The Later Renaissance

CADA, AND MELO-GENERAL HISTORIES-OCAMPO, ZURITA, MORALES-MARIANA-THE DECADENCE-SOLIS-MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS-GRACIAN AND THE PREVALENCE OF GóNGORISM-THE MYSTICS-SPANISH MYSTICISM-THE

h hist

he world of his greatness. Thus the sixteenth century,[158] and the early years of the seventeenth, saw the production of a very important Spanish historical literature. It followed the fortunes of the country with curious exactness. Every great campaign, every great achievement in America during the reign of Charles V., has been well and amply described. The reign of Philip II. is equally well recorded by contemporaries, and was the period of the great general histories of Morales, Zurita, and Mariana. But a

of partic

hes to the evidence of capable men who saw great events. Luis de ávila is also valuable because he gives expression to that pride and ambition of the emperor's Spanish followers, who really dreamt that they were helping towards the establishment of a universal empire. Another writer of the same stamp, who lived when the fortune of Spain had reached its height and was beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier of the school of the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of distinction, was ambassador in England some years before the Armada, and in France during that great passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and "in religio

orians of

ering among the native tribes for ten years, 1527-1537. A power of endurance, wellnigh more than human, was required to bear up against all he suffered; but he lived to hold a governorship in the Rio de la Plata, of which also he has left an account. A much gayer and a more famous book is the account of the conquest of Mexico written by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the companions of Cortés, who survived nearly all his brothers in arms, and died at a great age in Guatemala, on the estate he had won with his sword. His

torians of

the Indies of very different value from Oviedo. The first is the Bishop of Chiapa, the justly famous Bartolomé de las Casas (1474?-1566), who supplied the critics of his countrymen (most of whom afterwards showed that they wanted only the opportunity in order to equal the crimes) with weapons by his famous Very Brief Account of the Ruin of the Indies. This, first printed in 1542, was reprinted with other tracts written for the honourable purpose of defending the unfortunate Indians from oppression in 1552, and was made known to all Europe in translations. The general History of the Indies, which he wrote during his old age, remained unprinted till it was included in the Collection of inedited Documents for the History of Spain published by the Spanish Government.[50] Las Casas was a man of a stamp not unfamiliar to ourselves. His hatred of cruelty was equally vehement and sincere. In his perfectly genuine horror for the excesses of his countrymen, which are not to be denied, he sometimes exaggerated and was sometimes unjust. He was perhaps inevitably emotional in his style, yet the fact that he had principle and passion and a cause to plead, gives his book a marked superiority[163] over the mainly chronicle work of Gómara and Oviedo. Antonio de Herrera (1549-1625) was a very different man, an official historian-he was historiographer of the Indies-who served the king as literary advocate, and was supplied with good information. His General History of the Deeds of the Cas

Of those mentioned here, almost all wrote in a straightforward manly fashion, with little straining after effect, and a manifest desire to tell the truth. There is little in them of that overweening arrogance which ha

Moncada,

Spanish atalaya for the watch by day, and escucha (listen) for the watch by night. The Expedition of the Catalans and Aragonese against the Turks and Greeks of Francisco de Moncada, Count of Osona (1635), which Gibbon said he had read with pleasure, has a great reputation among the Spaniards. It is certainly a well-written account of the expedition of the Free Companions who were led by Roger de Flor to serve under the Paleologi against the Turks, and who, after making themselves intolerable to their employers, ended by expelling the Dukes of Athens of the house of Brienne from their duchy, and then held it for the crown of Aragon. Moncada was a viceroy and general who served with high distinction, and a very accomplished man of literary tastes; but his narrative, which is very brief, is mainly a good Castilian version of the Catalan Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner, and has, in a phrase dear to Mr Hallam, been praised to the full ext

l Hist

showed little faculty, though his intentions were good; but his successor, Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1581), was a scholar in the fullest sense of the word. It was his wish to write a real history of Spain, based on chronicles and records. But he obtained his post[167] late in 1570, and his work is a fragment ending so early as 1037. Morales was unquestionably influenced by the example of his friend Gerónimo de Zurita, the historiographer of the crown of Aragon. The unanimous judgment of scholars has recognised the right of Zurita to the name of historian, and even to the honour of being the first of modern historians. His father had been physician to Ferdinand the

ri

d educated by the Jesuits, in whose college in Sicily he taught for many years; but his later life was spent in the house of his order at Toledo. His troubles with his superiors form a not very honourable passage in the history of the Jesuits. The first purpose of his great work was to make Europe acquainted with the past of Spain, and he wrote in Latin, the universal language of scholarship. Twenty of the thirty books were published in that language in 1572. But, unlike Ba

country. The defects of the history are patent, and one of them is a mere matter of change of fashion. He took Livy for a model, and therefore put long speeches into the mouths of his personages. This, however, was a mere literary convention not intended to deceive anybody, and not likely to mislead the most uncritical reader. It was only a now disused way of giving what the modern historian would give in comment and illustration. The same following of Livy led him into including in his history, and presenting as history, a great deal of what he knew t

deca

vindicated its independence[170] of the see of Rome, told from the point of view of a Spanish Jesuit. Prudencio de Sandoval, a distinguished churchman and one of the historiographers of the Crown, continued the general history of Morales, and then added to Ma

and dramatist, but in the schools of other and more original writers. There are few more melancholy lives among the biographies of men of letters.[171] In spite of reputation and success, he was always poor. Although he held the post of Cronista Mayor of the Indies in the latter part of his life, he died in utter poverty, leaving "his soul to be the heir of his body"-that is, giving orders that his few belongings should be sold to pay for masses. In the general bankruptcy of Spain his salary was probably not paid. A sense of duty rather than an inclination to the task may be supposed to have led him to undertake the writing of a book which has always remained very dear to the Spaniards. This is The Conquest

aneous

finished example of all that bad taste and pretentiousness can do to make a man of some, though by no means considerable, faculty quite worthless. It was his chosen function to be the critic, prophet, and populariser of Góngorism. He wrote a treatise to expound the whole secret of the detestable art of saying everything in the least natural and perspicuous manner possible.[55] This Agudeza y Arte de Ingenios-'Wit and the Wits' Art'-was not written till he had published a book on The Hero to show that he had every right to speak with authority. Gracian was otherwise a copious writer. His Criticon, translated into English under the name of The Spanish Critic, by Paul Rycaut in 1681, about thirty years after it appeared, is an allegory of life, shown by the adventures of a shipwrecked Spaniard and a "n

ristian Prince'; Vera y Figueroa, the author of The Ambassador; Suarez de Figueroa, who wrote the miscellaneous critical dialogues called El Pasagero-'The Traveller,'-were none of them insignificant men, but there was a perpetual straining after sententious gravity in them, an effort to look wiser than life, an attempt to get better bread than could be made out of wheat. They helped to give Europe the old idea of the rigid sententious Spaniard which is so strangely unlike the real man. But it was the time of the frozen court etiquette of the Hapsburg dynasty, and of grave peremptory manners in public, covering an extraordinary relaxation of morals, and an unabashed taste for mere horseplay in private. These writers gave the literary expression of the artificial Spain of the seventeenth

1

t autobiography, swollen out by specimens of the loas he wrote for his fellow-actors. The historical value of the book is considerable, for Roxas gives a very full account of the theatrical life of his time, and is the standard authority for the early history of the Spanish stage. The literary merits of the book are not small, for, consciously or unconsciously he takes, and keeps, the tone of the true artistic Bohemian, the w

Myst

f the "Quietism" of the later seventeenth century. But Molinos lived in Italy, did not address his countrymen, and found his following mainly in France. There were a few alumbrados, as the Spaniards called them-"Illuminati"-in Spain, as there were a few Protestants; but they were exceptions, and examples of mere personal eccentricity. The Inquisition had the sincere support of the nation in stamping out both. When it went too far and condemned what the Spaniards did not dislike, as when, for instance, the Guia de Pecadores-'The Guide for Sinners'-of Luis de Granada was put in the Index, the Inquisition was forced to reverse its decision. But it had the approval of the country in its efforts to suppress teaching which had a dangerous tendency to arrive at the doctrine that, when the soul of the believer is un

ly by the deference of the austere Philip II. to Santa Teresa, but by the docility of his grandson, Philip IV.-a very different and a very pleasure-loving man-to Maria de Jesus de ágreda, a woman far inferior in intellect and force of character to the reformer of the Ca

orm, and doth

at the Holy Office was felt to be oppressive by the majority of Spaniards, there can be no doubt that its yoke was heavy on the neck of individuals-even of the most orthodox. The persecution of Luis de Granada, who as a Dominican, and therefore as a member of the order which controlled the Inquisition, might have been supposed to be sure of the most favourable treatment, is an example of the vigilance exercised over all who even approached religious questions. Luis de Leon incurred an imprisonment of five years on accusations brought by envious rivals at Salamanca, and too favourably received by the jealousy of the Dominicans

far the greater part of them have fallen dead to the Spaniards themselves. They

de C

nfluence of the books of chivalry; but his own style is very often-at least to our modern taste-more fit for a romance than a book of devotion. He wrote verse-and well. It must be read with a constant recollection that it was not written for us, but in a time when the application of the language of The Song of Solomon to devotion was justified by the all but universal belief in the allegorical character of the poem. In this practice, of which we have well-known examples of our own, Malon de Chaide never went to the extreme reached by Juan de la Cruz. Juan de ávila. The venerable master Juan de ávila (1502-1569), known as the Apostle of Andalucia, an older man than Malon de Chaide, was also much less the fashionable divine. The most famous of his many works

de Gr

and in learning, besides being master of a far more manly style than any of them. He was also a man of independent intrepid character, and it may be that the fear with which the Inquisition regarded him was largely inspired by his strictures on the ignorance of the clergy and their flocks. Inquiry and knowledge were dreaded at a time when the Protestants were using them as instruments against the Church. The Perfecta Casada was written for a lady, Do?a Maria Varela Osorio. These writers, it will be seen, worked much for women. It was the age of the directors as distinguished from the old confessors. Pious people, and more especially women, who wished to

a Te

Carmelites, that they should return to their original purity, and prove an effective instrument for the Church. Her literary work may be divided into two parts. One contains the different treatises she wrote by the order of her superiors, who probably began by wishing to test her orthodoxy, and who ended by revering her as one inspired. Then there are her many letters, written to all ranks of her contemporaries, from the king down to the nuns of her houses.[183] In both Santa Teresa wrote the same Castilian-the language as it was spoken by the nobles, not lea

de la

ed by the Spaniards. To us it seems that nobody stands in greater need of being judged by the widest interpretation of the text, "To the pure all things are pure." There is an amatory warmth of language, an application to religion of erotic images in Juan de la Cruz, which, considered i

of the Mys

ould deal with Jerónimo Gracian (not to be confounded with Baltasar), with Juan de Jesus Maria, or Eusebio Nieremberg. As the seventeenth century drew on there was continually