The Later Renaissance

UL'-INFLUENCE AND CHARACTER OF THESE TALES-THE REAL CAUSE OF THEIR DECLINE-THE CHARACTER OF THE "NOVELAS DE PíCAROS"-THE 'CELESTINA'-'LAZ

and shor

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 Patra?uelo-'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 vulga

ballerías, like the Romances, cannot be said[126] to belong to the literature of the Renaissance. They were a surviv

he 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 i

ne 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[127] Palmerin by correcting Anthony Munday's transla

os de Ca

ot 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

adis o

ntitled 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 manusc

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.

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

e 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 collab

character of

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[133] destroyed them may seem to be a truth too firmly established to be shaken, and yet

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[134] 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 w

ause of th

e 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 Fa?rie 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 Ordo?ez was tortured into the absurdities

the Novelas

d 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

Cele

elf 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[139] 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. C

irst 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[141] a wife with a dowry, and not spirited enough to serve as a sold

de Al

tle 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 al

s of Mat

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

ev

ablo 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[145] 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 lawy

van

d 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.

li

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[148] 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 w

wo

ould 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[149] Spanish dramatic literature. Even the Novelas Ejemplares, though they pos

inor

lays 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[150] 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 wa

o 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.

Quix

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[153] 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 Ar

he builded better than he knew. The work of burlesque, though often necessary, and, when decently done,[154] 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 an

s 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 wen