ROMANCES IN THE STYLE OF ROGUES.--STATE OF MANNERS THAT PRODUCED
THEM.--MENDOZA’S LAZARILLO DE TORMES.--ALEMAN’S GUZMAN DE
ALFARACHE, WITH THE SPURIOUS CONTINUATION OF IT BY SAYAVEDRA
AND THE TRUE ONE BY ALEMAN.--PEREZ.--ESPINEL AND HIS MARCOS DE
OBREGON.--YAÑEZ.--QUEVEDO.--SOLORZANO.--ENRIQUEZ GOMEZ.--ESTEVANILLO
GONZALEZ.
The next form of prose fiction produced in Spain, and the one which,
from its greater truth, has enjoyed a more permanent regard than the
last, is found in those stories that have commonly gone under the name
of “tales in the _gusto picaresco_,” or tales in the style of rogues.
Taken as a class, they constitute a singular exhibition of character,
and are, in fact, as separate and national in their air as any thing in
the whole body of modern literature.
Their origin is obvious, and the more so from what is most singular
in their character. They sprang directly from the condition of some
portions of society in Spain when they appeared;--a condition, it
should be added, which has existed there ever since, and contributed to
preserve for the stories that bear its impress no little of the favor
they have always enjoyed. Before speaking of them in detail, we must,
therefore, notice the peculiar circumstances of the country, and the
peculiar state of manners that gave them birth.
The wars of the opposing races and religions, that had constituted so
much of the business of life, and so long engrossed the thoughts of
men, in Spain, had, indeed, nearly ceased from the time of Ferdinand
and Isabella. But the state of character they had produced in the
Spanish people had by no means ceased with them. On the contrary, it
had been kept in the freshest activity by those vast enterprises which
Charles the Fifth had pushed forward in Italy, France, and Germany,
with such success, that the Spanish nation, always marked by a sanguine
enthusiasm, had become fully persuaded that it was destined to achieve
an empire which, covering the whole of the New World and whatever was
most desirable in the Old, should surpass in glory and power the empire
of the Cæsars in the days of its palmiest supremacy.
This magnificent result was a matter of such general faith, that
men often felt a desire to contribute their personal exertions to
accomplish it. Not only the high nobility of Spain, therefore, but
all cavaliers and men of honor who sought distinction, saw, with the
exception of places in the civil administration of affairs or in the
Church, no road open before them on which they were so much tempted
to enter as that of military enterprise. Laborious occupation in the
business of common life and practical and productive industry were, in
consequence, discountenanced, or held in contempt, while the armies
were thronged, and multitudes of gentlemen and men of culture, like
Cervantes and Lope de Vega, gladly served in them as simple soldiers.
But large as were the armies of Charles the Fifth and Philip the
Second, all who desired it could not be soldiers. Many persons of
decent condition, therefore, remained idle, because they found no
occupation which was not deemed below their rank in society; while
others, having made an experiment of military life sufficient to
disgust them with its hardships, returned home unfitted for every
thing else. These two sorts of persons formed a class of idlers that
hung loose upon society in the principal cities of Spain, thriving at
best by flattery and low intrigue, and sometimes driven for subsistence
to crime. Their number was by no means small. They were known and
marked wherever they went; and their characters, represented with much
spirit, and often with great faithfulness, are still to be recognized
in the proud, starving cavaliers of Mendoza and Quevedo, who stalk
about the streets upon adventure, or crowd the antechamber of the
minister, and weary his patience with their abject supplications for
the meanest places it is in his power to bestow.
But there was yet another body of persons in Spain, nearly akin to the
last in spirit, though differing from them in their original position,
who figure no less in this peculiar form of fiction. They were the
active, the shrewd, and the unscrupulous of the lower portions of
society;--men who were able to perceive that the resources and power
of the country, with all the advantages they desired to reach, were
already in possession of an aristocratic caste, who looked to them for
nothing but a sincere and faithful loyalty. During a long period,--the
period of danger and trouble at home,--the fidelity of this class
had been complete and unhesitating; bringing with it little feeling
of wrong, and perhaps no sense of degradation; for such men, in such
times, claimed from their superiors only protection, and, receiving
this, asked for nothing else.
At last, however, other prospects opened upon them. Peace came
gradually, as the Moors were driven out; and with it came a sense of
independence and personal rights, which sometimes expressed itself in
social restlessness, as in the frequent troubles at the universities;
and sometimes, as in the wars of the _Comuneros_, in open rebellion.
Contemporary, too, with these upward struggles of the masses of the
people, which were always successfully rebuked and repressed, came the
conquests in America, pouring such floods of wealth as the world had
never before seen upon a country that had for ages been one of the
poorest and most suffering in Europe. The easily got treasure--which
was at first only in the hands of military adventurers or of those
who had obtained grants of office and territory in the New World--was
scattered as lightly as it was won. The shrewd and unprincipled of
the less favored classes, therefore, soon learned to gather round its
possessors, as they came home with their tempting burdens, and found
ready means to profit by the golden shower that fell on all sides, with
a profusion which carried an unhealthy action through every division of
society. Little, however, could be obtained by men so humble and in a
position so false, except by the arts of cunning and flattery. Cunning
and flattery, therefore, were soon called forth among them in great
abundance. The wealth of the Indies was a rich compost, that brought
up parasites and rogues with other noxious weeds; and Paul, the son of
a barber, and nephew of a hangman; Cortadillo, a young thief, whose
father was a village tailor; and Little Lazarus, who could never settle
his genealogy to his own satisfaction, became, in the literature of
their country, the permanent representatives of their class;--a class
well known under the degrading name of the _Catariberas_,[92] or the
gayer one of _Pícaros_.
[92] For these low, vagabond attorneys, or jackals of
attorneys,--the _Catariberas_,--see, _ante_, Vol. I. p. 519, and
note.
The first instance of a fiction founded on this state of things was, as
we have already seen, the “Lazarillo de Tórmes” of Mendoza, which was
published as early as 1554; a bold, unfinished sketch of the life of a
rogue, from the very lowest condition in society. This was followed,
forty-five years afterwards, by the “Guzman de Alfarache” of Mateo
Aleman, the most ample portraiture of the class to which it belongs
that is to be found in Spanish literature. What induced Aleman to write
it we do not know. Indeed, we know little about him, except that he
was a native of Seville, and wrote three or four other works of less
consequence than this tale; that he was long employed in the treasury
department of the government, and subjected to a vexatious suit at law
in consequence of it; and that at last, retiring of his own choice to
private life, he visited Mexico in 1609, and devoted the remainder of
his days, either there or in Spain, to letters.[93] He may, at some
period, have been a soldier; for one of his friends, in a eulogium
prefixed to the second part of “Guzman de Alfarache,” sums up his
character by saying that “never soldier had a poorer purse or a richer
heart, or a life more unquiet and full of trouble, than his was; and
all because he accounted it a greater honor to be a poor philosopher
than a rich flatterer.”
[93] Antonio, Bib. Nova, Article _Matthæus Aleman_; and Salvá,
Repertorio Americano, 1827, Tom. III. p. 65. For his troubles
with the government, see Navarrete, “Vida de Cervantes,” 1819,
p. 441. He seems to have been old when he went to Mexico; and
Don Adolfo de Castro, at the end of the “Buscapié,” 1848, gives
us a letter, dated at Seville, April 20th, 1607, from Aleman to
Cervantes, of whose origin or discovery we receive no account
whatever, and into which its author seems to have thrust all
the proverbs and allusions he could collect;--none, however, so
obscure that the curious learning of Don Adolfo cannot elucidate
them. The whole letter is a complaint of Aleman’s own hard
fortune, and a prediction of that of Cervantes, ending with a
declaration of the purpose of its writer to go to Mexico. It does
not seem to me to be genuine; but if it is, it gives the _coup
de grace_ to Clemencin’s conjectures, in his notes to both the
first and second part of Don Quixote, (Parte I. c. 22, and Parte
II. c. 4,) that Cervantes intended to speak slightingly of the
“Guzman de Alfarache”;--a conjecture not to be sustained, if
the relations of Cervantes with Aleman were as friendly as this
letter, published by Don Adolfo de Castro, implies.
But whatever he may have been, or whatever he may have suffered, his
claims to be remembered are now centred in his “Guzman de Alfarache.”
As it has reached us, it is divided into two parts, the first of which
was published at Madrid, in 1599. Its hero, who supposed himself
to be the son of a decayed and not very reputable Genoese merchant
established at Seville, escapes, as a boy, from his mother, after his
father’s ruin and death, and plunges into the world upon adventure. He
soon finds himself at Madrid, though not till he has passed through
the hands of the officers of justice; and there undergoes all sorts of
suffering, serving as a scullion to a cook, and as a ragged errand-boy
to whomsoever would employ him; until, seizing a good opportunity, he
steals a large sum of money that had been intrusted to him, and escapes
to Toledo, where he sets up for a gentleman. But there he becomes, in
his turn, the victim of a cunning like his own; and, finding his money
nearly gone, enlists for the Italian wars. His star is now on the wane.
At Barcelona, he again turns sharper and thief. At Genoa and Rome, he
sinks to the lowest conditions of a street beggar. But a cardinal picks
him up in the last city and makes him his page; a place in which, but
for his bold frauds and tricks, he might long have thriven, and which
at last he leaves in great distress, from losses at play, and enters
the service of the French ambassador.
Here the first part ends. It was very successful; falling in with the
vices and humors of the times, just as the loose court of Philip the
Third, and the corrupting influences of his favorite, the Duke of
Lerma, came to offer a sort of carnival to folly and vice, after the
hypocrisy and constraints of the last dark years of Philip the Second.
The Guzman, therefore, within a twelve-month after it appeared,
passed through three editions; and, in less than six years, through
twenty-six, besides being translated into French and Italian.[94] It
was imitated, too, in a second part by some unknown person, probably
by Juan Marti, a Valencian advocate, who disguised himself under the
name of Mateo Luxan de Sayavedra, and published in 1603 what he boldly
called a continuation of the Guzman.[95] But it was a base attempt,
which, though not without literary merit, brought upon its author the
just reproaches of Aleman, who intimates that his own manuscripts
had been improperly used in its composition, and the just sarcasm of
Aleman’s friend, Luis de Valdes, who exposed the meanness of the whole
fraud.
[94] The first three editions, those of Madrid, Barcelona, and
Saragossa, are well known, and are all of 1599; but most of the
remaining three-and-twenty rest on the authority of Valdes,
in a letter prefixed to the first edition of the second part,
(Valencia, 1605, 12mo,) an authority, however, which there seems
no sufficient reason to question, remarkable as the story is.
Valdes says expressly, “The number of printed volumes exceeds
fifty thousand, and the number of impressions that have come to
my notice is twenty-six.”
[95] This continuation, not quite so long as the first part of
the original work, was printed at Madrid, 1846, 8vo, in the
third volume of the “Biblioteca” of Aribau. Previously, it had
been hardly known in literary history, and much overlooked by
the bibliographers; Ebert, who had found some traces of it,
attributing it to Aleman himself, and considering it as a true
second part of the Guzman. But this is a mistake. Both Aleman
himself and his friend Valdes are explicit on the subject, in
their epistles prefixed to the first edition of the second
part;--Valdes declaring that the author of the continuation in
question was “a Valencian, who, falsifying his own name, called
himself Mateo Luxan, to assimilate himself to Mateo Aleman.”
Aleman himself says he was obliged to rewrite his second part,
because he had, through a prodigal communication of his papers,
been robbed and defrauded of the materials out of which he had
originally composed it. The work of the Valencian was printed at
Barcelona in 1603, at Brussels, 1604, etc. On the title-page to
the first edition of the genuine second part Aleman says, “Let
the reader take notice, that the second part published before
this is none of mine, and that this is the only one I recognize.”
Fuster, in his “Biblioteca,” Tom. I. p. 198, gives strong reasons
for supposing the spurious second part was written by Juan Marti,
a Valencian advocate.
In 1605, the genuine second part appeared.[96] It begins with the
life of Guzman in the house of the French ambassador at Rome, where he
serves in some of the most dishonorable employments to which the great
of that period degraded their mercenary dependants. But his own follies
and crimes drive him away from a place for which he seems to have been
in most respects well fitted, and he goes to Siena. At this point in
his story, it seems to have occurred to Aleman to attack the Sayavedra
who had endeavoured to impose upon the world with a false second part
of the Guzman. He therefore introduces a person who is made thus to
describe himself:--
[96] There has been some confusion about the time of the first
appearance of these two second parts; one having sometimes
been mistaken for the other. But Fuster evidently believed in
no edition of the _spurious_ second part older than 1603, the
license to which is dated in 1602; and I possess the edition of
the _genuine_ second part, printed at Valencia in 1605, with a
license of the same year, recognizing no earlier publication,
and bearing all the usual proofs of being the first. Both of the
second parts promise a third, which never appeared.
“He told me,” says Guzman, who always writes in the style of
autobiography, “he told me, that he was an Andalusian, born in Seville,
my own native city, Sayavedra by name, with papers to show that he
belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished families among us.
Who would suspect fraud under such a fair outside? And yet it was all a
lie. He was a Valencian. I do not give his true name, for good reasons;
but what with his flowing Castilian, his good looks, and his agreeable
manners, it was impossible for me to suspect that he was a thief, a
sponge, and a cheat, who had dressed himself up in peacock’s feathers
only to obtain by falsehood such an entrance into my apartments that he
could rob me of whatever he liked.”[97]
[97] Parte II. Lib. I. c. 8.
This personage, his history and adventures, fill too large a space in
the second part of the Guzman; for when once Aleman had seized him,
he seemed not to tire of inflicting punishment so soon as the reader
does of witnessing it. Sayavedra robs and cheats Guzman early in this
portion of the story; but afterwards accompanies him, in an equivocal
capacity, through Milan, Bologna, and Genoa, to Spain, where, partly
perhaps to get rid of him, and partly perhaps, as Cervantes did
afterwards in the case of Don Quixote and Avellaneda, in order to end
his story and prevent his enemy from continuing it any further, Aleman
brings his victim’s life to an end.
The remainder of the book is filled with the adventures of Guzman
himself, which are as wild and various as possible. He becomes
a merchant at Madrid, and cheats his creditors by a fraudulent
bankruptcy. He marries, but his wife dies soon; and then he begins, as
a student at Alcalá, to prepare himself for the Church;--a consummation
of wickedness which is prevented only by his marriage a second
time. His second wife, however, leaves him at Seville, where he had
established himself, and elopes with a lover to Italy. After this, he
is reduced again to abject poverty; and, unable to live with his old,
wretched, and shameless mother, he becomes major-domo to a lady of
fortune, robs her, and is sent to the galleys, where he has the good
luck to reveal a conspiracy and is rewarded with his freedom and a full
pardon.
With this announcement the second part abruptly ends, not without
promising a third, which was never published, though the author, in his
Preface, says it was already written. The work, therefore, as it has
come to us, is imperfect. But it was not, on that account, the less
favored and admired. On the contrary, it was translated and printed
all over Europe, in French, in Italian, in German, in Portuguese, in
English, in Dutch, and even in Latin; a rare success, whose secret
lies partly in the age when the Guzman appeared, and still more in
the power and talent of the author.[98] The long moralizing discourses
with which it abounds, written in a pure Castilian style, with much
quaintness and point, were then admired, and saved it from censures
which it could otherwise hardly have failed to encounter. These are, no
doubt, the passages that led Ben Jonson to speak of it as
“The Spanish Proteus, which, though writ
But in one tongue, was formed with the world’s wit,
And hath the noblest mark of a good booke,
That an ill man doth not securely looke
Upon it; but will loathe or let it passe,
As a deformed face doth a true glasse.”[99]
[98] The common bibliographers give lists of all the
translations. The first English is by Mabbe, and is excellent.
(See Wood’s Athenæ, ed. Bliss, Tom. III. p. 54, and Ret. Review,
Tom. V. p. 189.) It went through at least four editions, the
fourth being printed at London, 1656, folio; besides which
there has been a subsequent translation by several hands,
taken, however, I think, from the French of Le Sage. The Latin
translation was by Gaspar Ens, and I have seen editions of it
referred to as of 1623, 1624, and 1652. Every thing, indeed,
shows that the popular success of the Guzman was immense
throughout Europe.
[99] See the verses prefixed to the translation of Mabbe, and
signed by Ben Jonson.
This, however, is not its real, or at least not its main character.
The Guzman is chiefly curious and interesting because it shows us,
in the costume of the times, the life of an ingenious, Machiavellian
rogue, who is never at a loss for an expedient; who always treats
himself and speaks of himself as an honest and respectable man; and who
sometimes goes to mass and says his prayers just before he enters on
an extraordinary scheme of roguery, as if on purpose to bring it out
in more striking and brilliant relief. So far from being a moral book,
therefore, it is a very immoral one, and Le Sage spoke in the spirit of
its author, when, in the next century, undertaking to give a new French
version of it, he boasted that he “had purged it of its superfluous
moral reflections.”[100]
[100] There are four French translations of it, beginning with
one by Chappuis, in 1600, and coming down to that of Le Sage,
1732, which last has been many times reprinted. The third in the
order of dates was made by Bremont, while in prison in Holland;
and, out of spite against the administration of justice, from
which he was suffering, he made bitter additions to the original
whenever a judge or a bailiff came into his hands. See the
Preface of Le Sage.
It has, naturally, a considerable number of episodes. That of
Sayavedra has already been noticed, as occupying a space in the
work disproportionate to every thing but the anger of its author.
Another--the story of Osmyn and Daraxa, which occurs early--is a
pleasing specimen of those half-Moorish, half-Christian fictions
that are so characteristic a portion of Spanish literature.[101] And
yet another, which is placed in Spain and in the time of the Great
Constable, Alvaro de Luna, is, after all, an Italian tale of Masuccio,
used subsequently by Beaumont and Fletcher in “The Little French
Lawyer.”[102] But, on the whole, the attention of the reader is fairly
kept either upon the hero or upon the long discussions in which the
hero indulges himself, and in which he draws striking, though not
unfrequently exaggerated and burlesque, sketches of all classes of
society in Spain, as they successively pass in review before him. At
first, Aleman thought of calling his work “A Beacon-light of Life.” The
name would not have been inappropriate, and it is the qualities implied
under it--the sagacity, the knowledge of life and character, and the
acuteness of its reflections on men and manners--that have preserved
for it somewhat of its original popularity down to our own times.
[101] Parte I. Lib. I. c. 8. It is related by Guzman, however,
who is much too young to tell such a story. It may be noted,
also, that Guzman grows very suddenly to man’s estate, after
leaving Madrid and before reaching Toledo, whither he went as
fast as he could to escape pursuit.
[102] Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Weber, Edinburgh, 1812, 8vo,
Vol. V. p. 120. Le Sage omits it in his version, because, he
says, Scarron had made it one in his collection of tales. It has,
in fact, been often used, as have many other stories of the same
class.
In 1605 another story of the same class appeared, the “Pícara
Justina,” or the Crafty Justina,--again a seeming autobiography,
and again a fiction of very doubtful morality. It was written by a
Dominican monk, Andreas Perez of Leon, who was known, both before and
after its appearance, as the author of works of Christian devotion,
and who had so far a sense of the incongruity of the Pícara Justina
with his religious position, that he printed it under the assumed name
of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda. He claims to have written it when he was
a student at the University of Alcalá, but admits, that, after the
appearance of the “Guzman de Alfarache,” he made large additions to
it. It is, however, in truth, a mere imitation, and a very poor one,
of Aleman. The first book is filled with a tedious, rambling account
of Justina’s ancestors, who are barbers and puppet-showmen; and the
rest consists of her own life, brought down to the time of her first
marriage, marked by few adventures, and ending with an intimation,
that, at the time of writing it, she had already been married yet twice
more; that she was then the wife of Guzman de Alfarache; and that she
should continue her memoirs still further, in case the public should
care to hear more about her.
The Justina discovers little power of invention in the incidents, which
are few and not interesting. Indeed, the author himself declares that
nearly all of them were actual occurrences within his own experience;
and this circumstance, together with the meagre “improvements,” as they
are called,--or warnings against the follies and guilt of the heroine,
with which each chapter ends,--is regarded by him as a sufficient
justification for publishing a work whose tendency is obviously
mischievous. Nor is the style better than the incidents. There is a
constant effort to say witty and brilliant things; but it is rarely
successful; and besides this, there is an affectation of new words and
singular phrases which do not belong to the genius and analogies of the
language, and which have caused at least one Spanish critic to regard
Perez as the first author who left the sober and dignified style of the
elder times, and, from mere caprice, undertook to invent a new one.[103]
[103] The first edition of the “Pícara Justina” is that of
Medina del Campo, 1605, 4to, since which time it has been often
printed; the best edition being probably that of Madrid, 1735,
4to, edited by Mayans y Siscar, who, in a prefatory notice, makes
the reproach against its author, as the oldest corrupter of the
Spanish prose style, alluded to in the text. There is a good
deal of poetry scattered through the volume; all very conceited
and poor. Some of it is in that sort of verses from which the
final syllable is cut off,--such verses, I mean, as Cervantes has
prefixed to the first part of Don Quixote; and as both that part
and the “Pícara Justina” were originally published in the same
year, 1605, some question has arisen with Pellicer and Clemencin,
who is the inventor of these poor, truncated verses. _Le jeu ne
vaut pas la chandelle._ But, as the first part of Don Quixote,
according to the _Tassa_ prefixed to it, was struck off as early
as the 20th of December, 1604, though the full copyright was not
granted till the 9th of February following, there can be little
doubt that Cervantes was the earliest.
But though the “Pícara Justina” proved a failure, the overwhelming
popularity of “Guzman de Alfarache,” when added to that of “Lazarillo,”
rendered this form of fiction so generally welcome in Spain, that it
made its way into the ductile drama, and into the style of the shorter
tales, as we have already seen when treating of Lope de Vega and
Cervantes, and as we shall see hereafter when we come to speak of Salas
Barbadillo and Francisco de Santos. Meantime, however, the “Escudero
Marcos de Obregon” appeared; a work which has, on many accounts,
attracted attention, and which deserves to be remembered, as the best
of its kind in Spanish literature, except “Lazarillo” and “Guzman.”
It was written by Vicente Espinel, who was born about 1540, at Ronda,
a romantic town, boldly built in the mountain range that stretches
through the southwestern portion of the kingdom of Granada, and
picturesquely described by himself in one of the most striking of
his poems.[104] He was educated at Salamanca, and, when Lope de Vega
appeared as a poet before the public, Espinel was already so far
advanced in his own career, that the young aspirant for public favor
submitted his verses to the critical skill of his elder friend;[105]--a
favor which Lope afterwards returned by praises in “The Laurel of
Apollo,” more heart-felt and effective than he has usually given in
that indiscriminate eulogium of the poets of his time.[106]
[104] See the “Cancion á su Patria,” which is creditable alike to
his personal feelings and--with the exception of a few foolish
conceits--to his poetical character. Diversas Rimas de V.
Espinel, Madrid, 1591, 12mo, f. 23.
[105] Espinel’s own Prólogo to “Marcos de Obregon.”
[106] End of the first _silva_ to the “Laurel de Apolo,” which
was published in 1630.
What was the course of Espinel’s life we do not know. It has generally
been supposed that many of its events are related in his “Marcos de
Obregon”; but though this is probable, and though some parts of that
story are evidently true, yet many others are as evidently fictions, so
that, on the whole, we are bound to regard it as a romance, and not as
an autobiography. We know, however, that Espinel’s life in Italy was
much like that of his hero; that he was a soldier in Flanders; that
he wrote Latin verses; that he published a volume of Castilian poetry
in 1591; and that he was a chaplain in Ronda, though he lived much in
Madrid, and at last died there. He was regarded as the author of the
form of verse called sometimes _décimas_, and sometimes, after himself,
_Espinelas_; and he is said to have added a fifth string to the guitar,
which soon led to the invention of the sixth, and thus completed that
truly national instrument.[107] He died, according to Antonio, in 1634;
but according to Lope de Vega, he was not alive in 1630. All accounts,
however, represent him as having survived his ninetieth year,[108]
and as having passed the latter part of his life in poverty and in
unfriendly relations with Cervantes;--a fact the more observable,
because both of them enjoyed pensions from the same distinguished
ecclesiastic, the kindly old Archbishop of Toledo.[109]
[107] Lope de Vega, Dorotea, Acto I. Sc. 8.
[108]
Noventa años viviste,
Nadie te dió favor, poco escribiste,--
says Lope, in the “Laurel.”
[109] Salas Barbadillo, Estafeta del Dios Momo, 1627, Dedicacion.
Navarrete, Vida de Cervantes, 1819, 8vo, pp. 178, 406.
The “Escudero Marcos de Obregon” was first published in 1618, and
therefore appeared in the old age of its author.[110] He presents his
hero, at once, as a person already past the middle years of life; one
of the esquires of dames, who, at that period, were personages of
humbler pretensions and graver character than those who, with the same
title, had followed the men-at-arms of old.[111] The story of Marcos,
however, though it opens upon us, at first, with scenes later in his
life, soon returns to his youth, and nearly the whole volume is made up
of his own account of his adventures, as he related them to a hermit
whom he had known when he was a soldier in Flanders and Italy, and at
whose cell he was now accidentally detained by a storm and flood, while
on an excursion from Madrid.
[110] The first edition is dedicated to his patron, the
Archbishop of Toledo, whose _daily_ pension to him, however,
_may_ have well been called “alms”--_limosna_--by Salas
Barbadillo. Other editions followed, and “Marcos” has continued
to be reprinted and read in Spain down to our own times. In
London, a good English translation of it, by Major Algernon
Langton, was published in 1816, in two volumes, 8vo; and in
Breslau, in 1827, there appeared a very spirited, but somewhat
free, translation into German, by Tieck, in two volumes, 18mo,
with a valuable Preface and good notes. The original is on the
Index of 1667 for expurgation.
[111] The _Escudero_ of the plays and novels of the seventeenth
century is wholly different from the _Escudero_ of the romances
of chivalry of the sixteenth. Covarrubias, _in verb._, well
describes both sorts, adding, “Now-a-days” (1611) “esquires are
chiefly used by ladies, but _men_ who have any thing to live upon
prefer to keep at home; for as esquires they earn little, and
have a hard service of it.”
In many particulars, his history resembles that of his predecessor,
Guzman de Alfarache. It is the story of a youth who left his father’s
house to seek his fortune; became first a student and afterwards a
soldier; visited Italy; was a captive in Algiers; travelled over a
large part of Spain; and after going through a great variety of dangers
and trials, intrigues, follies, and crimes, sits down quietly in his
old age to give an account of them all, with an air as grave and
self-satisfied as if the greater part of them had not been of the most
discreditable character. It contains a moderate number of wearisome,
well-written moral reflections, intended to render its record of
tricks, frauds, and crimes more savory to the reader by contrast;
but though it falls below both the “Guzman de Alfarache” and the
“Lazarillo” in the beauty and spirit of its style, it has more life in
its action than either of them, and the series of its events is carried
on with greater rapidity, and brought to a more regular conclusion.[112]
[112] “Marcos de Obregon” has been occasionally a good deal
discussed, both by those who have read it and those who have not,
from the use Le Sage has been supposed to have made of it in
the composition of Gil Blas. The charge was first announced by
Voltaire, who had personal reasons to dislike Le Sage, and who,
in his “Siècle de Louis XIV.,” (1752,) said, boldly enough, that
“The Gil Blas is taken entirely from the Spanish romance entitled
‘La Vidad de lo Escudiero Dom Marcos d’Obrego.’” (Œuvres, ed.
Beaumarchais, Paris, 1785, 8vo, Tom. XX. p. 155.) This is one of
the remarks Voltaire sometimes hazarded, with little knowledge
of the matter he was discussing, and it is not true. That Le
Sage had seen the “Marcos de Obregon” there can be no doubt; and
none that he made some use of it in the composition of the Gil
Blas. This is apparent at once by the story which constitutes its
Preface, and which is taken from a similar story in the Prólogo
to the Spanish romance; and it is no less plain frequently
afterwards, in the body of the work, where the trick played on
the vanity of Gil Blas, as he is going to Salamanca, (Lib. I.
c. 2,) is substantially the same with that played on Marcos,
(Relacion I. Desc. 9,)--where the stories of Camilla (Gil Blas,
Liv. I. c. 16, Marcos, Rel. III. Desc. 8) and of Mergellina
(Gil Blas, Liv. II. c. 7, Marcos, Rel. I. Desc. 3), with many
other matters of less consequence, correspond in a manner not
to be mistaken. But this was the way with Le Sage, who has used
Estevanillo Gonzalez, Guevara, Roxas, Antonio de Mendoza, and
others, with no more ceremony. He seemed, too, to care very
little about concealment, for one of the personages in his Gil
Blas is called Marcos de Obregon. But the idea that the Gil Blas
was _taken entirely_ from the Marcos de Obregon of Espinel, or
was very seriously indebted to that work, is absurd. See the next
Period, Chap. IV., note on Father Isla.
Ten years later, another romance of the same sort appeared. It was by
Yañez y Rivera, a physician of Segovia; who, as if on purpose to show
the variety of his talent, published two works on ascetic devotion, as
well as this _picaresque_ romance; all of them remote from the cares
and studies of his regular profession. He calls his story “Alonso,
the Servant of Many Masters”; and the name is a sort of index to its
contents. For it is a history of the adventures of its hero, Alonso,
in the service, first of a military officer, then of a sacristan, and
afterwards of a gentleman, of a lawyer, and of not a few others, who
happened to be willing to employ him; and it is, in fact, neither
more nor less than a satire on the different orders and conditions of
society, as he studies them all in the houses of his different masters.
It is evidently written with experience of the world, and its Castilian
style is good; but something of its spirit is diminished by the
circumstance, that it is thrown into the form of a dialogue. When Yañez
published the first part, in 1624, he said that he had already been a
practising physician twenty-six years, and that he should print nothing
more, unless it related to the profession he followed. His success,
however, with his Alonso was too tempting. He printed, in 1626, a
second part of it, containing his hero’s adventures among the Gypsies
and in Algerine captivity, and died in 1632.[113]
[113] The name of this author is one of the many that occur
in Spanish literature and history, where it is difficult to
determine which part of it should be used to designate its owner.
The whole of it is Gerónymo de Alcalá Yañez y Rivera; and,
no doubt, his personal acquaintances knew him as “the Doctor
Gerónymo.” In the Index to Antonio’s Bib. Nova, he is placed
under _Alcalá_; but as that name only implied, I presume, that
he had studied in Alcalá, I have preferred to call him Yañez
y Rivera, the first being his father’s name and the second
his mother’s; and I mention the circumstance only because it
is a difficulty which occurs in many cases of the same sort,
and should be noticed once for all. The title of his romance
is “Alonso Moço de Muchos Amos,” and the first part was first
printed at Madrid, in 1624; but my copy is of the edition of
Barcelona, 1625, 12mo, showing that it was well regarded in its
time, and soon came to a second edition. Many editions have been
published since; sometimes, like that of Madrid, 1804, 2 tom.
12mo, with the title of “El Donado Hablador,” or The Talkative
Lay-Brother, that being the character in which the hero tells his
story. Yañez y Rivera was born in 1563.
Quevedo’s “Paul the Sharper,” which we have already noticed, was
published the year after Yañez had completed his story, and did much
to extend the favor with which works of this sort were received.
Castillo Solorzano, therefore, well known at the time as a writer
of popular tales and dramas, ventured to follow him, but with less
good-fortune. His “Teresa, the Child of Tricks,” was published in 1632,
and was succeeded immediately by “The Graduate in Frauds,” of which
a continuation appeared in 1634, under the whimsical title of “The
Seville Weasel, or a Hook to catch Purses.” This last, which is an
account of the adventures of the Graduate’s daughter, proved, though
it was never finished, the most popular of Solorzano’s works, and has
not only been often reprinted, but was early translated into French,
and gained a reputation in Europe generally. All three, however, are
less strictly _picaresque_ tales than the similar fictions that had
preceded them;--not that they are wanting in coarse sketches of life
and caricatures as broad as any in Guzman, but that romantic tales,
ballads, and even farces, or parts of dramas, are introduced, showing
that this form of romance was becoming mingled with others more
poetical, if not more true to the condition of manners and society at
the time.[114]
[114] Alonso de Castillo Solorzano seems to have had his greatest
success between 1624 and 1649, and was at one time in the service
of Pedro Faxardo, the Marquis of Velez, who was Captain-general
of Valencia. There is an edition of the “Niña de los Embustes” as
early as 1632, and one of the “Garduña de Sevilla” in 1634. But,
except the few hints concerning their author to be gathered from
the titles and prefaces to his stories, and the meagre notices
in Lope de Vega’s “Laurel de Apolo,” Silva VIII., and Antonio,
Bib. Nova, Tom. I. p. 15, we know little of him. He sneers at
_cultismo_ on one page of his “Niña de los Embustes,” and falls
into it on the next.
Another proof of this change is to be found in “The Pythagoric Age” of
Enriquez Gomez, first published in 1644; a book of little value, which
takes the old doctrine of transmigration as the means of introducing a
succession of pictures to serve as subjects for its satire. It begins
with a poem in irregular verse, describing the existence of the soul,
first in the body of an ambitious man; then in that of a slanderer
and informer, a coquette, a minister of state, and a favorite; and it
ends with similar sketches, half in poetry and half in prose, of a
knight, a schemer, and others. But in the middle of the book is “The
Life of Don Gregorio Guadaña,” in prose, which is a tale in direct
imitation of Quevedo and Aleman, sometimes as free and coarse as theirs
are, but generally not offending against the proprieties of life;
and occasionally, as in the scenes during a journey and in the town
of Carmona, pleasant and interesting, because it evidently gives us
sketches from the author’s own experience. Like the rest of its class,
it is most successful when it deals with such realities, and least so
when it wanders off into the regions of poetry and fiction.[115]
[115] “El Siglo Pitagórico y la Vida de Don Gregorio Guadaña,”
was written by Antonio Enriquez Gomez, a Portuguese by descent,
who was educated in Castile, and lived much in France, where
several of his works were first printed. The earliest edition of
the “Siglo Pitagórico” is dated Rouen, 1644, but the one I use is
of Brussels, 1727, in 4to. There is a notice of the life of Gomez
in Barbosa, Tom. I. p. 297, and an examination of his works in
Amador de los Rios, “Judios de España,” 1848, pp. 569, etc. He
was of a Jewish Portuguese family, and Barbosa says he was born
in Portugal, but Amador de los Rios says he was born in Segovia.
That he renounced the Christian religion, which his father had
adopted, that he fled to France in 1638, and that he was burnt
in effigy by the Inquisition in 1660, are facts not doubted.
His Spanish name was Enriquez de Paz; and in the Preface to his
“Sanson Nazareno” he gives a list of his published works.
But the work which most plainly shows the condition of social life that
produced all these tales, if not the work that best exhibits their
character, is “The Life of Estevanillo Gonzalez,” first printed in
1646. It is the autobiography of a buffoon, who was long in the service
of Ottavio Piccolomini, the great general of the Thirty Years’ war; but
it is an autobiography so full of fiction, that Le Sage, sixty years
after its appearance, easily changed it into a mere romance, which has
continued to be republished as such with his works ever since.[116]
[116] “Vida y Hechos de Estevanillo Gonzalez, Hombre de Buen
Humor, compuesta por el mismo,” was printed at Antwerp in 1646,
and at Madrid in 1652. Whether there is any edition between these
and the one of 1795, Madrid, 2 tom. 12mo, I do not know. The
_rifacimento_ of Le Sage appeared, I believe, for the first time
in 1707.
Both in the original and in the French translation, it is called
“The Life and Achievements of Estevanillo Gonzalez, the Good-natured
Fellow,” and gives an account of his travels all over Europe, and
of his adventures as courier, cook, and valet of the different
distinguished masters whom he at different times served, from the
king of Poland down to the Duke of Ossuna. Nothing can exceed the
coolness with which he exhibits himself as a liar by profession, a
constitutional coward, and an accomplished cheat, whenever he can thus
render his story more amusing;--but then, on the other hand, he is not
without learning, writes gay verses, and gives us sketches of his times
and of the great men to whom he was successively attached, that are any
thing but dull. His life, indeed, would be worth reading, if it were
only to compare his account of the battle of Nordlingen with that in
De Foe’s “Cavalier,” and his drawing of Ottavio Piccolomini with the
stately portrait of the same personage in Schiller’s “Wallenstein.”
Its faults, on the other hand, are a vain display of his knowledge;
occasional attempts at grandeur and eloquence of style, which never
succeed; and numberless intolerable puns. But it shows distinctly,
what we have already noticed, that the whole class of fictions to which
it belongs had its foundation in the manners and society of Spain at
the period when they appeared, and that to this they owed, not only
their success at home, in the age of Philip the Third and Philip the
Fourth, but that success abroad which subsequently produced the Gil
Blas of Le Sage,--an imitation more brilliant than any of the originals
it followed.