Part 17

Meanwhile some noticeable elements in the character of the rising Spanish literature were being cultivated under Oriental influence. Chief among these were the love of aphorism and the love of story. The Spanish mind has at all times been peculiarly sententious, and the proverbial philosophy of Spain extraordinarily rich. The Spanish taste has also set strongly in the direction of fiction of no very probable kind, whether embodying more or less supernatural marvel, impossible sentiment, chivalric and pastoral, or crowd of incident. These predilections already showed themselves during the nascent period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Spanish taste worked with the Oriental in respect both of proverb and story. The people of the _Arabian Nights_ naturally passed on their _répertoire_ more readily to their Spanish neighbours than elsewhere. The Arabic version of the _Fables_ (or _Tales_) _of Pilpay_ was translated under the same title of _Kalila and Dimna_, and the Arabic version of the _Seven Sages_ (or _Book of Sindabad_) into the _Stratagems of Women_. With these and other materials there went a native inventiveness, in which Spanish writers have seldom been deficient. When they proceed to issue stories in their own names, though still derived from eastern sources (as in the forty-nine tales of the _Count Lucanor_ of Don Juan Manuel early in the fourteenth century), the sententious character common to Moors and Spaniards is in strong evidence. The same people which was gathering proverbial wisdom into such collections as _Blooms of Philosophy_ and _Mouthfuls of Gold_, affected tales with a moral. _Count Lucanor_ consists of stories, told by a minister to a prince according to the Oriental machinery, which are meant to do more than amuse. They have the credit of being the first collection of novels, if we may call them such, in modern Europe. Scattered _fabliaux_ existed in France, and various tales were current in Italy, but there was as yet no _Decameron_. The extent to which portions of this early fiction filtered into England cannot very well be estimated, but in the neo-Latin countries, with their comparative nearness of language and traditions, their racial affinities and their common church, the tales enjoyed a large vogue, which brought them into the hands of the French composers of _fabliaux_, of Boccaccio’s Italian predecessors, of Boccaccio himself, and thence of Chaucer. The plot of one of Don Manuel’s stories is familiar to us through the _Taming of the Shrew_, and on the Continent some of them reappear in the dramas of Calderon, or the novels of Lesage. Nor was the circulation of the proverbs confined to Spain. In Caxton’s _Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers_, translated from the French, there appear aphorisms which correspond to those in the Spanish Florilegia.

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The next step in Spanish literature consists of the prose “Chivalric Romances,” or _libros de caballerias_, of which the existence is best known to the ordinary reader through the derision showered upon them by Cervantes in _Don Quixote_. The only exception which he makes is in the case of their parent, the original _Amadis of Gaul_ (or _Wales_), as being the best book in this kind, and deserving of preservation as an example of a type. This _Amadis_, derived from Welsh sources, appeared early in the fourteenth century, but enjoyed its greatest popularity during the fifteenth. Elsewhere in western Europe the age of chivalry had already passed, but in Spain the spirit lingered. The _Amadis_ romances, with their peculiar blend of Celtic knightly self-devotion and the semi-Oriental fondness for magical and other marvels, were entirely to the Spanish taste. About the original _Amadis_ and some of its imitations, despite their extravagant conception of knightly honour and knightly prowess, and their lack of all reality of time, place, and circumstance, there is a certain tone or temper of nobility which redeems them from entire contempt. Beyond this the sequels to _Amadis of Gaul_, such as _Palmerin_, _Palmerin of England_, and _Amadis of Greece_, possess no literary virtues. They are simply more or less ingenious variations of one another, employing much the same figures and much the same situations. Their knights-errant are totally unreal, and move with much prolixity in an unreal world, of which the chief elements appear to be love and sorcery. Nevertheless, when reinforced by a new development, of which we are to speak next, their chivalric virtues gave them life under a new shape in France of the seventeenth century.

This new development was the pastoral romance. Our knights and their loves are now placed in the Arcady of shepherds and shepherdesses. It is the same world of chivalric impossibility of sentiment, heroism, and enchantment; but, during the vogue of the Amadises, Italy had developed the pastoral, and the increasing contact of Spain with Italy—since the acquisition of Naples—speedily brought before the Spanish writers the example of Sannazaro. From the _Arcadia_ of the Italian on the one hand, and from the _libros de caballerias_ on the other, the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor created his famous _Diana_. This work, like Sidney’s _Arcadia_, is partly in prose and partly in verse, and, in such English development as arose from the pastoral, the influence of the Spaniard must be reckoned with that of the Neapolitan. It appears in Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_, and incidentally it may be observed that, before writing his _Two Gentlemen of Verona_, Shakespeare would seem at least to have been told of the substance of Montemayor. Not only did this influence come directly from the Spanish work, and from its translation into English at the end of the sixteenth century; it came also by way of France in the latter part of the seventeenth. For in France, early in that century, had appeared the _Astrée_ of D’Urfé, based upon the Spaniard, and this in turn was the parent of those tedious creations of sentimental affectation, the heroic romances of La Calprenède and Scudéry, which have already been mentioned in dealing with the effect of French literature upon our post-Restoration writers of drama and fiction.

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It would, however, be an error to suppose that, during this period of romance and pastoral, literature made no approach towards real existence. When war has come to play a smaller part in the national interest, and when reading is becoming general, a country which loves stories and “situations” will begin to find material for them in the facts, or at least the possibilities, of real life. It was so with Spain. In the latter part of the fifteenth century appears the first instalment of non-romantic or non-chivalric literature in the shape of _Calisto and Meliboea_, better known as _Celestina_, a work of uncertain authorship. A prose “comedy,” though impracticable for the stage, and written in twenty-one so-called acts, it sets forth—ostensibly with a dissuasive moral purpose—a tale of intrigue and vice which might conceivably belong to the realities of contemporary Spain. “Realistic,” indeed, it cannot be called, since realism describes things strictly as they are. The work was translated in all western Europe, including England. The fact that in the early sixteenth century the productions of Spain found ready access to our own country will be considered later. Meanwhile it is most convenient to note the subsequent history of the Spanish novel of common life. That history was peculiar, but intelligible. Spain was growing weary of the monotonous pretences of the Amadises, and it was by the treatment of the most opposite type of humanity that the liveliest interest could be evoked. From the knight-errant to the rogue-errant was a grateful change. The country possessed a plenty of _picaros_ or rogues, who lived by the exercise of their wits, and whose adventures might be embellished into stories at least as interesting as those of a Palmerin. The appearance of _The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, his Fortunes and Adventures_ (1554)—a work of unknown authorship, though commonly attributed to Mendoza—marks the date at which such stories first take shape as a distinct branch of the novel, to be known as the “picaroon” or “picaresque.” From that time, for nearly a century, the “Novelas de Picaros” are a chief product of Spanish writing. In them the vagabond of low life is carried by his cunning and his luck through a multitude of such adventures as the Spanish mind considered humorous, even though they might not be particularly edifying. Unfortunately the hero and his history tend to become as stereotyped as those of the chivalric romance; and unhappily also many of the situations at which contemporary Spain could evidently laugh, are, to us, rather productive of pity or disgust. Chief among the progeny of _Lazarillo_ are _Guzman de Alfarache_ (1599), a sequel to _Lazarillo_ itself by Luna (1620), and _The Life of Buscon_ (otherwise entitled _The Great Knave_) by Quevedo (1626). All these were quickly translated into English. Upon England the effect of the picaresque novel first appears in the _Jack Wilton_ of Nash, who was well acquainted with Spanish, and whose choice of a picaroon higher in the social scale than Lazarillo is merely a concession to contemporary English tastes and interests. In France the type passed through the hands of Scarron and reached those of Lesage, whose _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ were destined to eclipse the fame of the Spanish originals. From the example of France this species broke out in England with the _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_ of Defoe, the _Joseph Andrews_ of Fielding, the _Roderick Random_ and _Peregrine Pickle_ of Smollett. In the nineteenth century it finds its congeners in the _Three Musketeers_ of Dumas and in the works of several minor English novelists. Mr. Jingle does not essentially differ from the type.

It is commonly said that it was the ridicule of Miguel Cervantes which destroyed the vogue of the chivalric romances. In reality he is rather the embodiment of his epoch, dealing the _coup de grâce_ to that which was already dying. His immortal _Don Quixote_ appeared first in 1605, when Amadis and Palmerin had already been losing their hold for a generation. Cervantes himself began with a pastoral _Galatea_, but it is not to be wondered at that his characteristic satirical sense of reality diverted him from this vein to the writing of original novels. Some twelve of these “Novelas Exemplares,” or moral and instructive tales, were published in 1613, and, though of uneven quality, they are the nearest approach which Spain could show to a novel of actuality. Some of these were soon converted into plots for dramas by the later Elizabethan playwrights. _La Gitanilla_ becomes the _Spanish Gipsy_ of Middleton, and Fletcher’s _The Fair Maid of the Inn_ is from the _Illustrious Housemaid_. But the abiding fame of Cervantes rests upon work of an entirely novel kind, and one which has remained unique, despite all efforts at imitation. Though full of contemporary Spain, _Don Quixote_ is one of those immortal books which become the property of the world rather than of any particular country. Its happy conception and execution, its humour, its fine suggestion of the true gentleman, and its admirable style, combine to make Cervantes the one significant name in Spanish literature. _Don Quixote_, a poor gentleman of La Mancha, a true type of the Castilian with all his native dignity and ready acceptance of lofty views of honour and loyalty, has bemused himself—as so many others had done—with the reading of the _libros de caballerias_. Accepting the world of the chivalric romances as a real world, where wrongs and oppressions clamour for heroic knights to redress them, he saddles his gaunt mare, Rosinante, clothes himself in old armour, with a barber’s dish for helmet, and sallies forth to seek adventures. To him Cervantes attaches the necessary squire in the shape of Sancho Panza, a good-natured, ignorant peasant, endowed with a simple readiness to believe his betters, but also with a fund of vulgar shrewdness which forms an excellent contrast to the idealizing monomania of his master. The story consists of the adventures of this worthy pair. The inns which the knight takes for castles, and the windmills which he takes for giants, are now a commonplace, and had become proverbial in England within a few years of the appearance of the book. The word “Quixotic” itself tells the story of the vogue which the work secured. But thousands have been entertained by the book as a novel without realizing its deeper perfections. _Don Quixote_ is something far greater than a satire upon the chivalric romances. It is a work of creative art, a perfect mirroring of two types of character, all the more true to nature for the apparent contradictions which each embraces. And Cervantes possesses the supreme gift of creation, in that, like Swift or Defoe, he makes his persons live. We are apt to feel, not that the Don is an imaginary character in a book, but that he once actually lived and entertained his noble delusions in La Mancha. The skill which not only saves him from contempt, but invests him with pathetic admiration, is in itself the skill of genius. It should be observed that Cervantes adapts his Spanish to the situations with the delicate tact of a master, and that more than usual is therefore inevitably lost in translation. The difficulty of imitating such a work is manifest. Among the best known must be reckoned the _Hudibras_ of Samuel Butler (1663), but beyond adopting the notion of an errant knight and squire, in the persons of Sir Hudibras and Ralpho, he achieves little that is comparable to his original. Sir Hudibras is a cowardly and contemptible person of narrow mind, but, even as such, his treatment is inconsistent, and the verse which Butler employs in place of Cervantes’ prose is but facile doggerel. It would be better indeed to speak of _Hudibras_ as a vulgar, if often amusing, travesty of _Don Quixote_ than as an imitation.

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Meanwhile the Spanish lyric verse of the _cancioneros_, cultivated with much assiduity but with little genius, hardly concerns us, whether in its native form or when reshaped into sonnets and other varieties under Italian influence by “learned” poets like Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega. Of most importance is the fact that poetry of the latter kind was disfigured by Gongora, a writer of the end of the sixteenth century, into one of those styles of exaggerated preciosity which always seem to secure a temporary success by their very absurdity. The _estilo culto_, otherwise known as Gongorism, was a deliberate invention, of which the main features were the consistent avoidance of the natural word and, as far as possible, of the natural order. Such tricks were congenial to the Spanish taste, which has always been too much inclined, whether in verse or prose, to verbose and ornate expression. Gongorism is but a new species of Spanish artificiality in this respect—a national characteristic recognized and ridiculed by Shakespeare in his Don Armado. How much of the peculiar style of Lyly’s _Euphues_ may be due to Spanish as well as Italian influences cannot be determined with any preciseness. But it should always be borne in mind that, after the marriage of Henry VIII with Catharine of Aragon, the English Court was frequented by Spaniards, and that, thanks to this fact, and the general prominence of Spain in the eyes of contemporary Europe, Spanish manners, whether of person or expression, were regarded as a proper subject of emulation by gallants and _beaux esprits_. This imitation extended far into the reign of Elizabeth. Before Gongora had introduced his new varieties of expression, this circle of Englishmen had been more or less familiar with the sententious antitheses and fantastic prolixities of the prose of Guevara (of the early sixteenth century), whose _Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius_ and _Golden Letters_ combined the characteristic proverbial philosophizing, often tediously platitudinarian, of his nation with its almost equally characteristic straining after uncommonness of phrase. Indeed it would seem that Elizabethan England caught from the Spaniards a taste for apophthegmatic wisdom which reached some among even the best of its writers, including no less a person than Bacon.

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It only remains to remark briefly upon that form of literature which, apart from Cervantes, is the chief boast of Spain. This was the drama, established by Lope de Vega (1562-1635), and polished by Calderon a generation later. Spanish plays had begun in the usual manner with the performance of “Mysteries” and “Miracles,” of which the latter, when connected with the sacrament, were called _autos_. But from these Spain, like England, and unlike Italy or France, developed an entirely native species of drama. As in England, the attempts to impose the Senecan form, with its unities of place and time and its entire distinction of the tragic from the comic, entirely failed. But, unlike the drama of England, that of Lope de Vega and Calderon does not undertake to mirror human nature and action with all its various sides and complex motives. Its characters are but types, and, even as such, they are narrowly conceived. In the “cloak and sword” pieces a lady, a lover, a sober old man, and a clown, are the stock figures, who are brought into existence chiefly for the purpose of enacting their parts in certain ingenious and complicated intrigues with abundance of exciting or amusing situations. If Calderon shows a more finished style and a finer observation than Lope, his scope is otherwise the same. The Spanish stage does, indeed, like the French or Italian, affect frequent displays of rhetoric, but there the resemblance ends. Of special note among the _comedias_ were those above mentioned as “cloak and sword” (_de capa y espada_). The title refers to the usual equipment of a typical Spaniard of the higher middle class, who was the most natural hero of adventures and intrigues. It is not difficult to find in Ben Jonson and Fletcher resemblances to these plays of Spain. In France, where Spanish influence was at its highest in the time of Lope, comedy was inevitably affected by much that was congenial in the tastes and lives of the two peoples, and with the Restoration the same influence reached England in an attenuated form. Perhaps the most amazing thing in all Spanish literature is the miraculous fecundity of Lope, to whom are credited nearly two thousand plays, dashed off with a rapidity which remains a unique phenomenon. In finish they are, of course, to seek; but the passableness of the verse thus composed, and the ingenuity of the plots conceived, are beyond denial. To the Spaniards Lope was “the prodigy of nature,” and “the Spanish phoenix.”

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It is needless for our purpose to follow further the story of Spanish literature, which, since the seventeenth century, has been singularly barren, and, in any case, has exerted no appreciable effect whatever upon our own. On the whole it has been justly said that the writing of Spain has not been quite worthy of the nation. Perhaps its best work, leaving Cervantes aside, has been in history, from which, however, we have derived no definite influence which can be classed as literary. Apart from these its merits are those of inventiveness in plot and of a certain high conception of dignity—a most consistent trait of the Spaniard. But it is a literature wordy in expression, lacking in insight, and seldom concerning itself with the deeper interests of human life.

BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF SPANISH LITERATURE.

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE. CHIEF REPRESENTATIVE OR WORK. DATE. SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE. Fiction: (_a_) Moral Tales Don Juan MANUEL (_Count Lucanor_) Early fourteenth century Passed into stock of _fabliaux_ and _novelle_, and thence occasionally reappear, _e.g._, in _Taming of the Shrew_. CERVANTES (_Novelas Exemplares_) 1613 Utilized by later Elizabethan playwrights, _e.g._, Middleton’s _Spanish Gipsy_, Fletcher’s _Fair Maid of the Inn_. (_b_) Chivalric Romances (Libros de Caballerias) _Amadis of Gaul_ Fourteenth century _Palmerin_, _Palmerin of England_, etc. Fifteenth century The chivalric romances, combined with the pastoral, led (through D’Urfé) to the French “heroic romances” of La Calprenède and Scudéry. For their effect on English work, _see_ French Literature. (_c_) Pastoral Romance (part prose, part verse) MONTEMAYOR (_Diana_) 1520-1562 CERVANTES (Galatea) 1585 The _Arcadia_ of Sidney and Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ owe some influence to Montemayor. _Diana_ was Englished at the end of the sixteenth century. (_d_) Romance of Common Life _Celestina_ (_Calisto and Meliboea_) Fifteenth century Picaroon Novels (Novelas de Picaros) _Lazarillo de Tormes_, _Guzman de Alfarache_ 1554, 1599 QUEVEDO (_Life of Buscon_) 1626 The original source of the picaroon (or picaresque) novel, first seen in England in, _e.g._, Nash’s _Jack Wilton_. In France passed through Scarron to Lesage. Taken up by Defoe (_Moll Flanders_, etc.), Fielding (_Joseph Andrews_), Smollett (_Roderick Random_, etc.). Revived by Dumas and his followers. (_e_) Satirical CERVANTES (_Don Quixote_) 1547-1616 (_D.Q._ 1605) Greatly read and quoted in England at all times. Imitated in Butler’s _Hudibras_. Poetry: (_a_) Early Romance _Poem of the Cid_ Twelfth and thirteenth centuries (_b_) Learned Poetry (lyric) GARCILASO DE LA VEGA 1530-1568 GONGORA 1561-1627 The _estilo culto_ joins with Italian influence to create artificiality of style. Ethical Writing Early Collection of Proverbs Utilized in Caxton’s _Dictes and Sayings_, _etc._ GUEVARA (_Golden Book_ and _Golden Letters_) 1474-1546 Much effect on Tudor England in encouraging apophthegmatic and sententious style. Drama LOPE DE VEGA 1562-1635 CALDERON 1601-1681 The “cloak and sword” dramas of situation and intrigue influence plays of Jonson and Fletcher. French comedy sought material in Lope, and England was thence indirectly affected after the Restoration.

(_b_) GERMAN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

For our purpose, which is that of surveying the influence exerted by other literatures upon both the form and contents of our own, the writings of Germany are of less prominence than those of the countries with which we have hitherto dealt. To Latin our debt has been great and continuous; to Greek it has been less continuous, but essentially much more important; to Italian it was a debt of considerable dimensions for some three centuries; to French it has been an extensive obligation at two different and well marked epochs of some duration and potency. But to German we owed but an inconsiderable debt until the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth, and, even since that time, the influence has been rather philosophical and scientific than literary—one affecting general currents of thought and methods of thinking rather than one affecting range of literary subject or manner of literary expression.

German “literature” at its best covers some half-century. The years from about 1770 to about 1820 were its golden period, the age of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Since the latter date Heine alone stands forth as one of those names in pure literature which have a cosmopolitan, and not merely a German, significance. In speaking thus we are not forgetting minor poets like Uhland, or philosophers like Schopenhauer, or historians like Mommsen. But, in a literary inquiry of the present scope, we must not, on the one hand, confound science, even the science of philosophy, with literature; and, on the other, we must not lose our truth of perspective by magnifying the relatively small.

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