin, Jean, 329.
Borrow, George, 26.
Boscan, Juan, 10, 30 _sq._, 41.
Brantôme, Pierre de, 336.
Breton, 272.
Bruno, Giordano, 360-365.
Burton, Sir Richard, 58 note.
Calderon, 80, 83-90, 93, 94, 111-120.
Caminha, Pedro de Andrade, 55.
Camoens, Luiz da, 57-59.
Campion, Thomas, 189.
_Cancioneros_, the, 10 _sq._
Cano, Dominican Melchior, 46.
Carloix, Vincent, 330.
Carvajal, Micael de, 65.
Casas, Bartolomé de las, 162.
Castellanos, Juan de, 53.
Castillejo, Cristobal de, 10, 25, 35.
Castillo, Hernan del, 11, 15.
Castro, Guillen de, 82.
_Celestina_, 6, 64, 138, 139.
Cervantes, 5, 61, 120 _sq._, 145-156.
Cetina, Gutierre de, 32, 43.
Chaide, Malon de, 179.
Charron, Pierre, 350.
Coloma, Carlos, Marquis of Espinar, 159.
Cruz, Juan de la, 179, 183.
Cueva, Juan de la, 37 _sq._, 71, 92.
Daniel, Samuel, 213-215.
Daurat, Jean, 292, 301.
Dekker, 276.
_Diálogo de la Lengua_, 23.
Diaz, Bernal, 160.
Drayton, 210, 216-219.
Encina, Juan del, 8, 10, 64 _sq._
Ercilla, Alonso de, 54 _sq._
Espinel, Vicente, 143.
Estella, Diego de, 177.
Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 58 note.
_Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja_, 63.
Ferreira, Antonio, 55, 66.
Figueroa, Francisco de, 48.
Figueroa, Suarez de, 174.
Figueroa, Vera y, 174.
Fitz-Geoffrey, Charles, 211.
Fontaine, 27.
Garcilaso, 10, 31, 41 _sq._
Garnier, Robert, 317-320.
Gascoigne, George, 191.
Gómara, Francisco Lopez de, 161.
Gomez, Enriquez, 138.
Góngora and Góngorism, 34, 48 _sq._
Googe, Barnabe, 191.
_Gorboduc_, 232.
Gosson, Stephen, 201.
Gracian, Baltasar, 172.
Granada, Luis de, 176, 181.
Grant-Duff, Sir M. E., 172.
Greene, Robert, 238-240, 272.
Grévin, Jacques, 316.
Guarini, Giambattista, 365.
Guevara, Antonio de, 26 _sq._
Guevara, Luis Velez de, 156 note.
Hall, Joseph, 219 _sq._
Hallam, 286.
Harvey, Gabriel, 186.
Herrera, Antonio de, 163.
Herrera, Hernan de, 10, 41, 42, 45, 47.
_History of the Civil War_, 210.
Hita, Ginés Perez de, 136.
Hooker, Richard, 286-289.
Inca Garcilaso, the, 163.
Jerez, Francisco de, 161.
Jodelle, Estienne, 312-316.
John II., 7.
Johnson, Dr, 46.
Kyd, Thomas, 242.
Larivey, Pierre, 321-324.
_Lazarillo de Tormés_, 7, 140.
Ledesma, Alonso de, 51.
Leon, Luis de, 34, 45 _sq._, 181.
Leon, Pedro Cieza de, 161.
Lewes, G. H., 86 note.
_Libros de Caballerías_, 125 _sq._
Lockhart, J. G., 18 _sq._
Lodge, 219, 235, 272.
Longfellow, H. W., 9.
Lyly, John, 235, 266 _sq._
Manrique, Jorge, 42.
Mardones, Cristobal de Salazar, 49 _sq._
Mariana, Juan de, 167-169.
Markham, Gervase, 211.
Marlowe, Christopher, 242-245.
Marprelate, Martin, 263 _sq._, 276-285.
Marston, 219 _sq._
Melo, Francisco Manuel de, 166.
Mena, Juan de, 7 _sq._, 35.
Mendoza, Bernardino de, 159.
Mendoza, Diego de, 32, 43 _sq._, 140, 164.
Menendez, Don M., 40, 61, 86 note.
Molina, Tirso de, 29, 81, 105-110, 125.
Molinos, Miguel de, 176.
Moncada, Francisco de, 165.
Monluc, Blaise de, 334.
Montaigne, Michel de, 344-350.
Montalvo, Garcia Ordoñez de, 128.
Montchrestien, Antoine de, 320.
Montemayor, Jorge de, 124.
Morales, Ambrosio de, 166.
Morel-Fatio, M. Alfred, 43 note.
Moreto, 90.
Morley, Mr John, 173.
Naharro, Bartolomé de Torres, 67.
Nash, Thomas, 235, 273-276.
Nebrissensis, 22.
Noue, François de la, 331.
Ocampo, Florian de, 166.
Oliva, Fernan Perez de, 22.
Ortega, Fray Juan de, 140.
Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernandez de, 161.
“Palmerines,” the, 130 _sq._
Pedroso, Eduardo Gonzalez, 62 note.
Peele, George, 240-242.
Perez, Andreas, 143.
Pléiade, the, 291, 310 _sq._
Puttenham, George, 188, 262.
Quevedo, 51, 144 _sq._
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 264 _sq._
Regnier, Mathurin, 308.
Rengifo, Juan Diaz, 36.
Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 169.
_Romanceros_, the, 14 _sq._
Ronsard, Pierre de, 34, 292, 295-298.
Roxas, Agustin de, 175.
Roxas, Francisco de, 90.
Rueda, Lope de, 68 _sq._
Sa de Miranda, Francisco de, 55.
Saavedra-Fajardo, Diego de, 170, 173.
Sackville, Sir Thomas, 189, 232.
Sanchez, Francisco, 42.
Sandoval, Prudencio de, 170.
Santillana, Marquis of, 8, 25, 35.
_Satyre Ménippée_, the, 339-344.
Schlegel, A. W., 122.
Sempere, Hierónimo, 52.
Shakespeare, 247-258.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 37, 200-204, 269-272.
Silva, Feliciano de, 131.
Solis, Antonio de, 170.
Sommelsdyck, Aarsens van, 6.
Song-books, Elizabethan, 208.
Sonneteers, Elizabethan, 206.
Southey, Robert, 55 _sq._
Spenser, Edmund, 185, 192-199.
Still, John, 231.
Sully, 327.
Taille, Jacques de la, 317.
Tasso, Torquato, 353-360.
Teresa, Santa, 177-182.
Thyard, Pontus de, 301.
Ticknor, Mr, 28, 30, 40, 64 note, 87.
Timoneda, Juan de, 63, 70, 125.
_Tirant lo Blanch_, 126.
Turberville, George, 190 _sq._
Udall, Nicholas, 230.
Vaca, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de, 160.
Vair, Guillaume du, 351.
Váldes, Juan de, 23.
Valera, Don Juan, 4.
Valois, Marguerite de, 337.
Vega, Lope de, 28, 48, 53, 61, 64, 72-80, 92, 94-102.
Vicente, Gil, 62.
Villalobos, Francisco de, 22.
Virues, Cristobal de, 71.
Warner, William, 211-213.
Watson, Thomas, 204-206.
Webbe, 187, 190, 262.
Zapata, Luis de, 52.
Zarate, Augustin de, 161.
Zurita, Gerónimo de, 167.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled
consecutively through the document.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.
p. 168: 1501 changed to 1601 (in 1601, was)
p. 205: παλιλλογἱα transliterates into English as palillogia (called
παλιλλογἱα or)
p. 205: ἀναδἰπλωσις transliterates into English as anadiplôsis (or
ἀναδἰπλωσις, of)
p. 333: ἄστοργος transliterates into English as astorgos (word
(ἄστοργος), which)