PASTORALS AND SHORT STORIES—THE ORIGINAL WORK OF THE SPANIARD—THE “LIBROS DE CABALLERÍAS”—THE ‘AMADIS OF GAUL’—FOLLOWERS OF ‘AMADIS OF GAUL’—INFLUENCE AND CHARACTER OF THESE TALES—THE REAL CAUSE OF THEIR DECLINE—THE CHARACTER OF THE “NOVELAS DE PÍCAROS”—THE ‘CELESTINA’—‘LAZARILLO DE TORMÉS’—‘GUZMAN DE ALFARACHE’—THE FOLLOWERS OF MATEO ALEMAN—QUEVEDO—CERVANTES—HIS LIFE—HIS WORK—THE MINOR THINGS—‘DON QUIXOTE.’

The mere bulk of the Spanish stories was great, but it is subject to many deductions before we can disentangle the permanently important part. Pastorals, for instance, were much written in Spain, and one, the Diana[37] of Jorge de Montemayor (1520?-1561?), is excellent in its insipid kind. But they were and could be only echoes of Sannazzaro. In estimating the literature of any nation we can afford to pass over what it has only taken from a neighbour with a notice that the imitation was made. The merit of creating the type, be it great or little, belongs to the original. Even when an imitator is himself widely read, as was the case with Montemayor, he is but carrying on the work of the first master. Short stories, again, were popular enough in Spain; but to a large extent they, too, were imitations. The PatraÑuelo—‘The Story-Teller’—of Juan de Timoneda, or the Cigarrales de Toledo of Tirso de Molina, are full of the matter of the Fabliaux and the Italian Novelli.[38] What the Spaniard did which was also a contribution to the literature of Europe was done neither in the pastoral nor in the short story, but in the long tale of heroic or of vulgar adventure. His are the Libros de CaballerÍas—‘Books of Knightly Deeds’ which are the parents of the true modern romance; and the Novelas de PÍcaros, or, ‘Tales of Rogues,’ the counterpart, and even perhaps a little the burlesque of the first, are the ancestors of all the line which comes through Gil Blas. Then his was Don Quixote, which belongs to no class, but is at once universal and a thing standing by itself, a burlesque of the Libros de CaballerÍas which grew into a sadly humorous picture of human delusion, and was also an expression of the genius of Miguel de Cervantes.

The books of Chivalry, or of Knightly Deeds, which is perhaps the more accurate translation of the Spanish plural CaballerÍas, like the Romances, cannot be said to belong to the literature of the Renaissance. They were a survival of the Middle Ages, the direct successors of the Romans d’Aventures, which had sprung from the Chansons de Gestes.

The Arthurian stories of Lancelot and of Merlin were known to the Spaniards, and had an enduring popularity by the side of their own Tales of Chivalry. There is even one book belonging in essential to the school which certainly preceded the Amadis. This is the Valencian Tirant lo Blanch, written in Catalan, of which the first three books are the work of Juan Martorell, and the fourth was added by Mosen Juan de GalbÁ, at the request of a lady, Isabel de Loriz. It was printed in Valencia in 1490, was translated into Spanish, though with suppressions, and had the rather curious fortune to be published in a French version in 1737 by a gentleman whose own name was not unworthy of a Libro de CaballerÍas, A. C. P. TubiÈres de Grimoard de Pestels de Levi, Count of Caylus.

Here it is, perhaps, but fair to warn the reader of the extreme difficulty of making more than a slight acquaintance with these once widely read tales. Popularity and neglect have alike been fatal to them. They were thumbed to pieces while they were liked, and thrown aside as worthless when the fashion had changed. Single copies alone remain of some, as, for instance, the curious ‘Don Florindo, he of the Strange Adventure,’ of which Don Pascual de Gayangos gives a long analysis. Even Don Pascual had never seen the Spanish original of the once renowned Palmerin of England. Southey was compelled to make up his Palmerin by correcting Anthony Munday’s translation from a French version. Surviving copies are scattered in the public libraries, and it is probable that nobody has seen them all. So we must speak with a certain reserve concerning them, but yet with a tolerably well-founded conviction that what one has not seen does not differ in material respects from what has come in one’s way.

It is not the matter of these tales, but the spirit, which attaches them to the Middle Ages. Knights and damsels errant, dwarfs, dragons, giants, and enchanters were not neglected by the poets of the Italian Renaissance, but they were dealt with in gaiety, and more than half in mockery. But the Libros de CaballerÍas are very serious. Chivalry was not to their authors an old dream, but a still living standard of conduct, and they carried on the tradition of the Middle Ages with absolute sincerity.

When the Libros de CaballerÍas are described as the direct descendants of the Romans d’Aventures, it must be understood that this does not imply that the actual story had its origin out of Spain. We cannot say stories, because there is in reality only one, which was constantly rewritten, with changes which in the majority of cases hardly go beyond the names. There is one parent story closely imitated by the others, and that is the Amadis of Gaul.[39] The honour of the first invention has been claimed by the French, on the general ground that their influence in Spain and Portugal was great, and that therefore they must not only have carried the taste for tales of chivalrous adventure beyond the Pyrenees, but have created all the stories and personages. But the French Amadis has been lost, and though that may be his only defect, it suffices to leave us entitled to doubt whether he ever existed, except in the patriotic French literary imagination. What is certain is that Amadis was a popular hero of romance with the Castilians and Portuguese before the end of the fourteenth century. It also appears to be put beyond doubt that a version of the story was written by Vasco de Lobeira, a Portuguese gentleman who died in 1403. Whether it was the first, or was a version of a Castilian original, or whether the French, who were then very numerous both in Castile and Portugal, and had an undeniable influence on the poetry of both countries, and more especially of the second, did not at least inspire Vasco de Lobeira, are questions which can be debated for ever by national vanity, without settlement. The Amadis of Gaul, which belongs to literature, and not to the inane region of suppositions, disputes, and lost manuscripts, is the work of Garcia OrdoÑez de Montalvo, of Medina del Campo in Leon. It was announced as an adaptation from the Portuguese. As the manuscript of Vasco de Lobeira was lost in the destruction of the Duke of Arveiro’s library in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, we cannot tell how far Montalvo followed, or improved upon, or did not improve upon, his original. Indeed, in the absence of a Portuguese manuscript, it is impossible to be sure that the Spanish author did not adopt the common device of presenting his work as a translation, when in fact it was wholly his own. It is certainly strange, considering the immense popularity of the Amadis of Gaul all over Europe, that the Portuguese did not vindicate their right to him by publishing Vasco de Lobeira, since the manuscript was known to exist, and to be accessible in the library of a great noble.

Be all that as it may, we are on firm ground when we come to the proved facts concerning the actual writing of the Spanish Amadis. It belongs to the years between 1492 and 1504. The first known edition, that of Rome, is dated 1519; but it is unlikely, though not impossible, that there had not been a Spanish predecessor. There is a known edition of the first of the rival Palmerin series, which is dated 1511. What is beyond doubt is that its popularity was immediate and widespread. Spain produced twelve editions in fifty years. It was translated in French and Italian with immense acceptance. One of the best known stories of lost labour and disappointment in literature is that Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato, founded a considerable reputation on the fact that he had undertaken to make the Amadis the foundation of an epic, which reputation endured until the appearance of the poem.

As if in direct imitation of the mediÆval custom, Amadis was made the founder of a family. Montalvo gave the world the deeds of his son Esplandian in 1526, and from another hand came in the same year his nephew, Florisando, and then a long line, reaching to the twelfth book. The succession in France was even longer, for it reached the twenty-fourth. Beside the house of Amadis, there arose and flourished the distinguished family known as the Palmerines. The first two of this series, the Primaleon and the Palmerin de Oliva, are said to have been the work of a lady of “Augustobriga, a town in Portugal.” But her name and very existence are uncertain, while neither of the places called Augustobriga in the time of the Roman dominion in the Peninsula is in Portugal. The most famous of this line, the Palmerin of England, was for long attributed to a Portuguese, Francisco de Moraes, who after a rather distinguished public career was murdered at Evora in 1572; but it was probably the work of a Spaniard, Luis Hurtado of Toledo. It was the confusing habit of the authors of these tales to call them the fifth, or sixth, or other, “book” of Amadis, or of Primaleon. Sometimes rival fifths or sixths appeared, and translators did not follow the Spanish numeration. Hence much trouble to the faithful historian. Yet the family history can be followed with tolerable accuracy. Don Pascual de Gayangos has been at the pains to make a regular pedigree for both, showing the main lines and collateral branches. It is a satisfaction to be able to state with confidence that the lady FlÉrida, daughter of Palmerin de Oliva, married Don Duardos (Edward), son of Frederick, King of England, and of a sister of MelÈadus, King of Scotland, and that Palmerin of England was their son. He again married Polinarda, and was the father of Don Duardos de BretaÑa II., who was the father of Don Clarisel. The Palmerin series, by the way, is much less rich than the Amadis in those superb names which are not the least of the pleasures of the Tales of Chivalry. It rarely rises to the height of Cadragante, or Manete the Measured, or Angriote de Estravaus, and never to the level of the Queen Pintiquinestra, or the Giant Famongomadan, whom Cervantes had in his mind when he imagined Brandabarbaran de Boliche. The stories independent of these two series are numerous, though less numerous than the reader who has not looked into the matter may suppose. Their names—and that is all which survives of some—will be found in their proper places in the lists of Don Pascual de Gayangos.

It will be seen that much of this work is either anonymous, or is attributed on vague evidence to authors of whom the name only is known. The chief exception is the Feliciano de Silva at whose style Cervantes laughed. It happens that something is known of Feliciano, and that it is to his honour. He was page to the sixth Duke of Medina Sidonia, and he saved the Duchess from being drowned in the Guadalquivir at the risk of his own life; which, it will be allowed, was an action not unworthy of the author of Libros de CaballerÍas. He wrote the Lisuarte de Grecia, the Amadis de Grecia, and several others, including the Florisel de Niquea. Feliciano was an industrious man of letters, who would have been a useful collaborator with, and fairly successful imitator of, Dumas, had time and chance suited. He adulterated his tales of knightly deeds by imitations of the pastoral model, and his style certainly laid him open to the ridicule of Cervantes. Yet it is not more pompous and mechanical than our own Lyly, and is better than the manner of some of the Novelas de PÍcaros.

None of the commonplaces in the history of literature are better established than these: that the Libros de CaballerÍas were tiresome and absurd; that they appeared in immense numbers, and flooded out all better and more wholesome reading; and that they were killed by Don Quixote. Yet there are probably not three worse founded commonplaces. That these books can be tedious, and that the worst of them can be very tedious, is true. But none are more long-winded than the Golden Epistles, which had an equally great popularity, or than some well-accepted reading of any generation is apt to look to later times, when fashion has changed. They were certainly neither more tiresome nor more essentially absurd than the Novela de PÍcaros. Their number was not very great. The whole body is not nearly as numerous as the yearly output of novels to-day in England; and even when their inordinate length is allowed for, their total bulk is not greater, though they were written during a century. As for their supposed predominance, it must be remembered that the great time of the Libros de CaballerÍas was also the time of the “learned poetry” of Spain, of the growth of the drama, of most of the romances, and of some of the best work of the historians and the mystic writers. That Don Quixote destroyed them may seem to be a truth too firmly established to be shaken, and yet the contrary proposition, that it was the waning popularity of the Tales of Knightly Deeds which made Don Quixote possible, is on the whole more consistent with fact. They had been less and less written for a generation before Cervantes produced his famous First Part. The Novela de PÍcaros was taking their place. Readers were predisposed to find them laughable, and therefore enjoyed the burlesque. Cervantes’ own half-humorous boast has been taken too seriously. The ridicule of the Libros de CaballerÍas is the least valuable part of Don Quixote, and is not in itself better than much satire which has yet failed to destroy things more deserving of destruction than the family of Amadis.

Neither the popularity nor the decline of the Libros de CaballerÍas was in the least unintelligible. These books supplied the Spaniards with stories of fighting and adventure in a fighting adventurous time, when the taste for reading, or at least hearing others read, was spreading, and when the theatre—the only possible rival—was still in its feeble beginnings. And what they gave was not only suited to the time but not inferior to what came after. The English reader who wishes to put it to the test has an easy way open to him. Let him take the adaptations which Southey made of Amadis of Gaul, or Palmerin of England, and compare them, not with Sir Walter Scott, who showed what a great genius could do with a motive not unlike that of the Libros de CaballerÍas; not with Gil Blas, which shows what genius could do with the machinery of the Novela de PÍcaros; not with Don Quixote, which is for all time,—but with an English version of the Guzman de Alfarache, the book which first firmly established the gusto picaresco at the very close of the sixteenth century. He will find much repetition (though Southey, who made one or two notable additions, has suppressed largely) in both, but in the Guzman it is endless sordid roguery, in which there is no general human truth, and in place of it a mechanical exaggeration of a temporary form of Spanish vagabondage, while in the Amadis or Palmerin it is something not unlike the noble fancies of the Arthurian legend.

The decline of the Libros de CaballerÍas is easily accounted for. They ended by wearying the world with monotony, and the increasing extravagance of incident and language, which was their one resource for avoiding monotony. The Spaniard’s tendency to repeat stock types in the same kind of action was visible here as elsewhere. The Amadis gave the pattern, and it was followed. A hero who is the son of a king, and is also a model of knightly prowess and virtues, with a brother in arms who, while no less valiant, is decidedly less virtuous, are the chief figures. Amadis, the Beltenebros—the lovely dark man—is the pink of loyalty to his peerless Oriana, who is the fairest and most loving of women. Galaor is gay and volatile, light of love, but loyal in friendship. Amadis is born out of wedlock, and left to fortune by his mother, or for some other reason brought up far away from the throne which is lawfully his, and fights his way to his crown without ever failing for an instant in his devotion to Oriana. Galaor helps him, and loves what ladies he meets on the road. Amadis breathes out his mistress’s name as he lays his lance in rest, Galaor throws a defiant jest in front of him; Amadis has the gift of tears, but Galaor laughs in the jaws of death, laughs in fact at everything except the honour of a gentleman—and on that he smiles. It is a brotherhood between Sir Charles Grandison and Mercutio. Combats, giants, fairy ladies, enchanters good and bad, make up the matter of the story. If it is essentially unwholesome, so is the Round Table legend; and if it is necessarily absurd, so is the FaËrie Queen. But when it had been done once in Amadis, and for a second time in Palmerin, it was done for good. To take the machinery of the Libros de CaballerÍas, and put a new spirit into it, which, as Cervantes saw, was possible, was not given to any Spaniard. All they could do was to repeat, and then endeavour to hide the repetition by multiplying everything on a fixed scale. The giants grew bigger, the sword-cuts more terrific, the combats more numerous, the monsters more hideous, the exalted sentiments swelled till they were less credible than the giants. The fine Castilian of Garcia OrdoÑez was tortured into the absurdities which bad writers think to be style. The Libros de CaballerÍas, which had been a natural survival, and revival, of the Middle Ages in the early sixteenth century, were unnatural at its close. Don Quixote did but hasten their end. They would have perished in any case before the Novelas de PÍcaros, which in turn ran much the same course, and were extinguished without the intervention of satire. That the taste of the time was tending away from the higher forms of romance is shown by the little following found for the Civil Wars of Granada by GinÉs Perez de Hita, of whom little or nothing is known.[40] This book, of which the first part was published in 1598 and the second in 1604, is the original source of all the stories of the Zegries and Abencerrages. It gave the Spaniards a model for the historical novel proper, but though it was popular at the time—so popular that it was taken for real history—Perez de Hita founded no school. The Spanish character was becoming too impoverished for a large and poetic romance. What imagination there was, was becoming concentrated in the theatre before withering entirely.

The fate of the Novelas de PÍcaros is one of the most curious in literature. But for them, and their popularity outside of Spain, there could not well have been any Gil Blas, and without him the history of modern prose fiction must have been very different. Yet apart from the example they set, and the machinery they supplied, their worth is small. We find in them the same monotony of type and incident as in the comedia and the Libros de CaballerÍas, while they have neither the fine theatrical qualities of the first (which was, we may allow, inevitable) nor the manly spirit of the second. Poetry, heroic sentiment, or deep religious feeling we could not expect from what only professed to deal with the common and animal side of life. But they do not give what might have compensated for these things, average sensual human nature, acting credibly and drawn with humour. Their fun—and they strained at jocularity—is of the kind which delights to pull the chair from below you when you are about to sit down, and laughs consumedly at your bruises. To make the jest complete you must be old, ugly, sickly, and very poor. There is no laugh in the Novelas de PÍcaros, only at their best a loud hard guffaw, and when they do not rise to that, a perpetual forced giggle. Truth to life is as far from them as from the Libros de CaballerÍas, but the two are on opposite sides. In mere tediousness they equal the heroic absurdity, for—and this is not their least offensive feature—they are obtrusively didactic. The larger half of the Guzman de Alfarache is composed of preachment of an incredibly platitudinous order. Boredom for boredom, the endless combats of the knight-errant are better. And withal we find the same childish effort to attain originality by mere exaggeration. The Lazarillo de TormÉs forces the tone of the Celestina, Guzman de Alfarache advances, more particularly in bulk, beyond Lazarillo, Marcos de Obregon improves on Guzman, and so it goes on to the grinning and sardonic brutality of Quevedo’s Pablo de Segovia and the jerking capers of Don Gregorio GuadaÑa. This last is the work of an exiled Spanish Jew, Enriquez Gomez (f. 1638-1660). Imagine Villon’s Ballade des Pendus without the verse, without the pathos, spun out in prose, growing ever more affected through endless repetitions of sordid incident, and you have the Novela de PÍcaros.[41]

Yet they started from what might well have been the beginning of better. The Celestina had a certain truth to life in its really valuable parts, and it did not strive to amuse with mere callous practical joking.[42] This curious dialogue story was written perhaps before, or it may be about, the time of the conquest of Granada—1492—and both the identity of its author and its date of publication are obscure. It is divided into twenty-one so-called acts, of which the first is very long and the others are very short. Fernando Rojas of Montalvan, by whom it was published, says that the first act was the work of Rodrigo Cota of Toledo, a Jew, the known author of some tolerable verses in the style of the Court school; and that he himself finished it at the request of friends. This account has been disputed by the criticism which delights in disputing the attribution of everything to everybody. It is neither supported by internal, nor contradicted by external, evidence. The literary importance of the tale is not affected by it in the least. There are two elements in the Celestina. It contains a love-story of the headlong southern order, sudden and violent in action, inflated, and frequently insufferably pedantic in expression, withal somewhat commonplace. With this, and subservient to this, there is a background, a subordinate, busy, scheming world of procuresses, prostitutes, dishonest servants, male and female, and bullies, which is amazingly vivid. Celestina, whose name has replaced the pompous original title of the story, Tragicomedy of Calisto and Meliboea, is the ancestress of the two characters of similar trade in Pamela and Clarissa. She had many forerunners in mediÆval literature, in and out of Spain. But she has never been surpassed in vividness of portraiture, while her household of loose women and bullies, with their intrigues and jealousies, their hangers-on, and their arts of temptation, is drawn with no less truth than gusto. The quality of their talk is admirable, and the personages are not described from the outside, or presented to us as puppet types, but allowed to manifest themselves, and to grow, with a convincing reality rare indeed in Spanish literature.

Though the popularity of the Celestina, not only in Spain but abroad, was great, it did not produce any marked effect on Spanish literature until a generation had passed. It was adapted on the stage, but there it left few traces except on the racy dialogue of the prose entremeses. The poetic form of the Spanish comedy did not, and even perhaps could not, adapt itself to the alert naturalistic tone of the Celestina, and the subjects of the plays grew ever more romantic and more remote from the vulgar world. But this answered too well to a natural taste of the Spaniards to remain without a following. "The Lazarillo de TormÉs." Its first real successor (apart from rifacimentos or mere echoes, of which there were several) was the Vida de Lazarillo de TormÉs; sus Fortunas y Adversidades,[43] attributed on very dubious evidence to the famous Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and with not much greater probability to Fray Juan de Ortega, of the Order of St. Jerome. The date of its composition is uncertain. The first known edition is of 1553, but it may have been read in manuscript before that. In the Lazarillo we have the Novela de PÍcaros already complete, differing only from those which were to come after in the greater simplicity of its style and in freshness. The hero is a poor boy of TormÉs, in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, none too honest by nature, and made perfectly unscrupulous by a life of dependence on harsh, or poverty-stricken, masters. The story tells how he passes from one service to another, generally after playing some more or less ferocious trick on his employer. It is a scheme which affords a good opening for satirical sketches of life, and the author, whoever he was, clearly adopted it for that among other reasons. Lazarillo’s master, the poor cavalier who keeps up a show of living like a gentleman while in fact he is starving at home—too proud either to work or beg, but not too proud to cherish schemes of entrapping a wife with a dowry, and not spirited enough to serve as a soldier—was no doubt a familiar figure in Spain, and he became a stock puppet of the Novelas de gusto PÍcaresco. Another scene of real, though not peculiarly Spanish, satire deals with a dishonest seller of pardons and his sham miracles. The Reformation had imposed limits on the freedom of orthodox writers to deal with the sins, or even absurdities, of churchmen, and this passage was suppressed, as of bad example, by the Inquisition. The majority of the figures are, however, less satirical than grotesque. We find in the Lazarillo, though not to the extent which afterwards become common, the love of dwelling on starvation, poverty, and physical infirmities as if they were things amusing in themselves. But this is less the case than in its successors, and being nearly the first, or even the actual first, in the fully developed form, it has a certain freshness. It has the merit of being short, and leaves its hero dishonourably married, with a promise of a continuation, which was never written by the author.

Putting aside spurious “second parts” of the Lazarillo, the next event in the advance—we cannot say the development—of the Novela de PÍcaros is the publication of the Guzman de Alfarache of Mateo Aleman, a Sevillian of whose birth, life, and death nothing certain is known. This book, appearing just as the Libros de CaballerÍas were dying of exhaustion, set the example to a swarm of followers. Yet it was itself but an imitation of Lazarillo, greatly enlarged, and over-burdened with what Le Sage, who translated it, most justly called “superfluous moral reflections.” The second title of the book, La Atalaya de la Vida—‘The Beacon of Life’ indicates Aleman’s didactic intention, which even without it is obtrusive. But a beacon of life, to be other than a useless blaze, must be set to warn us off real dangers in real life: it must flame with satire on possible human errors. The satire of Aleman is akin to Marston’s, and Marston’s many followers among ourselves,—it is a loud bullying shout at mere basenesses made incredible by being abstracted from average human nature, and kneaded into dummies. Celestina, besides being an impudent, greedy servant of vice, is also a woman with humour and an amusing tongue. Her household are the scum of the earth, but they are human scum, with a capacity for enjoying themselves as men and women without dragging their humour of vice in, when no cause sets it in motion. They can laugh and cry, like and dislike, as other human beings do. But the personages of Mateo Aleman are grinning puppets, galvanised to imitate the gestures of greed, cowardice, mendacity, and cruelty, abstracted from humanity. Then, they are set to play a wild fantasia in vacuo. What is true of Mateo Aleman applies equally to his followers.

A brief outline must suffice for his successors. A spurious second part of Guzman de Alfarache was published in 1603, written, as it would seem by one Marti, a Valencian, who assumed the noble name of Luxan. This, by the way, is one proof among many that the Libros de CaballerÍas were not the prevailing taste of readers when Cervantes published his first part of Don Quixote in 1605, or else it would have suggested itself to nobody to trade on the popularity of Guzman. In 1605 Aleman wrote a second part, in which he victimises the plagiarist in a fashion afterwards followed by Cervantes when provoked in the same fashion. In the same year came out the PÍcara Justina of Andreas Perez, a Dominican who wrote under the name of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda, with a she rogue as heroine, with exactly the same spirit and machinery, and an identical didactic purpose, but written in a tortured style. Vicente Espinel (?1551-?1630), who was otherwise notable for adding the fifth string to the guitar and as a verse-writer, published El Escudero (i.e., Squire) Marcos de Obregon in 1618. This squire is of the class of the Biscayan whom Don Quixote overthrew, an elderly man who waited on ladies—the forerunner of the footman with the gold-headed stick, familiar to ourselves till very recent times. He has led the usual life. The Marcos de Obregon had the honour of contributing a few incidents to Le Sage. The soul of Pedro Garcia is not taken from the introduction, but put in place of what Espinel had written. In the Spanish story two students find a tombstone on which are written the words “Unio, unio,” a pun on pearl and union. One sees nothing in the riddle, and goes on. The other digs and finds—the skeletons of the lovers of Antequera, who threw themselves together from a precipice to escape capture by the Moors. Here we see what Le Sage did with the framework supplied him by the Spaniards. He took what was only Spanish, and made it universal. We can all laugh over the bag of coin which was the soul of Pedro Garcia, but who understands the story of the Spanish lovers without a commentary? After Marcos de Obregon there follow mainly repetitions.

An exception must, however, be made for the Gran TacaÑo—‘The Great Sharper,’ Paul of Segovia, by Quevedo.[44] Don Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas, SeÑor de la Torre de Juan Abad (1580-1645), was a very typical Spaniard of those who came from “the mountain,” and lived an agitated life in the Spain of the seventeenth century. He served under the once famous Duke of Osuna, viceroy of Sicily and Naples, was implicated in the mysterious conspiracy against Venice, and finally suffered from the hostility of the Count Duke of Olivares. In literature he is still the shadow of a great name as poet, scholar, and satirist. Among his countrymen his memory is still popular as the hero of innumerable stories of much the same kind as those told in Scotland of Buchanan, and in France of Rabelais. For his sake Pablo de Segovia may be mentioned, and also because it is the Novela de PÍcaros as the Spaniards wrote it, stripped of the last rag of whatever could disguise its essential hard brutality. If you can gloat over starvation—if the hangman expatiating joyfully over halters and lashes seems a pleasant spectacle to you—if blows, falls, disease, hunger, dirt, and every form of suffering, told with a loud callous laugh, and utterly unrelieved, seem to you worth reading about, then Pablo de Segovia is much at your service. But Quevedo did other than this. Some of his satiric verse has life, and if not gaiety, still a species of bitter jocularity; and moreover, he gave a new employment to the gusto picaresco in his Visions. These once world-renowned satires are composed of such matter as the vices of lawyers, doctors, police-officers, unfaithful wives, complacent husbands, &c. To those who wish to master the Castilian language in all its resources they are invaluable, and it is in itself so fine that we can endure much to gain access to its treasures. But it is possible to gain a quite accurate understanding of Quevedo by reading the translation and amplification of his Visions by our own Sir Roger L’Estrange. Then, just in order to see where this spirit and this method lead, it is not a waste of time to go on to Ned Ward. There was something very congenial to the Restoration in the Spanish gusto picaresco, and that is its sufficient condemnation. Yet it did supply Le Sage with what he might not have been able to elaborate for himself, and thereby it contributed to the gaiety and the wisdom of nations.

That the name of Miguel de Cervantes towers above all others in Spanish literature is a commonplace. Montesquieu’s jest, that Spain has produced but one good book, which was written to prove the absurdity of all the others, is only the flippant statement of the truth that the one Spanish book which the world has taken to itself is Don Quixote. What else the Spaniards have done in literature may have its own beauty and interest. It may even have affected the literature of other nations. The Spanish drama did something to form the purely theatrical skill of the playwright, and the Novela de PÍcaros gave a framework for the prose story of common life. Yet the plays of Lope or of Calderon, the tales of Aleman, Espinel, and others, are essentially Spanish, and Spanish of one time. It is only in touches here and there that we find in them, behind their native vesture, any touch of what is human and universal. Even when they dealt with what was common to them with other peoples, the emotions of piety and devotion, they gave them their own colour, their own purely Spanish flavour. There is no Imitation of Christ, no Pilgrim’s Progress, in their religious writing. But Don Quixote is so little purely Spanish that its influence has been mainly felt abroad, that it has been, and is, loved by many who have neither heard nor wish to hear of the literature lying round it.

The life of Cervantes has been made so familiar that the details need only be briefly mentioned here.[45] It is within the knowledge of all who take any interest in him at all that he was by descent a gentleman of an ancient house. His own branch of it had become poor. He was born, probably on some day in October 1547, at AlcalÁ de Henares, a town lying to the east of Madrid, and the seat of the university founded by Cardinal Jimenez. It does not appear that Cervantes ever attended the university, or received more than the trifling schooling which fell to the lot of Shakespeare also. Mar, Iglesia, y casa de rey—the sea (i.e., adventure in America), the Church, and the king’s service—were the three careers open to a gentleman at a time when trade, medicine, and even the law, were plebeian. Cervantes began life in the household of a great Italian ecclesiastic, Cardinal Acquaviva, in one of those positions of domestic service about men of high position which were then, in all countries, filled by gentlemen of small or no fortune. From 1571 to 1575 he served as a soldier under Don John of Austria, and received that wound in the left hand at the battle of Lepanto in which he took a noble pride. From 1575 to 1580 he was a prisoner in Algiers. After his release in 1580 till his death in 1616—for thirty-six long years full of misfortune—he led the struggling life of a Spanish gentleman who had no fortune, no interest, no command of the arts which ingratiate a dependent with a superior. At the very end he may have enjoyed some measure of comparative ease, but few men of letters have been poorer. Most men of his class were no richer than himself,—for Spain was a very poor country, and mere poverty was deprived of its worst sting when men ranked by birth and not by their possessions. No want of means could cause a noble to be other than the social superior of the merely rich man, while the Church had been only too successful in investing poverty with a certain sanctity. Yet though there were alleviations, the lot of Cervantes was a hard one, embittered by disappointments and imprisonments, which seem to have been chiefly due to the clumsy brutality of the Spanish judicial system. All this he bore with that dignity in misfortune which is one of the finest features in the character of the Spaniard, and with a cheerful courage all his own. Everything known of his life shows that he possessed two of the finest qualities which can support a man in a life of hardship—pride and a sweet temper.

The written work of Cervantes is divided in a way not unexampled in literature, but nowhere seen to the same extent except in the case of Prevost, a far smaller, but a real, genius. If he had left nothing but Don Quixote, his place in literature would be what it is. If he had not written his one masterpiece, he would have passed unnoticed; and there would have been no reason why he should have been remembered, unless it were with Bermudez and Virues, as one of the forerunners of Lope who made vague, ill-directed experiments in the childhood of Spanish dramatic literature. Even the Novelas Ejemplares, though they possess a greater measure of his qualities than any part of his literary inheritance, other than Don Quixote and his entremeses, are mainly interesting because they are his. Other Spaniards did such things as well as he, or better, but none have approached Don Quixote. The difference is not in degree, it is in kind.

We may, then, pass rapidly over the minor things. It is to be noted that his natural inclination was not towards letters, but to arms. When a mere boy he did, indeed, write some verses on the death of Isabelle of Valois, the wife of Philip II., but they were school exercises written at the instigation of his master, Juan Lopez de Hoyos, and published by him. Like Sir Walter Scott, he believed in the greater nobility of the life of action, and more particularly in the superiority of the “noble profession of arms.” If he could have had his choice it would have been to serve the king, and more especially to serve him in the reconquest of Northern Africa from the Mahometans. He was driven to write by mere necessity, and the want of what he would fain have had. During his captivity in Algiers he made plays for the amusement of his fellow-prisoners. After his release, when he was again employed as a soldier in the conquest of Portugal, in 1580 he wrote his unfinished pastoral, the Galatea. He was married in 1584, and established in Madrid. At this period he wrote many plays, now lost, and two which have survived. The Trato de Argel, or ‘Life in Algiers,’ has some biographical interest, and some general value as a picture of the pirate stronghold, but is valuable on these grounds only. The Numancia belongs to the class of works describable in the good sense as curious. It is a long dialogued poem divided into scenes and acts, on the siege of Numantia by Scipio, and is not without a certain grandiose force. As a play it shows that the Spanish drama had not found its way, and that Cervantes was not to be its guide. It struggles between imitation of the mystery, vague efforts to follow an ill-understood classic model, and attempt to strike a new and native path which the author could nowhere find. Then comes a long interval, during which Lope was sweeping all rivals from the stage, and Cervantes, in his own phrase, was buried “in the silence of oblivion.” He was struggling for mere subsistence, working as a clerk under the Commissary of the Indian fleet, collecting rents for the Knights of St John, and finally, as it would seem, supporting himself, his wife, a natural daughter born to him in Portugal before his marriage, and a sister, by the trade of escribiente at Valladolid. The escribiente, still a recognised workman in Spain, writes letters for those who cannot write for themselves.

He never quite lost his connection with literature. A few commendatory verses in the books of friends, and other slight traces, remain to show that in the intervals of the work by which he lived he endeavoured to keep a place among the poets and dramatists of the time. During these years he wrote the first part of Don Quixote. It appeared in 1605, but, according to the usual practice, had been shown to friends in manuscript. His last years were spent in Madrid. How he lived must remain a mystery. The Don Quixote was popular, but copyrights were then not lucrative, even if they could be said to exist. He again tried the stage, and was again unsuccessful. In 1613 he published the Novelas Ejemplares, a collection of short stories, partly on the picaresque, partly on an Italian, model. During the following year he brought out the Voyage to Parnassus, a verse review of the poets of his time, a common form of literary exercise, and not a good specimen of its kind. In 1614 he was provoked by the false second part of Don Quixote. This was a form of literary meanness from which Mateo Aleman had already suffered, but Cervantes had particular cause to be angry. The continuer of Guzman de Alfarache appears to have been only an impudent plagiarist, but the writer who continued Don Quixote was obviously animated by personal hostility. He descended to a grovelling sneer at Cervantes’ wounded hand. It has been guessed that this is another chapter in the miserable history of the quarrels of authors. Avellaneda, as the author of the false second part called himself, is supposed to have acted on the instigation of Lope de Vega, who is known to have had no friendly feelings for Cervantes. The trick, which was as clumsy as it was spiteful, probably hastened the appearance of the genuine second part. It undoubtedly had some influence on the form, for it induced Cervantes to alter the course of the story, in order to make the two as unlike as possible. Perhaps it decided the author to kill the hero lest another should murder him. The second part was printed in 1615. Cervantes died in the next year. Cheerful and hopeful to the end, even when “his foot was in stirrup” for the last journey, he had prepared his Persiles y Sigismunda for the press before he died. This was meant to be a model of what a tale of adventure might be, and was written with more care in the formal and mechanical parts than he gave to Don Quixote; but, like almost all he is known to have done with deliberate literary intentions, it is dull and lifeless.

There is a difficulty in speaking of Don Quixote. One has to come after Fielding and Scott, Heine, Thackeray, and Sainte-Beuve, not to mention many others hardly less illustrious. These are great names, and it may seem that after they have spoken there is nothing left to say. The first duty which this position imposes is not to endeavour deliberately to be different, in the vain hope of attaining originality. But the cloud of witnesses who might be summoned to prove the enduring interest of Don Quixote is itself a part of the critical history of the book, and a tribute to its solitary place in Spanish literature. The ascetic and so-called mystic writers had their day of influence among us in the seventeenth century. Crashaw alone is enough to prove that here, and in a certain section of English life and literature, Santa Teresa and Juan de la Cruz were living forces. Quevedo had his day, and the Novela de PÍcaros their following. During the romantic movement, the dramatists were much in men’s mouths. But in each case the Spaniard remained only for a time. Calderon once had his place in Lord Tennyson’s Palace of Art, but he fell out, and that has been the fate of all things Spanish in literature. They have given an indication, have been used—and forgotten, or they have been welcomed as strange, mysterious, probably beautiful, and then silently dropped as too exclusively Spanish, too entirely belonging to a long past century. But Don Quixote has been always with us since Shelton’s translation of the first part appeared in 1612. This of itself is proof enough that there is something in Don Quixote which is absent from other Spanish work, whether his own or that of other men.

No words need be wasted in controverting the guesses of those who wish to account for the greatness of a great piece of literature by some hidden quality not literary. They have ranged from the fantastic supposition that Cervantes was ridiculing Charles V. down to the amazing notion that he was attacking the Church. Nor need much respect be shown to the truth that Don Quixote was meant to make fun of the books of chivalry. This would be self-evident even if Cervantes had not said so. It may be that this was all he meant, and then he builded better than he knew. The work of burlesque, though often necessary, and, when decently done, amusing, is essentially of the lower order. In this case it was not necessary, for the Libros de CaballerÍas were already dying out before the sordid rivalry of the Novelas de PÍcaros. It was the less necessary, because it was no reform. The Spain of the Libros de CaballerÍas was the Spain of Santa Teresa and Luis de Leon, of the great scholars of the stamp of Francisco Sanchez El Brocense, of Diego de Mendoza, of CortÉs and Pizarro and Mondragon—the Spain which BrantÔme saw, “brave, bravache et vallereuse et de belles paroles profÉrÉes À l’improviste.” It was a better country than that in which the Count Duke of Olivares had to complain that he could find “no men.” The follies of the Libros de CaballerÍas were a small matter. It was not a small matter that a nation should replace Amadis of Gaul by Paul of Segovia, should pass from the lofty romantic spirit of Garcia OrdoÑes to the carcajada—the coarse, braying, animal, and loveless guffaw of Quevedo.

In so far as Cervantes forwarded that change he did evil and not good. He did help to laugh Spain’s chivalry away. But in truth it was dying, and the change would have come without him. He is great in literature, because while consciously doing a very small, unnecessary, and partially harmful thing, he created a masterpiece of that rare and fine faculty which while thinking in jest still feels in earnest (the definition of what is, it may be, undefinable is taken from Miss Anne Evans), and which we call humour. Elsewhere in Spanish literature we find a type fixed and unvarying, or even a mere puppet, met through a succession of events, and moved about by them. In Don Quixote we have two characters acting on one another, and producing the story from within. And these two characters are types of immortal truth—the one a gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of good faculty, for whom a slight madness has made the whole world fantastic; the other an average human being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere coward, and ignorant, yet not unkindly, nor incapable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what his limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his greed. The continual collisions of these two with the real world make the story of Don Quixote. Cervantes had a fine inventive power, the adventures are numerous and varied, yet the charm lies not in the incidents, but in the reality and the sympathetic quality of the persons. We have no grinning world of masks made according to a formula. The country gentlemen, priests, barbers, shepherds, innkeepers, tavern wenches, lady’s-maids, domestic curates, nobles, and officials are living human beings, true to the Spain of the day no doubt, but also true to the humanity which endures for ever, and therefore intelligible to all times. In the midst is honest greedy Sancho with his peering eyes, so shrewd, and withal so capable of folly, the critic, and also the dupe of the half-crazed dreamer, by whom he rides, and will ride, as long as humanity endures, in this book, and under every varying outward form in the real earth. As for Don Quixote, is he not the elder brother of Sir Roger de Coverley, of Matthew Bramble, of Parson Adams, of Bradwardine, of Colonel Newcome, and Mr Chucks, the brave, gentle, not over-clever, men we love all the more because we laugh at them very tenderly?[46]