| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII | HTML | PDF ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Later Renaissance
Author: Hannay, David
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Later Renaissance" ***
(This file was produced from images generously made
Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_) and ^{} encloses
superscripted material.
Sidenotes are identified as: [SN: text of sidenote].
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
Periods of European Literature
EDITED BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY
VI. THE LATER RENAISSANCE
* * * * *
PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE.
EDITED BY PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY.
“_The criticism which alone can much help us for the future is a
criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual
purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working
to a common result._”
--MATTHEW ARNOLD.
In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. Price 5s. net each.
The DARK AGES Professor W. P. KER.
The FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE
AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY THE EDITOR.
The FOURTEENTH CENTURY F. J. SNELL.
The TRANSITION PERIOD G. GREGORY SMITH.
The EARLIER RENAISSANCE
The LATER RENAISSANCE DAVID HANNAY.
The FIRST HALF OF 17TH CENTURY
The AUGUSTAN AGES OLIVER ELTON.
The MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY J. HEPBURN MILLAR.
The ROMANTIC REVOLT Professor C. E. VAUGHAN.
The ROMANTIC TRIUMPH T. S. OMOND.
The LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY THE EDITOR.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE
BY DAVID HANNAY
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCXCVIII
_All Rights reserved_
PREFACE.
The general rules by which this series is governed have been fully
stated by the Editor in the first published volume, _The Flourishing
of Romance and the Rise of Allegory_. It will therefore not be
necessary for me to do more than endeavour to justify the particular
application of them in this book. Mr Saintsbury has fully recognised
the magnitude of the task which has to be overcome by the writer who
should undertake to display “intimate and equal knowledge of all the
branches of European Literature at any given time.” Nobody could be
more conscious of his insufficiency to attain to any such standard of
knowledge than I have had occasion to become in the course of executing
the part of the plan intrusted to me. Though I hope my work has not
been shirked, I still cannot venture to boast of “intimate and equal
knowledge” of all the great bulk of literature produced during the
later sixteenth century. Happily so much as this is not required. Some
ignorance of--or at least some want of familiarity with--the less
important, is permitted where the writer is “thoroughly acquainted
with the literature which happened to be of greatest prominence in the
special period.” I must leave others to decide how far my handling
of the Spanish, English, and French portions of the subject can be
held to excuse my less intimate familiarity with the Italian and
Portuguese. The all but unbroken silence of Germany during this period
made it unnecessary to take account of it. Modern Dutch and modern
Scandinavian literature had hardly begun; such Scottish poets as Scott
and Montgomerie are older than their age. These and other things, on
the principles of the series, fall into the previous or the next volume.
Although the reasons for the course taken with the literature of Spain
are given in the text, they may be repeated here by way of preliminary
excuse. It has been decided to treat the Spaniards as an example of the
overlapping necessary to the satisfactory carrying out of a series in
periods. I have begun with them earlier than with others, have ended
with them later, and have as far as space permitted treated them as
a whole. For this there is what appears to me to be a sound critical
reason. Although Spain undoubtedly belongs to Europe, yet there is in
her something which is not quite European. The Spaniards, though they
have always been, and are, vigorous and interesting, have a certain
similarity to some oriental races. This is not the place for an essay
on the Spanish national character. The comparison is only mentioned as
a justification for pointing out that, like some oriental races, the
Spaniards have had one great period of energy. At no time have they
been weak, and to-day they can still show a power of resistance and
a tenacity of will which promise that if ever the intellect of the
nation revives, they will again play a great part in the world. But
it is none the less a matter of fact that, except during their one
flowering time, they have not been what can be called great. From the
fifteenth century till well into the seventeenth, those defects in the
national character, which have kept the Spaniards stationary and rather
anarchical, were in abeyance. The qualities of the race were seen at
work on a vast stage, doing wonderful things in war, colonisation, art,
and letters. Yet the very reason that the Spaniard was then exercising
his faculties to the full extent to which they would go, gives a
complete unity to his Golden Age. It cannot be divided in any other
than a purely arbitrary way. England and France were destined to grow
and develop after the Later Renaissance. Tasso and Bruno were the last
voices of a great Italian time. But Spain suspended the anarchy of her
middle ages at the end of the fifteenth century, gathered force, burst
upon the world with the violence of a Turkish invasion, flourished
for a space, and then sank exhausted at the end of a hundred and fifty
years.
It may be thought that too little attention has been paid to the
Portuguese. I will not venture to assert that the criticism is ill
founded. Still I shall plead by way of excuse that what the lesser
Peninsular nation did in literature was hardly sufficiently original
to deserve fuller notice in a general survey of a very fertile period.
Sà de Miranda and his contemporaries, even Camoens and his follower
Corte-Real, were after all little more than adapters of Italian forms.
They were doing in kindred language what was also being done by the
Spanish “learned poets.” In Camoens there was no doubt a decided
superiority of accomplishment, but the others seem to me to have been
inferior to Garcilaso, Luis de Leon, or Hernan de Herrera. And this
“learned poetry” is in itself the least valuable part of the literature
of the Peninsula. In what is original and important, the share of
the Portuguese is dubious or null. They have a doubtful right to the
_Libros de Caballerías_. They have a very insignificant share in the
stage, and no part in the _Novelas de Pícaros_. Barros and the other
historians were men of the same class as the Spaniards Oviedo or
Gómara. For these reasons, I have thought it consistent with the scheme
of the book to treat them as very subordinate.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
The unity of Spanish literature--Limits of treatment--A
prevailing characteristic--The division into native
and imitative--The inheritance from the fifteenth
century--Spanish verse--The _Cancioneros_--The romances--The
_Romanceros_--The quality of this poetry--Spain and
Italy--The _Diálogo de la Lengua_--Prose of the early
sixteenth century--The influence of the Inquisition 1
CHAPTER II. THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS.
The starting-point of the classic school--The natural
influence of Italy--Prevalence of the classic school--Its
aristocratic spirit--What was imitated from the
Italians--Its technique and matter--Artificiality of the
work of the school--Boscan--Garcilaso--Their immediate
followers--The schools of Salamanca and Seville--Góngora and
Góngorism--The epics--The _Araucana_--The _Lusiads_ 30
CHAPTER III. THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
The national character of the Spanish drama--The first
beginnings of the religious plays--The starting-point of
the secular play--Bartolomé de Torres Naharro--Lope de
Rueda--Lope de Vega’s life--His influence on the drama--The
conditions of the work--Contemporaries and followers of
Lope--Calderon--Calderon’s school 60
CHAPTER IV. FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
The prevailing quality of the Spanish drama--Typical
examples--_La Dama Melindrosa_--_El Tejedor de
Segovia_--_El Condenado por Desconfiado_--The plays on
“honour”--_A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza_--The _Auto
Sacramental_--the _loa_--The _Verdadero Dios Pan_--_Los Dos
Habladores_ 91
CHAPTER V. SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE.
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_ 124
CHAPTER VI. SPAIN--HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND THE
MYSTICS.
Spanish historians--Histories of particular events--Early
historians of the Indies--General historians of the
Indies--Gómara, Oviedo, Las Casas, Herrera, the
Inca Garcilaso--Mendoza, Moncada, and Melo--General
histories--Ocampo, Zurita, Morales--Mariana--The
decadence--Solis--Miscellaneous writers--Gracian and
the prevalence of Góngorism--The mystics--Spanish
mysticism--The influence of the Inquisition on Spanish
religious literature--Malon de Chaide--Juan de Ávila--Luis
de Granada--Luis de Leon--Santa Teresa--Juan de la
Cruz--Decadence of the mystic writers 157
CHAPTER VII. ELIZABETHAN POETRY.
The starting-point--Italian influence--The opposition to
rhyme--Excuses for this--Its little effect--Poetry of
first half of Elizabeth’s reign--Spenser--Order of his
work--His metre--Character of his poetry--Sir P. Sidney--The
_Apologie for Poetrie_--His sonnets and lyrics--Watson--The
Sonneteers--Other lyric poetry--The collections and
song-books--The historical poems--Fitz-Geoffrey
and Markham--Warner--Daniel--Drayton--The satiric
poets--Lodge--Hall--Marston--Donne 185
CHAPTER VIII. THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS.
The first plays--Resistance to classic influence--Advantages
of this--And the limitations--The dramatic
quality--Classic, Spanish, and French drama--Unity in
the English Plays--_Ralph Roister Doister_--_Gammer
Gurton’s Needle_--_Gorboduc_--Formation of the
theatre--Lyly--Greene--Peele--Kyd--Marlowe--Character of
these writers--Shakespeare--Guesses about his life--Order
of his work--Estimates of Shakespeare--Divisions of his
work--The Poems--The Dramas--The reality of Shakespeare’s
characters 223
CHAPTER IX. THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS.
Elizabethan prose--Two schools of writers--Roger
Ascham--His books and style--Webbe and Puttenham--The
sentence--Euphuism--The _Arcadia_--Sidney’s style--Short
stories--Nash’s _Unfortunate Traveller_--Nash and the
pamphleteers--Martin Marprelate--Origin of the Marprelate
Tracts--The _Diotrephes_--Course of the controversy--Its
place in literary history--Hooker--_The Ecclesiastical
Polity_ 259
CHAPTER X. FRANCE. POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE.
The Pléiade--Ronsard--The lesser stars--The _Défense
et Illustration de la Langue Française_--The
work of Ronsard--His place in poetry--Joachim du
Bellay--Remi Belleau--Baïf--Du Bartas--D’Aubigné--The
dramatic work of the Pléiade--Jodelle--Grevin and La
Taille--Montchrestien--The comedy--_La Reconnue_--Causes of
failure of early dramatic literature 290
CHAPTER XI. FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS OF THE LATER SIXTEENTH
CENTURY.
Abundance of later sixteenth-century
prose--A distinction--Sully--Bodin--The
great memoir-writers--Carloix--La
Noue--D’Aubigné--Monluc--Brantôme--The _Satyre
Ménippée_--Its origin--Its authors--Its form and
spirit--Montaigne--His _Essays_--The scepticism of
Montaigne--His style--Charron and Du Vair 326
CHAPTER XII. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
The later Renaissance in Italy--Torquato Tasso--His work--The
_Gerusalemme Liberata_--Giordano Bruno--Literary character
of his work--Giambattista Guarini 352
CHAPTER XIII. CONCLUSION 367
INDEX 379
* * * * *
THE LATER RENAISSANCE.
CHAPTER I. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
THE UNITY OF SPANISH LITERATURE--LIMITS OF TREATMENT--A PREVAILING
CHARACTERISTIC--THE DIVISION INTO NATIVE AND IMITATIVE--THE
INHERITANCE FROM THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY--SPANISH VERSE--THE
“CANCIONEROS”--THE ROMANCES--THE “ROMANCEROS”--THE QUALITY OF THIS
POETRY--SPAIN AND ITALY--THE “DIÁLOGO DE LA LENGUA”--PROSE OF THE
EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY--THE INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION.
[SN: _The unity of Spanish Literature._]
The Literature of Spain, of which the Portuguese is the little
sister, or even at times the echo, stands apart. In this fact lies
the excuse for the division adopted in this volume. There is at first
sight something arbitrary in beginning a survey of Literature of the
later Renaissance with a book written at the close of the fifteenth
century. To carry the story on till the close of the seventeenth may
well appear to be a violation of proportion. The Renaissance even in
Italy was not in its later stages in 1500, and it is far behind us
when we get to the years in which Boileau, Molière, and Racine were
writing in France, while Dryden was the undisputed prince of English
poets and prose-writers. Yet there is good critical reason for making
a wide distinction between the one period of literary greatness of
the Peninsula and those stages in the history of the Literatures of
England, France, or Italy, which belong to the time of the later
Renaissance. It is this--that we cannot, without separating things
which are identical, divide the literature of Spain and Portugal in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The years between the appearance
of the _Shepherd’s Calendar_ and the death of Shakespeare form a period
possessing a character of its own in the history of our poetry, our
prose, and our drama. It is still more emphatically true that French
literature, between the rise of the Pléiade and the death of Mathurin
Regnier, is marked off sharply, both from what had gone before and what
was to follow. But we cannot draw a line anywhere across the Spanish
drama, poetry, or prose story of the great time and say, Here an old
influence ended, here a new one began. We have to deal with the slow
growth, very brief culmination, and sudden extinction of a brilliant
literature, which came late and went early, and which for the short
time that it lasted is one and indivisible. It grew up partly from
native roots, partly under an influence imparted by Italy; attained
its full stature in the early years of the seventeenth century; then
“withered, fell into puerile ravings, and died,” with the close of the
Austrian dynasty.
[SN: _Limits of treatment._]
As, then, the Golden Age of Spain is one, we are justified in taking
it as a whole, even though we appear to violate the harmony of the
arrangement of the series to which this volume belongs. And this
division of the matter imposes an obvious limitation on the treatment
to be adopted. Spanish literature is, in one sense, exceedingly rich.
During the century and a half, or so, of its vigour, it produced a
vast number of books, and the catalogue of its authors is very long.
Don Nicolas Antonio, the industrious compiler of the _Biblioteca
Hispana_, has calculated the number of mystic and ascetic works (of
which some are among the best of Spanish books) at over three thousand.
The fecundity of its theatre is a commonplace; the fluency of its
poets is boundless; the bulk of its prose stories is considerable; its
historians are many, and not a few are good. It is needless to add
that much was written on law, theology, and the arts which has value.
In dealing with all this mass of printed matter in the space at our
disposal, it is clearly necessary to remember the injunction, “il faut
savoir se borner.”
We must, to begin with, leave aside all that is not primarily
literature, except when it can be shown to have influenced that which
is. Again, even in dealing with our proper subject, we must submit to
limits. It is manifestly necessary to omit scores--nay, hundreds--of
minor names. But that is not all. In making a survey of a fertile
literature in a brief space, we are always obliged to go by kinds and
classes rather than by individual writers. But in Spanish literature
this is more especially true.
[SN: _A prevailing characteristic._]
In the course of an introduction to a translation of Shakespeare’s
plays by Señor Clarke, Don Juan Valera (himself the author of stories
both Spanish and good) has made a complaint, which is of the nature
of an unconscious confession. He has lamented that the characters of
Spanish drama are so little known. An artist, so he says, has only
to paint a young man in a picturesque dress on a rope-ladder, with
a beautiful young woman on a balcony above him, and all the world
recognises Romeo and Juliet. If he takes his anecdote from Lope and
Calderon, nobody will be able to guess what it is all about. With less
than his usual good sense, Señor Valera accounts for the obscurity into
which the world has been content to allow the characters and scenes of
the Spanish drama to fall, by the political decadence of his country
at the end of the seventeenth century. Yet the passing away of Spain’s
greatness has not prevented Don Quixote and Sancho from being familiar
to the whole world. If anecdote pictures are to be the test, Cervantes
has no reason to fear the rivalry of the English dramatic poet. There
is less of Spanish pride than of its ugly shadow, Spanish vanity, in
Don Juan Valera’s explanation. The Drama of Spain, brilliant as it was
within its limits, is not universally known, because it does not give
what we find in Cervantes, and in boundless profusion in Shakespeare,
characters true to unchanging human nature, and therefore both true
and interesting to all time. It is mainly a drama of situation, and of
certain stock passions working through personages who are rarely more
than puppets. We may say the same of the prose stories, whether Libros
de Caballerías, or Novelas de Pícaros--Books of Chivalry, or Tales
of Rogues. They all have the same matter and the same stock figures.
They differ only in the degree of dexterity with which the author has
used his material. In the poetry of Spain we see two influences at
work--first, the Italian Renaissance, which ruled the learned poetry
of the school of Garcilaso; and then the native “romance” or ballad
poetry, which held its ground beside the more varied and splendid
metres imitated from abroad. Each of these, within its own bounds, is
very uniform, and the works of each school vary only according to the
writer’s greater or less mastery of what he uses in common with all
others. Such a literature is manifestly best treated by classes and
types. Cervantes, indeed, stands apart. His greatness is not a towering
superiority but a difference of kind. It is as individual as the
greatness of Velasquez in painting.
[SN: _The division into native and imitative._]
These two influences, the foreign and the native, divided Spanish
literature of the Golden Age between them in very different
proportions. To the first is owing the whole body of its learned
poetry, and part of its prose. To the second belong all the “deliveries
of the Spaniard’s self,” as they may be called in a phrase adapted
from Bacon, the prose tale, the ballad, the drama, and the ascetic
works of the so-called mystics. These are the genuine things of Spanish
literature, and in them the Spaniard expressed his own nature. It
was very shrewdly noted by Aarsens van Sommelsdyck, a Hollander who
visited Spain in the later seventeenth century, that however solemn the
Spaniard may be in public, he is easy and jocular enough in private.
He is very susceptible to what is lofty and noble, capable of ecstatic
piety, of a decidedly grandiose loyalty and patriotism, endowed with a
profound sense of his own dignity, which nerves him to bear adversity
well, but which also causes him to be contumaciously impenetrable to
facts when they tell him he must yield or amend his ways. With all
that, and perhaps as a reaction from all that, he can enjoy crude forms
of burlesque, can laugh over hard realistic pictures of the sordid side
of life, and delights in rather cynical judgments of human nature. The
lofty and the low have their representations in his literature, in
forms easily traced back to the middle ages. About the third quarter of
the sixteenth century it might have appeared to a superficial observer
that the native element was overpowered by the foreign. But the triumph
of the “learned” literature was in show, not in reality.
The book already alluded to as marking the starting-point of the Golden
Age is the once famous _Celestina_, a long story in dialogue, of
uncertain authorship and age. It was written at some time between the
conquest of Granada and the end of the fifteenth century. Precision
is in this case of no importance, since the true descendants of the
_Celestina_ were the Picaresque stories. Its first successor was the
_Lazarillo de Tormes_, which, though no doubt written earlier, appeared
in or about 1547. Then at an interval of fifty years came the _Beacon
of Life_--_Atalaya de la Vida_--better known as _Guzman de Alfarache_,
of Mateo Aleman, and from him sprang the great Rogue family. But while
the Picaresque novel was gathering strength, all the more slowly
because it was not an imitation, the classic school of poetry had
blossomed, and was already showing signs of decadence. The drama,
another purely native growth, had risen by degrees alongside the prose
tale, and reached its full development at about the same time. Both are
intrinsically of far greater value than the learned verse. Yet since
their maturity came later, they may be postponed while the story of the
school of Garcilaso is told.
[SN: _The inheritance from the fifteenth century._]
Before entering upon that, it is necessary to say something of the
conditions which the “new poetry” and the influence of the Renaissance
found before them when they began to influence Spain. The fifteenth
century had not been barren of literature. King John II. (1407-1454)
had collected round him a school of Court poets whose chief was Juan
de Mena. Although the last representatives of this school resisted
the innovations of Boscan and Garcilaso as unpatriotic, it was itself
entirely foreign in origin--being, in truth, little more than an echo
of Provençal and early Italian poetry. Juan de Mena, the Prince of
Poets of his time, wrote long allegorical poems in imitation of Dante,
and was perhaps not uninfluenced by the French _rhétoriqueurs_. Indeed
the earlier leaders of the school made no secret of their debt. The
Marquis of Santillana, a contemporary of King John, candidly says, in
a letter to the Constable of Portugal, that he sought the origin of
poetry in the _Gai Saber_ of Provence. The troubadours, when driven
from France, had found refuge in the dominions of Aragon, and had there
given rise to a school of imitators. The connection of Aragon with
Italy was close. Dante found translators, and Petrarch imitators, among
the Catalan poets of Valencia, and from thence their influence spread
to Castile. Juan del Encina, who in 1496 prefixed a brief _Ars Poetica_
to one of those collections of lyric verse called _Cancioneros_,
and who was himself a poet of the Court school, confessed that he
and his brother verse-writers had conveyed largely from the earlier
Italians. Moreover, he made this the main ground of their claim to be
considered poets. It was not till the next century, and until the last
representatives of this school found themselves opposed by the Italian
influence, that they began to claim to be essentially Spanish.
[SN: _Spanish verse._]
What there was of really Spanish in their verse must be allowed to have
been mainly the impoverishment of the original models. The Spaniard has
always been recalcitrant to the shackles imposed by complicated and
artful forms of verse, and there is a natural tendency in him to drift
at all times to his native trochaic assonants of eight syllables.
His language, admirable when properly handled for prose, wants the
variety of melody required for poetry. Impatience of the difficulties
of metre is another name for the want of a due sense of the beauty of
form. Indeed it is not by its form that Spanish literature has been
distinguished. Given, then, a people who had very little faculty for
delicate verse, and a language which wanted both the wealth of the
Italian accent and the flexibility of the French, and it is easy to
see what was likely to be the end of the Provençal and Petrarchian
influence in the Court school. Its poetry, never more than an echo,
sank into mechanical verse-making--mostly in eight-syllabled couplets,
relieved by a broken line of four. The inborn preference of the
Spaniard for loose metres gradually gained the upper hand. No doubt
fine verses may be picked out from the bulk of the writings of the
troubadour school of Castile. The _rhythmus de contemptu mundi_, known
as the _coplas de Manrique_, which has been made known to English
readers by Mr Longfellow, is even noble in its rigid gravity. But
the merit lies not in the melody of the verse, which soon becomes
monotonous. It is in this, that the _coplas_ give us perhaps the finest
expression of one side of the Spaniard. They are full of what he
himself calls in his own untranslatable word _el desengaño_--that is to
say, the melancholy recognition of the hollowness of man’s life, and
“the frailty of all things here”--not in puling self-pity, but in manly
and pious resignation to fate and necessity.
[SN: _The_ Cancioneros.]
This old or troubadour school did not give up the field to the new
Italian influence without a struggle. Its models continued to be
imitated nearly all through the sixteenth century. It was praised
and regretted by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. Boscan and Garcilaso
found an opponent and a critic in Cristobal de Castillejo, a very
fluent verse-writer, a most worthy man, and a loyal servant of the
house of Austria, who died in exile at Vienna in 1556. El buen de
Castillejo--the good Castillejo, as he is commonly called, with
condescending kindness--was an excellent example of the stamp of
critic, more or less common in all times, who judges of poetry
exclusively by his own stop-watch. He condemned Boscan and Garcilaso,
not for writing bad poetry, but for not writing according to what he
considered the orthodox model. The new school not unnaturally retorted
by wholesale condemnation of the old. When Hernan, or Fernan, de
Herrera published his edition of Garcilaso in 1572, he was rebuked for
quoting Juan del Encina in the commentary. A pamphleteer, believed to
have been no less a person than the Admiral of Castile, whose likeness
may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery among the ambassadors who
signed the peace at the beginning of the reign of James I., laughed
at Herrera for quoting as an authority one who had become a name for
a bad poet. This was pedantry as bad as Castillejo’s, and represented
an opinion never generally accepted by the Spaniards. They continued
to read the collections of ancient verse called _Cancioneros_, even
when the new school was at the height of its vigour. The _Cancioneros
Generales_ of Hernan del Castillo, the great storehouse of the poetry
of the fifteenth century, was reprinted, with some changes, no less
than nine times between 1511 and 1573. The extreme rarity of copies of
these numerous editions proves that they must have been well thumbed to
pieces by admiring readers. Yet they constitute no inconsiderable body
of literature. The modern reprint issued (unfortunately only to its own
members) by the Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles is in two weighty
volumes.
[SN: _The romances._]
In this _Cancionero_ there are two elements, destined to very different
fates. Hernan del Castillo included eighteen _romances_ in his
collection, and they reappeared in subsequent editions. The importance
of this word in Spanish literature seems to call for some definition of
its scope. The word “romance” bore originally in Spanish exactly the
same meaning as in other tongues descended from the Latin. It was the
vernacular, and to write _en romance_ was to write Castilian, Galician,
or Catalan. “Ni romance ni romano”--neither Romance nor Roman--is a
phrase bearing more or less the meaning of our “neither rhyme nor
reason.” But little by little, by use and wont, it came about the end
of the sixteenth century to be applied exclusively to the form of
verse dearest and most native to the Spaniard, the already mentioned
trochaic eight-syllable assonant metre. As the ancient ballads are
mainly, though not exclusively, written in this form, they are called
_romances_. Yet to write _romances_ does not necessarily mean to write
ballads, but only to write in that metre, whether in the dialogue of a
play or in long narrative poems, or for any other purpose.
The assonant metre, as is well known, is not peculiar to Spain. It may
well have been imported into Castile from France by those churchmen
to whom the country owes so much of its architecture, what learning
it had, and its civilisation when it began to revive from the merely
martial barbarism produced by the Moorish conquest. But if the Spaniard
did indeed take the assonant metre from his French teachers, he soon
subjected it to that process which all forms of verse are apt to
undergo in his hands. He released it from shackles, and gave it a
freedom amounting to licence. The _romance_ is a loose-flowing rhythm,
in which the rhyme is made by the last accented vowel. Sometimes the
same vowel is used line after line until it is exhausted. More commonly
the assonant comes in alternate lines. As a rule there is no division
into stanzas, but the verse runs on till the speech is ended, or the
tale is told. To this there are, however, exceptions, and the _romance_
is divided into _redondillas_--that is, roundels or staves of four
lines, assonanced either alternately, or the first with the fourth
and the second with the third, or into _quintillas_ of five lines,
with an assonant in three. The recalcitrance of the Spaniard to all
limitations in verse-making has caused him to give a very wide range
indeed to the assonant. The vowel _u_ is allowed to rhyme with _o_,
and _i_ with _e_, though they have a very different sound and force.
The Spaniard, again, allows a diphthong to be assonant to a vowel,
although he pronounces both the vowels in his diphthongs. It will be
seen that such verse as this can be written with extreme facility.
Indeed it is a byword in Spain that nothing is easier than to write
_romances_--badly. The difficulty, in fact, is to avoid writing them
in prose; and it is no small one, when the ear of a people finds a
rhyme in so faint a similarity of sound, and in a language in which
the accent is at once so pronounced and as little varied. It is not,
I trust, superfluous to add that in Castilian, which we call Spanish,
there is a marked accent in the last syllable of words ending in a
consonant, on the penult of words ending in a vowel, while a limited
number of words are _esdrujulo_--that is, accented on the antepenult.
The addition of a syllable to form the plural, or of the adverbial
termination _mente_, does not alter the place of the accent. These
rules, though nowise severe, are not rigidly followed. Not infrequently
the assonant rhyme falls into the full or consonant rhyme, while the
_liesse_ or stave formed on one vowel, and its equivalents, is broken
by a line corresponding to nothing. Even the rule requiring the use of
eight syllables is applied with restrictions,--an accented syllable
at the end counts as two, while two unaccented syllables rank only as
one. It must be acknowledged that this metre is unsatisfactory to an
ear attuned to the melody of English poetry. In our language it renders
hardly a tinkle. When we have become accustomed to it in Castilian--and
until we do it tantalises with a sense of something wanting--its
highest virtue seems to be that it keeps the voice of the speaker in a
chanted recitative. It is more akin to numbered prose than to verse.
However incomplete the _romance_ may seem to us, to the Spaniard it
is dear. When _romances_ were not being well written in Spain, it was
because nothing was being written well. The metre not only held its
ground against the court poetry of the fifteenth century, but prevailed
against the new Italian influence. Here as in other fields the Spaniard
was very tenacious of the things of Spain. To find a parallel to
what happened in Spain we must do more than suppose that the Pléiade
in France, or Spenser and his successors in England, had failed to
overcome the already existing literary schools. It was as if the ballad
metres had won a place even on the stage. No Spanish Sir Philip Sidney
need have apologised for feeling his heart stirred by those ballads of
the _Cid_, or of the _Infantes de Lara_, which answer to our _Chevy
Chase_. They were strenuously collected, and constantly imitated, all
through the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century. [SN: _The_
Romanceros] So far were they from falling into neglect, that they were
first able to shake the slowly withering poetry of the troubadour
school, and then to fill a long series of collections, known, in the
beginning, as _Cancioneros_, or _Libros_, or _Sylvas de Romances_, but
finally as _Romanceros_. Much bibliographical learning and controversy
has collected about these early editions. Even if I could profess
to be competent to speak on such matters, they would have no proper
place here. From the point of view of the literary historian, the
interesting fact is that at a time when classic, or at least new
influences, born of the Renaissance, were carrying all before them in
France and England, and in Italy had long ago definitively conquered,
the Spaniards did not wholly part with their inheritance from the
Middle Ages.
The few ballads, and fragments of ballads, printed by Hernan del
Castillo in 1511, proved so popular that an editor was tempted to form
a special collection. The place and date of this first ballad-book
proper are both significant.[1] It appeared at Antwerp in or about
1546--that is to say, three years or so after the first edition of
the poems of Boscan and Garcilaso. The editor was one Martin Nucio.
Antwerp, be it observed, was always a great publishing place for
Spanish books, a fact which may be accounted for, not only by the
political connection between Spain and the Low Countries, the number of
Spaniards employed there in various capacities, as soldiers, officials,
or traders, and the then extensive use of their language, but also by
the superiority of the Flemish printers. That same carelessness of form
which is found in the Spaniard’s literature followed him in lesser
arts, where neatness of handling was more necessary than spirit and
creative faculty. He was, at any rate in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, rarely a good engraver, and hardly ever a good printer.
The _Cancionero de Romances_, brought out, it may be, primarily for
the pleasure of the Spaniards scattered over Flanders and Germany, was
soon reprinted in Spain, by one Estéban de Najera, at Saragossa. These
contemporary collections are not quite identical, but essentially the
same. This _Cancionero_, or _Sylva, de Romances_ met with a reception
which proved how strong a hold his indigenous verse had on the
Spaniard. Three editions, with corrections and additions, appeared by
1555. The latest of these was not reprinted until well into the next
century. In the meantime other editors had followed Nucio and Najera.
A _Romancero_ in nine parts appeared at places so far distant from
one another as Valencia, Burgos, Toledo, Alcalá, and Madrid, between
1593 and 1597. This again grew into the great _Romancero General_ of
1604-1614, wherein there are a thousand ballads.
[SN: _The quality of this poetry._]
In so far as this great mass of verse is really an inheritance from the
Middle Ages, it does not belong to the subject of this book. All that
it is necessary to do here is to note the fact that it did survive,
and did continue to exert an influence. But nothing is more doubtful
than the antiquity of the vast majority of the _romances_. The best
judges have given up the attempt to class them by age, and indeed that
must needs be a hopeless task where poems have been preserved by oral
tradition alone, and have therefore been subject to modification by
every succeeding generation. The presence of very ancient words is no
proof of antiquity, since they may be put in by an imitator. Neither
is the mention of comparatively recent events, or of such things as
clocks or articles of commerce only known in later times, of itself
proof that the framework of the ballad was not ancient when it took
its final shape. The _Romances_ were collected very much in the style
of the _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, and we all know with what
facility remains of popular poetry are found when there is a demand for
them, when no critical tests are applied, and when the searchers are
endowed with a faculty for verse-writing. The Moorish ballads have been
called old, and yet nothing is more certain than that they were the
fruits of a literary fashion of the later sixteenth century. The Moor,
like the Red Man, became a picturesque figure only when he ceased to
be dangerous. Another class of the ballads, those called of chivalry,
are full of references showing that the writers were acquainted with
Ariosto, and cannot have been written before the middle of the century
at the earliest. Where the _romance_ is identical in subject with,
and very similar in language to, a passage in the great chronicle of
Alfonso the Wise, or other unquestionably mediæval work preserved in
writing of known antiquity, it may be accepted as ancient. Where that
test cannot be applied, it is safer not to think that the ballad is
older than the sixteenth century. In some cases the inspiration can
be shown to have been French. The subject of the _Molinero de Arcos_,
a popular ballad existing in several versions, was taken from a
well-known French farce, _Le Meunier d’Arleux_.
It is very necessary, when judging this great body of verse, to stand
on our guard against certain besetting fallacies. There is always
a marked tendency in collectors to excuse what is grotesque on the
ground that it is ancient, and to pardon what is bad on the ground
that it is popular. The Spanish ballads have suffered from the too
great zeal with which modern editors have reprinted what was accepted
by the indiscriminate taste of first collectors. Many of the ballads
belong to the class of _romances de ciegos_--_i.e._, “blindmen’s
ballads”--which were doggerel at all times. Others are not above the
level of the poets’ corner of not over-exacting newspapers. Even in
the best, the intention and the first inspiration are commonly far
better than the expression. The Spaniard’s slovenliness of form is
found here as elsewhere. Lockhart, in the preface to his adaptations,
has rebuked the Spaniards for “neglecting old and simpler poets,”
who wrote the romances, in favour of authors “who were at the best
ingenious imitators of classical or Italian models.” He has himself,
however, subjected those he selected for translation into English to
a treatment which conveys a severe and a just critical judgment. A
comparison between his ballads and the originals will show that he
occasionally, though very rarely, weakened a forcible phrase. Now and
again there are signs that his knowledge of Spanish was not deep. He
writes, “So spake the brave Montanez,” as if that had been the name of
the Lord of Butrago, whereas _montanes_ (mountaineer) was a common old
Spanish equivalent for noble, a custom due to the belief that the old
Castilian aristocracy drew its “blue blood,” shown by its grey or blue
eyes, from the Visigoths, who held the mountains of Asturias against
the Moors. The Lord of Butrago was a historical personage, and the head
of the house of Mendoza. But if a few faults of this kind can be found,
there are to be set off against them a hundred passages in which he
has suppressed a redundancy or replaced the purely prosaic original by
poetry. A very good test case is to be found in the last verse of the
Wandering Knight’s song--which stands thus in Lockhart:--
“I ride from land to land,
I sail from sea to sea;
Some day more kind I fate may find,
Some night kiss thee.”
What can be more pretty or more fit? but it is not in the _Cancionero
de Romances_, where the words stand:--
“Andando de Sierra en Sierra
Por orillas de la mar,
Por provar si en mi ventura
Ay lugar donde avadar;
Pero por vos, mi señora,
Todo se ha de comportar.”
“Wandering from hills to hills by the shore of the sea, to try whether
my fortune will give me a ford; but for you, my lady, all things are to
be endured,” is the bald literal meaning, which, though it is at least
as old as 1555, and is simple enough, is also, unfortunately, bathos.
And this is very far from being a solitary example. The result is,
that Lockhart’s ballads give an unduly high estimate of the originals
to those who only know the English _rifacimento_. A reader who refuses
to be enslaved by authority will find that he is constantly compelled
to make allowances for the faults which Lockhart was in the fortunate
position of being able to correct--for redundancies, for lines of mere
prose, for vulgarities, for flat, spiritless endings. He will often
feel that he is reading mere repetitions in a popular form, written by
painfully uninspired authors, whose too frequent use of stock literary
phrases shows that they were far from the simplicity attributed to the
ballad-maker. It is true that poetic feeling, and some poetic matter
in the shape of traditional stories, is to be found in the _romances_,
but, as it were, in solution. Nor is it to be denied that it is to
the honour of a people when it clings to a national form of verse,
and to its own traditions. Yet neither good poetic intention nor the
most respectable patriotism will make inferior execution anything but
inferior even in national ballads. It is unquestionably unjust to
find fault with a body of professedly unlearned writers because they
show the defects of men who have not a severe literary training. But
the claim made for the Spanish _romances_ is that they express the
natural feelings of a poetic people with simplicity: it is quite fair
to answer that the great mass of them belong to a time of high literary
cultivation; that they show signs of being the work of its inferior
writers; that, even at their best, their loose metrical form--far
looser as it is than our own ballad stanza--permitted them to be
written by persons who could not have mastered even doggerel rhyme;
and that they are too often wanting in the direct, simple, passionate
expression by which the rudest genuine poet can force his way to the
realm of poetry.
[SN: _Spain and Italy._]
It was a real, but in all probability an inevitable, misfortune
that the best poetic faculty in Spain during the sixteenth century
neglected the native metre, and turned for inspiration “to the sweet
and stately measures of the Italian poesie.” An Italian influence, as
has been already pointed out, was no new thing in Spain, and as the
sixteenth century drew on it was sure to be felt again. Italy, indeed,
was full of Spaniards. They were numerous at the papal Court, and
the wars for Naples brought them in greatly increased numbers. Until
the close of the fifteenth century those who settled in the southern
kingdom were mainly drawn from Aragon. A great change came with the
reign of Ferdinand the Catholic. He claimed Naples by right of his
inherited crown of Aragon, but he fought for it with the forces, and
the arms, of Castile. Isabel was tenacious of her rights as queen
of the greater kingdom, but she was scrupulous in fulfilling her
wifely duty to comfort her husband. She supported him with her own
subjects. After her death he was regent, except for the short period
during which he was displaced by his worthless son-in-law, Philip
the Handsome. Thus the Castilians came more directly in contact with
Italy and Italian civilisation than they had ever done before. They
abounded as soldiers, as diplomatists, lay and ecclesiastical, and
as administrators. Some among them were sure to feel the artistic and
literary influences of that many-sided time. The way was prepared
in Spain by the alliance between the crowns of Castile and Aragon,
which could not give the country administrative unity, but did give
an internal peace. It was a time of expansion and vigour. Isabel had
favoured learning. Her favourite scholar, Antonio de Lebrija--better
known by the Latinised form of his name as Nebrissensis--drew up
a Castilian grammar and dictionary. The language came rapidly to
maturity, and was in fact full grown at the beginning of the sixteenth
century. This speedy maturity, though perhaps not for the good of
the language in the end, was natural. Castilian, in spite of a large
admixture of Arabic words, is so thoroughly Latin that little was
needed to fit it for literary purposes when once the study of classical
models was seriously begun--much as the art of printing came quickly
to perfection because the early typographers had beautifully executed
manuscripts before them as models.
The early sixteenth century in Spain was not barren in prose-writers,
mostly didactic, and also for the most part imitators of the Italians.
Francisco de Villalobos, of whom little is known except that he was
doctor to Ferdinand the Catholic and the Emperor Charles V., and Fernan
Perez de Oliva of Córdova (1492-1530), are the best remembered of
the class. But the _Problems_ of the first, and the treatise on the
_Dignity of Man_ of the second, are mainly notable as examples of the
growing wish to write Castilian for serious purposes.[2]
[SN: _The Spanish tongue._]
But a more interesting proof of the care the Spaniards were giving to
their language is to be found in the _Diálogo de la Lengua_[3]--_Talk
about our Language_, as it may be freely but not inaccurately
translated. [SN: _The_ Diálogo de la Lengua.] This little book appears
to have been written about, and perhaps a little after, 1530, but was
not printed till Mayans included it in his _Origenes de la Lengua
Castillana_ in the last century. There is strong internal evidence to
show that it was the work of one Juan de Váldes, a Spaniard belonging
to the colony settled in Naples, a Castilian by birth, and a member of
the doubtfully orthodox society collected round Vittoria Colonna. Juan
de Váldes himself is included in the short list of Spanish Protestants,
and his heterodoxy accounts for the length of time during which his
work remained in manuscript. He smelt of the fagot, as the French
phrase has it. All who possess even a slight acquaintance with the
literary habits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are aware
that we must not draw from the fact that work remained in manuscript
the deduction that it was little known. The _Diálogo de la Lengua_
was never quite forgotten. It is in itself somewhat disappointing,
being altogether narrower in scope and less ambitious in aim than
Joachim du Bellay’s _Défense et Illustration de la Langue française_,
published in 1549. Much of it is devoted to nice points in the use of
words, while the scholarly, perhaps also the patriotic, leanings of
Váldes led him to assume the untenable position that the few Greek
colonies on the Mediterranean coast of Spain had spread the use of
their language all over the country before it was displaced by the
Latin. But though the _Diálogo_ is not, like the _Défense_, a great
literary manifesto, and though its learning is at times fantastic, it
has some intrinsic interest, and no small value as a piece of evidence.
That exceedingly difficult literary form the dialogue is very fairly
mastered. The four speakers--two Spaniards and two Italians--who take
part in the conversation have a distinct dramatic reality, and the
tone of talk, familiar, occasionally even witty in form, but serious
in substance, is well maintained. The scheme is that three of a party
of four gentlemen who are spending a day at a villa on the Bay of
Naples join in a friendly conspiracy to draw the fourth, whose name,
by the way, is Váldes, into expounding to them, before they take horse
to return to the city, how a cultivated man ought to speak and write
Castilian. The doctrine of Váldes differs significantly from the lesson
enforced by Joachim du Bellay. He does not call upon his countrymen
to go forth to the conquest of the haughty Greeks and Romans. On the
contrary, it is his contention that although the vocabulary requires
refining, and the grammar needs to be better fixed, the language is
already as fit for every purpose of literature as the Italian, or even
as the classic tongues. With the pride of a genuine Spaniard he seeks
his examples in the _refranes_, the proverbs and proverbial phrases.
He makes free use of the collection formed in the fifteenth century
by the Marquess of Santillana, who gathered the traditional sayings
“from the old women sitting round the hearth.” Váldes may be held to
have given evidence in support of his own belief in the maturity of the
language. The Castilian of the _Diálogo_ has very little in it that is
antiquated, and where it differs from the modern tongue it is in being
more terse and manly. His literary doctrine, which is rather indicated
than expounded, would have commended itself to our Queen Anne men. To
be simple and direct, to avoid affectation, to prefer at all times the
natural and straightforward way of saying what you have to say--that
is the advice of Juan de Váldes. Withal, he has no squeamish dislike
of the common, when, as in the case of his beloved proverbs, it is
also pure Spanish. The principles of Váldes might have been fatal to a
stately and embroidered eloquence (of which Castilian has in any case
no great store), but they would preserve a literature from the affected
folly of Góngorism on the one hand, and from the grey uniformity of
general terms, which was the danger incident to the classic literature
of the eighteenth century.
Váldes, who cited Garcilaso with praise, would not have agreed in many
things with Cristobal de Castillejo, but he would have applauded his
saying that Castilian is friendly to a “cierta clara brevedad”--to a
certain lucid brevity. We shall be better able to judge later whether
the recognition of this truth does not lead directly to agreement with
Mr Borrow, when he says that Spanish Literature is not wholly worthy
of the language. [SN: _The prose of the early sixteenth century._]
Lucid brevity is certainly not the quality to be noted in Spanish
prose-writers of what we may call the time of preparation--the earlier
sixteenth century. The quality may indeed be found in an eminent
degree in the writings of Spaniards who were not men of letters--in
the despatches of Cortes, or in the numerous extant narratives of
soldiers or priests who were eyewitnesses of the wars of Italy, of the
sack of Rome, or of the conquest of America. It would be easy to make
an excellent collection of stories of adventure from their letters,
which would show the masculine force and the savoury quality of
Castilian. But these were men of the sword, or churchmen as adventurous
as they--not men of letters who knew by what devious paths the Muses
should be approached. The prose-writers of this epoch as a class need
not detain us in what must be a brief outline portrait of Spanish
literature. There is, however, one exception in Antonio de Guevara,
the Bishop of Mondoñedo (_d._ 1545), who is best known to us as the
author of the once famous _Golden Epistles_, if only for the sake of
the influence he may have had on Lyly.[4] Guevara wants, indeed, the
quaint graceful fancy, and also the oddity of the English writer; but
it is possible that his sententious antithetical style had some share
in producing euphuism. Guevara is also worth notice as an early, though
not the earliest, example of the pretentiousness and the tendency to
wordy platitude which have been so fatal in Spanish literature. He had
knowledge both of books and the world, and some command of sarcasm.
These qualities were, however, swamped in the “flowing and watery vein”
of his prose style. No writer ever carried the seesaw antithetical
manner to a more provoking extent. To make one phrase balance another
appears to have been his chief aim, and in order to achieve this end
he repeated and amplified. In his own time, when whatever was at once
sound as moralising, learned, and professedly too good for the vulgar
was received with respect, Guevara had a wide popularity both in Spain
and abroad. To-day he is almost unreadable, and for a reason which it
is easy to make clear. It is known that La Fontaine took the subject
of the _Paysan du Danube_ from the _Golden Epistles_ indirectly if not
directly. Spaniards may be found to boast that there is nothing in the
fable which is not in their countrymen. This is partly true, but it is
stated in the wrong way. The accurate version is that there is nothing
in Guevara’s prose which is not in La Fontaine’s verse, but that it
is said in several hundred times as many words, and that the meaning
(not in itself considerable) is smothered in tiresome digressions and
amplifications.
[SN: _The influence of the Inquisition._]
A few words, and they need be very few, on the influence of the
Inquisition seem not out of place in a history of any part of Spanish
life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They are even to be
justified by the fact that its oppressive influence has been called on
to account for the withering of the national will and intelligence,
which dried up the very sources of literature. The prevalence of
the destructive affectation called Góngorism has been excused by Mr
Ticknor on the ground that men were driven back on mere playing with
words because the Inquisition made thinking dangerous. But we are
met at once by the problem of the Sufi pipkin. It is hard to tell
which is potter and which is pot. Did the Spanish intellect wither
because the Inquisition wrapped it in over-tight swaddling-clothes?
or did the Spaniard first create and then submit to this repressive
institution because he had little tendency to speculation? To judge
by what went before and by what has come after the Inquisition, the
second reading of the riddle is at least as plausible as the first.
However that may be, it is difficult to see how the Inquisition is to
be made responsible for the carelessness of form and the loquacious
commonplace, which are the main defects of Spanish prose and verse,
while it may fairly claim to have helped to preserve Spanish literature
from one grave fault so visible in parts of our own. The Holy Office,
which allowed Lope de Vega to write _La Esclava de su Galan_, would not
have punished him for writing an _As You Like It_. Since it suffered
Cervantes to create _Don Quixote_, it would not have burnt the author
of a _Novela de Pícaros_, who had made his hero as real as Gil Blas.
The Inquisition was no more responsible for the hasty writing of Lope
than for his undue complacence towards the vices of his patron the
Duke of Sessa. A literature which could produce _La Vida es Sueño_,
_El Condenado por Desconfiado_, and the _Mágico Prodigioso_, had all
the freedom necessary to say the profoundest things on man’s passions
and nature in the noblest style. It was his own too great readiness
to say “This will do,” and not the Inquisition, which prevented Tirso
de Molina from making _La Venganza de Tamar_ as perfect in form
all through as it is in one scene. The Church had no quarrel with
perfection of form. It had, indeed, a quarrel with mere grossness
of expression, and would certainly have frowned on many so-called
comic scenes of our own Elizabethan plays. This was a commendable
fastidiousness of taste not peculiar to the Spanish Church. The
Spaniard may not be always moral, but he has seldom been foul-mouthed.
In this, as in other respects, the Church spoke for the nation; but
it was the effective administrative instrument which could coerce an
offending minority into decency--and that we may surely count to it for
righteousness.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The fullest collection of Spanish ballads is that of Duran in the
_Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_; but the best are in the _Rosa de Romances_
of Wolf and Depping, ed. 1844-1846, with notes by Don A. Alcalá Galiano.
[2] For Villalobos see _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, B. xxxvi. There is
a modern edition of Perez de Oliva. Madrid, 1787.
[3] _Origenes de la Lengua Castillana._ Mayans y Siscar. Madrid, ed. of
1873.
[4] The early editions and translations of Guevara are very numerous.
The passages spoken of in the text will be found in _Biblioteca de
Ribadeneyra_, _Obras de Filósofos_.
CHAPTER II. THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS.
THE STARTING-POINT OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL--THE NATURAL
INFLUENCE OF ITALY--PREVALENCE OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL--ITS
ARISTOCRATIC SPIRIT--WHAT WAS IMITATED FROM THE ITALIANS--ITS
TECHNIQUE AND MATTER--ARTIFICIALITY OF THE WORK OF THE
SCHOOL--BOSCAN--GARCILASO--THEIR IMMEDIATE FOLLOWERS--THE SCHOOLS
OF SALAMANCA AND SEVILLE--GÓNGORA AND GÓNGORISM--THE EPICS--THE
‘ARAUCANA’--THE ‘LUSIADS.’
[SN: _The starting-point of the classic school._]
Mr Ticknor has made the very just remark, that the manner of the
introduction of the later Italian influence into Spanish poetry enables
us to see for once in a way exactly, when and at whose instigation a
literary revolution was begun. The story is told by the best possible
authority, by Juan Boscan, who was one of the leaders of the movement,
in the long letter to the Duchess of Soma, which is printed as a
preface to the second book of the collected works of himself and his
friend Garcilaso de la Vega, published at Barcelona in 1543.[5] En (to
give him his native title) Juan Boscan Almogaver was a Catalan of a
noble family and of good estate. The date of his birth is uncertain,
but it probably fell in the last years of the fifteenth century. He
died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he had gone in discharge of his duty
as _ayo_, or tutor, to that formidable person the great Duke of Alva.
The story has been often told, but must needs be repeated in every
history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who had already written verse
in the old forms of the previous century, was a cultivated gentleman
who had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good knowledge of
the language. This he afterwards turned to account in a translation of
Castiglione’s _Courtier_, which was considered by the Spaniards as not
inferior to the original, and had great popularity. In 1526 he attended
the Court at Granada, and there met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian
ambassador. Navagiero urged him to write “in the Italian manner.”
Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his long ride back to
Barcelona, and finally decided to act on it, though not without doubts,
and not until he had been encouraged by a friend. This was the far more
famous Garcia Laso de la Vega, whose names, according to a not uncommon
custom, were combined into Garcilaso.[6] He was born in 1503 of a very
ancient house of nobles of Toledo, and was killed by being hurled from
a ladder while leading a storming-party at Frèjus in 1536. Little is
known of their friendship, and indeed it would seem that they cannot
have seen much of one another, for Boscan spent most of his life on
his estate or at Court, whereas Garcilaso, who was first a page and
then soldier to Charles V., lived, in common with all who followed “the
conquering banners” of the emperor, on the march or on shipboard, from
the Danube to Tunis.
[SN: _The natural influence of Italy._]
It would unquestionably be an error to conclude from the exact manner
of its beginning that there would have been no Spanish imitation of
Italian models if Boscan had not met Navagiero at Granada in 1526.
Garcilaso, Diego de Mendoza, Gutierre de Cetina, and others, would no
doubt have begun to write pastorals, epistles, and _canzones_ “in the
Italian manner” in any case. Allowing for the strength of the Italian
influence of the day, the close kinship of the two languages, the
frequent intercourse between the peoples, the ease with which Castilian
could be run into a Tuscan mould, this was inevitable. Yet the story
not only gives a curious incident in literary history, but it is
characteristic of the classic poetry of Spain. Boscan we see took to
playing with the foreign metres as a mere exercise of ingenuity, and as
an amusement for his leisure. He implies that Garcilaso acted on the
same motives as himself. With such a beginning there was an obvious
danger that the Spaniards would work as mere pupils and produce only
school exercises.
[SN: _Prevalence of the classic school._]
The ample following found by these two is itself a proof that
Navagiero’s advice and Boscan’s docility were hardly necessary. It
needed only an accident to provoke the literary activity of the
Italianate Spaniards gathered round the emperor, in the Court of Rome,
at Naples, and at home, where the “learned” men were all readers of
Italian and of Latin. Greek was never much read in Spain, though a few
of her scholars were good Hellenists. The ambition of the poets of the
school of Boscan and Garcilaso is shown by their favourite epithet of
praise--the word _docto_. The literal sense is “learned,” but educated
expresses its true meaning more accurately. It did not necessarily
imply much more than this, that the poet was familiar with Horace as
well as with Sannazzaro and Ariosto, which, at a time when Latin was
the language of education and diplomacy, and Italian was the language
of society, hardly amounted to learning, in the full sense of the
word. The seed fell on well-prepared soil. A quick and copious harvest
sprang up, which for a time overshadowed all other forms of literary
growth. The second half of the sixteenth century was the time of the
learned poets of Spain. The school lasted, indeed, into the seventeenth
century, but it had produced its best work before 1600.
[SN: _Its aristocratic spirit._]
The origin of this poetry would of itself lead us to expect to find
it composed of imitators who produced more or less ingenious school
exercises. Its works are extant to show that the expectation would be
well founded. Again, we should expect to find that it was always much
more of a society fashion than a manifestation of the real qualities of
the Spaniard in literature, and here also experience will be found to
confirm expectation. It was an aristocratic school, not perhaps quite
so indifferent to appearing in print as some others have been, but
still not uncommonly satisfied to leave its work in manuscript. These
poets could afford to be indifferent to publication, since they did not
thereby injure their fame in the only world to which they appealed.
They were careless of the great unlearned public, whose tastes favoured
the _romances_ and the theatre. Manuscript copies sufficed for their
own limited society. Luis de Leon, for instance, was the recognised
chief of the Castilian learned poets in his lifetime, yet his works
were not printed till they were brought out, forty years after his
death, by Quevedo, in the idle hope of converting his countrymen from
Góngorism by the sight of better examples, while Góngora was able to
found a school of affectation by his influence, and yet his poems were
not published during his lifetime. The learned poets did not expect to
find readers among the _vulgo_, the common herd, of whose _brutez_,
or bestial stupidity, they habitually spoke in a very high and mighty
fashion. This attitude of superiority was not peculiar to the learned
poets of Spain. It was habitual with the school of Ronsard, and indeed
common to the whole Renaissance, which was emphatically scholarly and
aristocratic. But though the pretensions of Spain’s learned poets
were not different from those of the Italian, the Frenchman, or the
Englishman, they were less fully justified. These very self-conscious
“children of the Muses” were not so superior to the vulgar herd
of writers of _romances_ and _coplas_ in poetic inspiration as to
be entitled to look down upon them, on the strength of a certain
mechanical dexterity acquired from foreigners by imitation.
[SN: _What was imitated from the Italian._]
The question what exactly it was that the innovators of the sixteenth
century took from their Italian masters is easier to put than to
answer. The mere imitation of Italian models was in itself no
novelty. Cristobal de Castillejo denied the claim of the new school
to originality in the writing of hendecasyllabics. They had, he said,
already been written by Juan de Mena. So they had, and by Ausias March
and other poets of the Catalan school also. The Marquess of Santillana
had written sonnets on the Petrarchian model; the _ottava rima_ and
tercets were not unknown to the Court school of Castile or to the
Catalans. The canzone had been written in Spain by imitators of the
earlier Italian poetry. What then remained for the innovators to take?
If we look at the names only, and the bare skeleton of the verse,
little indeed; but when the manner of the execution is considered, a
great deal. The Italian hendecasyllable, which the Spaniards allowed to
be the original of their own line of eleven syllables, and of the line
of ten with an accent on the final syllable, had become very monotonous
in their hands. The cæsura fell with unvarying regularity after the
fourth syllable. The innovators learnt to vary the pause, and thereby
to give a new melody to the verse. It remained to them also to be more
slavish in imitation than their predecessors had been. [SN: _Its
technique and matter._] This slavishness was shown by the establishment
of the _endecasílabo piano_, with the unaccented vowel termination as
alone legitimate. Castilian abounds in _vocablos agudos_, in masculine
rhymes, and was not under the same necessity as Italian to prefer the
softer form. The Spanish poets were, we may suppose, influenced by the
fact that the accented ending had become associated with comic verse
among the Italians, and yet by submitting to a limitation which was not
justified by the genius of their language, they began by impoverishing
their poetic vocabulary, and they did it in pure unintelligent
imitation. The restriction was not accepted without reluctance.
Rengifo, who is the Spanish Puttenham[7]--the author, that is to say,
of the standard work on the mechanism of verse written in Spain in the
close of the sixteenth century--even puts in a plea for the _verso
agudo_. He had good authorities to support him, for Garcilaso had dared
to end a line with the word _vestí_. Boscan, who, however, is not
accepted by the Spaniards as of unimpeachable authority, had been so
left to himself as to end on _nació_, while Diego de Mendoza had done
the evil thing “a thousand times.” According to the stop-watch of the
new school this was wrong, and all three were duly pilloried for their
offences in the _Egemplar Poético_--_i.e._, _Ars Poetica_--of Juan de
la Cueva.[8]
Yet Juan de la Cueba or Cueva (the _b_ and _v_, being very similar in
Spanish pronunciation, were constantly written for one another before
the spelling was fixed) was a man not unworthy of attention. His life
is covered by the obscurity common to the men of letters of the time,
and on the whole more dense in Spain than elsewhere. But we know that
he lived in Seville during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
His _Egemplar Poético_, though not considered as above reproach in form
by Spanish critics, undoubtedly contains the orthodox poetic creed of
the school, and is therefore of authority. Nothing is more striking
or, when the future of poetry in the two countries is considered, more
significant, than the contrast between the three verse epistles of Don
Juan de la Cueva, and the _Apologie for Poetrie_ of Sir Philip Sidney.
The _Egemplar_ is in tercets, and the _Apologie_ in fresh youthful
prose; but the work of the Englishman is all on fire with the very soul
of poetic feeling, while the work of the Spaniard is a cold didactic
treatise of the most mechanical kind. Sir Philip committed himself
to the heresy that the essential of poetry is in the matter, the
passion, and the intention, while the verse is an accident. Don Juan is
spotlessly correct on the one point on which Sir Philip is heterodox.
On the many on which our countryman goes to the root of the matter, the
Sevillian is worse than wrong. He drops no single word to show that he
thinks them worthy of consideration. A few general platitudes are to be
found inculcating the wisdom of consulting your genius, the excellence
of consistency and decency, the duty of despising the _profanum
vulgus_, the folly of applying the metres and language proper to kings
and great persons to the doings of common people. Then having cleared
the way, he proceeds to the things really of necessity for a poet,--as
that no _cancion_ should contain more than fifteen stanzas; that a
_sestina_ is rhymed _a b c_, _c b a_, and that its lines ought to end
in nouns and never in verbs; that three adjectives are more than enough
for any substantive; that an _agudo_ at the end of a hendecasyllable
is the abomination of desolation; that the letter _l_ is useful for
sweetness; that _r_ comes in with good effect “when violent Eurus
opposes his rush with horrid fury to powerful Boreas”; and that _s_
suits with soft sleep and savoury repose (“al blando sueño y al sabroso
sosiego”), for he did not scorn alliteration’s artful aid.
It would be trivial to insist on the _Egemplar Poético_ if the author
had been an insignificant man, or if the bulk of Spanish classic poetry
showed that he spoke only for himself. But Juan de la Cueva has an
honourable place in the history of Spanish dramatic literature among
the forerunners of Lope de Vega. When he comes to write upon the comedy
he rises at once above the level of mechanism and commonplace. He
ceases to be a mere schoolboy to the Italians, and roundly vindicates
the right of his countrymen to reject the Senecan model, to be alive,
Spanish, and original on the stage, in defiance of all the rules and
all the doctors. The theatre was to imitate nature, and to please.
Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute
critic. That is the sum and substance of Juan de la Cueva’s teaching,
and therein lies the explanation of the impassable gulf which separates
the Spanish drama--a very genuine thing of its kind--from Spanish
classic poetry--a school exercise, redeemed from time to time by a note
of patriotism or of piety.
[SN: _Artificiality of the work of the school._]
When poetry is approached in this spirit its matter is likely to be as
merely imitative as its form. Spanish classic poetry did not escape
this fate, and there is only too much truth in the taunt of “sterile
abundance” which has been thrown at it. We meet continually with the
exasperating, nameless, characterless shadow of a lady whose “threads
of gold” (which the rude vulgar call her hair) cruel hard tyrant Love
has used to enchain the lamenting poet, whose sorrows just fill the
correct number of stanzas. The pastoral raged. The same Tirsis and
the same Chloe repeat many hundreds of times identical things in a
landscape which has flowers but no flower, trees but no tree, and is
withal most manifestly sham in arid, rocky Spain. Spanish critics
have complained that their classic poets so seldom touched on the
life of their time,--but that is a small matter. They have--piety and
patriotism apart--little human reality of any kind. Love according
to an Italian literary pattern, varied by platonism learnt from the
Florentines, is the staple subject. Don Marcelino Menendez, the most
learned of contemporary Spanish critics, has said, when controverting
Ticknor’s theory that the Inquisition was accountable for the
prevalence of Góngorism, that the real explanation of that disaster
lies elsewhere. Europe, he says, was invaded in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries by a sham middle age and a sham antiquity, which
could end in nothing but verbal follies. One does not recognise the
truth of this judgment in the case of France and England, but it has
force as applied to Spain.
A general estimate of a school must always be difficult to justify
except by a profusion of quotation, which is impossible here. We
can do no more than leave it to be accepted or rejected by those
who can control it by a knowledge of the original, and proceed to
give such a sketch of the history of Spanish classic poetry as our
limits allow.[9] It falls naturally under two heads--the Lyric and
the Epic--and in both the presence of the Italian model is constant.
The leading form in lyric poetry is the _cancion_ in hendecasyllables
with _quebrados_--that is, broken lines of seven syllables. But the
_Epístola_ in tercets, imitated from the _capitolo_ of the Italians, is
very common. The song proper is wholly absent. There is no “Come unto
these yellow sands,” no voice of Ariel in Spanish poetry. The Spaniard
does not sing; he chants.
[SN: _Boscan._]
Of the two chiefs of the school, Boscan ranks mainly by virtue of the
example he set. He was somewhat harshly condemned by his follower,
Herrera, for hanging jewels robbed from the classics and Italians
on his own robe of frieze. The charge of plagiarism is not easily
rebutted, for Boscan certainly took his goods where he found them in
Virgil or Horace. As for the quality of his robe, it is undoubtedly
of the nature of frieze. What strikes the reader most in Boscan is
a certain worldly good sense, more like our own Queen Anne men than
the poetry of a sixteenth-century school at its beginning. His most
quoted piece, an _Epístola_ addressed to Diego de Mendoza, is eminently
rational prose disguised in verse, avowing a most heterodox affection
for his wife (his whole tone to women is thoroughly modern), and a
quite unpoetic liking for a good supper by a blazing fire of logs at
the end of a day in the open air. But we note also the maturity of the
language, in spite of a certain awkwardness due to the writer’s want
of skill. [SN: _Garcilaso._] This same premature and fatal maturity is
even more conspicuous in Garcilaso, who was more master of his pen.
In the small body of his verse, and the one fragment which remains
of his prose--a letter to his friend’s wife praising her good taste
for enjoying the _Courtier_ of Castiglione--there is hardly a word
or phrase which has become antiquated. This classic poetry was born
with an old head on young shoulders, and had no youth. His finished
form earned and kept for Garcilaso the rank of Prince of Castilian
poets. In the latter part of the century he was twice edited--once at
Salamanca in 1577 by the Humanist, Francisco Sanchez, called, from the
name of his native town, Las Brozas, el Brocense, and best known as
the author of the _Minerva_; and then at Seville by Hernan de Herrera.
The edition of Herrera has a commentary on a large scale, and is of
considerable value for the history of Spanish poetry; but it set an
example which was followed to an excess of tiresome pedantry by the
editors of Góngora and Camoens. It led to a famous and not unamusing
literary quarrel. The Castilian critics, who were banded in support
of their own man, Sanchez, fell on Herrera with some justice for his
inappropriate display of scholastic pedantry, and most unjustly for
ignorance of Castilian. No Castilian will ever readily allow that an
Andalusian (which Herrera was) speaks the language quite correctly. Of
the matter of Garcilaso’s verse it may be said that it is pastoral, or
gentlemanlike, and melancholy. The Spaniard finds, no doubt, a charm in
the mere language, which of itself is enough; but even to him there may
be suspected to be some tedium in this obvious determination to get a
stool to be melancholy on. It is not the melancholy of Jorge Manrique,
who is saddened by those eternal sorrows, death of kin and friends and
the burden of life, but the melancholy of a gentleman who is imitating
a model to pass the time in winter quarters. But the so-called _Lira_
or ode, in lines of seven syllables mixed with hendecasyllabics,
addressed “To the flower of Gnidus” is elegant. It is in stanzas of
five lines, rhyming the first with the third, the second, fourth, and
fifth together, and enforces the well-known lesson, “Gather ye rosebuds
while ye may,” for the instruction of a young lady at Naples who had
not favoured the suit of one of the poet’s friends.
[SN: _Their immediate followers._]
Only a very full history of Spanish literature could afford to dwell
on Ferdinand de Acuña (Ferdinand, Fernando, Fernan, and Hernan are all
forms of the same name, employed according to taste or local usage),
who was a Portuguese noble in the service of Charles V., a soldier of
distinction, a writer of Castilian verse, and a copious translator
from the classics; or Gutierre de Cetina, a soldier best known by a
graceful madrigal;[10] or many others whom it would be a barren display
to name; but Diego Hurtado de Mendoza is too strong a man to be passed
in a crowd. He is chiefly famous as a man of action--as a soldier
who governed Siena for Charles V., and a diplomatist who represented
the emperor in a very military fashion at the Council of Trent. In
literature he ranks chiefly as the undoubted author of a history of
the revolt of the Moriscoes, and as the possible, though doubtful,
author of the _Lazarillo de Tormes_. Diego de Mendoza (1503-1575) was
a younger son of the Count of Tendilla, head of one of the many titled
branches of his famous house--the Douglases of Spain. He was the direct
descendant of the Marquess of Santillana, and through him of that
Lord of Butrago who sacrificed his life for the king at the battle of
Aljubarrota.[11] His poetry was the relaxation of a great noble who
broke through the rules in a fashion well calculated to horrify such
critics as Juan de la Cueva. But Don Diego had fire enough in him to
burn up a wilderness of correct poets of that order. Sometimes it
flamed out with little regard to decency. But in happier moments--as,
for instance, in the ode to Cardinal Espinosa--he could strike that
note of a haughty, or even arrogant patriotism, which is the finest in
Spanish poetry. Even in his case we have examples of the same premature
maturity noted in Boscan. One of his epistles addressed to this very
writer begins by the Horatian “Nil admirari”--an excellent maxim,
perhaps, but chilling in the first youth of a poetry. Mendoza wrote
not only in the Tuscan, but the native metres, couplets, and _glosas_.
The _glosa_ is a favourite exercise of verse-making ingenuity with the
Spaniard. It consists in taking any stanza of whatever number of lines,
and building on it a poem of the same number of stanzas as there are
lines. Each must end in one of the lines of the foundation stanza taken
in their order. They must be brought in without violence, and the whole
must be a variation on the theme of the stanza quoted. Diego de Mendoza
outlived Charles V., and spent his last years in exile at Granada,
incurred by a too great promptitude in resenting impertinence within
the precincts of the Court.
[SN: _The two schools of Salamanca and Seville._]
It has been the custom to divide the poets of Spain into the Castilian
and the Andalusian, or those of Salamanca and those of Seville.
The division is somewhat arbitrary, and corresponds to very little
distinction in tone, method, or language among the writers, or at least
so it seems to a foreigner who compares Luis de Leon with Hernan de
Herrera, though the first is counted as the chief of the school of
Salamanca, and the second as the chief of the school of Seville. Both
wrote the same fine Castilian, both were good scholars, and there was
the same intense religious feeling, the same high patriotism, in both.
Luis Ponce de Leon (1528-1591), as if to show how artificial this
distinction is, was born at Granada, which is one of the sub-kingdoms
of Andalusia.[12] He was an Augustine friar, and occupied two important
chairs in succession at Salamanca. Between 1572 and 1576 he was
imprisoned by the Inquisition. The charge made against him was that
he had translated the _Song of Solomon_, which, at a time when the
Reformers were making an active use of the Bible in the vernacular
tongues against the Church, was a serious offence. The leader of the
attack on him was the Dominican Melchior Cano, of whose _De Locis
Theologicis_ Dr Johnson wrote, “Nec admiror, nec multum laudo.” It
is a well-known story of Luis de Leon that when the verdict of the
Holy Office was given in his favour, and he was allowed to resume his
lectures, he began where he had left off, and with the words, “As we
were saying yesterday, gentlemen.” His poetry may be divided into
that part which is inspired by Horace, and that which is inspired by
the Bible. It is perhaps only natural that he should appear to more
advantage when he is paraphrasing the description of a perfect wife
from the _Proverbs of Solomon_ than when he is endeavouring to adapt
the _lira_ of Garcilaso to some theme obviously taken because it bore
a certain resemblance to the subject of one of the odes of Horace.
These imitations of the classic models were not confined to the graver
and more reflective parts of his originals. Luis de Leon, though a
churchman of undoubted piety, wrote amatory poems. The _coplas_ in the
old Spanish metres called _A una Desdeñosa_--to a scornful lady--are
on exactly the same subject as the already named _Flor de Gnido_ of
Garcilaso. Whether he was following the classics and learned poets of
his own country, or paraphrasing the Psalms, Luis de Leon was always a
master of the very purest Castilian; while his reflective poems--the
_Noche Serena_, for instance, or the ode which imitates the _Beatus
Ille_ of Horace--are something more than mere exercises of ingenuity.
It was his reputation as a stylist which secured the publication of his
poems forty years after his death. Luis de Leon himself seems to have
considered them only as amusements for his leisure. But in 1631 Quevedo
brought out the first edition, in order to counteract the growing taste
for Góngorism.
The poet who has the honour to rank as a stylist among the Spaniards,
next to, if not on an equality with Garcilaso, is Hernan de Herrera of
Seville (1534-1597), a churchman of whose life almost nothing is known
with certainty.[13] As usual, he published little during his life, and
much of his manuscript was lost by an accident after his death. The
remainder was published by his friend the painter Pacheco in 1619.
Spaniards, if asked to name the pieces of verse in their language which
display the greatest measure of force and dignity, would certainly
quote the famous odes on the battles of Lepanto and Alcázar el-Quebir,
together with the sonnet in honour of Don John of Austria. The vigour
of these verses is unquestionable, and if it cannot be claimed for them
that they display any great originality of form, they are animated by a
fine spirit of patriotism. Herrera, too, had a sense of the merits of
compression, which is not common with his countrymen. He worked at the
language in an artistic spirit.
Once more, as in the case of the immediate followers of Garcilaso, we
must pass over the names of all but the chiefs very lightly.[14] The
Aragonese brothers Lupercio and Bartolomé de Argensola, who may be
classed among the poets of Castile; Francisco de Figueroa, who spent
nearly all his life in Italy; Rioja, the poet of flowers, and the
author of a moral poem on the Ruins of Italica (a Roman colony near
Seville), inspired by Joachim du Bellay; Arguijo, and many others, must
be passed over in silence. It is proper to note, however, that whatever
anybody else was doing at this time, Lope de Vega did in as great
quantities as men who did nothing else. But there will be occasion to
speak of Lope elsewhere. For the present he must make room for the
writer whom some have claimed as the most genuine lyric poet of Spain,
and who bears the discredit of having flooded the literature of his
country with a ruinous affectation.
[SN: _Góngora and Góngorism._]
Don Luis de Argote y Góngora, who habitually used the second of these
names, which was his mother’s, was a Cordovese, born in 1561.[15] He
was educated at Salamanca, followed the Court for some years, and was
attached to the Duke of Lerma. He took orders, and received a benefice
when advanced in life, and died in his native city in 1627. His evil
fame, based on the invention of the particular form of bad literature
called after him Góngorism, is greater than his good, which yet has
some foundation. His _romances_ on stories of captives among Barbary
pirates, and of wars on the frontiers, are among the best of their
kind. Among his earlier poems on the Tuscan models there are some
which possess the lyric cry with a degree of intensity very rare
among the Spaniards. The third _cancion_, for instance, contains a
singularly passionate and admirably worded variation, on the theme of
Shakespeare’s forty-fourth sonnet, “If the dull substance of my flesh
were thought.” But it was not for this, the work of his earlier years,
that the reputation of Góngora has been spread over the world, but
because he, to steal an image from Carlyle, swings in chains on the
side of Parnassus, as the inventor of “El Culteranismo” or “Góngorism.”
At some period in his life he began to write in this style. Hostile
critics say he did so because he could not attract sufficient attention
by writing with sanity. Admirers have asserted that he had a literary
ambition to improve the poetic language of Spain, to make it, in fact,
more _culto_--more cultivated. The question what exactly Góngorism
was, will be best answered by an example. Here, for instance, is a
passage from the _Pyramus and Thisbe_, a short poem, published in 1636
by his admirer Cristobal de Salazar Mardones, with a wordy commentary
of incredible pomposity, and futility. The English translation is put
below the Spanish on the Hamiltonian system, and the reader is begged
to observe that the inversions and transpositions are only a little
more violent in English than in Spanish:--
Piramo fueron y Tisbe,
_Pyramus they were and Tisbe,_
Los que en verso hizo culto
_Those who in verse made[16] polished_
El Licenciado Nason
_The Licentiate Naso_
Bien romo ó bien narigudo
_Maybe snub, maybe beak_
Dejar el dulce candor
_To leave the sweet white_
Lastimosamente obscuro
_Lamentably dark_
Al que, túmulo de seda,
_Of that which, tomb of silk,_
Fue de los dos casquilucios
_Was of the two feather-heads_
Moral que los hospedó
_Mulberry which gave them shelter_
Y fue condenando al punto
_And was condemned at once_
Si del Tigris no en raizes
_If by the Tigris not in root_
De los amantes en frutos.
_By the lovers in fruit._
Don Cristobal de Salazar Mardones explains in prose, and with copious
references to Ovid, _Meta._, lib. iv., that what this means is that
the mulberry-tree was not torn up by the roots as a punishment by the
Tigris, but was coloured by the blood of the lovers. The reader will
see at once that this is puerile nonsense, and that it is a mere trick.
It is also a very old trick. When Thiodolf of Hvin, whose verse riddles
adorn the _Heimskringla_, wrote of a certain king--
“Now hath befallen
In Frodi’s house
The word of fate
To fall on Fiolnir;
That the windless wave
Of the wild bull’s spears
That lord should do
To death by drowning,”--
he was writing in “góngorina especie”--that is, in what was to be the
manner of Góngora. The whole secret lay, as Lope de Vega, indeed,
pointed out, in never calling anything by its right name, and in
transposing words violently. Given a great deal of bad taste, and
a puerile mania for making people stare, and the thing is easily
accounted for. In such conditions it may be thought clever to call mead
which men drink out of horns “the windless wave of the wild bull’s
spear,” or to describe a mulberry-tree as a tumulus of silk, though
the mistake was incomparably more excusable in Thiodolf of Hvin than
in Góngora, and the Norseman seems on the whole to have been the least
silly of the two. The comparison which has been made between Góngorism
and our own metaphysical school is too favourable to the Spaniards, in
whom there was absolutely nothing but juggling with words.
This folly spread as rapidly as the imitation of Italian models had
done. It was in vain that Lope argued against it for common-sense. He
was himself conquered. Quevedo,[17] who attacked it, was driven to
worse straits, for he endeavoured to resist it by means of another
affectation, the _conceptista_, or conceited style, which is more like
our “metaphysical” manner, but never had the popularity of Góngorism.
The founder of this school of affectation was Alonso de Ledesma of
Segovia (1552-1623). The poems which Quevedo published under the name
of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre were meant to reinforce Luis de
Leon, and were free from either kind of fault; but the learned poetry
of Spain had not vitality enough to throw off the disease. Góngorism
became the literary taste of the day, and was soon traceable everywhere.
[SN: _The Epics._]
The great mass of epics, or so-called epics,[18] which form the
non-lyric side of the learned poetry of Spain, belong with rare
exceptions, if not with only one exception, to the domains of
bibliography and curiosity. I have to confess that I do not speak with
any personal knowledge of the _Carolea_ of Hierónimo Sempere, published
in 1560, or many others, and with only a slight acquaintance with the
_Carlo Famoso_ of Don Luis de Zapata. This second poem, published in
1565, is in 50 cantos, and contains 40,000 verses. The subject is
the history of the Emperor Charles V., and it may stand here as a
specimen of the whole class to which it belongs. The _Carlo Famoso_ is
essentially prose, disguised in such _ottava rima_ stanzas as any one
who had once acquired the trick could probably write as easily as prose
pure and simple. If Don Luis de Zapata, who had served the emperor, had
been content to tell us of what he saw in prose, he would probably have
left a readable, and perhaps a valuable, book. But, unfortunately, he
felt called upon to build the lofty rhyme, in imitation of Ariosto, and
this brought with it the necessity for supernatural machinery, which
the Don Luis de Zapatas of all countries are very ill qualified to
handle. The ease with which verses of a kind are written in Spanish,
the influence of a fashionable model, and the prestige attaching to
the writing of verse, led to the production of innumerable volumes on
historical subjects of what would fain have been poetry if it could.
Some of this mass of writing is not without merit, the Elegies of
Famous Men of the Indies--_Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias_--of
Juan de Castellanos[19] is readable enough, and has some historical
value. Juan de Castellanos, whose dates of birth and death are unknown,
was an old soldier turned priest, who in common with many others could
in a fashion write _ottava rima_ stanza. He seems to have thought that
“Elegy” meant much the same thing as “Eulogy,” and his _Elegias_ are,
in fact, a history of the conquest of America by the Spaniards, carried
down to 1588. It is only a fragment, but even so, it fills a crown
octavo volume of 563 pages in double columns. Of course there are by
the side of work of this kind imitations of the Italian epic serious
or humorous, which have no pretensions to a historical character.
Here it was only to be expected that Lope de Vega would be among the
most fluent and the most conspicuous, for it may be repeated that he
tried his hand at whatever others were doing. The epics in the Italian
form being popular, he wrote several; and as he had an unparallelled
command of facile verse which always stopped short of becoming bad,
he is never unreadable, though, as he was also only a very superior
_improvisatore_, his poems never quite compel reading. The subject of
the _Dragontea_--the last cruise and death of Sir Francis Drake in
1594--is so much more attractive to an Englishman than the _Angelicas_
and _Jerusalem Conquistadas_, taken from Ariosto and Tasso, that one
is perhaps prejudiced in its favour. And yet it seems to me to have
a certain vitality not present in the rest, and to be by no means
inferior to them in other respects.[20]
[SN: _The_ Araucana.]
The partiality of his countrymen and the too good-natured acquiescence
of foreigners have given the name of epic to the _Araucana_ of Alonso
de Ercilla.[21] The author was a very typical Spaniard of his century.
He was born in 1533, and came to England as page to Philip of Spain
at the time of his marriage with Mary Tudor. It was from England that
he sailed to Chili for the purpose of helping in the suppression of
the revolt of the Araucans, which, became the subject of his poem.
While on service he was condemned to death for drawing his sword on a
brother officer. The sentence was remitted, but Ercilla resented it so
bitterly that he entirely omitted the name of his general, the Marquis
of Cañete, in his poem. He returned to Spain in 1565, and passed the
remainder of his life, until his end in 1595, partly in endeavouring to
secure a reward from the king for his services, and partly in compiling
his great _Araucana_. It appeared in three parts in 1569, 1575, and
1590. The story told by himself, that he wrote it on pieces of leather
and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies, therefore, only to
the first part. It is only by a figure of speech that the _Araucana_
can be described as an epic. Ercilla said that he found courage to
print it because it was a true history of wars he had seen for himself.
The first part is almost wholly occupied with the skirmishes of the
Araucan war. In the later parts he was tempted to provide a proper
epic machinery, but the change is only a proof of the tyranny of a
fashion. Ercilla was a good handicraftsman of _ottava rima_ stanzas, he
wrote very fine Castilian, and his poem has unquestionable vitality.
Yet it is, after all, hybrid. At its best it is a superior version
of the _Varones Ilustres_ of Castellanos, at its weakest an echo of
the Italians. The literature of the world would have been richer, not
poorer, if Ercilla had written memoirs on the model of his French
contemporary Monluc.
The Italian influence which produced the learned poetry of Spain had
its effect on Portugal also. The Portuguese remember Francisco de Sa de
Miranda (1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their language for
literary purposes, and the work was continued by Antonio Ferreira and
Pedro de Andrade Caminha, his younger contemporaries and followers. My
own knowledge of these writers is small, but as far as it goes it leads
me to believe that Southey’s sound literary judgment had as usual led
him right when he said that, “They rendered essential service to the
language of their country, and upon that their claims to remembrance
must rest.”[22] They are interesting in fact as examples of a general
literary movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all
Western Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have
naturally not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having
no modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the
Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner
and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union of Spain
and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that Portuguese
would have shared the fate of Catalan. It would not have ceased to be
spoken, but it would no longer have been the language of government and
literature. Even as it was, Castilian had in Portugal something of the
pre-eminence which mediæval French had had among neighbouring peoples.
Portuguese who wrote their own tongue also wrote Castilian--even
Camoens is in the list of those who used both languages. But the unity
of the Peninsula was destined never to be completed, and Portuguese has
escaped falling into the position of a dialect. Before the close of the
sixteenth century it was illustrated by a poem which has at any rate “a
world-wide reputation.”
[SN: _The_ Lusiads.]
It becomes the critic and historian of literature to approach works
of great fame, which he cannot himself regard with a high degree of
admiration, in a spirit of diffidence, or even of humility. I have
to confess my own inability to feel the admiration other, and no
doubt better, judges have felt for the _Lusiads_.[23] The pathetic
circumstances of the life of the author, Luiz da Camoens (1524?-1580),
are well known, and have perhaps served to prejudice the reader in
favour of the poem. He was a Portuguese gentleman who served in the
East Indies, who was ruined by shipwreck, and who ended his life in
extreme misery in Lisbon. The foundation of the _Lusiads_ is supplied
by the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope;
but Camoens has worked in a great deal from Portuguese history, and
the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator.
The matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under
correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion which
has been claimed for the _Lusiads_ is not great in a writer who had
Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a coherent
narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied--and no one
need wish to deny--that Camoens wrote his own language with great
purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more than
bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He has a real
tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his patriotism
is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the best are
fitter for the lyric than the scope of the epic, the _Lusiads_ suffer
from the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both in language
and thought. The supernatural machinery is an example of childish
imitation. Camoens has introduced the heathen mythology together with
the sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese poet had many
precedents for the combination, but he is not strong enough to make us
endure its essential absurdity. The _Lusiads_ has, in fact, the defect
of all the learned poetry of the Peninsula--that it is very much of a
school exercise. He saw his heathen gods and goddesses in Virgil, and
transferred them bodily to his own Christian poem, not because they had
any fit place there, but because they were ordered to be provided in
the “receipt for making an epic poem.”[24]
The reader who compares the _Lusiads_, not with the _Faërie Queen_,
which belongs to a very different mansion in the house of literature,
but with the masterpieces of the class to which it really belongs,
the purely literary epic, done by an accomplished writer according
to rule, is, it may be, liable to be rendered impatient by the loud
calls made on him for extreme admiration. He finds stanza following
stanza of smooth, but somewhat nerveless, _ottava rima_, full of matter
which might equally well be expressed in prose, and would not then
appear to differ essentially from much of Hakluyt’s voyages. Now and
then he will find incidents--the vision of the Spirit of the Cape, for
example, and the episode of the island of Love--where the intention
to be poetical is visible enough, but which do not come of necessity,
and have no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is, and that is
what is most truly poetical and genuine in Camoens. And of that again
there are better and more spontaneous examples in his sonnets. On the
whole, one has to come to the conclusion that he was a real poet,
though of no wide scope, who could express a certain tenderness and
melancholy in forms he had learnt from the Italians, but who owes his
great name mainly to the fact that he is the only man his country can
quote as worthy to rank with the great poets of the world. Therefore
he has a whole nation to sing his praise, and nobody is concerned to
contradict.[25]
FOOTNOTES:
[5] I have used the first edition of Boscan, Barcelona, 1543, but have
seen mention of a modern reprint by William J. Knapp, Madrid, 1875.
[6] _Tesoro del Parnaso Español_ of Quintana, 41-51. _Biblioteca de
Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxii.
[7] The _Arte Poética Española_, which goes under the name of Juan Diaz
Rengifo, a schoolmaster of Ávila, is believed to have been written by
his brother Alfonso, a Jesuit. With the addition of a dictionary of
rhymes, it became the handbook of Spanish poetasters, a numerous tribe.
It appeared at Salamanca in 1592.
[8] The _Egemplar Poético_ is the first piece quoted in vol. viii. of
the _Parnaso Español_ of Sedaño, 1774.
[9] This seems the most convenient place to note that fairly
ample specimens of Spanish literature will be found in the very
useful collection known as the _Biblioteca de Aribau_, or _de
Ribadeneyra_--seventy-one somewhat ponderous volumes printed with
middling skill on poor paper. The texts are the best where few are
really good, and the introductions of value. It is well indexed. I
prefer to make my references to this rather than to earlier editions
or better editions published by societies, and therefore not easily
accessible in this country.
[10] A very interesting study of this phase of Spanish poetry, and some
account of its writers, will be found in the introduction written by M.
Alfred Morel-Fatio to his reprint of a _Cancionero General_ of 1535, in
his _L’Espagne au XVI^{me}. et au XVII^{me}. Siècle_. Heilbronn, 1878.
[11] _Parnaso Español_ of Sedaño, vol. vii.; and _Ribadeneyra_, vol.
xxxii.; _Poetas Liricos de los Siglos_, xvi., xvii.
[12] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxvii., contains the work of
Luis de Leon, both prose and verse, together with a selection from the
papers of his trial before the Inquisition.
[13] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxii.
[14] The reference is again to _Ribadeneyra_, vols. xxxii., xlii.
[15] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxii.
[16] “Made” is the past tense of the verb. The order is “made to
leave,” which is shown by the inflection in Spanish.
[17] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. xxiii., xlviii., lxix. There is
a very pretty edition of Quevedo in eleven octavo volumes, by Sancha,
Madrid, 1791, which is occasionally met with.
[18] Vols. xvii. and xix. of the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_ contain
not only all, but more than all, that is entitled to survive of this
portion of Spanish literature.
[19] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. iv.
[20] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra._ _Obras no dramaticas de Lope de
Vega_; also, _Obras Sueltas_. Madrid, 1776-1779.
[21] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xvii.
[22] Article on Portuguese Literature in the _Quarterly_ for May 1809.
[23] The general reader cannot do better than make his acquaintance
with the _Lusiads_ in Mr Aubertin’s translation, which gives the
Portuguese text opposite the English version.
[24] Whether because the subject is maritime, or in consequence of
our long trading and fighting alliance with Portugal, the _Lusiads_
has been translated into English with an almost curious persistence.
Sir Richard Fanshawe made a very quaint version in the middle of the
seventeenth century. The flowing, and extremely free, translation of
Mickle proved lucrative to its author as late as 1776. In our time Mr
Aubertin has translated it closely, and Sir Richard Burton has given a
version both of the _Lusiads_ and of the minor poems which is admirably
fitted to introduce the English reader--to the translator.
[25] _Obras de Camoens._ Lisbon, 1782-1783.
CHAPTER III. THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA--THE FIRST BEGINNINGS
OF THE RELIGIOUS PLAYS--THE STARTING-POINT OF THE SECULAR
PLAY--BARTOLOMÉ DE TORRES NAHARRO--LOPE DE RUEDA--LOPE DE
VEGA’S LIFE--HIS INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA--THE CONDITIONS OF THE
WORK--CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE--CALDERON--CALDERON’S
SCHOOL.
[SN: _The national character of the Spanish drama._]
The dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own, purely national.
The classic stage had no influence on it whatever; the contemporary
theatre of Italy very little, and only for a brief period in the
earlier years. There were in Spain translators both of the Greek and
Latin dramatic literature, while her scholars were no less ready than
others to impress on the world the duty of following the famous rules
of Aristotle. But neither the beauty of the classic models, nor the
lessons of scholars, nor even the authority of Aristotle--though it
was certainly not less regarded in the last country which clung to
the scholastic philosophy than elsewhere--had any effect. It would
be too much to say that they were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic
writers were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them with
profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known passage of _Don Quixote_,
reproaches his countrymen for their neglect of the three unities; and
Lope de Vega, who more than any other man helped to fix the Spanish
comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and place, and its
habitual contempt for the rules that the comic and tragic should
never be mingled in one piece, or that great personages should never
be brought on except with a due regard to their dignity, avowed that
he saw what was right, and confessed its excellence. He even boasted
that he had written no less than six orthodox plays. But Cervantes,
in the little he wrote for the stage, never made his practice even
approach his precept, while nobody has ever been able to find of which
of his plays Lope was speaking when he said that he had observed the
unities. It has even been supposed that when he made the boast, he was
laughing at the gentlemen to whom he addressed his _Arte Nuevo de Hacer
Comedias_ (New Art of Writing Comedies). Not a little ingenuity has
been wasted in attempts to discover what both meant. The good sense
of Don Marcelino Menendez[26] has found by far the most acceptable
explanation of the mystery, and it is this,--that Cervantes, Lope,
and their contemporaries had a quite sincere theoretical admiration
for the precepts of Aristotle, or what were taken to be such by the
commentators, but that in practice they obeyed their own impulses,
and the popular will, though not without a certain shamefaced
consciousness that it was rather wicked in them. Spanish dramatists, in
fact, treated the orthodox literary doctrine very much as the ancient
Cortes of Castile were wont to treat the unconstitutional orders of
kings,--they voted that these injunctions were to be obeyed and not
executed--“obedicidas y no cumplidas,” thereby reconciling independence
with a respectful attitude towards authority. Some were bold enough to
say from the first that the end of comedy was to imitate life, and that
their imitation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally became as
fully established in theory as it always had been in practice. Nothing
is more striking than the contrast between the slavishness of Spanish
learned poetry and the vigorous independence of the native stage.
[SN: _The first beginnings of the religious plays._]
There was little in the mediæval literature of Spain to give promise
of its drama of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries.
Spaniards had mysteries, and they dramatised the lessons of the Church
as other nations did; but they had less of this than most of their
neighbours, and very much less than the French. In the earlier years
of the sixteenth century there was a perceptible French influence at
work in Spain.[27] The _San Martinho_ of Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who
wrote both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is a moral play like
many in mediæval French literature. It is on the well-known story of
Saint Martin and the beggar, is written in flowing verse, and breaks
off abruptly with a note that the performers must end with psalms,
for he had been asked to write very late, and had no time to finish.
The _Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja_, which, from a reference to
the spread of the Lutheran heresy, seems to belong to the years about
1520, betrays a French model by its very title. Farce had not the
meaning it acquired later. The personages are Labour, Peralforja, his
son, Teresa Jugon, Peralforja’s sweetheart, the Church, and Holy Writ.
The subjects are the foolish leniency of Labour to his son, and its
deplorable effects (a favourite theme with French writers of _farses_
and moralities), the sorrows of the Church, who is consoled by Holy
Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his weakness, and induce Peralforja
to amend his ways. There is nothing here particularly Spanish--nothing
which might not be direct translation from the French. The religious
play was destined to have a history of its own in Spain; but its
earlier stage is marked by little national character. Even the _Oveja
Perdida_ (the Lost Sheep), written, or at least revised and recast, by
Juan de Timoneda about 1570, which long remained a stock piece with the
strolling players, is a morality on the universal mediæval model. The
Lost Sheep is of course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite,
and rescued by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other characters are Saint
Peter, the Archangel Michael, and the Guardian Angel. Except that it
has an elaborate introduction, divided between an _Introit_ to Ribera,
the Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, before whom it was
played, and an _Introit_ to the people, it does not differ from the
_San Martinho_ or the _Farsa Sacramental de Peralforja_.
[SN: _The starting-point of the secular play._]
It has been customary to treat the _Celestina_ as the foundation,
or at least an important part of the foundations, of the Spanish
secular drama. This curious story in dialogue is indeed called a
“tragi-comedy,” and it most unquestionably proves that its author,
or authors, possessed the command of a prose style admirably adapted
for the purposes of comedy. But the Spanish is a poetic, not a prose
drama. The qualities which redeem the somewhat commonplace love-story
of Calisto and Melibœa, and the tiresome pedantry of much of the
_Celestina_, its realism, and its vivacious representation of low life
and character, are seldom found on the Spanish stage. We shall do
better to look for the starting-point of the comedy of Lope de Vega
in the _Eclogas_ of Juan del Encina, who has been already mentioned
as one of the last lights of the troubadour school.[28] The model
here is obviously the little religious play of the stamp of Vicente’s
_San Martinho_, modified by imitation of the classic Eclogue. The
personages, generally shepherds, are few, the action of the simplest,
and the verse somewhat infantile, though not without charm. Yet
the mere fact that we have in them examples of an attempt to make
characters and subjects, other than religious, matter of dramatic
representation, shows that they were an innovation and a beginning.
Juan del Encina, who was attached in some capacity to the Duke of Alva
of his time, wrote these Eclogues to be repeated for the amusement
of his patrons by their servants. It does not appear that they were
played in the market-place, or were very popular. During the first
half of the sixteenth century the Church endeavoured to repress the
secular play. The struggle was useless, for the bent of the nation was
too strong to be resisted. It conquered the Church, which, before the
end of the century, found itself unable to prevent the performance of
very mundane dramas within the walls of religious houses. Yet for a
time the Inquisition was able to repress the growth of a non-religious
drama at home. The working of the national passion for the stage, and
for something other than pious _farsas_, is shown in the _Josefina_[29]
of Micael de Carvajal. This long-forgotten work, by an author of whom
nearly nothing is really known, was performed apparently for, and
by, ecclesiastics at Valencia about 1520. It is on the subject of
Joseph and his Brethren, is a religious play, but has divisions, and a
machinery obviously adapted from the Latin, if not the Greek model.
There are four acts, a herald who delivers a prologue to the first,
second, and third, a chorus of maidens at the end of each. The dialogue
has life, and there is a not unsuccessful attempt at characterisation
in the parts of the brothers and of Potiphar’s wife. At the close comes
the _villancico_, a simple form of song hovering towards being a hymn,
which was obligatory at the close of the religious play. The _Josefina_
had no progeny, and is to-day mainly interesting as an indication of
the struggle of the national genius to find its true path. We cannot
say even that of the few direct imitations of the classic form produced
by the Spaniards. Such works as the _Nise Lastimosa_--the Pitiable
Agnes--a strictly Senecan play on the story of Ines de Castro, first
written in Portuguese by Ferreira, and then adapted into Castilian
by Gerónimo Bermudez, a learned churchman, and printed in 1577, are
simply literary exercises. They show that the influences which inspired
Jodelle, and Garnier in France, were not unfelt in Spain; but there, as
in England, the national genius would have none of them. In Bermudez
himself the imitation of Seneca was forced. The _Nise Lastimosa_ has a
continuation called the _Nise Laureada_. The first, which ends with the
murder of Agnes, is correct; but in the second, which has for subject
the vengeance of the king, he throws aside the uncongenial apparatus
of messenger and chorus, and plunges into horrors, to which the story
certainly lent itself, with the zest of his contemporary Cristobal de
Virues, or our own Kyd.
[SN: _Bartolomé de Torres Naharro._]
The true successors of Juan del Encina were to be found during the
reign of Charles V. in the Spanish colony at Rome. The Spanish proverb
has it that the Devil stands behind the cross--“tras la cruz está el
diablo”--and the Spaniards who lived under the shadow of the papal
Court enjoyed a licence which they would have missed under the eye of
the Inquisition. One of them, Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, who lived
and wrote in the early years of the century, is sometimes counted the
father of the Spanish stage. He was the author of a number of comedies,
published in Seville in 1520 under the title of _Propaladia_, which
deal with the favourite subjects of comedy, love intrigues, and the
tricks of lovers, _rufianes_--_i.e._, bullies--soldiers in and out of
service, and so forth, types which he had many chances of observing at
Rome when all Italy was swarming with Spanish _bisoños_, the wandering
fighting men who were mercenaries when any prince would employ them,
and vagabonds at other times. Naharro had considerable _vis comica_,
and a command of telling fluent verse. His personages have life, and if
his plays have touches of obscenity, which is not common in Spain, and
brutality, which is less rare, his time must be taken into account. But
Naharro, though a genuine Spaniard, lived too near the Italians not to
be influenced by Machiavelli and Ariosto. His plays mark only a short
step forward to the fully developed comedy of Lope. The _Propaladia_
was soon suppressed by the Inquisition, not because it contained
heresy, but for a freedom of language in regard to ecclesiastical
vices which would have passed unrebuked in the previous century, but
had become of very bad example after the Reformation had developed
into a formidable attack on the Church. The form of his comedy was not
that finally adopted by the Spaniards. It was in five acts, with the
_introito_ or prologue.
[SN: _Lope de Rueda._]
A truly popular national drama was hardly likely to arise among
courtiers and churchmen. It needed a chief who looked to the common
audience as his patron, and who also had it in him to begin the work
on lines which literature could afterwards develop, Spain found such
a leader in Lope de Rueda (_floruit_ 1544?-1567?). Little is known
of his life, but that little is more than is known with certainty of
some contemporary men of letters. He was a native of Seville, and
originally a goldbeater by trade. It may be that he acquired his taste
for the stage by taking part in the performance of religious plays,
which were always acted by townsmen or churchmen. The separation of
the actor from the amateur, if that is the right word to apply to the
burghers and peasants of the Middle Ages who appeared on the stage
partly for amusement and partly from piety, on the one hand, and from
the mere juggler, minstrel, or acrobat on the other, was going on in
France and England. The same process was at work in Spain. By steps of
which we can now learn nothing, Lope de Rueda became in the fullest
sense a playwright and actor-manager. He strolled all over Spain.
Cervantes, who had seen him, has immortalised his simple theatre--the
few boards which formed the stage, the blanket which did duty as
scenery, and behind which sat the guitar-player who represented the
orchestra, the bags containing the sheepskin jackets and false beards
forming the wardrobe of the company. The purely literary importance
of Lope de Rueda’s work is not great. That part of it which survived
is inconsiderable in bulk, and shows no advance on Naharro. He was
not an ignorant man. The Italian plays were certainly known to him,
and he wrote pure Castilian. But his chief contribution to the form
of Spanish dramatic literature was the _paso_ or passage, a brief
interlude, generally between “fools” or “clowns” in the Shakespearian
sense, frequently introduced between the acts of a regular comedy.
The monologue of Lance over his dog, or the scene between Speed and
Lance with the love-letter, in the third act of the _Two Gentlemen
of Verona_, would serve as _pasos_. But Lope de Rueda’s chief claim
to honour is that he fairly conquered for the Spanish stage its
place in the sun. He hung on no patron, but set his boards up in the
market-place, looking to his audience for his reward. When he died, in
or about 1567, the theatre was a recognised part of Spanish life. If he
had not much enriched dramatic literature, he had provided those who
could with a place in which they were free to grow to the extent of
their intrinsic power. It is pleasant to know that he had his reward.
He seems to have been a prosperous man, and Cervantes speaks with
respect of his character. The fact that he was buried in the Cathedral
of Córdova is a proof that he was not considered a mere “rogue and
vagabond,” but had at least as good a position as an English actor
who was the queen’s or the admiral’s “servant.” As Lope de Rueda was
nobody’s servant, we may fairly draw the deduction that the Spanish
stage had a more independent position than our own.
[SN: _The followers of Lope de Rueda._]
The school of Lope de Rueda, as they may be called with some
exaggeration, must be allowed to pass under his name. The most
memorable of them was Juan de Timoneda, already named as the author,
or adapter, of the _Oveja Perdida_. He was a bookseller of Valencia,
who died at a great age, but at some uncertain date, in the reign of
Philip II. Juan de Timoneda published all that were published of the
plays of Lope de Rueda, and in his capacity of bookseller-publisher
was no doubt helpful to literature. But as a man of letters he was
mainly an adapter, and his plays are echoes of Naharro and Rueda, or
were conveyed from Ariosto. The sap was now rising, and the tree began
to bear fruit in more than one branch. Spain as it then was, and as
it long remained, was rather a confederation of states than a state.
There was no capital in the proper sense of the word. Charles V. had
never rested, and had spent much of his life out of Spain. Philip II.
did indeed fix his Court at Madrid, or in the neighbourhood, but it was
not until the close of his life that the society of a capital began
to form about him. In the earlier years of his reign the capitals of
the ancient kingdoms were still centres of social, intellectual, and
artistic activity, nor did they fall wholly to the level of provincial
towns while any energy remained in Spain. Thus as the taste for the
stage and for dramatic literature grew, it was to be expected that its
effects would be seen in independent production in different parts of
the Peninsula. [SN: _The dramatists of Seville and Valencia._] The
writers who carried on the work of Lope de Rueda, and who prepared
the way for Lope de Vega, were not “wits of the Court,” or about
the Court. They were to be found at Seville and Valencia. Juan de
la Cueva, the author of the _Egemplar Poético_, was a native of the
capital of Andalusia. To him belongs the honour of first drawing on
the native romances for subjects, as in his _Cerco de Zamora_--‘Siege
of Zamora’--a passage of the _Cid_ legend, and of first indicating, if
not exactly outlining, the genuine _Comedia de Capa y Espada_ in _El
Infamador_--‘The Calumniator.’ In Valencia Cristobal de Virues (1550-
----?) wrote plays less national in subject but more in manner. He did
once join the well-meaning but mistaken band which was endeavouring to
bind the Spanish stage in the chains of the Senecan tragedy; but, as
a rule, he wrote wild romantic plays, abounding in slaughter, under
classic names. This was an effort which could not well lead anywhere to
good, but at least it testifies to the vitality of the interest felt in
the stage; and Valencia has this claim to a share in the development
of the Spanish drama, that for a short time it sheltered, encouraged,
and may have helped to determine, the course of the Phœnix of wits,
the Wonder of Nature, the fertile among all the most fertile, the once
renowned, the then unjustly depreciated, but the ever-memorable Lope
de Vega.
If a writer is to be judged by his native force, his originality, the
abundance of his work, the effect he produced on the literature of his
country, and his fame in his own time, then Lope, to give him the name
by which he was and is best known to his countrymen, must stand at the
head of all Spain’s men of letters.[30]
If it is a rule admitting of no exception that the critic or historian
of literature should have read all his author, then I at least must
confess my incapacity to speak of this famous writer. Yet, encouraged
by a firm conviction that there never lived nor does live, or at any
future period will live, anybody who has achieved or will achieve this
feat, being, moreover, persuaded, for reasons to be given, that it is
not necessary to be achieved, I venture to go on.
[SN: _Lope de Vega’s life._]
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio came of a family which originally belonged
to the “mountain,” the hill country of northern and north-western
Spain, which never submitted to the Moor. His father was “hidalgo de
ejucatoria,”--that is, noble by creation,--but his mother was of an
old family, and both came from the valley of Carriedo in Asturias.
He was born at Madrid on 25th November 1562. His life is known
with exceptional fulness, partly because many passages of his works
are avowedly biographical, partly because a number of his letters,
addressed to his patron in later years, the Duke of Sessa, have been
preserved. It would be better for Lope’s reputation if he had been
more reticent, or his patron more careless. As it is, we know not only
that he passed a stormy youth, but that in his later years he was an
unchaste priest. His father died when he was very young, and he was
left to the care of an uncle, the Inquisitor Don Miguel de Carpio.
The Jesuits had the honour of educating him, among the many famous
men trained in their schools. It is recorded by his biographers, and
we can believe it, that he was very precocious. At five he could read
Latin, and had already begun to write verses. After running away in a
boyish escapade, he was attached as page to Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop
of Ávila, who sent him to the University of Alcalá de Henares, the
native town of Cervantes. From the account given of his youth in the
excellently written dialogue story _Dorotea_, he appears to have been
a mercenary lover, even according to the not very delicate standard of
his time. His adventures were unsavoury, and not worth repeating. It
is enough that, both before he took orders and in later life when he
was tonsured and had taken the full vows, he presented a combination,
not unknown at any time or in any race, but especially common on both
sides in the seventeenth century, of intensity of faith with the most
complete moral laxity. He alternated between penance and relapses.
After leaving Alcalá he was for a time attached to the Duke of Alva,
the grandson of the renowned governor of the Low Countries. For him he
wrote the pastoral _Arcadia_, which deals with the duke’s amours. He
married, but marriage produced no effect on his habits. He was exiled
to Valencia for two years, in consequence of obscure troubles arising,
he says, from “jealousy.” Shortly after his return to Madrid his wife
died, but he continued to give cause for “jealousy,” and other troubles
sent him off to join the Armada. From that campaign of failure and
suffering he had the good fortune to return in safety, and he bore it
so well that he wrote at least a great part of a long continuation of
Ariosto, called _The Beauty of Angelica_, during the voyage. After
his return to Madrid in 1590 he was again married, and again marriage
made little difference. In 1609 he became a priest. During his later
years he was attached, not apparently as a servant but as a patronised
friend, to Don Pedro Fernandez de Córdova, first Marquess Priego, and
then Duke of Sessa,--a very dissolute gentleman of literary tastes,
belonging to the famous house which had produced the Great Captain,
Gonsalvo de Córdova. He died at the age of seventy-three in 1635.
[SN: _His influence on the drama._]
A poet who could venture on so great an enterprise as a continuation
of Ariosto amid all the distractions of the Armada cannot have wanted
for confidence in himself, nor was he likely to have an idle pen. The
productiveness of Lope was indeed enormous. He may be said to have
tried every literary form of his time, from the epic on the Italian
model down to the romance. In bulk, the life-work of an industrious
journalist might be about equal to his surviving writings. And Lope
was no mere journalist. His execution of everything he touched has a
certain interest. If space allowed, there would be something to say
of his religious poem on _San Isidro_ and his sonnets, serious and
burlesque. But space does not allow, and we must consider him here
chiefly in his great and dominant character of dramatist, remembering
always that he was a man of many-sided ability, and that the average
cleverness of his non-dramatic work goes far to justify the admiration
of his countrymen in his time, and the place they have never ceased to
give him as, with the one exception of Cervantes, the chief of their
literature. The number of his plays has remained a wonder and a legend.
Eighteen hundred _comedias_ and four hundred _autos sacramentales_
is the figure given on fair authority as his total life-work for the
stage. He himself confesses to two hundred and nineteen pieces as early
as 1603, and in 1624 to one thousand and seventy. An eyewitness has
recorded that he once wrote five plays in fifteen days; and that on
another occasion, having undertaken to collaborate with two friends in
a comedy, he finished his share of the work before breakfast, though it
was one act out of three, and wrote some other verse into the bargain.
Nor are these stories, incredible as they sound, altogether beyond
belief.
They could be accepted without hesitation if the writing of Lope de
Vega were all imitative and bad. But that is far from being the case.
Over and above the fact that he sometimes--as in the _Dorotea_, for
example--wrote an admirable style, he was the creator of a literary
form. Lope de Vega was the real creator of the Spanish _comedia_, a
word which must not be understood to mean only comedy, but stage-play
of every kind. Others prepared the way, and some collaborated in the
ending of the work, but the merit is none the less his. Without Lope
there could have been no Calderon, who found the form ready made to
his hands. That a writer of so much productiveness, and so little
concentration, would have many faults will be easily understood.
Finish was not to be expected from him, nor profundity. There would
inevitably be much that was hasty and careless, much repetition,
much taking of familiar situations, much use of stock characters,
and a great deal of what the French call the _à peu pris_--the “that
is good enough”--instead of the absolutely best, which is not to be
attained except by thought and the labour of the file. He must have
been prepared to do whatever would please an uncritical audience, as
indeed Lope candidly avowed that he was. In short, he might be expected
to have all the weaknesses of the class which Carlyle defined as “the
shallow vehement,” and they would be the more conspicuous because he
lived in a time of learning, but of no great criticism, because he
was a beginner, and not least because he belonged to a people who
have always been indifferent to finish of workmanship. But with all
this, for which a narrow criticism of the stamp of Boileau’s would
have condemned him utterly, Lope had the one thing necessary, which is
creative faculty. The quality of his plays will be best shown later
on, when we treat of the Spanish stage as a whole. For the present it
is enough to deal with the more mechanical side of his workmanship.
Before his time Spanish play-writers had hesitated between the classic
division into five acts and a tentative division into four. One early
and forgotten writer, Avendaño, took three. Lope, not without the
co-operation of others, but mainly by his example, established this
last as the recognised number of _jornadas_--acts--for a Spanish
play. The choice was made for a definite reason. In the _Arte Nuevo
de Hacer Comedias_--a verse epistle written to a friend who had asked
him to justify his works before the critics who held by the classic
rules--Lope laid it down that the first act should introduce the
characters and knit the intrigue; the second lead to the crisis, the
_scène à faire_ of French dramatic critics; and the third wind all up.
He formulated the great secret of the playwright’s craft, which is
that the audience must always know what is going to happen, but never
exactly how it is going to be brought about. They must never be left in
a puzzling doubt as to the meaning of what is going on, and yet must
always be kept in a pleasing uncertainty as to what is about to happen
next. This supposed a very real unity of action, compatible with plot
and underplot, but not with two independent plots. For the unities of
time and place he cared as much, and as little, as our own Elizabethans.
[SN: _The conditions of the work._]
Not even Lope’s fertility and activity could have been equal to the
production of two thousand two hundred plays, of which all, or even
a majority, were executed in conformity with his own standard. Such
a piece of construction as the _Dama Melindrosa_ cannot have been
one of the five plays written in fifteen days. There is a great deal
in Lope’s literary baggage which is mere scribbling, meant to please
an audience for an afternoon. Though the Spaniards loved the theatre
much, they were not numerous enough in the towns to supply many
audiences, and they clamoured for new things. To meet this demand,
every Spanish dramatist who wished to stand well with the managers was
compelled to produce a great deal of what may be called journalism for
the theatre, the mere rapid throwing together of acceptable matter,
which might be love-adventures or the news of the day, historical
stories or religious legend, in stock forms. The stage was not only
all the literature of the mass of the people, but all the newspapers,
and all the “music-hall” side of their amusements too. In all cases
the comedy was accompanied by interludes of the nature of music-hall
“turns,” _loas_, _pasos_, or _entremeses_--brief scenes of a comic
kind, songs, and, above all, dances. The _patio_ or court--that is, the
pit--filled by the poorest, most numerous, and most formidable part
of the audience, who stood, and who were addressed in compliment as
the Senate or the musketeers, and were known in actors’ slang as the
_chusma_--_i.e._, the galley-slaves--would not endure to be deprived
of their dances. So the most truly famous comedy would hardly have
escaped the cucumbers with which the “grave Senate” expressed its
disapproval, if it had been presented without “crutches” in the form
of the dance, the song, or the farcical interlude. Thus it inevitably
followed that the playwright was often called upon to supply what
was in fact padding to fill up the intervals between the popular
shows. And this Lope supplied, besides writing the _entremeses_,
_mojigangas_, _saynetes_--all forms of brief farce. Such work could
not well be literary. His reputation, and indeed the reputation of
the Spanish drama, has suffered because matter of this kind was not
allowed to die with the day for which it was written. During his later
years, and the better part of the life of his successor, Calderon,
the drama held its place at Court. Plays were frequently first given
before the Court (which at that time, and at all festivals, meant
substantially every lady and gentleman in Madrid), before reaching the
public theatre. This audience demanded a higher level of work, and the
best _comedias_ were probably written for it. Yet the drama made its
way to the palace, and was not originally directed to the king and
courtiers. It came as Lope de Vega had shaped it, and so remained in
all essentials. The metrical form was fixed by him: the _silvas_ or
_liras_--lyric verse in hendecasyllabic and seven-foot lines--for the
passionate passages, the sonnet for soliloquies, the _romance_ for
narrative and dialogue, the _redondillas_ or roundelays of assonant
and consonant verse, are all enumerated by him in the _Arte Nuevo de
Hacer Comedias_. And what he did for the secular play he did for the
religious. _The Voyage of the Soul_, given in his prose story, _El
Peregrino en Su Patria_, is an _Auto Sacramental_ as complete as any of
Calderon’s. Whatever the Spanish drama has to give us was either found
undeveloped by Lope de Vega, and perfected in shape by him, or was his
invention. Other men put their mark on their versions of his models,
or showed qualities which he wanted, but nobody modified the Spanish
drama as he had built it in any essential. He was, as far as any single
man could be, the creator of the dramatic literature of his country;
and even though Tirso de Molina was greater in this or that respect,
Alarcon had a finer skill in drawing a character, Calderon a deeper
poetic genius,--though he might have cause to envy this man’s art or
that man’s scope--yet he must remain the chief of one of the very few
brilliant and thoroughly national dramatic literatures of the world.
[SN: _Contemporaries and followers of Lope._]
This predominance of the _Luca fa presto_ of literature may have been a
misfortune, though when the conditions are remembered, and the innate
indifference of the Spaniard to artistic finish is allowed for, an
inevitable one. We must accept it and its consequences. One of them is
this, that after Lope de Vega there could be no room for historical
development on the Spanish stage. Calderon was a different man writing
the same drama. There is no such difference between these two as
between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; and nowhere in Spanish dramatic
literature is there anything answering to the contrast between the
Elizabethan and the Restoration stages. The division often made between
the school of Lope and the school of Calderon is very arbitrary. It is
largely a matter of date. The earlier men are classed with the first,
and the later with the second. To find a distinction between them it
is necessary to insist on mere matters of detail, or on such purely
personal differences of genius and character as must always be found
where there is life among a large body of men. The rule of a literary
as of a political despot may cramp as well as support. It is possible
that if they had not been overshadowed by the Marvel of Nature his
contemporaries might have developed with more freedom. None of them
may seem to have suffered more from the consecration of hasty writing
than Gabriel Tellez (1570?-1648), known in literature as the Maestro
Tirso de Molina, a churchman, who died as head of a religious house at
Soria. Tirso de Molina may be said to live on the universal stage of
the world as the first creator of Don Juan.[31] One of his plays, _The
Vengeance of Tamar_, contains a scene of very high tragic power--that
in which the outraged sister waits veiled outside the tent prepared by
Absalom for the slaughter of his brother. She has a long double-edged
dialogue with the offender, full of warnings of doom intelligible to
the audience, but misunderstood by him, and when he has gone to his
fate her soliloquy is a fine example of the legitimate dramatic use of
the chorus. There is a certain quiet in this scene, a reserve, and an
appeal not to the mere passion for seeing something going on, but to
the emotions of pity and terror, which is rare indeed on the amusing,
but too often noisy and shallow, Spanish stage. Calderon, using the
freedom of a Spanish dramatist, conveyed the whole act into his _Hairs
of Absalom_. One is inclined to think that the playwright who first
rough-hewed the universally true character of Don Juan might, if he
had felt called upon to finish as well as to imagine and sketch, have
also given us the finished type of the debauchee whom the pursuit of
his own pleasure has made a violator and brute, all the more odious
because there is on him an outward show of gallantry and high-breeding.
Tirso’s _Marta la Piadosa_--‘The Pious Martha’--has been most absurdly
compared to Tartuffe. It is the story of a lively young lady who
affects a passion for good works and a vow of charity in order to
escape a disagreeable marriage, and is in other respects the usual
_comedia de capa y espada_. Yet there is a power of characterisation
in it, a liveliness and a genial humanity, which need little to be the
most accomplished comedy. But it misses of what it might have reached,
and we may say that it failed because his audience, and the taste of
his time, called upon Tirso for nothing better than hasty work. In
Guillen de Castro (1569-1631), again, the friend of Lope at Valencia,
we find the same contrast between a vigorous original force of
imagination, with great powers of presentment, and a sudden drop into
what no doubt pleased the “musketeers,” but is now only worth looking
at because it did. His _Youth of the Cid_, which up to a certain point
supplied Corneille with more than a model, falls to puerile miracle
and ends incoherently. Juan Ruiz de Alarcon reached very high comedy.
His _Verdad Sospechosa_--‘The Doubted Truth’--has had a great progeny
on the stage of the world. All the romancing liars--they who lie not
for sordid ends but by imagination, and from a love of shining, or
getting out of the immediate difficulty--who follow one another on all
theatres, may claim descent from his hero. But Alarcon was not popular,
and he also could be hasty. The list of names might easily be swollen
in a country which counted its known dramatic writers at certain
periods by sixties and seventies, but nothing would be gained for the
understanding of the school by the repetition.[32]
Although he cannot be said to have developed or even modified the form
of dramatic literature in Spain, Calderon was too considerable a man to
be allowed to pass with a school.[33]
[SN: _Calderon._]
Pedro Calderon de la Barca Barreda Henao y Riaño, Knight of the Order
of Santiago, Priest, Honorary Chaplain of his Majesty, and our Lords
the New Kings of the Cathedral of Toledo--to give him all his names
and titles--was a native of Madrid, “though from another place he took
his name, an house of ancient fame.” The splendour of his pedigree was
perhaps exaggerated by the partiality of friends. It is a point on
which the Spaniard has all the reverence of the Scotsman. Yet he was
undoubtedly a noble, and “came from the mountain,” as indeed did all
Spain’s greatest men in letters and art. His long life, which lasted
from 1600 to 1681, unlike Lope’s, was honourable, but is otherwise
little known. We are told that he served as a soldier in his youth,
but in a time of truce when not much service was to be seen. From one
of the few certain passages in his life it appears that he was not
slow to draw his sword on sufficient provocation. He had once to take
sanctuary after chasing an actor through the streets of Madrid sword
in hand. The man had stabbed Calderon’s brother in the back, and the
excuse was held to be good. For the rest, the poet’s life was peaceful
and prosperous. He was educated by the Jesuits and at Salamanca, was
known as a writer when he was twenty, and after the death of Lope de
Vega, he became the acknowledged chief of Spanish dramatists. Philip
IV. greatly favoured and employed him. Calderon was, in fact, as much
the king’s poet as Velasquez was his painter. By the favour of the king
he also was admitted into the Order of Santiago, which might bring with
it a commandery and a revenue. In the revolt of Catalonia in 1640,
when the king went to the army, Calderon joined the other knights who
rendered their military service under the royal banner. At the age of
fifty-one he took orders. This was not always a proof of a sincere
vocation, for Swift’s saying, that it was easier to provide for ten
men in the Church than one out of it, was even truer of Spain than of
England. But Calderon’s sincerity need not be doubted. He appears to
have given up writing directly for the theatre after taking orders, but
continued to produce plays for the Court which were repeated in public.
During the latter half of his life he preferred to devote himself to
the _autos sacramentales_, which he had an exclusive right to supply
to the town of Madrid. No dramatic author of the time seems to have
been so indifferent to the fate of his plays. A few were printed by his
brother, but he himself published none, though he was continually vexed
by piracies, and by learning that rubbish had been presented in his
name to provincial audiences. In his old age he drew up a list of his
genuine plays at the request of the Duke of Veragua, the representative
of Columbus. From the letter sent with the list we learn that there
were two noted pests of the Madrid theatre, one known as Great, and the
other as Little, Memory. The first could remember a whole play (one
supposes it must have been _taliter qualiter_) after hearing it once,
the other after hearing it two or three times, and the two gained a
dishonourable livelihood by poaching for piratical managers. As many
dramas reached the press by their exertions, the wretched state of the
text is easily accounted for. When Great or Little Memory was at a
loss he put in his own trash. Even in Calderon’s genial and peaceful
old age this outrage moved him to bitterness. Yet he never edited his
plays. His executor, Don Juan de Vera Tasis, who published the first
edition after his death, was unfortunately a partisan of the detestable
_estilo culto_, and is suspected of having inserted some very bad
examples of this vicious affectation. Between the indifference of the
poet and the insufficiency of the editor the text has suffered greatly.
Calderon’s high estimate, not perhaps so much of his own _autos_ as of
the sanctity of work written for a religious purpose, is shown by the
fact that he did publish some of them, lest they should suffer the same
misuse as his plays.
The reputation of Calderon has suffered from the opposite evil to that
which has injured Lope’s. The Phœnix of Geniuses has been punished
in modern times for the wild overpraise of his own, by some neglect.
German criticism has treated him as a mere amuser. Calderon, on the
other hand, has been the victim of the incontinence in praise of
the Schlegels, who were determined to make another, and a better,
Shakespeare if they could not find one. Many readers who had formed an
idea of him at second hand have probably suffered a severe shock on
becoming acquainted with his work.[34]
[SN: _His limitations._]
No reader should expect to find a world poet in Calderon, who was a
Spaniard of the Spaniards. No more intensely national poet ever wrote,
and it is for that he must be read and appreciated. Moreover, he is a
Spaniard of the seventeenth century, when the monarchical sentiment was
at its height, and when all life was permeated by a religion in which
the creed had, in Mr Swinburne’s phrase, replaced the decalogue. His
conception of honour (we shall come back to the point of honour as a
motive for Spanish plays) is that of his time--thoroughly oriental. It
was not the sentiment which nerves a man against fear of consequences,
and enables him to resist the temptation to do what is dishonourable,
or, better still, makes him incapable of feeling it, but the fixed
determination not to allow the world the least excuse for saying that
somebody has done something to you which renders you undignified or
ridiculous. As has been already said, he added nothing to the formal
part of Spanish dramatic literature, not even to the _auto_. He was too
much affected by the Góngorism of his early manhood, for even the most
partial of editors cannot throw all, or even the most, of the errors in
that style found in his plays on Don Juan de Vera Tasis.
[SN: _His qualities._]
Yet with his limitations Calderon was a considerable poet, and a very
skilful master of the machinery of the Spanish comedy. When not misled
into Góngorism he wrote magnificently, and there are lyric choral
passages in the _autos_ which Mr Ticknor rightly praised as worthy of
Ben Jonson’s masques. Indeed not a little of his work is identical
in purpose with the masque, though different in form. As a Court poet
he was called upon to write for the entertainment of the king and the
courtiers, and to supply theatrical shows at royal marriages, births
of princes, and so forth. There was no intrinsic novelty here, for
Calderon did but give the high-bred Spaniard of the Court a finer
poetic version of the dances, songs, and bright short pieces under
various, names, which delighted the humbler Spaniard in the _patios_.
The intensely national sentiment which he expresses may strike us at
times as a little empty, but is high and shining, and lends itself to a
certain stately treatment which he could give. The romantic sentiment
was strong in Calderon, and even in the most purely Spanish trappings
that is not remote from us. A poet who dealt not inadequately with
great passions could hardly help sometimes piercing through the merely
national to the universal, though it must be acknowledged that his
characters rarely utter the individual human saying, and that he was
far too fond of long casuistical amplifications, which are almost
always frigidly pedantic, and not rarely bombastical. The most quoted
passage in all his work, the lines which close the second act of _La
Vida es Sueño_, gain by being taken apart from their context:
“Que es la vida? Un frenesi:
Que es la vida? Una ilusion,
Una sombra, una ficcion
Y el mayor bien es pequeño
Que toda la vida es sueño
Y los sueños sueño son.”
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
It is a fine poetic reflection, well fitted to stand beside the yet
more beautiful lines of the _Tempest_, but it is not wise to approach
the play in the hope that all of it will be found at the same level.
As in the case of Lope, though not to the same extent, the critic who
is severely limited in space must be content to speak in general terms
of much of Calderon’s work. It would be interesting to take _El Mágico
Prodigioso_ (‘The Wonder-working Magician’), _El Mayor Monstruo los
Zelos_ (‘Jealousy the greatest Monster’), and _La Puente de Mantible_
(‘The Bridge of Mantible’), and show what has been added in any of
them--or a score of others which it were as easy to name--to the
unchanging framework of the Spanish play. In the _Mágico Prodigioso_,
for instance, perhaps the most generally known of Calderon’s greater
dramas, which has been ineptly enough compared to _Faust_, we have, in
addition to the usual machinery of _dama_, _galan_, and _gracioso_,
a story of temptation by the devil. Looked at closely, it is a tale
told for edification, and for the purpose of showing what a fool the
devil essentially is. He is argued off his legs by Cyprian the hero
at the first bout, beaten completely by stock arguments to be found
in text-books. His one resource is to promise Cyprian the possession
of Justina, and he signally fails to keep his word. The false Justina
he has created to satisfy the hero turns to a skeleton at once, and
Cyprian becomes a Christian because he discovers that the devil is
unable to give him possession of a woman, and is less powerful than
God, which he knew by the fiend’s own confession at the beginning. It
is an edifying story to all who accept the premisses and the parade
of scholastic argument, and are prepared to allow for the time, the
nation, and the surroundings.
[SN: _The school of Calderon._]
Calderon wound up and rounded off the historical development of the
Spanish drama so completely that little need be said of his school,
which indeed only means contemporaries who wrote Lope’s drama with
Calderon’s style. Yet Moreto was a strong man, and to him also belongs
the honour of having put on the stage an enduring type, the Lindo Don
Diego, who was the ancestor of our own Sir Fopling Flutter, of Lord
Foppington, and of many another theatrical dandy. Francisco de Roxas,
too, has left a point-of-honour play, not unworthy of his master, _Del
Rey Abajo, Ninguno_--‘From the King downwards, Nobody.’ One feature
common to all the later writers for the old Spanish stage may be
noticed. It was their growing tendency to re-use the situations and
plots of their predecessors. Moreto was a notable proficient in this,
and Calderon himself did as much. It seems as if a theatre which dealt
almost wholly with intrigue and situation had exhausted all possible
combinations and could only repeat. When men began to go back in this
fashion the end was at hand. Calderon, less fortunate than Velasquez,
outlived the king who was their common patron, and saw with his own
eyes the decadence of Spain. Beyond him there was only echo, and then
dotage prolonged into the eighteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] _Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España._
[27] _Autos Sacramentales_ in _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_. The
introduction by Don Eduardo Gonzalez Pedroso gives the early history
of these religious plays in Spain, but with scarcely sufficient
recognition of the fact that they were common to all western Europe.
[28] An accessible and still most useful account of the early Spanish
drama is to be found in the first volume of Ochoa’s _Tesoro del Teatro
Español_, which gives the introduction and catalogue of Don Leandro
de Moratin, Paris, 1836; but the standard authority is Schack’s
_Geschichte der Dramatischen Literatur und Kunst in Spanien_, Berlin,
1845-46. Yet, here and always, the English reader cannot do better than
follow Mr Ticknor.
[29] Published by the Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles, 1870.
[30] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. xxiv., xxxiv., xli., lii., give
the best modern texts of 120 of Lope de Vega’s comedies, including,
not very properly, the _Dorotea_; but the Spanish Academy has begun
a portentous edition, in quarto, of his whole work. The first volume
contains a life by Don C. A. de la Barrera, founded largely on
the poet’s numerous extant letters. The _Obras Sueltas_--_i.e._,
non-dramatic works of Lope--are to be found in a desirable form
published at Madrid from the excellent press of Francisco de Sancha in
21 vols., 1776-79.
[31] All the writers mentioned in this paragraph will be found under
their names in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_.
[32] Whoever wishes to gain an original knowledge of the dramatists of
this time may be referred to vols. xliii. and xlv. of the _Biblioteca
de Ribadeneyra_, with their introductions and catalogues by Don Ramon
Mesonero Romanos.
[33] Not the best but the most accessible edition of Calderon’s plays
is that of J. J. Keil, Leipzig, 1827. Don Eugenio Hartzenbusch has
edited him for the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. vii., ix., xii.,
xiv., and lviii.
[34] For an example see the _Spanish Drama_ by Mr G. H. Lewes, 1846, a
shrewd piece of criticism by one who was a good judge of a play. But
Mr Lewes was too manifestly excited to revenge his own once excessive
confidence in Schlegel on Calderon. Don M. Menendez’s _Calderon y su
escuela_, a series of lectures delivered in 1881, is a very sound piece
of criticism.
CHAPTER IV. FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
THE PREVAILING QUALITY OF THE SPANISH DRAMA--TYPICAL EXAMPLES--‘LA
DAMA MELINDROSA’--‘EL TEJEDOR DE SEGOVIA’--‘EL CONDENADO POR
DESCONFIADO’--THE PLAYS ON “HONOUR”--‘A SECRETO AGRAVIO SECRETA
VENGANZA’--THE “AUTO SACRAMENTAL”--THE “LOA”--THE ‘VERDADERO DIOS
PAN’--‘LOS DOS HABLADORES.’
[SN: _The prevailing quality of the Spanish drama._]
There may well seem to be something over-bold, even impudent, in the
attempt to give an account of the different kinds of Spanish drama
in one brief chapter. Its abundance alone would appear to render the
effort vain, and the common elaborate classification of the plays into
heroic, romantic, religious, of “cloak and sword,” and so forth, seems
to imply the existence of a number of types distinct from one another,
and calling for separate treatment. Yet though I cannot hope to be
exhaustive, it is, in my opinion, possible to be at least not wholly
inadequate. The task is materially facilitated by the great uniformity
of the Spanish drama. No matter what the name may be, the action is
much the same, and the characters do not greatly vary. It has been
said that Calderon’s personages are all like bullets cast in a mould;
and though this, as is the case with most sweeping assertions, fails to
take notice of the exceptions, it has much truth, and may be applied
to others. The Spanish drama is above all a drama of action, conducted
by fixed types. Juan de la Cueva had said in a spirit of prophecy that
the artful fable was the glory of the Spanish stage, and Lope appeared
in good time to prove him right. The types who move in the action are
the _Dama_, the _Galan_, the _Barba_, and the _Gracioso_--the Lady, the
Lover, the Old Man, and the Clown. They have the stage to themselves
in the _comedia de capa y espada_. This phrase, when translated into
French or English, has an air of romance about it which is somewhat
misleading. The cloak and sword were the distinctive parts of the dress
of the private gentleman. _Caballero de capa y espada_ was the man
about town of our own Restoration plays, who is neither great noble,
churchman, nor lawyer. The _comedia de capa y espada_ was then the
genteel comedy of Spain. But the _Dama_, the _Galan_, the _Barba_, and
the _Gracioso_ figure in every kind of play, even in those of religion.
By these is meant the stage drama turning on some religious motive, and
not the _auto sacramental_, which was a mystery differing from those of
the Middle Ages only in this, that it was written by men of letters on
whom, and on whose art, the Renaissance had had its influence. In the
Romantic plays there is more passion, and the sword is more often out
of its scabbard, but we find the same types, the same general action.
Spain produced a certain number of plays approaching our own comedy of
humours. These are the _comedias de figuron_. _La Verdad Sospechosa_
and the _Lindo Don Diego_ are the best known examples. But here again
the “humour”--the _figuron_--is placed in the midst of the stock types
and the customary action.
[SN: _Typical examples._]
To show what these types and this action were in general terms would be
easy enough, but perhaps a better, and certainly a more entertaining,
method is to take half-a-dozen typical plays, and to give such an
analysis of them as may enable the reader to appreciate for himself
that skilful construction of plot at which the Spaniards aimed, and
to judge how far it is true that however much the subject differed,
the _dramatis personæ_ did not greatly vary. For this purpose it is
not necessary to take what is best but what is most characteristic. I
have selected as an example of the comedy of lively complicated action
the _Dama Melindrosa_, which may be translated ‘My Lady’s Vapours,’
by Lope de Vega; as a romantic play, the _Tejedor de Segovia_--‘The
Weaver of Segovia’--by Juan Ruiz de Alarcon; as a religious play, the
_Condenado por Desconfiado_--‘Damned for want of Faith’--of Tirso
de Molina; for the play which has “honour” for its motive, the _A
Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza_--‘A Secret Vengeance for a Hidden
Wrong’--of Calderon. The _Dama Melindrosa_ draws a little towards the
_comedia de figuron_, but it is none the less a perfect specimen of the
cloak-and-sword comedy, and a good example of Lope. It is chosen also
because it possesses a plot sufficiently entangled to show the Spanish
_enredo_ (_i.e._, tangle), and yet not so complicated as to be obscure
in the telling. Specimens of the romantic, and religious, play might
have been easily found in Calderon, but to show the general quality
of a literature, we must not confine ourselves to the greater men.
There remain the _auto sacramental_, and the short interludes, which
under various names surrounded, and enlivened, the _comedia_. For the
first we must go to Calderon, and none seems more fit to show what the
Renaissance had done with these survivals of the Middle Ages than the
_Verdadero Dios Pan_--‘The True God Pan.’ For an example of the smaller
pieces we can take the _Dos Habladores_--‘The Two Chatterers’--of
Cervantes, who excelled in this, and only in this, dramatic form.[35]
[SN: La Dama Melindrosa.]
Belisa, the Dama Melindrosa, the lady with the vapours, of Lope’s
comedy, is the daughter of a rich widow, Lisarda, and she has a
brother, Don Juan. The brother spends his nights serenading ladies, in
company with his friend Eliso, and lies in bed till midday. Belisa has
hitherto refused all the husbands proposed by her mother, giving more
or less fantastical reasons in each case, and is a very airy whimsical
young person. In the first scene of the play Lisarda confides her
troubles with her children to her brother Tiberio, the _barba_--beard,
or old man--of the piece. Lisarda professes her desire to get her
children married and settled in life, in order that she may retire
to the country with one gentlewoman and a slave, there to bewail her
lost lord (who, we learn, has been dead for about a year), like the
tender turtle on a thorn. Tiberio pooh-poohs his sister’s sentiments,
and makes the unsympathetic remark that widows generally seem to find
solitude a thorn, to judge by their perpetual fidgeting, but offers to
use his influence to persuade Belisa to marry. Then follows a scene
with the young lady. She knows she is going to be sermonised, and puts
on all her airs and graces. A chair is brought for Tiberio and cushions
for the ladies, who squat on them in the old Spanish fashion. Mme.
d’Aulnoy, the author of the fairy tales, who came to Spain as wife of
the French Ambassador, has explained how intolerable she found this
attitude. Belisa provokes her uncle, who has the usual peppery temper
of the _barba_, into expressing a desire to box her ears, but will
accept no husband. To this party enter an _alguacil_, or officer of
police, with an _escribano_, a species of attorney and process-server.
We learn that Lisarda has a claim on her son’s friend Eliso, who owed
her husband money, and will not pay it. She has therefore sued out a
writ, and is sending the officers to seize a _prenda_, or pledge, which
she can keep or sell for the discharge of the debt, if Eliso will not
pay what he owes.
The scene now changes to the house of Eliso, who is found discussing
with his servant Fabio the question whether it is better to pay
the debt or compound by marrying Belisa, with her vapours. His
conversation is broken off by the hurried entry of Felisardo, sword in
hand. He has found a Navarrese cavalier persecuting Celia, who is on
her way home from church, with unwelcome attentions. The usual duel
has followed. The Navarrese is on the pavement, and Felisardo is on
his way to take sanctuary, bringing Celia with him to leave her under
the protection of Eliso. Of course Eliso behaves like a gentleman,
orders his front door to be shut in case the police-officers are in
pursuit, and gives his friends refuge. He persuades the two to disguise
themselves in the holiday dresses of his Morisco slaves, Pedro and
Zara, who are absent on his estate. Meanwhile Fabio reports that there
are police-officers below, and is sent down with orders to delay them
as long as he can. Eliso has a soliloquy on the hazards of love, in
the form of a half-burlesque sonnet in which all the last words are
_esdrújulo_, accented on the antepenult. At last the _alguacil_ is
admitted, deeply angered by the delay, and announces that he has come
to serve Lisarda’s writ. Eliso is relieved, and tells him to take what
he likes--and he takes the two supposed slaves. The scene now returns
to Lisarda’s house. She is much pleased by the intelligence of the
_alguacil_, and the attractive appearance of the supposed Pedro and
Zara. Belisa, too, is impressed by the gallant bearing of Felisardo,
who enters into the game with spirit. Meanwhile Don Juan is at last up.
He finds Celia among the servants, and on learning who she is supposed
to be, observes that his friend Eliso was wise not to let him see
her. Of course he makes hyperbolical love to her at once. Celia is not
pleased at the admiration of Lisarda’s female servants for Felisardo,
and he is jealous of Don Juan. And so the first act ends. Lope, it will
be seen, has carried out his dramatic scheme so far with great success.
He has introduced his persons, and knitted his intrigue. Everything has
happened in a probable way, and there are infinite possibilities of
complications and cross purposes.
The second act opens with Belisa’s confession of her love for the
supposed Pedro. It is made to the indispensable _confidante_, who,
as a matter of course, is her servant Flora, the counterpart of the
_gracioso_, and the _soubrette_ of the French comedy. Belisa speaks
largely in infantile little lines of six syllables. She explains and
excuses her own _melindres_ at considerable length, and asks Flora
how to escape from a love which she feels is disgraceful, and half
considers as a punishment for her whims. Flora makes the ferocious
suggestion that she should insist on having Pedro branded on the face,
after the manner of runaway slaves. This was a rebus formed of the
letter _s_, pronounced “_es_,” and a nail--_clavo_--which together make
the word _esclavo_, a slave. The object of this precious device is to
kill Belisa’s love by degrading its object. The _melindrosa_ hesitates,
but finally takes her servant’s counsel, and when her mother, who is
as much in love with Pedro as herself, declines, threatens hysterics.
Lisarda in despair applies to Tiberio, who advises that the rebus
should be painted on the faces of the slaves, which will quiet Belisa,
and do no harm. In the meantime Eliso pays a visit to Lisarda. He has
at last made up his mind to become Belisa’s suitor. The mother warns
him of her daughter’s humours, but promises her help, insisting,
however, that he must make her a present of the slaves, although he has
now satisfied the debt. Eliso, who knows he gives nothing, consents
with just sufficient appearance of reluctance to provoke the lady’s
wishes still further. He also drops hints that the slaves are not what
they seem. In a short conversation with Felisardo, Eliso tells him
that the Navarrese still lives, though in danger, that the police are
seeking for him and Celia, and that they will be wise to stay where
they are. They agree, and allow the infamatory mark to be painted on
their faces. The play need no longer be told scene by scene, and could
not be so told except at inconvenient length. Lisarda hankers after the
man slave, and Don Juan makes furious love to Celia. Belisa finds her
love is not cured by the supposed branding of Pedro, and is perpetually
either making advances to him, or flying off in more or less affected
hysterics. Celia for her part is jealous of the mother and daughter.
She and her lover are twice surprised in talk, and have to use their
wits to escape discovery. There is no small truth in the part Belisa
plays. Lope accepted slavery as a matter of course, and was writing to
amuse, not to enforce a moral, but he comes very near the best passages
in that powerful book _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_,--the scenes which follow the
death of St Clair. Mrs Beecher Stowe wrote to prove that slavery makes
it possible for a weak self-indulgent nature to be horribly brutal in
act. Belisa is not allowed to go beyond whims. The second act ends by
her insisting that an iron collar shall be put on Pedro’s neck, which
makes an effective “curtain,” and no doubt left the audience highly
excited as to what was coming next.
The third act opens with a scene between Lisarda and Eliso, who
reproaches her with ill-treating the slaves, and repeats his warning
that they are not what they appear to be. This only excites Lisarda
in her determination to marry Pedro. Then Eliso is angered by Don
Juan’s servant Carrillo, the _gracioso_ of the piece, who tells him
that the slave is making love to Belisa. With a want of scruple too
common with the Spanish _galan_, he eggs on Don Juan to persevere in
his pursuit of Celia. Belisa also has begun to have her suspicions
as to the real character of the slaves, but cannot believe that a
free man and woman would allow themselves to be branded. Now follows
a set of scenes hovering between farce and melodrama. In a more than
usually exalted state of the vapours, Belisa pretends to faint, in
order that Pedro may carry her to her room. She has first given him
a ring. Pedro is not a little embarrassed, but finally takes her up
with disgusted resignation, and is about to carry her to her room,
when Celia comes in, and “makes him a scene of jealousy.” Supposing
the _melindrosa_ to be insensible they address one another by their
true names, and say some uncomplimentary truths of Belisa. At last
Felisardo puts Belisa down on a sofa, as Celia insists upon it, gives
his lady-love the ring as a proof of his loyalty, and walks off to
the stable. Belisa is furious, puzzled, but still doubtful. In a fit
of rage she accuses Celia of stealing the ring, and the _dama_ is in
some danger of learning that it is perilous to play the part of slave.
She is, of course, rescued from the officious Carrillo, who is eager
to inflict the punishment ordered by his mistress, by Don Juan. The
young gentleman is in high indignation, and swears that he will marry
the slave. His mother, who means to do the same with Pedro, is not on
that account the less angry with him. Being now thoroughly tired of
Don Juan’s rebellion and Belisa’s whims, she begs the help of Tiberio
to bring about her marriage with the slave. The helpful Tiberio has a
resource. He has seen a gentleman named Felisardo about the court who
is wonderfully like Pedro. Let the slave be dressed as a gentleman
and introduced as Lisarda’s proposed husband. In the meantime Don
Juan has plotted with Eliso that Celia shall be helped to resume her
true place, when he will of course marry her, and present his mother
with the accomplished fact. After a well-handled passage of mutual
reproaches between mother and daughter, there comes a stage device
which the play-goer will recognise as now worn threadbare, but which
is always effective. Lisarda decides that when Tiberio returns with
Felisardo, whom she still believes to be the slave Pedro, she will put
out the light by an affected accident, and seize the opportunity to
make a declaration of love. What follows need hardly be told. The light
is put out. Everybody says the wrong thing to everybody, and when the
candles are lit again the play is over. Felisardo is married to Celia,
who arrives at the right moment. Belisa, her vapours being no longer
heeded, consents to marry Eliso. Carrillo is paired off with Flora.
Lisarda declares herself satisfied, and so the play being played out,
the puppets return to their box.
Here, it will be allowed, is a play--and it is one of many--which may
well have amused a Spanish audience for an afternoon. We may confess
that this was its main purpose. Yet it is also amusing to read. Lope,
indeed, wrote well. His verse in its various forms, including blank
verse, which has been comparatively little written by other Spaniards,
is accomplished, when haste did not make him careless; and it has the
qualities of the prose of our own Vanbrugh--straightforward simplicity
and natural ease. The actors must have found it pleasant to learn. His
characters, again, have a respectable measure of general truth to human
nature. They are not, indeed, the living persons we meet in Molière
and Shakespeare. Even Belisa is only a _dama_ with _melindres_, and as
Celia is, so his other _damas_ are; nor does one _galan_, _gracioso_,
or _barba_ differ essentially from another. Yet they are true, with the
measure of truth possible to conventional types, and their doings are
lively. The doings are always the essential thing. Whatever literary
merit Lope’s play may have, it is always strictly subordinate to the
purely theatrical purpose, to the necessity of pleasing an audience by
a lively action which must be full of surprises in the details, but
always intelligible in the general lines. Of this purely theatrical
art he was a master. He knew how to bring about a good situation, how
to lead up to an effective ending to his act, how to make the wildly
improbable look probable on the boards. In so far he is very modern.
The popular play of to-day, the French comedy of _quiproquo_, is only
Lope’s comedy of intrigue in modern trappings. It is never better in
these qualities than his are at their best. He had discovered all the
devices which the playwright finds more effective, and much easier
to produce, than passion, or thought, or poetry. And he did at least
present them in poetic form. He was the most poetic of playwrights, and
the ancestor of all who write merely for the stage, whose aim it is to
amuse, and to move by direct appeal to the eye, and the laughter, or
tears, which lie near the surface.
[SN: El Tejedor de Segovia.]
The _enredo_ supplied the canvas on which, or the background against
which, the Spanish dramatist had to place whatever romantic, religious,
or other figure or action he wished to present to his audience. In
the _Tejedor de Segovia_--‘The Weaver of Segovia’--of Alarcon we have
romance of the most approved type, the story of a gentleman who is
driven by oppression to become a Robin Hood, a “gallant outlaw,” and
who finally earns pardon, and restoration to his honours, by service
against the Moor. This is Don Fernando Ramirez, whose father has been
unjustly put to death by the king Don Alfonso, at the instigation of
the favourite, the Marques Suero Pelaez. It is supposed that Fernando
has also been killed, but he is living disguised as a weaver at
Segovia, with his _dama_ Teodora. A sister, Doña Ana Ramirez, is
living in retirement near the town with a servant, Florinda. She is
in love with the Count Don Julian, son of Suero Pelaez, who neglects
her, and is tired of her. Don Julian has caught sight of Teodora, and
has fallen in love with her in the usual fire-and-flames style. He is
determined to carry her off, and when the play opens, is prowling about
the weaver’s house with his servant Fineo. Don Julian is convinced
that a mere mechanic will not dare to resist the son of so powerful
a man as Suero Palaez. As a matter of fact the weaver is absent, and
Teodora is alone in the house with the servant Chinchon, the _gracioso_
of the piece, and an accomplished specimen of the greed, cowardice,
brag, and low cunning proper to the type. A moderately experienced
reader of romance sees at once what the course of the story must be.
The count endeavours to gain admittance. Chinchon the coward proves
no protection. He is rather a traitor, and Teodora is assailed by the
count, when the weaver returns. Fernando takes a high line with Don
Julian, and when the count endeavours to carry things with a high
hand, shows that, weaver as he appears to be, he can use a sword like
a gentleman. The count and his servant are ignominiously driven into
the streets. Then the storm breaks on the weaver. He is imprisoned, and
Teodora has to fly to hiding. In prison the weaver finds Don Garceran
de Miranda, and various others, who form the raw material of a model
band of brigands. The courage and craft of Fernando aiding, they all
break out and take to “the sierra”--the hillside--which is the Spanish
equivalent of our green wood. Through many adventures, each coming one
out of the other, all the personages playing their part with that sense
of the theatre which Lope had conveyed to his countrymen, Don Fernando
works back to his own, and to revenge. It is a Robin Hood story, told
by a Spaniard for the stage, and with Spanish types.
There are individual scenes of the best Spanish romance. One is that
in which Suero Pelaez, the _barba_, the personification of austere
Castilian honour and loyalty, reproaches his son with his disorderly
life. Suero Pelaez is the typical _père noble_, the heavy father of the
stage, comparable for rigid loftiness of sentiment to the Ruy Gomez of
_Hernani_. Victor Hugo would have done the scene magnificently, and as
Alarcon wrote it, it will stand comparison with the best of the French
romantic plays. In another scene Teodora and Fernando are prisoners to
the count, and she saves her lover by pretending to betray him. She
asks to be allowed to kill him, and when supplied with a sword for
that atrocious purpose, cuts his bonds and gives him the weapon--a
_coup de théâtre_ repeated with more or less disguise many thousands
of times, but unfailing in its effect. In a more thoroughly Spanish
scene, Fernando forces the count to do justice to his sister, Doña
Ana, by promising to marry her, and having so salved the honour of
his family, kills him in fair fight. Doña Ana displays the philosophy
rarely wanting in the second _dama_ at the end of a play. While Don
Julian was alive, honour required her to insist on marriage; but now
that he is dead, and she has been righted, she is quite prepared to
marry Don Garceran, who has gallantly played his part as Patroclus,
Achates, Horatio, Amyas Leigh’s Lieutenant Cary, or Jack Easy’s friend
Gascoigne--in short, hero’s right-hand man. It is not _King Lear_, or
even _Phèdre_, but it is very amusing reading, made of such stuff as
romance is made of at all times.
[SN: El Condenado por Desconfiado.]
With the play on a religious motive we come to what is far more alien
to ourselves. In Tirso de Molina’s _Condenado por Desconfiado_ we have
something which, at any rate in such a form as this, is unknown on the
modern stage. Paul the hermit is a man of thirty, who has fled from the
world ten years ago, and is living in the practice of every austerity.
Inappropriate as it may seem, he has with him a servant, Pedrisco, the
_gracioso_ of the piece, who differs in nothing from others of the same
function on the Spanish stage. In the first scene Pedrisco is absent
begging for the herbs on which the hermit lives. The play opens with
a soliloquy by Paul, which is a rapid theatrical equivalent for Lord
Tennyson’s monologue of St Simeon Stylites. The hermit is troubled by
no doubts on any point of faith, but he is racked by anxiety to feel
assured that his austerities have earned him salvation, and we see
that he has yielded to spiritual pride. After giving expression to his
doubts and fears, through which there pierces an aggrieved sense that
heaven owes him salvation, Paul retires to his cave. We have a buffoon
interlude from Pedrisco, who complains of his diet (the _gracioso_
is ever a glutton), and tells us that he smuggles in something more
substantial than herbs for his own consumption. Then he goes into his
cave to eat, and Paul returns in great agitation. He has dreamt, and in
his dream has been taken to the judgment-seat of heaven. There he has
seen his good deeds weighed against his evil, and the good have proved
by far the lighter. He breaks into a wild prayer for assurance, for a
sign, which is by far the finest passage of verse in the play. It is
strictly according to tradition that he should be heard by the enemy
of mankind. The devil tells us that he is empowered to tempt the holy
man, that vulgar temptations have failed, but that now Paul is wavering
in his faith in the divine mercy, and he will tempt him in another
way. A disappointment now awaits the reader, who expects a scene of
temptation, and gets a device for helping on the action. Satan appears
in the shape of an angel, and tells Paul to go to Naples. There at a
certain place near the harbour he will meet one Enrico, son of Anareto.
He is to watch that man, for as the fate of Enrico is, so will his
own be, the devil being a liar from the beginning. Paulo wonders, but
obeys, and departs with Pedrisco for Naples.
There we precede him, and find ourselves with two gentlemen at the
door of Celia, who is a courtesan. From the conversation of these
two we learn of her beauty, her rapacity, her great wit, and many
accomplishments, as also that she is devoted to one Enrico, a ruffler,
gambler, and bully, who beats and robs her. One of the two gentlemen
has never seen her, and after due warning from his friend, it is
decided that they shall go in on pretence of asking Celia, who is a
poetess, for some love verses to be sent to their _damas_. They go in,
bearing gifts, and then Enrico bursts in with his follower Galvan.
Enrico plays the bully to perfection, drives off the two gentlemen, and
seizes their gifts to Celia, who wheedles and adores him as the most
valiant of men. All this scene is full of vigour, and is written with
astonishing gusto. When placated by Celia, Enrico promises her a feast
on her own money, and sending for friends, they go out to the sea-shore
by the harbour. Here Paulo is waiting, as he was directed by the
fiend. There is a scene, very intelligible, and not at all ridiculous
to a Spanish audience of the day, in which Paulo proves his Christian
humility by throwing himself on the ground and telling Pedrisco to
trample on him. Then Enrico and his riotous party burst on the scene.
Enrico has just tossed a troublesome old beggar into the sea out of
pure wickedness, and is in jovial spirits. He glories and drinks deep,
bragging of his own sins, and extorting the admiration of Celia and the
subordinate scoundrels who form the party. This, again, is an excellent
scene, and not untrue to nature. Paul recognises the man with whose
fate his own is bound up, and is horrified. He feels convinced that
this man can never be saved, and revolts at thinking that after all his
austerities he is to be lost. In an explosion of passion, not unhuman,
and certainly very southern, he decides that he too will lead a life
of crime and make the world fear one who, “although just,” has been
condemned.
So ends the first act. In the second and third we have the perpetual
contrast between the two men. Paulo has become a brigand, but is still
in trouble about his soul. He has a warning by an angel, who appears
in the shape of a shepherd-boy, and tells him a parable of the lost
sheep. Paulo understands, but still his doubts haunt him. Meanwhile
we learn, with some surprise, that Enrico has one virtue amid his
thousand crimes--a tender affection for his old father. He refuses
to kill an aged man, though he has taken pay to kill him. The old
man’s resemblance to his father disarms Enrico. When reproached by
his employer he kills _him_. He has now to fly Naples, and in order
to escape pursuit has to take to the water. Before plunging in he
prays for God’s mercy, for though a sinner Enrico has never doubted.
Considerations of time and space troubled the Spanish dramatist but
little. Enrico swims from Naples to the place where Paulo is camped
with his band. He falls into the hands of the ex-hermit. Paulo now
conceives a hope. If he can find that Enrico is repentant there will
be a chance for his salvation. He causes his prisoner to be tied to
a tree blindfold, in order that he may be shot to death, and then
resuming his hermit’s dress, exhorts him to prepare for death. But
Enrico will not go beyond a general acknowledgment that the divine
mercy can save him if God so pleases. Of confession and repentance he
will not hear a word, but is in all respects a hardened sinner. Paulo
is again plunged into despair, and repeats his determination to exceed
the crimes of Enrico, “since it is to be all one in the end.” The words
are trivial, but they contain blasphemy in the real sense. The close
of the play finds Paulo still revolving his weary doubt, and Enrico in
a dungeon waiting for execution. Here we have another very arbitrary
and pointless scene of temptation. The fiend shows Enrico a means of
escape, but he hears voices warning him to stay, and he stays. The
scene has no purpose, for the devil makes no attack on the prisoner’s
faith, and Enrico remains still an unbending sinner. At last he yields
to the prayers of his old father, confesses, and makes an edifying end.
In the last scene, while Paulo soliloquises, the soul of Enrico is
borne to heaven by two angels. But Paulo will not believe that so great
a sinner can have been saved. He does not, it is true, see the vision,
and has only the word of Pedrisco for Enrico’s pious end. Then Paulo is
killed by soldiers who are hunting him down. Flames are seen round his
dead body, and his voice is heard announcing that he is lost for ever,
“por desconfiado,” as one who did not trust God’s mercy.
The morality and doctrine of this play need not concern us here,
all the more because they are not unfamiliar. There is some virtue
in a name, for if the Maestro Tirso de Molina had called his play
‘Justification by Faith,’ as he well might, he would have been in peril
of ending at the stake. Head of a house of Nuestra Señora de la Merced
Calzada at Soria, as he was, his play might pass for an illustration
of Luther’s much-debated “pecca fortiter.” The purely literary interest
of the piece is great. The scenes filled with the crimes and violence
of Enrico are written with the greatest _brio_. Indeed this venerable
churchman Gabriel Tellez excelled in drawing types, and more especially
a type of woman, of the simple, sensuous, and passionate order.
He appears to have had a strong sympathy with them, and a belief,
less monastic than sound, that there was something better in their
unfettered loyalty to nature than in the coward virtue of those who
fly the battle. His Enrico is a better fellow from the first than the
hermit. There is a manfulness about him which is more hopeful than the
self-seeking, conventional piety of Paulo. Whether Tirso de Molina
meant so much or not, his lost hermit is a vigorous rough sketch of the
stamp of man who is not essentially good, but only very much afraid
of hell-fire, and abjectly eager to escape it by acting according to
rule. The play, it will be seen, does not differ essentially from
the accepted model of the Spanish drama. There is no development of
character. The action is imposed on the personages, not produced by
them. Enrico does not repent in any real sense of the word. He only
makes a pious end, because his father, whom he loves, persuades him,
and the act is sufficient. As Paulo is at the beginning so he remains
to the end.
[SN: _The plays on “honour.”_]
With the play on the “point of honour” we return to more familiar
regions. There are hundreds of modern comedies in which the leading
personages are the lover, the wife, and the husband. But the Spaniards
were limited in their treatment of the theme. Neither the Church
nor their own more than half-oriental sentiment permitted of the
presentation of adultery as sympathetic, or even pardonable. When
they took this subject it was only for the purpose of showing by a
lively action how the husband vindicated his “honour.” This honour, as
has been already said, lay in the opinion the world had of him. Don
Gutierre Alfonso, in the _Médico de su Honra_, kills his wife, not
because he believes her guilty, but because she has been pursued by
a lover and he will not have it said that this has been, and that he
has not avenged himself. To do this effectually he must kill both--the
innocent woman and the lover who sought to seduce her. If you ask Why?
he answers “Mi opinion”--which means not what I believe, but what the
world may believe of me--leaves me no choice. If I do not, it will
say, There is a man whose wife was courted, and she lives. Where one
failed another may succeed. There must be no doubt of my “honour.” And
so after a little complaint over the tyranny of the world he kills her
with no more scruple than he would show in despatching a worthless
horse or hound. The father, or brother, who is head of a house, is
under the same obligation as the husband. His honour is concerned
in seeing that his daughter or sister gives no occasion to the evil
tongues of the world. In Calderon’s very typical _comedia de capa y
espada_, the _Dama Duende_--the ‘Fairy Lady’--the heroine is a young
and beautiful widow living with a brother, who keeps her in a separate
set of rooms in his house, and will not let her be seen. She accepts
this tyranny as a matter of course, and has no more doubt of her
brother’s right to control, and if she is found disobeying his orders,
to punish her, than she would have had of a husband’s. How far all this
gives a true picture of the society of the time has been a debated
question. It certainly was the picture which that society liked to see
drawn of itself. We may accept it as giving no more than an exaggerated
theatrical representation of truth. Spain is a country of the Roman
law, which allows a husband to kill an unfaithful wife and her lover.
It had also been affected by the long Moorish dominion, and the women
of all ranks were certainly less independent than in England. In the
higher classes they were, and in provincial towns where ancient customs
linger, still are, much secluded.
[SN: A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza.]
None of the many plays in which Calderon set forth this conception of
honour is more interesting than _A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza_.
The action takes place in Portugal in the reign of Don Sebastian, just
before that king sails on his disastrous expedition to Africa. Don
Lope de Almeida, a Portuguese gentleman of great fortune, has made a
contract of marriage with Doña Leonora de Guzman, a Castilian lady. He
has never seen his future wife, who is travelling to Lisbon under the
escort of Don Lope’s uncle, Don Bernardino, when the play opens. In
the first scene Don Lope informs the king of his approaching marriage,
and asks leave not to accompany him on his invasion of Morocco. Then
after a brief conversation with his servant Manrique, the inevitable
_gracioso_, he catches sight of an old friend, Don Juan de Silva, who
comes on the stage poorly dressed. Don Lope greets him warmly, and
with some difficulty learns his story. In a long speech, disfigured,
according to a fault too common with Calderon, by repetitions,
apostrophes, and frigid ornament, Don Juan explains that at Goa he has
killed the son of the governor, and has been compelled to fly, leaving
his possessions, and is a ruined man. The provocation was great, for
Manuel de Sousa had given him the lie. Don Juan describes how he drew
at once and killed the insulter on the spot--not, be it observed, in
a duel, but by a thrust delivered before Sousa could draw his sword.
A passage of this speech is very necessary for the understanding of
the play. Don Juan breaks into an outcry against “the tyrannical error
of men,” the folly of the world, which allows honour to be destroyed
by a breath. He labours the point, he repeats himself to insist that
his honour was destroyed when he was called a liar, and that though
he avenged himself in the not very heroic fashion described, still it
will remain the fact that he has been called a liar. At a later stage
of the play this works. For the present Don Lope gives his old friend
refuge, and tells him of his marriage. We are now introduced to Doña
Leonor, and learn that she has had a lover, in all honour of course,
Don Luis de Benavídes. He, she thinks, is dead on an expedition to
Africa. She is marrying because she is forced, but will carry his love
to the altar. Beyond that it shall not go, for it would touch her
honour. But Don Luis is not dead. He appears, and makes himself known
to her by pretending to be a diamond-merchant, and sending her by the
hand of Don Bernardino a ring she has formerly given him. There is a
scene of reproach and explanation between them, but Doña Leonor is
loyal to honour so far. Her husband now comes on the scene, and greets
her with a sonnet, to which she answers with another of double meaning.
It is addressed both to Don Luis and her husband--each may read it his
own way, the first as a farewell, the second as a promise of faithful
obedience. Don Luis decides to follow her to Portugal and die for his
love, if die he must. So the personages being introduced, and the
intrigue on foot, the first act ends.
Now Don Luis establishes himself near the house of Don Lope, and is for
ever prowling about the neighbourhood. Don Lope sees him, and wonders
what he is doing. He suspects wrong at once, for the wronged husband
of these plays is not of a free and noble nature. From the Spanish,
and Italian, point of view he who is not suspicious is credulous, and
a fool. Yet he will not believe at once, his wife being what she is,
and he what he is. He shows his confidence by asking his wife’s leave
to join the king’s expedition to Africa. Leonor gives it, and he sees
no danger. But his friend Don Juan does. He drops a hint that it is
strange the lady should be ready to part with her husband so soon.
Again Don Lope is set speculating and wondering. Meanwhile Don Luis
has been persecuting Leonor for a last interview, and she agrees to
see him in the house, in the early morning, when she thinks she will
not be discovered by her husband. Don Luis comes and is caught by Don
Lope, but invents a story to the effect that he has taken refuge in the
house to escape an enemy. Don Lope pretends to believe, but does not,
and warns Don Luis plainly enough, though not in direct terms, that he
will permit no trifling with his honour. Now the action advances very
rapidly. Don Juan warns Don Lope by putting the supposed case of a man
who knows that an insulting word has been used of a friend, who has
not heard it, and asking whether he ought to be told. Don Lope advises
silence, because the more an offence to honour is repeated, the worse.
But he knows what is meant, and makes his mind up to take a secret
revenge for the secret wrong when once he is sure. The king refuses to
take him to Africa, on the ground that he is more needed in his own
house. “Is my wrong already so public?” is Don Lope’s comment.
Now a very skilful use is made of Don Juan’s story to influence the
mind of Don Lope. Don Juan hears himself described by two cavaliers
as the man to whom the lie was given by Manuel de Sousa. He draws,
kills one, and drives the other off. Then, in a paroxysm of grief, he
once more complains to Don Lope of the injustice which compels the
insulted man to bear the stigma of a public insult for ever. This
incident confirms Don Lope’s intention to be secret in his revenge,
lest it should make his wrong known. Fortune throws a chance in his
way. Doña Leonor, encouraged by what she believes has been her escape
from discovery, invites Don Luis to meet her on the other side of
the river in a garden. He comes on the stage reading her letter, and
meets Don Lope. The husband does not know what is in the letter, but
he suspects. He invites Don Luis to cross the river with him, pushes
off without the boatman, stabs his enemy in mid-stream, and upsets the
boat. Then he swims ashore to the garden where his wife is waiting for
Don Luis. To her he tells a story of an accident, and gives her the
name of the Castilian gentleman who has perished. Leonor faints, and
thus confirms Lope’s belief that she meant to betray him. He pretends
that her anxiety was for himself; but that night he fires his house,
strangles his wife in the confusion, and appears from among the flames
bearing her body in his arms, pretending that she has been stifled by
the smoke. The scene between husband and wife is not given. At the end
he tells the king what has happened as to the death of Don Luis, and
says that being no longer needed in his own house he is ready to sail
for Africa. Don Sebastian approves of his hidden vengeance for the
secret wrong, and we are left to suppose that Don Lope goes to perish
at Alcázar el Quebir.
This is a powerful drama, and a good example of Calderon’s command of
stage effect. It is written in the finished poetic form with which
he replaced the free-flowing dialogue of Lope de Vega. The defect of
this lay in the temptation it afforded to redundancy and undramatic
ornament, but it has a sparkling icy beauty of its own. There is no
development, even very little play, of character. The interest lies in
the consistent working of a fierce, sullen, suspicious jealousy.
[SN: _The_ Auto Sacramental.]
The _Auto Sacramental_ is very Spanish, very remote from us. These
mysteries were performed during the month containing the feast of
Corpus Christi in the streets, not in the theatres, which were shut
at this time, but they were acted by professional actors. “Andar en
los carros”--to go in the cars--was the regular phrase used by the
actors for this form of their work. The cars were elaborate structures,
covered, but capable of being opened to show scenes, and of letting
down drawbridges which served as the stage. They were taken to
different parts of the town, so that performances might be given in the
squares, or before the houses of distinguished people.
_The True God Pan_ may represent for us what the _Auto Sacramental_
had become in Calderon’s hands when his genius was at its fullest
development.[36] Calderon was fond of taking classical myths for
his _autos_, and treating them as symbols of things to come since
fulfilled. He used the story of Psyche and Cupid, and also the
Andromeda. The application of the myth of Pan to Christianity was not
uncommon in the Renaissance. Pan in Spanish means “bread,” and the
_auto_ was especially meant to set forth the mystery of the Sacrament.
This play on words is the key to the whole _auto_. If the reader thinks
the conceit puerile, and of more than dubious taste, he must remember
that he is asked to look not at what would please us, but at what
did please the Spaniards,--what was accepted by their still mediæval
simplicity of piety, and was in keeping with their love for playing on
words. [SN: _The_ loa.] First came the _loa_, or praise. This was an
introductory piece, sometimes delivered by a single speaker, sometimes
containing a little action. It was common on the secular stage, but had
no necessary connection with the piece to follow, being only part of
the surroundings and dependencies of the _comedia_. Calderon’s _loa_
was a regular introduction to the _auto_. In _The True God Pan_ there
are five personages in the _loa_--History, Poetry, Fable, Music, and
Truth. History, the _dama_, begins by announcing that in this time of
general joy it becomes her to speak, since she by the mouth of Paul
and John has told how the Bread (Pan) became flesh, and the Word had
become flesh. She calls in Music and the other personages. A forfeit
dance takes place--that is to say, all sing as they dance, and each who
makes a fault is called upon to pay a small forfeit. This was, and is,
a form of amusement in Spain. The songs all refer to the mystery of
the Sacrament, and the faults are the successive departures of Music,
Poetry, and the others from the Catholic truth. Fable promises to pay
her forfeit by telling one of her stories, and beginning with the
Spanish once upon a time--“Érase que se era”--gives an allegorised
version of the myth of Pan. Poetry promises an _auto_ on the same
subject, to show that the heathen had foreknowledge of our pure truths,
but being blind, without the light of Faith, applied them to their
own False Gods. The _auto_ shall be on the True God Pan. With a loyal
address to Charles the Consoler--the unhappy Carlos II., then a small
boy, before whom the _auto_ was performed--the _loa_ ends.
[SN: _El Verdadero Dios Pan._]
The personages of the _auto_ are--Pan, Night, the Moon, the World,
Judaism, Synagogue, Heathenism, Idolatry, Apostasy, Malice, Simplicity,
the Fiend, Faith, a child, shepherds, shepherdesses, with musicians and
attendants. Pan comes out of a tent, and begins by a lyric appeal to
Night. Night comes, and Pan explains that his birth was at Bethlehem,
which in Hebrew means house of grain, and from that point goes on to
allegorise, in a fashion which it is difficult to interpret, out of
its own proper language of piety and poetry, without offence. He asks
Night to lead him to the Moon, and then again allegorises, explaining
that she is Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, and Proserpine in hell,
therefore the type of human nature, which dwells on earth, aspires
to heaven, and can sink to the infernal regions. Night refuses,
telling him that all the country is ravaged by a monster of whom Paul,
Chrysostom, and Saint Augustine speak. Here we have an example of those
“impertinences” which excited the ridicule of Madame D’Aulnoy, who
would, no doubt, have found Ben Jonson’s masques “impertinent.” Pan
recognises the monster as “Sin,” and announces that he will retire to
the desert while the Gentiles sing to their false gods. The last words
are taken up by a chorus, and we have now a scene at the altar of the
Moon. Judaism, Heathenism, Synagogue, and the others appear, only
to quarrel and debate. The _auto_ goes on, with constant interludes
of singing and dancing. The monster “Sin” is heard of, ravaging the
flocks. All prove hireling shepherds except Pan, who appears to help
Luna in her distress. There is a scene of defiance between him and the
Fiend, quite in the style of the _comedia_ when _galan_ is opposed to
_galan_. The Fiend flies, leaving the trunk of a tree with which he
meant to strike down Pan. The comic element is not wanting. Judaism
takes up the weapon which the Fiend has dropped, and threatens Pan with
it, but he only succeeds in knocking down, and killing, Synagogue. Then
he carries off the body, saying in an aside that though all the world
knows Synagogue is dead, yet he will always consider him as alive.
Judaism rejects Pan, and Apostasy will not be persuaded that Flesh can
be Bread. Apostasy, of course, stands for the heretics who will not
accept the doctrine of transubstantiation. But Heathenism is persuaded,
and Luna, typifying human nature, believes. Pan takes her as “spouse,”
and both ascend to the celestial mansions.
[SN: _Los Dos Habladores._]
The _entremes_--interlude or farce--was by nature a slight thing. In
the _Dos Habladores_--‘The Two Chatterers’--of Cervantes we have the
simple story of a gentleman who is plagued in the streets by a ragged
gabbler of insufferable fluency. He makes several attempts to shake
him off without success, but at last sees how to make use of him.
Sarmiento, the pestered gentleman, has a talkative wife. He takes the
bore home, introduces him as a poor relation, and sets him at her.
Roldan the chatterer drives the woman frantic by torrents of talk which
leave her no chance to speak. The merit of the piece on the stage lay
no doubt in the opportunity it presented for “patter” and comic acting.
Yet the _entremeses_--not this one only, but the whole class--have
great literary interest as storehouses of vivid, richly coloured,
familiar Castilian.
A drama which flowered for a century, and was so productive as the
Spanish, cannot be fully illustrated by six examples. Yet these may
serve to show the reader what he may expect to find there. Much he
will not find, or will find only in passing indications. Perfection of
poetic form in the verse is too rare; the more than human beauty of the
Elizabethan lyric, the “mighty line,” whether of Marlowe, Shakespeare,
or Corneille, the accomplishment of Molière or Racine, are wanting.
The personages are constantly recurring types, with here and there
a humour. The Juan Crespo of Calderon’s _Alcalde de Zalamea_ stands
almost alone among the characters of the Spanish stage as a being of
the real world fixed for us by the poet. What has been called the _au
delà_ of Molière, and what is found in the very greatest masters--the
something which transcends the mere action before us, and is immortally
true of all human nature--is not on the Spanish stage. But there is
much good verse, easy, with a careless grace, and spirited in Lope,
or stately with a peculiar Spanish dignity in Calderon; there is a
fine wind of romance blowing all through, and there is ingenious,
unresting, yet lucid action. If it never reaches the highest level of
our Elizabethan drama, neither does it fall to the vacant horseplay
which is to be found side by side with the tragedy of Marlowe or
Middleton. And though this essentially theatrical drama cannot be said
to have held the mirror up to nature, yet it does give a picture of the
time and the people, adapted and coloured for the boards, but still
preserving the likeness of the original. This may be said to be its
weakness. Spanish dramatic literature is so much a thing of Spain, and
of the seventeenth century, that it must needs appeal the less on that
account to other peoples and later times. None the less the spectacle
is picturesque in itself, while the great theatrical dexterity of the
Spanish playwrights will always make their work interesting to all
who care for more than the purely literary qualities of drama. The
religion of the Spaniard is conspicuous in his plays. It has been said
that Calderon was the poet of the Inquisition, and if this is not said
as mere blame, it conveys a truth. That solution of the riddle of the
painful earth which A. W. Schlegel professed to have found in him,
is no doubt only the teaching of the mediæval Church. We may on this
account decline very properly to receive him as a deeper thinker than
Shakespeare, but that teaching of the Church, to which the Inquisition
strove to confine all Spaniards, had been the guide and consolation of
all civilised Europe. To have given it a lofty poetical expression for
the second time, as Dante had for the first, was no contemptible feat.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Those who wish to make a closer acquaintance with the minor forms
of the Spanish play may be referred to the _Entremeses, Loaas, y
Jácaras_, of Don Luis Quiñones de Benavente (----?-1652), edited by Don
C. Rosell in the _Libros de Antaño_. Madrid, 1872.
[36] Vol. v. of _Autos Sacramentales_ de Don P. Calderon, published by
Don Juan Fernandez de Apontes, Madrid, 1757-1760--five years before the
public performance of _autos_ was forbidden by Charles III.
CHAPTER V. SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE.
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.’
[SN: _Pastorals and short stories._]
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.
[SN: _The_ Libros de Caballerías.]
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.
[SN: _The_ Amadis of Gaul.]
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_.
[SN: _Influence and character of these Tales._]
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.
[SN: _The real cause of their decline._]
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.
[SN: _Character of the_ Novelas de Pícaros.]
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]
[SN: _The_ Celestina.]
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 Melibœa_, 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.
[SN: _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.
[SN: _Guzman de Alfarache._]
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.
[SN: _Followers of Mateo Aleman._]
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.
[SN: _Quevedo._]
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.
[SN: _Cervantes._]
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.
[SN: _His life._]
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.
[SN: _His work._]
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.
[SN: _The minor things._]
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.
[SN: _Don Quixote._]
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]
FOOTNOTES:
[37] There is a pretty and not uncommon edition of the _Diana_
published at Madrid by Villalpando in 1795.
[38] The _Patrañuelo_ is reprinted by Ochoa in his _Tesoro de
Novelistas Españoles_, Paris, 1847, vol. i. He also gives one story
from Tirso de Molina--_The Three Deceived Husbands_. It is a _fabliau_.
A _Cigarral_ was the name given to a country villa near Toledo.
[39] _Libros de Caballerías_ in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, with
an exhaustive introduction by Don Pascual de Gayangos, vol. xl.
[40] The _Guerras Civiles de Granada_ is in vol. iii. of the
_Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_.
[41] See _Novelistas anteriores a Cervantes_ and _Novelistas
posteriores a Cervantes_ in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. iii.
and xviii.
[42] For the history of the _Celestina_ see Mr Fitz Maurice Kelly’s
introduction to the reprint of Mabbe’s excellent version in Mr Henley’s
Tudor Translations.
[43] The early history of the book, with an account of the doubts which
prevail as to its authorship, will be found in the _Vie de Lazarillo de
Tormés_. A new translation by M. A. Morel Fatio. Paris, 1886.
[44] Quevedo’s works are in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_; but the
desirable edition is that of Sancha, Madrid, 1791, in eleven pretty
volumes. A translation of ‘The Sharper’ was published in London in
1892, admirably illustrated by the Spanish draughtsman known as Daniel
Vierge.
[45] The main authority for the life of Cervantes is still the
_Biography_ by Don Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, published by the
Spanish Academy in 1819. The memory of Cervantes has undergone the
misfortune of becoming the object of a cult to the persons calling
themselves Cervantistas, who have made it an excuse for infinite
scribbling. A few new facts of no importance have been discovered, but
Navarrete’s _Vida_ remains the real authority.
[46] The fame and the excellence of _Le Diable Boiteux_ of Le Sage
entitle the author of _El Diablo Cojuelo_ to notice in this chapter.
Luis Velez de Guevara (1572 or 1574-1644) of Ecija was a fertile
dramatist. His _Diablo Cojuelo_, published in 1641, supplied the
starting-point, and the matter but not the form, of the two first
chapters of _Le Diable Boiteux_. There is nothing answering to the
famous “Après cela on nous réconcilia; nous nous embrassâmes; depuis
ce temps là nous sommes ennemis mortels.” The matter of the _Diablo
Cojuelo_ is akin to the _Visions_ of Quevedo, and the style is very
idiomatic.
CHAPTER VI. SPAIN--HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND THE MYSTICS.
SPANISH HISTORIANS--HISTORIES OF PARTICULAR EVENTS--EARLY HISTORIANS
OF THE INDIES--GENERAL HISTORIANS OF THE INDIES--GÓMARA, OVIEDO,
LAS CASAS, HERRERA, THE INCA GARCILASO--MENDOZA, MONCADA, AND
MELO--GENERAL HISTORIES--OCAMPO, ZURITA, MORALES--MARIANA--THE
DECADENCE--SOLIS--MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS--GRACIAN AND THE PREVALENCE
OF GÓNGORISM--THE MYSTICS--SPANISH MYSTICISM--THE INFLUENCE OF THE
INQUISITION ON SPANISH RELIGIOUS LITERATURE--MALON DE CHAIDE--JUAN
DE ÁVILA--LUIS DE GRANADA--LUIS DE LEON--SANTA TERESA--JUAN DE LA
CRUZ--DECADENCE OF THE MYSTIC WRITERS.
[SN: _Spanish historians._]
It was natural that a very active time of great literary vigour should
be rich in historians. Spanish literature is, indeed, fertile in
historical narratives of contemporary events written by eyewitnesses,
and not less in authoritative narratives, the work of almost
contemporary authors. A people so proud of the present could not be
indifferent to the past. The Spaniard least of all; for he is, in his
own phrase, _linajudo_--proud of his lineage--not less concerned to
show that he had ancestors than to convince the world of his greatness.
Thus the sixteenth century, 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 as
the seventeenth century drew on, there was less and less which the
Spaniard cared to record, till after the revolt of Catalonia and the
separation of Portugal in 1640 we come to a period of entire silence.
The exhaustion of the national genius was felt here as elsewhere. When
the voice of Spanish history was last heard, it was in the conquest of
Mexico by Antonio de Solis--the work of an accomplished man of letters
who looked back over the disasters of his own time to the more glorious
achievement of the past.
[SN: _Historians of particular events._]
Much of the historical writing of the great epoch--the histories of
religious orders, of which there are many, and of towns, of which there
not a few, and genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable--does
not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But it would be a very
pedantic interpretation of the word which would exclude the _Comentario
de la Guerra de Alemaña_[47] of Luis de Ávila y Zuñiga. It is an
account of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an eyewitness
who served the emperor, and attended him in his retirement at Yuste.
The merit of this, and many other books of the same order, lies less in
any beauty of style they possess than in the interest which attaches
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 religion,”
having lived the full life of a fighting pious Spaniard who could
use both sword and pen. He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low
Countries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the _Theory and
Practice of War_. The commentaries were published in 1592. The treatise
had appeared in 1577. The great subject of the Low Country wars of a
somewhat later period--1588-1599--was also treated by another Spaniard
of the same stamp as Don Bernardino. This was Don Carlos Coloma,
Marquis of Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist (he came on
an embassy to England in the reign of James I.), and man of letters.
Besides his _Guerras de los Paises Bajos_ he made a translation of
Tacitus.
[SN: _Early Historians of the Indies._]
Contemporary with these and less famous authors of commentaries is the
long line of writers usually classed together by the Spaniards as Early
Historians of the Indies.[48] The desire to record what they had seen
and suffered was strong in the _conquistadores_, and a long list might
be made of their names. Only the most famous can be mentioned here.
No more amazing story of shipwreck and misery among savages has ever
been told than in the _Naufragios_ of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. He
was wrecked in Florida, and remained wandering 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 _True History_ was provoked by the earlier narrative
of Gómara, and was written to vindicate the honour due to himself and
his fellow-adventurers, which he thought had been unduly sacrificed by
the official historian of Cortés. Bernal Diaz is a Spanish Monluc, but
both ruder and more mediæval than the inimitable Gascon. Francisco de
Jerez, Augustin de Zarate, and Pedro Cieza de Leon (the work of the
last-named has only been wholly published in our own time) give the
Peruvian half of that wonderful generation of conquest.
[SN: _General Historians of the Indies._]
Beside these, the actual eyewitnesses of events, are to be put the
general historians of the Indies. The first who published his work
complete was Francisco Lopez de Gómara. He was born in 1510, too
late to share in the conquest, and was, in fact, a man of letters,
who travelled, indeed, but only in Italy. The accident that he was
secretary to Cortés when he had returned for the last time to Spain
probably directed Gómara’s studies. He was accused of knowing nothing
of many parts of his subject except what Cortés had told him, and of
having distorted truth in the interest of his patron. But Gómara wrote
well, and the immense contemporary interest in the subject gave his
_History of the Indies_ and his _Chronicle of New Spain_, which is a
panegyric of Cortés, a great vogue. They first appeared in 1552, 1553,
and 1554. An older man, and a much greater authority, was Gonzalo
Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557), whose _General and Natural
History of the Indies_ was partly published in 1535, before Gómara’s.
But the author kept his work in hand till his death, and appears to
have made corrections and additions to the last.[49] Oviedo was in the
West Indies in official posts for forty years, beginning in 1513, and
was therefore a contemporary of, though not a partaker in, the great
conquests. He is a garrulous writer of no great force of mind, much
more a chronicler than a historian. [SN: _Gómara, Oviedo, Las Casas,
Herrera, the Inca Garcilaso._] There are two general historians 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 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 Castilians in
the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea_ was published in 1601-1615
at Madrid. While compiling this great book, the most valuable part of
his work, Herrera was also engaged in drawing up a _General History
of the World in the time of our Lord the King Philip II._, and other
treatises, which are, in fact, statements on behalf of the Government,
and have in historical literature something like the place of the
yearly summaries in the old _Annual Register_. Herrera’s style was
businesslike, but he can never have been read for the pleasure of
reading him. With these writers may be placed the Inca Garcilaso de
la Vega (1540-1616), an attractive and rather pathetic figure. His
father was one of the _conquistadores_, and his mother belonged to the
sacred Inca race. The son was almost equally proud of his pedigree on
both sides. The Inca Garcilaso, as he is always called, did some other
literary work, including a translation of the once famous _Dialogues on
Love by Leon Hebreo_, an echo of the Florentine Platonists, written in
Italian by the exiled Spanish Jew, Juda Abarbanel, but he is best known
by the _Commentaries on Peru_. In this work, published in two parts in
1609 and 1617, he contrived to reconcile a genuine Christian zeal and
an equally genuine Castilian pride of descent with a tender memory of
his mother’s people. Garcilaso, though weak and garrulous, is touching,
and his commentaries have been the great storehouse of the more poetic
legends told of the Incas.[51]
Though writers who recorded what they had seen, and others who only
recorded what had happened in their time, or near it, cannot be wholly
classed together, yet the authors named above have certain qualities in
common. 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 has become associated with the character of the
Spaniard. There is no want of pride, which was, indeed, amply justified
by the stories they had to tell, but little of the vanity so common in
the time of Spain’s decadence.
[SN: _Mendoza, Moncada, and Melo._]
The account of the rebellion of the Moriscoes written by Don Diego de
Mendoza supplies a link between the series of histories just named
and the histories which belong wholly to learning and literature. The
subject was contemporary to the author, and members of his family took
an active part in the events; but Don Diego had a literary ambition
which is only too visible. It was plainly his intention to make a
careful copy of Latin models--chiefly Sallust--and in one passage he
slavishly follows the account given by Tacitus of the discovery of
the remains of the legions of Varus, by the soldiers of Germanicus.
But there was an intrinsic force in Diego de Mendoza which saved him
from falling into a mere school exercise, and though the mould of
sentence is too much taken from the Latin, the vocabulary is very pure
Castilian. He protests in one place against the use of the foreign word
_centinela_ for a sentinel, in place of the old 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 extent of its merits. It appeared in 1623,
twelve years before the death of the author, who was then viceroy in
Lombardy. A work on the same scale as Moncada’s, which has been praised
much beyond its merits, is the account of the revolt of the Catalans
against Philip IV. in 1640 by Francisco Manuel de Melo. It contains
only the beginning of the war, and though the author seems to promise
a continuation, he never went further. The book was published in 1645.
Melo had a curious literary history. He was a Portuguese in the Spanish
service, and a kinsman of the unfortunate general who lost the battle
of Rocroi. He lived long, wrote much, and it was his fortune to survive
Góngorism. But his _History of the Troubles, Secession, and War of
Catalonia_ was written while he was under a bad literary influence.
Without being exactly “Góngorical,” it is written in a strained,
pretentious, snappy style, which covers a decided poverty of thought.
[SN: _General Histories._]
The great school of Spanish historians has an unbroken descent from
the chronicles of the Middle Ages. It had been the custom of the kings
of Castile from the reign of Alfonso XI. (1350-1369), surnamed the
Implacable, or “he of the Rio Salado,” from the scene of the battle in
which he overthrew the last considerable Moorish invasion of Spain,
to appoint a chronicler. With Florian de Ocampo, who held this post
under Charles V., the chronicler became the “historiographer.” He was
not necessarily a scholar and student of the past, yet he might be if
he so pleased, and the spirit of the time invited him to adopt the
new character. [SN: _Ocampo, Zurita, Morales._] Ocampo himself 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 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 Catholic, and he was himself
one of the many secretaries of Philip II. Zurita, who was born in
1512 and died in 1580, was appointed historiographer of Aragon by
the choice of the Cortes in 1548. For a man with the ambition to be
a historian, the position was enviable. It gave him independence, a
right of access to all records; he had a fine story to tell, and as he
had no predecessors, he had no need to spend time in reading the works
of others. Zurita was worthy of his fortune. His _Annals of the Crown
of Aragon_ down to the death of Ferdinand the Catholic, in six folio
volumes, published between 1562 and 1580, has kept its place as a work
of scholarship and criticism.
[SN: _Mariana._]
The great name of Spanish historical literature is that of Juan de
Mariana,[52] the Jesuit, whose name once rang all over Europe for his
defence of regicide in the treatise _De Rege_, written for the benefit
of his pupil, Philip III. But this and his other treatises were written
in Latin, and never translated by himself. His place in Spanish
literature is due to his history. Mariana was of the most humble birth,
for he was a foundling. He was born at Talavera in 1536, and 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 Bacon, Mariana
did not believe that the learned language would outlive the modern
tongues. He was induced to make a Castilian version of his own Latin,
and when doing it he took the freedom which even the most strict critic
will allow to belong to the translator of his own work. He enlarged,
corrected, and amended, till the Castilian history, which appeared
in 1601, was almost a new work. Four editions, further enlarged and
amended, appeared before the author’s death in 1623.
In answering a minute critic, Mariana, with an audacity not perhaps to
be excused, declared that if he had stopped to verify every small fact,
Spain would have waited for ever for a history. This bold avowal of his
indifference to the tithings of mint and anise illustrates sufficiently
the spirit in which he wrote. He was not a historical scholar in the
same sense as Zurita--a minute student of original records--but a man
of great learning and high patriotic spirit, who applied himself to the
making of a work of literature worthy of the past of his 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 to be
legend, simply because it was picturesque and familiar. Against these
defects, which from the literary point of view are no defects at all,
are to be put a fine style quite uncontaminated by the usual defects of
Spanish prose, a great power of narrative, and then this, that Mariana
gave the history of his country throughout antiquity and the Middle
Ages in a lofty patriotic spirit, which may not interpret and explain
ancient institutions, but does convey to us a sense that we see an
energetic people of fine qualities struggling on to high destinies.
[SN: _The decadence._]
The fall from Mariana to any of his contemporaries or successors is
great. The _Cisma de Inglaterra_--‘The English Schism’--by Pedro de
Ribadeneyra (1527-1611), enjoys the reputation of being a well-written
account of the great movement by which the English Church vindicated
its independence 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 Mariana a life of Charles V., which is
of about the same length as the Jesuit’s whole history. Sandoval shows
what the reign of the great emperor looked like to a learned Spaniard
of the later sixteenth century, but it has no great force and no merit
of style.[53]
Other names might be added--Bartolomé de Argensola’s _History of the
Moluccas_ (1609), the work of a pure man of letters who wrote to
please his patron, and the _History of the Goths_ of the diplomatist
Saavedra-Fajardo, published at Munster in 1649--but they could swell a
list to little purpose. All these writers had the good fortune to write
before the invasion of Góngorism, except Saavedra-Fajardo, who escaped
it by residence abroad. [SN: _Solis._] Antonio de Solis (1610-1686)
had the honour of resisting the plague. If the second-rate men of a
literature could be dealt with at any length in our limits, Solis would
be an interesting figure to dwell on. He was an accomplished man, who
did very creditable work both as poet 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. 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 of Mexico_, published
by the help of a friend in 1684.[54] The excellence of the style was
recognised from the first, and has preserved the reputation of the
book. Yet it wants the rude life of the contemporary narratives, and
the understanding of, or at least strenuous effort to understand, the
native side, which is to be found in Mr Prescott. Flowing and eloquent
as Solis is, he is also somewhat nerveless. Perhaps our knowledge of
the fact that he stood on the very verge of the time when the voice
of literature in Spain was to be silenced altogether makes the reader
predisposed to find something in him of the signs of exhaustion. He
closes the time when the Spaniards wrote for themselves, and also wrote
well.
[SN: _Miscellaneous writers._]
Before closing this survey of the great period of Castilian literature
by a notice, which must necessarily be brief, of one intensely national
body of writers, some words must be said about the large class of
authors of miscellaneous books belonging to the first half of the
seventeenth century. The press was active in those years. Unfortunately
it was an age of oddity and extravagance. [SN: _Gracian and the
prevalence of Góngorism._] Its dominating figure is that Baltasar
Gracian (1601-1658) to whom the admiration of Sir M. Grant Duff
among ourselves, and the whim, if not the cynicism, of Schopenhauer
among the Germans, have given a limited revival of popularity in our
own time. He was an Aragonese Jesuit, who published his books under
the name of his brother Lorenzo. Gracian is not uninteresting as a
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 “natural
man,” whom he finds on the island of St Helena. It may have helped
Swift by showing him how not to write _Gulliver’s Travels_. The work
which has been revived of late by the freak of Schopenhauer is the
_Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia_--‘Hand (or Pocket) Oracle and
Art of Prudence.’ It is a collection of maxims. Mr Morley went to the
extreme limit of good nature when he said that Gracian sometimes gives
a neat turn to a commonplace. As a rule, his maxims are examples of
all that maxims ought not to be--long, obscure by dint of straining
after epigrammatic force, and in substance of platitude all compact. We
soon find that we are dealing with a “haberdasher of small wares,” who
is endeavouring to impose himself upon us as wise by dint of a short
obscure manner and a made-up face of gravity.
Gracian is worth singling out, not for his merits, but because he so
thoroughly typified a something in the Spaniard which, oddly mixed with
his real humour and sound sense, gives him a leaning to the theatrical
in the worst sense of the word. When Shakespeare drew Don Adriano de
Armado, the fantastical Spaniard, he was not laughing at random at
the foreigner. And this side of the people was never more conspicuous
than in the middle seventeenth century. It came out everywhere, from
serious treatises on politics down to the fencing-book of the egregious
Don Luis de Narvaez de Pacheco. It was not that Spain wanted for able
men. Diego de Saavedra-Fajardo, the author of the history of the Goths,
and of a curious book of emblems called _Empresas Politicas_, or ‘The
Idea of a Political Christian 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
century. It adds to the piquancy of the contrast that at a time when
Spain was marching resolutely, and with her eyes open, to ruin, by
accumulating fault upon fault, the political writers named here, and
others, abounded in good sense. To take a single example. Among the
emblems of Saavedra-Fajardo is one representing a globe supported
between the sterns of two warships, with the motto “His Polis.” In the
Essay the Spanish diplomatist sets out the whole doctrine, so familiar
in our own days as that of “sea-power,” with great force. Yet this was
written, a melancholy example of useless wisdom, when his country was
destroying its last chance of maintaining a navy, by bleeding itself
nearly to death in the wars of Germany for the purpose of vindicating
the claims of the house of Hapsburg.
Here may be mentioned, a little out of his date, but hardly out of his
place, for it is difficult to say where he ought to be classed, the
_Viage Entretenido_, or ‘Amusing Voyage,’ of Agustin de Roxas or Rojas.
He was a very busy miscellaneous writer, who led a strange roaming
life as a soldier, strolling actor, and in some sense _pícaro_. The
_Viage Entretenido_ is the only part of his work which survives. It
is a rather incoherent 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 wandering _enfant sans souci_ to whom the
hardships of his life, long tramping journeys, hunger, poverty, rags,
and spasms of furious hard work are endurable because they give him
intervals of reckless idleness, and save him from what he especially
hates, which is orderly industry. The _Viage Entretenido_ was the
model of Scarron’s _Voyage Comique_. It appeared perhaps in 1603, but
certainly very early in the seventeenth century.[56]
[SN: _The Mystics._]
A survey of Spanish literature of the great epoch cannot end more
appropriately than with the writers who by common consent are called
the Mystics. The term has become established in use, and there would be
pedantry in rejecting it. Yet it is far from being accurately applied.
What is, properly speaking, called Mysticism is not congenial to the
Spaniard, and was inevitably odious to the Inquisition. A train of
religious thought which led infallibly to trust in the “Inner Light,”
to the contempt for dogma, to indifference to the hierarchy, and to the
preference for emotional piety over morality of conduct, could not but
be suspect to a body which existed for the purpose of maintaining the
authority of the Church. One Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos, did indeed
show himself a true mystic, and was the father of 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 united in ecstatic devotion with God, the
sins of the flesh are no sins at all. The common-sense of the Spaniard,
which was never more conspicuous than in the greatest of his orthodox
mystics, Santa Teresa, left him in no doubt as to the real meaning
of such teaching as that. The stern handling it received from the
Inquisition had his sincere approval. [SN: _Spanish mysticism._] The
mysticism of the Spaniards consisted wholly in a certain Platonism or
Neo-Platonism, in the doctrine which can be sufficiently well learnt
in Spenser’s _Hymne of Heavenly Love_. This might have lent itself to
the extreme of Quietism or Antinomianism, but it was restrained by
the sense of the necessity for active virtue, which was strong in the
Spaniard, and was the result of the Church’s teaching that there is no
salvation without works.
It is not, however, the doctrine of the mystics, but their importance,
and the literary quality of their work, which concern us here. As
regards their position in the country, and their influence with all
ranks of Spaniards, there can be no question. It was shown not only
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
Carmelites.[57] To their work we may apply the expression, very
Platonist and old, which Diego de Estella uses of the soul in his _Very
Devout Meditations on the Love of God_. “Da vida,” he says, and “es la
forma del cuerpo”--“It gives life, and is the form of the body.”
“For soul is form, and doth the body make,”
as the same truth stands in Spenser’s hymn. The intense religious
spirit of the Spaniards gives their work life, and is the form of their
body. All the best of this side, if one ought not to say this basis, of
their character has gone into the “mystic” works. [SN: _The influence
of the Inquisition on Spanish religious literature._] The Spaniard has
not been a great preacher. Part of the explanation of this, on the face
of it, rather surprising fact, is no doubt to be found in saying that
if the Inquisition had listened to every denunciation of a preacher,
nobody would have been found to risk going into a pulpit. For, while
denying that 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, who were hostile to him as an
Augustinian.[58] Santa Teresa was sequestered by the Inquisition at
Seville. Her disciple, Juan de la Cruz, who helped her in the reform
of the Carmelites, was imprisoned for a year, and only released by the
intrepid exertions of the saint and the use of the royal authority. It
was dangerous to speak without much thought and care. So the Spaniards,
who might have given their country what the great Caroline divines
gave to English and Bossuet to French literature, preferred to confine
themselves to writing, where they could weigh every word and subject
their work to the revision of superiors.
The bulk of the Spanish mystic, religious, and ascetic writings is
enormous. By far the greater part of them have fallen dead to the
Spaniards themselves. They have never been made the subject of an
exhaustive study by any native scholar.[59]
[SN: _Malon de Chaide._]
The great names among the Spanish mystics of the golden time of
their literature are those of Malon de Chaide, Juan de Ávila, Luis
de Granada, Luis de Leon, Santa Teresa, and San Juan de la Cruz--and
of these Santa Teresa alone is a living force. It is difficult to
understand what sense the word mystic bore to the first person who
applied it to Pedro Malon de Chaide (?1530----?). He was of the Order
of St Augustine, and was a master of a fine-flowing, rather unctuous
style. The work by which he is known in Spanish literature is _The
Treatise of the Conversion of the Glorious Mary Magdalen_. It was
written for a young lady who had resolved to take the vows, but was
not published till many years later. Malon de Chaide was one of those
who denounced the evil influence 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. [SN: _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 is _The
Spiritual Treatise_ on the verse _Audi, filia_--“Hearken, O daughter,
and consider,” &c. It was at first only a letter of advice written for
a lady, Sancha Carrillo, who had resolved to take the vows, but Ávila
added to it largely, and in its final form it is a complete guide for
those who wish to lead the religious life, whether in a monastery or
in the century. It is not, perhaps, a book to be recommended to those
who cannot read with the eyes of a Spanish Roman Catholic, or at least
with as much critical faculty as will enable them to understand, and
to allow for, that point of view. The style of Juan de Ávila, though
verbose in the weaker passages, has an ardent eloquence at times, and
has always a large share of the religious quality of unction.
[SN: _Luis de Granada._]
Luis de Granada (1504-1588) and Luis de Leon (1527-1601) were
contemporaries, younger men than Juan de Ávila, and to some extent his
followers. _The Guide for Sinners_ of the first, and the _Perfecta
Casada_ of the second, have remained more or less popular books of
devotion. At least they are reprinted among the Spaniards. _The Guide
for Sinners_ was translated and read all over Europe. Granada’s _Book
of Prayer and Meditation_ on “the principal mysteries of our faith”
was hardly less famous. He had both the qualities and the defects
of the style of his master. [SN: _Luis de Leon._] Luis de Leon was
probably the greatest of the mystics in intrinsic force of intellect
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, Doña 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 lead a religious life,
and had been taught that it was necessary not only to do but to believe
what was right, were anxious for the constant guidance of a teacher
who must be both orthodox and learned. Santa Teresa insisted greatly
on this. The treatise is a long comment on the passage of Scripture
which will suggest itself to everybody as fit for the purpose--the last
chapter of Proverbs, beginning at the tenth verse. But the allegorical
meaning is more insisted on than the plain sense of the words, and the
_Perfecta Casada_ is a treatise on doctrine. Luis de Leon wrote much
else, including an exposition of the _Names of Christ_ and of _The Book
of Job_.
[SN: _Santa Teresa._]
The greatest name among the Spanish mystics, and one of the greatest
in all religious history, is that of Teresa de Zepeda y Ahumada, who
called herself “in religion” Teresa de Jesus. She was born of a noble
family of Ávila in Old Castile in 1515, and died in 1582. We are
not directly concerned here with her religious life, her reform of
the Carmelites, or her doctrine, which indeed was not original. The
inspiring motive of Santa Teresa was her desire to save the souls of
the Lutheran heretics, not by preaching to them, but by so reforming
her own order, the 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.
In both Santa Teresa wrote the same Castilian--the language as it was
spoken by the nobles, not learned, indeed, but not wholly uneducated,
who belonged to “the kidney of Castile,” and had not been affected by
the Italianate style of the Court. Her own great character is stamped
on every line. Nobody ever showed less of the merely emotional saintly
character, “Meandering about, capricious, melodious, weak, at the
will of devout whim mainly!” Her letters, which are not only the most
attractive part of her writing but even the most valuable, show her not
only as a great saint but as a great lady, with a very acute mind, a
fine wit, and an abounding good sense.
[SN: _Juan de la Cruz._]
Santa Teresa’s disciple and colleague in the reform of the Carmelites,
Juan de la Cruz, whose family name was Yepes (1542-1591), not unjustly
named the Ecstatic Doctor, was emphatically a saint of the “melodious”
order. His emotional--not to say gushing--style has been, and is, much
admired 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 in itself, and apart from what justified it at the time, is
nauseous. A quite sufficient example will be found in the much-quoted
verses in his _Ascent of Mount Carmel_, which begin, “En una noche
escura.” Yet Juan de la Cruz wrote eloquently in his emotional way, and
his verse is beautiful.
[SN: _Decadence of the Mystic writers._]
These are but a very few names from among the Spanish mystic, moral,
and ascetic writers, but it would only be a very full history of
Spanish religious literature which would 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 less thought in Spanish religious literature and more
emotion, while that emotion had an increasing tendency to abound in the
amatory images of Juan de la Cruz.[60]
FOOTNOTES:
[47] This and most of the other works mentioned here will be found
in the two volumes of _Historiadores de Sucesos Particulares_ in the
_Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. xxi. and xxviii.
[48] The _Historiadores Primitevos de Indias_ fill two volumes--xxii.
and xxvi.--in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_.
[49] The standard edition of the _Historia General y Natural de las
Indias, islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano_, is that in four volumes
folio, edited by Don Amador de los Rios for the Academy of History in
1851-1855.
[50] _Coleccion de Documentos inéditos para la Historia de España_,
vols. lxii.-lxvi.
[51] The commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso were early translated into
English, and have been reprinted by the Hakluyt Society.
[52] The works of Mariana are in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols.
xxx. and xxxi.; but it is much more pleasant to read his history in the
edition of Ibarra, 1780, 2 vols. folio, beautifully printed.
[53] There is not, I think, any modern edition of Sandoval, whose life
of Charles V. first appeared in 1604-1606, since the second edition of
Antwerp, 1681. It was translated and abridged in 1703 by Captain John
Stevens, an indefatigable hack to whom we are indebted for many bad
versions of Spanish originals.
[54] A very finely printed edition of _The Conquest of Mexico_,
unfortunately disfigured by silly plates, was published at Madrid by
Sancha in 1783.
[55] Part of Gracian is in the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. lxv.
A translation of the _Oráculo Manual_ has been included in _The Golden
Treasury_.
[56] _El Viage Entretenido de Agustin de Roxas._ Madrid, 1793.
[57] For this rather unexpected side to the character of Philip IV.,
and strange feature of the Spanish life of the time, see _Cartas de las
Venerable Madre Sor Maria de Agreda y del Señor Rey Don Felipe IV._ Don
Francisco Silvela. Madrid, 1885.
[58] For this example of the Inquisition at work see the papers of his
case in vols. x. and xi. of the _Documentos inéditos_.
[59] My own obligation is mainly to M. Paul Rousselot’s _Mystiques
Espagnols_, Paris, 1867, which the Spaniards have found it easier to
call insufficient than to displace.
[60] All the writers mentioned here will be found in the _Tesoro de
Escritores Místicos Españoles_ of Ochoa. Paris, _n.d._
CHAPTER VII. ELIZABETHAN POETRY.
THE STARTING-POINT--ITALIAN INFLUENCE--THE OPPOSITION TO
RHYME--EXCUSES FOR THIS--ITS LITTLE EFFECT--POETRY OF FIRST
HALF OF ELIZABETH’S REIGN--SPENSER--ORDER OF HIS WORK--HIS
METRE--CHARACTER OF HIS POETRY--SIR P. SIDNEY--THE ‘APOLOGIE FOR
POETRIE’--HIS SONNETS AND LYRICS--WATSON--THE SONNETEERS--OTHER
LYRIC POETRY--THE COLLECTIONS AND SONG-BOOKS--THE HISTORICAL
POEMS--FITZ-GEOFFREY AND MARKHAM--WARNER--DANIEL DRAYTON--THE SATIRIC
POETS--LODGE--HALL--MARSTON--DONNE.
[SN: _The starting-point._]
A long silence and two generations of effort preceded the renaissance
of English poetry, which may conveniently, though perhaps somewhat
arbitrarily, be said to date from the publication of the _Shepherd’s
Calendar_ in 1579. The choice of this year as the actual starting-point
is arbitrary, because Spenser was already recognised by his friends as
the “new poet,” and his work was known among them in manuscript. It had
therefore begun to live, and to exercise an influence, before it was
given to the world. But the convention which treats the ascertainable
date of printing, and not the first moment when the poet’s mind
began to create, as the starting-point, is useful, and we may (always
remembering that it is a convention) put 1579 at the head of the
history of the great Elizabethan poetry.
[SN: _Italian influence._]
With us, as with the Spaniard, the spark, which was to grow into so
great a flame, was brought from Italy. Before Spenser there had been
Surrey and Wyatt, who had worked in the Italian metres in the reign
of Henry VIII., and their example had been set up for all to follow
by the publication of _Tottel’s Miscellany_ in 1557. There had also
been the leaders of the New Learning, and the classic models. But the
resemblance between the history of poetry in the two countries goes
no further. Italy could affect only individual Englishmen. No such
similarity of language, beliefs, and character existed between the
two countries as would have enabled Italy to press on us as it did on
Spain, all along the line. There was not the same proximity, nor had
there been an equally close previous relationship of pupil to master
stretching far back into the Middle Ages. The Italian influence in
England was rather an incitement to independent effort than a mere
pattern to be copied, as it was to the Spaniard. [SN: _The opposition
to rhyme._] Nor were the Greek and Latin models more, though in
this case a deliberate effort was made to bring English verse into
subjection to ancient prosody. Much ridicule was shed then, and has
been poured since, on those who endeavoured to write English verse by
quantity only. The quaint pragmatic figure of Spenser’s friend Gabriel
Harvey, who was the most conspicuous, though not the first of the
school, was of itself enough to confer a certain absurdity on the
effort. And the verse produced in this struggle to do the impossible
was altogether worthy of Harvey’s oddities. Putting aside Stanyhurst’s
_Æneid_, published in 1582, which is the most bulky example of
misapplied labour, it ought, one would think, to have been warning
enough to those who thought to force English into an alien mould when
they found a writer of the real intelligence and natural good taste
of Webbe, author of _The Discourse of English Poetrie_, contentedly
pronouncing such a line as this:--
“Hedgerows hott doo resound with grasshops mournfully squeeking.”
Webbe did worse, for he seems really to have believed that he improved
Spenser, whom he admired and recognised as the new poet, when he turned
the song in _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ beginning--
“Ye dainty Nymphes that in this blessed brooke doo bathe your brest,”
into this:--
“O ye Nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke
For to bathe your pretty breasts at all times,
Leave the watrish bowers hyther and to me come
At my request now.”
Yet the mistake of Webbe was one which Spenser himself, and Sidney, had
so far shared that they played with the classic metres. [SN: _Excuses
for this._] Nor was it altogether absurd, but, on the contrary,
natural, and even inevitable. When there were no native models newer
than Chaucer to follow, and when the splendour of classic literature
was just being fully recognised, it was not wonderful that men who were
in search of a poetic form should have been deluded into thinking that
they could reproduce what they admired, or should have agreed with
Ascham that “to follow rather the Goths in rhyming, than the Greeks in
true versifying, were even to eat acorns with swine, when we may freely
eat bread among men.”
[SN: _Its little effect._]
Then this mania, pedantry, or whatever other evil name may be given it,
never attained to the dignity of doing harm. No Englishman who could
write good rhyme was ever deterred from doing so by the fear that he
would become a Goth, and eat acorns with swine. The real belief of
the Elizabethan poets was expressed in _The Arte of English Poesie_,
which tradition has assigned to George Puttenham. If we have not the
feet of the Greeks and Latins, which we “as yet never went about to
frame (the nature of our language and wordes not permitting it), we
have instead thereof twentie other curious points in that skill more
than they ever had, by reason of our rime, and tunable concords, or
simphonie, which they never observed. Poesie therefore may be an arte
in our vulgar, and that very methodicall and commendable.” _The Arte of
English Poesie_ was published in 1589. Webbe’s discourse had appeared
three years before. The conflict, such as it was, was really over,
though the superiority of “versifying” to rhyming might continue to be
discussed as an academic question. Thomas Campion, who, as if to show
the hollowness of his own cause, was a writer of rhymed songs of great
beauty, might talk “of the childish titilation of riming” in his _Art
of English Poetry_ in 1602, and be answered by Daniel in his _Defence
of Ryme_, but they were discussing “a question of the schools.” The
attempt to turn English poetry from its natural course belongs to the
curiosities of literary history.
[SN: _Poetry of first half of Elizabeth’s reign._]
Poetry so completely dominated the literature of Elizabeth’s reign that
we can leave not only the prose, which was entirely subordinate, but
the drama, poetic as it was, aside for the time. There was no great
drama till the poets had suppled and moulded the language. The example
set by Surrey and Wyatt had no such immediate influence as had been
exercised by Boscan and Garcilaso in Spain. Part even of their own work
hardly rose above the level of the doggerel to which English verse
had fallen. Those who look for an explanation of the flowering or the
barrenness of literature elsewhere than in the presence or absence of
genius in a people, may account for this by the troubled times which
followed the death of Henry VIII. But the return of peace and security
with the accession of Elizabeth brought no change. The first twenty
years of her reign were as barren as the disturbed years of Edward or
Mary. Indeed they were even poorer, for Sackville’s Induction to _The
Mirror of Magistrates_ and his _Complaint of Buckingham_, which have
been recognised as the best verse written in England between Chaucer
and Spenser, though not published till Elizabeth was on the throne, had
been written before 1559--in the reign of Mary. Between this year and
the publication of _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ (1579) the voice of poetry
was not mute in England--at least not the voice of those who were
endeavouring to write poetry. When Webbe spoke, with more emphasis than
respect, of the “infinite fardles of printed pamphlets,” mostly “either
meere poeticall or which tend in some respects (as either in matter
or forme) to poetry,” by which “this country is pestered, all shoppes
stuffed, and every study furnished,” he was not wholly exaggerating.
Translators were very busy, and not a few published original work.
There were certainly many others who wrote but did not publish. But
these forerunners could in no case have deserved more than the praise
which Sir John Harington gave to one of them, George Turberville:--
“When times were yet but rude thy pen endeavoured
To polish barbarism with purer style.”
Their inferiority to Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville diminishes their
claim even to so much as this.
They were enslaved to the old fourteen-syllabled metre, which might or
might not be printed in lines of eight and six, but which, in whatever
way it was arranged, had a fatal tendency to fall into a rocking-horse
movement. We constantly meet with rhymes like these:--
“The hawtye verse that Maro wrote
made Rome to wonder muche,
And mervayle none for why the style
and weightynes was such,
That all men judged Parnassus Mownt
had clefte herselfe in twayne,
And brought forth one that seemed to drop
from out Minervaes brayne.”
These verses, which are from Barnabe Googe’s _Epitaph_ on Thomas
Phayre, are not bad examples of a kind of metre which seems to come
naturally to Englishmen, but their capacity for turning to doggerel
is patent. They, with here and there a note which shows that if the
writer had had the good fortune to be young after, and not before,
_The Shepherd’s Calendar_, he might have contributed to the great
body of exquisite Elizabethan songs, make the staple of the verse
of the first half of the reign. These men are entitled to their own
honour. They rough-harrowed the ground. George Turberville, who was
born about 1530 and died about 1594; George Gascoigne, whose dates
are 1535 or thereabouts to 1577; and Barnabe Googe, born in 1540, who
died in 1594, tried many things; and if they did nothing else, they
helped to extend the knowledge of the average Englishman, and to give
practice to the language by their translations. The strongest of the
three was Gascoigne, who, in addition to his attempt to write a verse
satire--_The Steel Glass_--was the author of some pretty occasional
poetry, of a translation of Ariosto’s _Gli Suppositi_, stories from
Bandello, and a tragedy of Euripides, and who may be said to have
begun the writing of critical essays in English by his brief note
of Instruction for the construction of English verse, published as a
preface to _The Steel Glass_.[61]
[SN: _Spenser._]
The sincerity with which the best intellects in England were studying
poetry, and looking for a poet, helps to explain the instant
recognition of Spenser. At this moment the times called for the man,
and he came. Edmund Spenser was born in London, probably in 1552, of a
Lancashire branch of a very ancient and famous house. His family was
poor, and he received his education at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a
sizar. He remained at Cambridge from 1569 to 1573, and it is believed
that he then spent some time in the north of England with his family
before coming to London to seek his fortune. It could be obtained in
one way only--by the favour of friends who could secure him a place.
That Spenser was resolved to make poetry the chief aim of his life
is certain; but he could not live by it at a time when no form of
literature, with the exception of the drama, brought certain payment,
and even the drama gave but starvation wages. He had to rely on the
willingness of powerful patrons to see him provided for because he was
a poet. Spenser was not without friends who might have been useful.
At Cambridge he had become known to Gabriel Harvey, who, as the older
man, a good scholar, and perhaps also as a person of pragmatical
self-confidence and indomitable pertinacity, exercised a certain
limited influence over him. Harvey introduced Spenser to Leicester
and Leicester’s kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. His undoubted Puritanism
was, it may be, in part learnt from the equally undoubted though very
different Puritanism of the queen’s favourite. But Leicester did, and
it may be could do, little for his client. _The Shepherd’s Calendar_
was published in 1579, a year or two after Spenser came to London, but
he had no share in “the rich fee which poets won’t divide.” There is
no need to look far for the causes of his disappointment. Elizabeth
had little money, and much to do with it, while her Lord Treasurer,
Burghley, who had no love for Leicester, was the man to meet any
pensioned poet with the ungracious attitude of Sully to Casaubon:
“You are no use, sir, and you cost the king as much as two captains.”
In 1580 Spenser accompanied Lord Grey to Ireland, where estates of
confiscated land were to be won. From that time he was plunged into
the horrible strife between the anarchy of Celtic Ireland and the
repression of the queen’s officers, who fought for order with ferocious
means. He obtained a grant of land in County Cork, married in 1594, and
reached some measure of prosperity. A small but apparently ill-paid
pension was granted him. The rebellion of 1598 shattered his fortunes
altogether. His house at Kilcolman was burnt in the usual fashion
of the brutal Irish wars, and it was said that one of his children
perished with it. Spenser fled to England, and died on the 16th January
1599--“for lack of bread,” according to Ben Jonson, and undoubtedly in
great poverty.
[SN: _Order of his work._]
It seems certain that he began writing very young, for some
translations from Petrarch and Joachim du Bellay, which were afterwards
reprinted unchanged, or changed only by rhyme, in his acknowledged
works, appeared in _The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings_ of John Van
Noodt in 1569. Ten years, however, passed before he published _The
Shepherd’s Calendar_, and then an equal period before he prepared
to bring out the first three books of _The Faërie Queen_, which was
registered at Stationers’ Hall on the last day of 1589, and appeared
in the following spring. Next year--1591--appeared the minor poems,
under the name of _The Complaints_ (_The Ruins of Time_, _The Tears
of the Muses_, _Virgil’s Gnat_, _Mother Hubberds Tale_, _The Ruins of
Rome_, _Muiopotmos_, and _The Visions_). The address to the reader
gives a promise of other poems, which have been lost; and it may be
noted that the same thing had happened with _The Shepherd’s Calendar_.
The _Daphnaida_ followed. In 1596 the _Amoretti_, the _Epithalamium_,
_Colin Clout’s Come Home Again_, the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of
_The Faërie Queen_, the Hymns, and the _Prothalamium_ were published
within a short time of one another. Nothing more was to appear in
his life. Part of a seventh book of _The Faërie Queen_, and a prose
treatise giving a very vivid, very true, and very terrible “View of the
Present State of Ireland,” were printed after his death. The treatise
did not come out for thirty years, when it was published by Sir J.
Ware. The Fragments were included in the new edition of _The Faërie
Queen_ in 1611.
Few great poets were ever so little beholden to predecessors as
Spenser. He had before him Chaucer, and near his own time Sackville,
who had written with original force in Chaucer’s stanza. There were
also the Italians, whom he knew well, their few English followers,
and the French poets of the Pléiade. In his _Shepherd’s Calendar_
Spenser imitated the Italian copies of the classic Eclogues, and
he translated from the French. Neither he nor any man could live
uninfluenced by his time. The notes of the Renaissance are abundantly
audible in his work--its love of beauty, its desire for joy, and the
melancholy which was natural in men whose ideals were unattainable in
a very harsh world, which was never harder than amid the disruption
of faith, the violent clash of contending forces, and the unchaining
of violent passions, of the sixteenth century. But there might have
been all this, and no Spenser. [SN: _His metre._] He is great by what
was wholly his own, both in form and spirit. _The Shepherd’s Calendar_
may be called the work of his prentice hand, done when he had not
attained complete control of his own vast powers. Yet it is not so
far below the impeccable verse of his later years as it is above the
level of his immediate predecessors in Elizabeth’s reign. The part of
imitation which there is in it is the weakest. What he inherited from
nobody was the new melody he imparted to English poetry. It is out of
his own genius that he perfected the form in which that melody found
its full expression. The Spenserian stanza does not appear in _The
Shepherd’s Calendar_; but it had been constructed, and was being used
in the earlier cantos of _The Faërie Queen_ at least immediately after
the earlier work was finished. It is surely no longer necessary to
argue that this form was not imitated from the Italians. The _ottava
rima_ and the sonnet may have--indeed must have--helped Spenser with
indications, but they did no more. Had he been an imitator he would
have done as the Spaniards did,--he would have taken an already
finished form, and would have adhered to it slavishly. But he did a
very different thing. He constructed a stanza which is to English what
the _ottava rima_ is to the Italian. It is just the difference between
a successor and a mere follower, that whereas the second toils to
reproduce the letter, the first gives a new form to the spirit. The
relation in which Spenser stands to the Italians is that he carried on
the torch of great poetry, but he lit it of English wood, and bore it
to a measure of his own. His sonnet is hardly less independent than his
stanza, and all talk of obligation to any model becomes idle indeed
when we think of the melody of the Hymns, the _Epithalamium_, and the
_Prothalamium_.
[SN: _The character of his poetry._]
The matter which this form bodied forth to the world is not to be
expressed in our meagre prose. It could be uttered only in his own
perfect verse. The mere doctrine may be defined with no overwhelming
amount of difficulty, for there is a strong and, not only unconcealed
but, firmly avowed didactic aim in Spenser. It was no purpose of his
to be “the idle singer of an empty day.” He held with his friend Sir
Philip Sidney that the poet “doth intend the winning of the mind from
wickedness to virtue.” The poet in their creed was the seer, and
Spenser strove to fulfil his lofty function by teaching the Platonism
which endeavours to trace back the love of virtue and the love of
beauty to that divine origin where they are one, and by singing a
Puritanism which is the poetic expression of the Englishman’s innate
conviction that the religion which is not interpreted into conduct
is an empty hypocrisy. But all this didactic side of Spenser is the
side which was not necessarily poetic. In so far as the Hymns merely
teach a Platonist doctrine, they do not surpass the final pages of
Castiglione’s _Courtier_. In so far as _The Faërie Queen_ is an
allegory, it is no more consistent, ingenious, or perfectly adapted
to its purpose than _The Pilgrim’s Progress_. But over all that could
be adequately expressed in prose Spenser cast a spell which carried
it into the realm of fancy--that golden world of the poet which Sir
Philip Sidney contrasted with nature’s “brazen” earth. A very trifling
change in the wording of one passage of _The Apologie for Poetrie_ is
all that is needed to make it applicable to _The Faërie Queen_: “Nature
never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry as ‘this poet hath’ done,
neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers;
nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.” It
is to this word that the attempt to estimate Spenser finally leads. By
the magic of his melody, and the force of that imagination which could
transmute all from prose to poetry, he made a lovely world of poetry
out of the real earth. When he used ugliness, as he could, it was for
the purpose of heightening beauty by contrast.
As the poet of _The Faërie Queen_, Spenser stands apart in his time.
He is connected with his contemporaries by the sonnet. This form,
introduced into English literature by Surrey and Wyatt, had been
little, and ill, cultivated in the duller generation which followed
them. But with the revival of the poetic genius of England towards
the middle of the queen’s reign, it naturally attracted men who were
in search of richer and more artful forms of verse. Moreover, it lent
itself to the expression of feeling, and that was of itself enough
to make it popular with a lyrical generation. For this reason the
sonnet work of the Elizabethans has been made subject to a great
deal of comment which is not of the nature of literary criticism. It
has been treated as a form of confession and veiled autobiography.
Various considerations--the limits of space being not the least
important among them--make it impossible to discuss the question at
length here. Moreover, where the external evidence is naught, and
the internal evidence is subject to various interpretations, which
is always the case, comment on the inner meaning of the sonnets must
always be more or less guesswork. To start from arbitrary premisses,
with the certainty of arriving at no definite conclusion, ought to
be considered a waste of time. Sidney may have decided to leave it
on record that he found out his love for Penelope Devereux too late,
and that he then hovered round the thought of adultery. Shakespeare
may have made poetry out of his friendship and his love. If so, the
passions which left them so much masters of themselves as to be able to
produce these artistic forms of verse cannot have been very absorbing.
Finished sonnets do not come to men either in their sleep or in
anguish. What we know for certain of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and
others is, that they lived active lives in the world, and that they
were artists. The nature of the artist is that he endeavours to give
form to the passion or action which he can conceive, in the terms of
his art, whether he be poet, painter, or actor. It is because he has
the constructive imagination and the power of expression that he gives
truth to his work. The genius which could give reality to the sorrow of
Constance, to the manhood of the Bastard, to the jealousy of Othello,
to more men, women, and passions than could be named on this page, was
quite adequate to giving the same reality to the scheme of the Sonnets.
As much may be said of the other Elizabethans, each in his place in the
scale. From the literary point of view, too, it is of no importance
how the debate be settled. Poetry is not valuable because it tells us
that this or the other dead poet felt as a man the common hopes and
disappointments of humanity, but because it fixes what all men can feel
in forms of immortal beauty.
[SN: _Sir P. Sidney._]
The sonnet was much cultivated in the literary society gathered
around Sir Philip Sidney in and about 1580. His high birth,--he was
son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales and Lord Deputy in
Ireland, and nephew of Elizabeth’s sinister favourite, the Earl of
Leicester,--the fact that he stood in the relation of patron to many
of the men of letters of his time, his amiable personal character, and
the heroic circumstances of his death in a skirmish fought to prevent
a Spanish convoy from entering the besieged town of Zutphen in 1586,
have combined to make Sir Philip Sidney a very shining figure. It is
possible that he is more conspicuous than his intrinsic power would
have made him without the gifts of fortune. Yet there must have been a
great personal fascination in the man who could inspire the reverential
love which was felt for Sir Philip Sidney by Fulke Greville, while his
_Apologie for Poetrie_, his _Arcadia_, the sonnets collected under the
title of _Astrophel and Stella_, with his other poems, remain to prove
that wherever he had been born he would have left his mark on the time.
[SN: The Apologie for Poetrie.]
_The Arcadia_ may be left aside for the present, but _The Apologie for
Poetrie_, though written in prose, cannot, without violently separating
things akin to one another, be taken apart from his poetry. It is to
some extent our English equivalent for the _Deffense et Illustration
de la Langue française_ of Joachim du Bellay, the manifesto of a new
school of poets. The circumstances in which the two were written
differ widely. The Pléiade, with the Frenchman’s usual love of a
large and minute _ordonnance_, drew up a scheme for the conquest and
orderly division of the poetic world. Sir Philip Sidney was provoked
into writing his little treatise by a very foolish tract printed in
1579, and named _The School of Abuse_, the work of one Stephen Gosson
(1535-1624), an unsuccessful playwright who took orders, and lived to
a great age as a clergyman of Puritanical leanings. _The School of
Abuse_, which was absurdly dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney without his
consent, and perhaps because he was the nephew of the chief protector
of the Puritans, is in itself insignificant, except in so far as it
contains a statement of the narrow puritan view that all modern poetry
was wicked, and that the theatre was the home of every corruption. It
is chiefly worth naming now because Sidney did it the signal honour
to give it an answer. _The Apologie for Poetrie_ is in no sense an
_Ars Poetica_. Sidney does not deal with the formal part of poetry. He
replies to those who belittle it by an emphatic assertion that it is
the noblest of all things. The view and the spirit of the Elizabethan
time are nowhere more clearly shown than in the _Apologie_. That Sidney
fell into one gross heresy is true. He said that poetry was independent
of metre. But that was not an error likely to mislead either himself or
others. Against it has to be set his conception of poetry as the noble
expression of that which in itself is fine, made for a lofty purpose.
There may not be much guidance in this; but it is not as a guide that
the _Apologie_ is to be considered, but as the challenge of the coming
English poetry, lyrical, epic, and dramatic--a declaration that it
was to be something more than ingenious exercises in metres, that it
was to be the expression in beautiful form of passion and thought, of
fancy and imagination. If English poets of that generation looked up
to Sidney, it was not only for the reasons given above, but because he
spoke early and worthily to the enemy at the gate. The style of the
_Apologie_ is full of the animation and sincerity of the writer. It
has a colour and melody unknown to the downright sober English of his
predecessor Ascham or his contemporary Puttenham, and is free from the
conceits of his own _Arcadia_.
Sidney was himself one of the first to sound the high note of the great
Elizabethan poetry.
No part of his work was printed in his life. The _Arcadia_ was prepared
for publication immediately after his death in 1586, but it did not
appear till 1590, and then first in a pirated edition. A more accurate
version followed in 1593. [SN: _His Sonnets and Lyrics._] The sonnets
and other lyric pieces, collected under the title of _Astrophel and
Stella_, were printed in 1591, and the _Apologie for Poetrie_ in 1595.
His metrical version of the Psalms remained in manuscript till 1823,
while some fragments of his verse have only been recovered recently by
Dr Grosart.[62] But the date of printing was comparatively unimportant
at a time when a poet’s work not only could be, but generally was,
known in manuscript to the reading world long before it was published.
Sidney was renowned as a poet and prose-writer in his lifetime,
and his case is only one of many. Therefore we may fairly count his
influence as having been exercised from the day when his sonnets were
handed about among his friends, which must have been as early as, if
not earlier than, 1580. Those to whom they came must have learnt at
once that the day when Gascoigne, Turberville, Googe, or an industrious
decent verse-writer of the stamp of Churchyard, represented English
poetry, was over. The sonnets are not all on the same high level.
The epithet of “jejune” which Hazlitt applied to Sidney cannot be
justly used of any of them; but the sonnet beginning, “Phœbus was
judge betweene Jove, Mars, and Love,” or the other which has for first
line, “I on my horse and love on me, doth try,” or the third, “O
grammar-rules, O now your virtues show,” are not equally safe against
the other epithet “frigid.” They are at least more marked by laboured
and cold-blooded conceit than by passion or fancy. Yet even these have
an accomplishment of form which was new, and in the others the greater
qualities are by no means rarely shown. The first in the accepted
order--“Loving in truth and faine in verse my love to show,”--with its
ringing last line, “‘Foole,’ said my Muse to me, ‘looke in thy heart
and write,’” and the last, “Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to
dust,” are abundantly lofty and passionate; and were, in the sense
in which the word was used, “insolent”--that is, unprecedented--in
the English poetry of that generation. To these it would be easy to
add many others. “With how slow steps, O Moon”; “Having this day my
horse, my hand, my lance,” are but two of them; while the sonnet “Good
brother Philip” is a gem of gaiety overlaying passion. Sidney did not
confine himself to the so-called legitimate form of two quatrains and
two tercets, but tried experiments. He stretched the term sonnet as far
as it will go when he applied it to twelve Alexandrines and a heroic
couplet. Nor was it in the sonnet only that Sidney set an example. The
songs of _Astrophel and Stella_ usher in the great Elizabethan lyric,
in which there is nothing to surpass the “Doubt you to whom my Muse
these notes entendeth” in soaring melody. The verse which abounds in
the _Arcadia_ and the metrical version of the Psalms does not reach
the level of the _Astrophel and Stella_. Yet it appears inferior only
when judged by his own best work, and the best that was to follow. We
may doubt whether Sidney has a claim to the place in the active life of
Elizabeth’s time assigned him by the affection of Fulke Greville and by
tradition, but there can be no question that he stands beside Spenser
as one of the beginners of the unsurpassed poetic literature of her
reign.
[SN: _Watson._]
It is mainly on historical grounds that mention must be made of his
contemporary Thomas Watson (1557-1592). Watson was a busy writer
of verse and translator, whose claim to be remembered now rests on
this, that he was working at the sonnet beside Sir Philip Sidney,
and independently of him. What he called a sonnet was a set of
three stanzas of six lines, each complete in itself.[63] There the
independence of Watson ends. His sonnets are avowedly imitations of
Italian or French originals when they are not translations. But his
chief work, the _Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love_, has an
undoubted value as a piece of evidence. It supplies a link in the chain
of literary history, and then it gives what may be called a glimpse
into the workshop of a sonnet-cycle maker. Watson candidly confesses,
in a “Letter to the Friendly Reader,” that his pains in suffering the
pangs of love which his sonnets record are “but supposed.” His less
ingenuous followers leave us to guess as much concerning them. But in
addition to this there is an _apparatus criticus_ which in everything
except bulk bears a very close resemblance to the pedantic commentaries
added by his admirers to the early editions of the Spaniard Góngora.
Each sonnet is introduced, explained, annotated, and the passion it is
to express described, and we are shown the machinery at every stage.
One of these introductions contains what is, in fact, a by no means bad
criticism on the whole body of the sonnets. “This Passion,” No. xli.,
“is framed upon a somewhat tedious, or too much affected, continuation
of that figure of Rhetorique whiche of the Greeks is called παλιλλογἱα
or ἀναδἰπλωσις, of the Latins Reduplicatio.” Somewhat tedious, too
much affected, and full of repetitions are these sonnets; but they
show the increased mechanical skill of our writers of verse, and they
are historically interesting. When tempted to make autobiography out
of the cycles of other sonneteers, it is well to remember Watson’s
confession, and also this, that to have a lady for the saint of
your literary devotions had been “common form” as far back as the
troubadours. His later work, _The Tears of Fancy_, is in regular
quatorzains.
[SN: _The sonneteers._]
The popularity of the _Astrophel and Stella_ (there were three
editions in the first year in which it was printed--1591), as well
as the example it set, help to account for the profuse production of
sonnet cycles in the next few years. The following list, which does
not profess to be exhaustive, of the collections published before
1595, will show the wealth of Elizabethan literature in this form:
The _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ of Barnabe Barnes (which owes
its survival to the accident which has preserved a single copy at
Chatsworth, reprinted by Dr Grosart), the _Licia_ of Giles Fletcher,
and the _Phillis_ of Thomas Lodge, were published before the end of
1593. In 1594 appeared the _Cœlia_ of William Percy, Constable’s
_Diana_, Daniel’s _Delia_, and Drayton’s _Idea_. To these may be added
the names of Willoughby’s _Avisa_, which, however, does not consist
of sonnets, and the anonymous _Zepheria_. Spenser’s _Amoretti_, or
love sonnets, belong in date of publication to 1595. Three other
collections--the _Fidessa_ of Griffin, Lynch’s _Diella_ (thirty-eight
sonnets, prefixed to the amorous poem of _Diego and Genevra_), and the
_Chloris_ of W. Smith, belong to 1596. The sonnet, too, was written by
others who did not construct cycles. Every reader of _The Faërie Queen_
knows the splendid “Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,” by
Sir W. Raleigh, and its less legitimately built successor, “The praise
of meaner wits,” which was addressed less to Spenser’s masterpiece than
to the vanity of Queen Elizabeth. During many long fallow years of
silence the poetic genius of the English race had been accumulating,
and it wanted but a touch to set it free. Even among the poets named
here who are not otherwise famous, there was some measure of original
power. Putting aside Spenser, who towers over all, the finest lyric
force was in Lodge, and the most uniform accomplishment in Daniel. It
was left to Shakespeare to give the greatest of English sonnets, but
the form he preferred--the three rhymed quatrains and the couplet--had
been polished and established as the prevalent English type by
Daniel.[64]
[SN: _Other lyric poetry._]
Although the Elizabethan age was great in all forms of pure literature,
except the prose romance and the satire, and was not wholly barren even
of these, yet it was more copious, more uniformly excellent in the
lyric, than in any other. Sir Walter Scott has spoken of the wind of
poetry which blew throughout that wonderful generation. He was thinking
of the drama; but this general inspiration which gives its grandeur to
the activity of the time is to be traced more widely, and with less
admixture of weakness in its songs, than in any other of its manifold
activities. But this very extension of the lyric faculty, and the
number of the singers, makes it not merely difficult but impossible
to deal fully with the subject within the limits of our space. Of the
sonnet writers we can speak with some approach to completeness, for
there the field, though large, is not boundless. But the freer forms of
lyric spread over all the life and literature of England. Raleigh, who
was a soldier, politician, discoverer, colonist, historian, political
writer, and amateur chemist, was also a lyric poet of more than note.
So were the Jesuit missionary Southwell and the courtier Earl of
Oxford. Some of the most beautiful lyrics in the language were written
by pamphleteers, prose story-writers, and dramatists. The composer
wrote his own songs, and some of them are among the best, while many
are only just below that level. So much was the time penetrated by
poetic fire, that gems of verse are to be found in its song-books for
which no known author can be traced.
[SN: _The Collections and Song-books._]
The general wealth of the time in lyric poetry can be better
appreciated by taking its miscellaneous collections, whether of pure
poetry or of verse written to accompany music, than by a list of
the names of writers who may be held to deserve particular mention.
Putting aside _Tottel’s Miscellany_ as belonging to an earlier time,
though it was repeatedly reprinted under Elizabeth, and _The Mirror
of Magistrates_, which stands apart, there were numerous collections
of minor pieces made in the queen’s reign. _The Paradise of Dainty
Devises_, 1576; _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_, 1578;
_A Handful of Pleasant Delights_, 1584; _The Phœnix Nest_, 1593;
_England’s Helicon_, 1600; _A Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602; _England’s
Parnassus_, 1600; and _Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses_, in the
same year, are the names of some of them. To these are to be added
the list of song-books collected or written by Byrd, Yonge, Campion,
Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and others.[65] Some of the poems
in these collections have always been known, but they contain many
which had fallen entirely into obscurity. There can have been very
few readers to whom Mr Bullen’s collection, made from a class of
books which in most ages are full of mere insipidities, was not a
revelation. The point is that it represents not the exceptional work
of the time, but the average production, which we may almost call
commercial, or the poets’ corner, and that being this, it maintains
such an extraordinarily high level of inspiration and melody. It is
not a mere question of that workmanlike dexterity which a great poet,
as Scott said half humorously, but not without truth, to Moore, can
teach a receptive generation. Spenser himself could never have taught
anybody to produce such a piece of genuine lyric poetry as the “Fain
would I change that note,” which Mr Bullen quotes from Captain Hume’s
_First Part of Airs_. It, and much else only less good, would not have
been written without Spenser and Sidney; but it is one thing to be
influenced by great models, and another merely to echo them.
[SN: _The historical poems._]
The love of verse led in England, as in Spain, to the production of not
a little in what is almost inevitably a bastard kind--the historical
poem. By attempting to do in poetry what could be adequately done in
prose, the authors of _The History of the Civil War_ or of _The Barons’
Wars_, condemned themselves to be often dull, or to endeavour to escape
dulness by mixing purely romantic episodes with what professes to be
record of matter of fact. The romance is superfluous to those who read
for the history, and the history is tiresome to those who read for
the romance. Our own historical poems are commonly the more subject
to the danger of dulness, because the authors, unlike the Spaniards,
did not, as a rule, choose the great events of their own time, or of
the previous generation, of which the memory was still fresh. They
went back to the past, which they could only know through books. This
would have done no harm if they had used their authorities only to
find “local colour” for their romance. But they did not. They aimed at
even a minute historical accuracy, and thereby condemned themselves to
produce works of learning in an inappropriate shape. It is no doubt bad
criticism to condemn any form of literature for being itself and not
another. Yet we could spare even the _Polyolbion_ for an Elizabethan
Mariana, which Drayton, whose prose was excellent and whose learning
was great, might well have been, and still have left himself free to
write his sonnets, his _Nymphidia_, and his _Ballad of Agincourt_.
[SN: _Fitz-Geoffrey and Markham._]
The curious literary bad fortune which has pursued the achievements of
Englishmen at sea is well illustrated by the vehement, but also frothy
and flamboyant, poem of Charles Fitz-Geoffrey, called _Sir Francis
Drake, his Honourable Life’s Commendation and his Tragical Death’s
Lamentation_. It is in the seven-line stanza which Drayton, after first
trying it, renounced as too soft for the subject of his _Barons’ War_.
Fitz-Geoffrey wraps up the substantial figure of Sir Francis in clouds
of hyperbole, and makes a terrible abuse of the figure called “by
the Latines Reduplicatio.” We see the great corsair only in glimpses
through the very smoky flames of Fitz-Geoffrey’s melodious rhetoric.
_The most honourable Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinvill_, by Gervase
Markham, in an eight-lined stanza, very flowing and mythological, has
much the same defect. The author, who founded his poem on Raleigh’s
pamphlet describing the last fight of the Revenge, endeavours to
“outcracke the scarcrow thunderbolt.”
[SN: _Warner._]
Three names stand out among the writers of historical poems--William
Warner, because he was at once a forerunner to the others and a link
between the poetry of the earlier and the later Elizabethans; Daniel,
for a certain mild, yet grave, wisdom; Drayton, for his manly force
and intrinsic poetic power. Warner, who was born about 1567, and who
certainly died in March 1609 (the year in which Shakespeare’s Sonnets
were published), was attached in some uncertain relationship as client
or servant to the Careys, Lords Hunsdon. His historical poem, _Albion’s
England_, was in part written before 1586, when it was suppressed
for some unknown reason by an order of the Star Chamber.[66] If this
date is correct, the decidedly jejune account of the defeat of the
Armada, and the most unfriendly passage on the execution of Queen
Mary, must have been added later. Warner had written a collection of
prose stories called _Syrinx_, as he says, “with acceptance.” But his
claim to be remembered rests on his _Albion’s England_, a long poem
in the old seven-foot or fourteen-syllable metre, on the history,
and more particularly on the legends of the history, of England. His
well-established reputation as “a good, honest, plain writer” is
fully deserved. Warner, indeed, carries plainness so far that in the
most poetic passage of his book--the episode of Curan and Argentill,
in which there is a genuine simple poetry--he tells us that the hero
“wiped the drivel from his beard.” Beginning at the creation of the
world, he comes down to his own time, with constant digressions into
romantic episodes of his own growing, and classical or Biblical tales.
He does not always escape the tendency of his metre to drop into a
jog-trot, yet in the main he canters briskly along with a very fair
proportion of spirited lines. His farewell to Queen Mary is worth
quoting, both as an example of his verse and as a rather engaging
mixture of charity and implacability:--
“Then to her wofull servants did she pass a kind a-dew,
And kissing oft her crucifix, unto the block she drew,
And fearless, as if glad to dye, did dye to papisme trew.
Which and her other errors (who in all did ever erre)
Unto the judge of mercie and of justice we referre.
If ever such conspirator of it impenitent,
If ever soule pope-scooled so, that sea to Heaven sent,
If ever one ill lived did dye a papist Godwards bent,
Then happie she. But so or not, it happie is for us,
That of so dangerous a foe we are delivered thus.”
His moderate length (a fairly girt reader can begin and end him in a
longish evening), his disregard for mere historical fact, and a certain
childish downrightness, make Warner easier reading than much better
poets. Although Warner adhered to the fourteener in the face of Spenser
and Sidney, he was so far affected by their example that he generally
raised his verse above the mere rocking-horse motion, which is its
special bane.
[SN: _Daniel._]
Samuel Daniel, the son of a music-master, was born near Taunton
in 1562, and was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He began by
translating the _Imprese_ of Paulus Jovius, and his first independent
works were his sonnets to _Delia_, already mentioned. It is possible
that he went abroad as servant to Elizabeth’s ambassador in France,
Lord Stafford, and that he visited Italy before 1590. Although Daniel
wrote two tragedies--_Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_--they were on the
classical model, which our stage has never tolerated, and he therefore
could not live by literature, since it was then only the theatre which
paid. It was necessary for him to seek support in the service of rich
people. He found it in the patronage of the Pembroke family, and was
afterwards tutor to the daughter of the famous seafaring Earl of
Cumberland. In his later years he was in the service of Queen Anne, the
wife of James I., as “inspector of the children of the Queen’s revels,”
and as groom or “gentleman extraordinary of her majesty’s private
chamber.” At the end he appears to have achieved independence, for he
died on a farm of his own near Beckington in 1619.
In spite of the interruptions caused by his tutoring, at which he
repined not a little, Daniel was a voluminous writer. He was the author
in prose of a history of England down to the reign of Edward III.,
popular in its day, and of the excellent _Defence of Rime_ in answer to
Campion’s belated plea for “pure versifying.” But it is as a poet that
Daniel ranks in English literature, though with a limitation, somewhat
roughly worded by his stronger contemporary Drayton, who said that “his
manner better fitted prose.” This would be a very unfair judgment if
it were applied to all his work without qualification. _The Complaint
of Rosamonde_, his first considerable poem, published in 1592, is
neither in manner nor matter better fitted for prose. It is a very
poetic retelling of the legend of Henry II.’s mistress in the favourite
seven-line stanza. His moral epistles in verse escape the vice of mere
moralising by virtue of a loftiness of sentiment which is fitly enough
wedded to poetic form. Yet there is none of the “lofty, insolent, and
passionate” note of the Elizabethans in Daniel, and Drayton’s harsh
sentence may be applied with little or no restriction to the _Civil
Wars_. Daniel’s claim to honour was as well stated by himself in some
prefatory verses to an edition of his poems in 1607 as by any of the
many good judges of literature who have praised him:--
“I know I shall be read among the rest
So long as men speak English, and so long
As verse and virtue shall be in request,
Or grace to honest industry belong.”
Grace to honest industry seems but a humble plea for the poet. We may
paraphrase it with more dignity and not less truth by saying that
Daniel was a most accomplished and conscientious artist in verse, who
had a genuine, but mild, poetic nature. The care he took to revise his
work is evidence of his conscience as a workman, and the fact that his
changes were commonly for the better is proof of his judgment. It is
mainly the beauty of his English which will cause him to be read for
ever among the rest. If it never has the splendour of the greatest
Elizabethan poetry, neither does it fall into “King Cambyses’ vein,”
into the roaring fury which gave an outlet to the exuberant energy of
that time. Southey gave Daniel as the nearest English equivalent to
Camoens, on the ground that the main charm of both is the even purity
of their language. This of itself is hardly compensation enough for the
undoubted tediousness of his _Civil Wars_, which tell the essentially
dreary history of the Wars of the Roses down to the marriage of Edward
IV.[67]
It was perhaps partly his dislike of the Bohemian habits of his brother
men of letters which has left the life of Michael Drayton so obscure.
He was a Warwickshire man of respectable parentage, but so poor that he
owed his education to the kindness of patrons. The date of his birth
was 1563, and he died in 1631, well into the reign of Charles I. If
confidence can be placed in the jottings of Drummond of Hawthornden,
there was at one time an armed neutrality between Jonson and Drayton;
but Jonson wrote some highly laudatory verses on the _Polyolbion_, and
we need not place too much reliance on casual remarks he threw out in
conversation when he had no knowledge that his words were to be written
down. It is known, too, that Drayton was patronised by Prince Henry,
who in his short life was the friend of many men of pith and substance,
from Raleigh to Phineas Pett the shipbuilder. Ill-founded legend
asserts that he was of the party in the carouse which is said to have
been the death of Shakespeare.
[SN: _Drayton._]
Drayton[68] was a stronger man than Daniel, and there came forth more
sweetness from him. No writer of the time was more voluminous. The
sonnets, to which he seems to have been somewhat indifferent, form a
very small portion of his work. Whenever he began to write (it is said
that his love of literature was shown when he was a boy), he did not
publish early. His first poem--_A Harmonie of the Church_--appeared in
1591. It was suppressed by the censorship, then directed by Archbishop
Whitgift, but republished under another title, _The Heavenly Harmonie
of Spiritual Songs and Holy Hymns_, in 1610. In 1593 he published nine
eclogues with the title of _Idea_, a name also given to the sonnets
printed in 1594. It is to be noted that the famous sonnet beginning,
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” which is so
superior to the others, and so like Shakespeare’s, was first included
in the edition of 1619. Drayton, like Daniel, was much in the habit of
revising his work. He not uncommonly incorporated his earlier poems
in his later with great changes. In 1596 appeared the awkwardly named
_Mortimeriados_, in the seven-line stanza, recast and republished in
_ottava rima_ in 1603 under the title of _The Barons’ Wars_. Between
these two came the _Heroical Epistles_ in 1597. In 1604 Drayton made
a most unfortunate attempt to win the favour of James I. by flattery,
and he also published a satirical poem, _The Owl_, and his _Moses in
a Map of his Miracles_. To 1605 belongs a collection of short poems,
including the most famous of his minor poems, except the universally
known sonnet, the magnificent _Ballad of Agincourt_. The years which
follow were employed in the composition of his vast _Polyolbion_, of
which nineteen books appeared in 1613, and which was completed in 1622.
Between these dates he brought out an edition of his poems in 1619. In
1627 he went back on the battle of Agincourt, and produced the poem
of that name, together with _Nymphidia_ and _The Miseries of Queen
Margaret_. At the very close of his life, in 1630, he published the gay
and graceful _Muses’ Elysium_. He wrote also for the stage, to which
he had no natural inclination, in an occasional and subordinate way.
This list, which is not exhaustive, will show that the forty years of
Drayton’s known activity were remarkably well filled. And the quality
of this great bulk of work was not less remarkable than the quantity.
It may be allowed at once, and without conceding too much to the
eighteenth-century criticism, which talked of his “creeping narrative,”
that much of his poetry is dull to other readers than those who find
all dull except the last smart short story or newspaper scandal. The
reader who can master _The Battle of Agincourt_ (not the Ballad),
_The Miseries of Queen Margaret_, and _The Barons’ Wars_ without an
effort may hold himself armed against the more laborious forms of
study. Drayton indeed tempted dulness when he chose for subject the
Barons’ War of Edward II.’s reign, and did not also decide to make
the “she-wolf of France” his heroine and to throw history to the
winds. Yet even in these the strong poetical faculty of the writer can
never be forgotten. The longest of all his poems--the _Polyolbion_,
or “Chorographical Description of all the Tracts, Rivers, Mountains,
Forests, and other parts of Great Britain,” which may be described as
a poetical guide-book to his native country--is not dull, though it
cannot be praised as exciting. Drayton may have made an error when he
decided to write it in the long twelve-syllable line, and not in his
favourite eight-line stanza, which, in the words of his preface to _The
Barons’ Wars_, “both holds the time clean through to the base of the
column, which is the couplet at the foot or bottom, and closeth not but
with a full satisfaction to the ear for so long detention.” Yet he has
mastered his unwieldy verse, and after a time, when the reader’s ear
has become attuned to the melody, his at first rather strange mixture
of topography, legend, and vigorous romantic flashes rolls on in a
majestic course. It is a proof of the essential strength of Drayton
that his most delicate work--the fairy poetry of the _Nymphidia_ and
the _Nymphalls_ or _Muses’ Elysium_--belongs to his later years. He
grew sweet as he mellowed.
[SN: _The Satiric Poets._]
A time so rich as the Elizabethan in new forms of literature could
hardly fail to produce the satirist. In this case also there were
Italian and, it need hardly be added, Classic models to follow, and
they were followed. Satiric writing there had always been, and that
inevitably, since so soon as men began to record observation at all
they would see that there was much vice and folly in the world, and
from this experience all satire springs. The satiric spirit abounded
in the prose pamphlet literature of the time. Between this and the
help afforded by the Latin models, who supplied the ready-made mould,
the poetic satirists were led forward by the hand. As a class, and in
so far as they were satirists, they were the least interesting body
of writers of their time. It is very necessary to limit this estimate
to their satires; for the four who may be mentioned here are all, for
one reason or another, notable men, or even more. Lodge, without ever
attaining to originality or power of the first order, was a successful
writer in many kinds. Marston has a deservedly high place in our
dramatic literature. Hall, though that part of his life lies outside
the scope of this book, was a divine and controversialist of mark in
his later years. Donne, who however belongs in the main to a later
time, is one of the most enigmatical and debated, alternately one of
the most attractive and most repellent, figures in English literature.
If Hall’s boast in the Prologue to his Satires--
“I first adventure, follow me who list,
And be the second English Satirist,”
is to be taken seriously, he must be supposed to have claimed the
honour of leading. If so, he must also be presumed not to have known
_The Steel Glass_ of Gascoigne, an undeniable though rambling and
ineffective satire, belonging to the first half of the queen’s reign.
[SN: _Lodge._] He certainly ignored the earlier claim of Lodge, whose
_Fig for Momus_ appeared in 1595, two years before the first six books
of Hall’s _Virgidemiarum_. But it may be that he wrote long before he
printed, and in any case the originality is not great enough to be
worth fighting over, since both were followers of Latin originals;
while it appears more than probable that Marston and Donne were turning
their thoughts in the same direction about the same time. In fact, the
Poetic Satire was so certain to arise that many men may well have begun
it together in complete independence one of another. The satire of
Lodge is confessedly a mere echo of Horace.
[SN: _Hall._]
This cannot be said of the Satires of Joseph Hall. Hall, who in his
very interesting brief autobiography says that he was born on the 1st
January, 1574 (which, if he went by the old official calendar, means
1575), and was educated at the Puritan College of Emmanuel, Cambridge,
lived to attain the bishopric of Exeter, to play a conspicuous part
in the early days of the Long Parliament, to be translated to Norwich
in the eclipse of King Charles’s fortunes, and to be rabbled out of
his palace by the Puritans. He died at Heigham in 1656. His Satires,
therefore, appeared when he was at the utmost only twenty-three.
Although marked by a certain youthful loftiness of moral pose and
some impudence, they show an undoubted maturity of form much more
meritorious then than it would be now, when there is so much more
in English to copy. In “A Postscript to the Reader,” printed with
the first issue of the _Virgidemiarum_ (a pedantic title taken from
_Virgidemia_, a gathering of rods), he states what undoubtedly was the
literary faith of the satirists of the time: “It is not for every one
to relish a true natural satire, being of itself, besides the nature
and inbred bitterness and tartness of particulars, both hard of conceit
and harsh of style, and therefore cannot but be unpleasing both to the
unskilful and over-musical ear.” In other words, a rough form and a
deliberate violation of melody were proper to satire. Marston and Donne
acted on that rule. But Hall in his own verses is not markedly hard of
conceit or harsh of style. His couplets flow easily enough, carrying
with them shrewd but not very important remarks on the contradictions
of sinners. We can well believe that when Pope was shown them late
in life he wished he had seen them sooner, and that he thought the
first satire of the sixth book “optima satira.” Hall’s attitude of
superiority to a sinful world is rather comic in a young gentleman who
knew no more of it than lay inside the walls of “pure Emmanuel.” His
worst fault was a habit of sniffing at contemporary poets, whose poetic
shoe-latchet he was not worthy to undo. He falls upon the sonneteers
and their “Blowesses” (_i.e._, Blowsibellas) after a fashion afterwards
bettered by Swift with his incomparable brutality.[69]
[SN: _Marston._]
Marston’s first set of Satires were printed under the assumed name
of W. Kinsayder in 1598, together with a poem called _Pygmalion’s
Image_. A second instalment of the Satires followed next year, and both
bear the same title--_The Scourge of Villainy_. There was not much
villainy to which Marston had better call to apply the scourge than the
greasy lubricity of _Pygmalion’s Image_. He preferred to scold at his
contemporaries in verse which is as pleasant to read as charcoal would
be to eat, and to lecture an imaginary world made up of vices which he
took at second hand from Latin books, in a style which raises the image
of ancient Pistol unpacking his heart with curses.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] _Tottel’s Miscellany_ has been reprinted by Mr Arber, who has also
republished Gascoigne’s _Steel Glass_, and the _Eclogues_, _Epitaphs_,
and _Sonnets_ of Barnabe Googe in his English reprints. Turberville is
in vol. ii. of Chalmers’s _British Poets_. Works of Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, 1859.
[62] _The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney_, edited by the Rev. A.
B. Grosart, 2 vols., 1873, in “The Fuller’s Worthies Library.”
[63] _Poems of Thomas Watson_, in Arber’s English reprints.
[64] For Barnes, Percy, Constable, Lynch, _Zepheria_, and Smith, see Mr
Arber’s _English Garner_; for Daniel and Drayton, vols. iii. and iv. of
Chalmers’s _British Poets_.
[65] Mr Arber in his _English Garner_, and Mr Bullen in his _Lyrics
from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age_, 1887, have made selections
from these sources.
[66] Chalmers’s _British Poets_, vol. iv.
[67] Chalmers’s _British Poets_, vol. iii. Complete works, edited by Dr
Grosart. 5 vols., 1885-1896.
[68] Chalmers’s _British Poets_, vol. iv. A very thorough monograph on
Drayton by Mr O. Elton has been published by the Spenser Society, 1895.
[69] _Satires by Joseph Hall._ Chiswick Press, 1824.
CHAPTER VIII. THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS.
THE FIRST PLAYS--RESISTANCE TO CLASSIC INFLUENCE--ADVANTAGES
OF THIS--AND THE LIMITATIONS--THE DRAMATIC QUALITY--CLASSIC,
SPANISH, AND FRENCH DRAMA--UNITY IN THE ENGLISH PLAYS--‘RALPH
ROISTER DOISTER’--‘GAMMER GURTON’S NEEDLE’--‘GORBODUC’--FORMATION
OF THE THEATRE--LYLY--GREENE--PEELE--KYD--MARLOWE--CHARACTER OF
THESE WRITERS--SHAKESPEARE--GUESSES ABOUT HIS LIFE--ORDER OF HIS
WORK--ESTIMATES OF SHAKESPEARE--DIVISIONS OF HIS WORK--THE POEMS--THE
DRAMAS--THE REALITY OF SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS.
[SN: _The first plays._]
Three plays stand at the threshold of the Elizabethan drama--_Ralph
Roister Doister_, _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_, and _Gorboduc_, or _Ferrex
and Porrex_. None of the three indicate the course which that dramatic
literature was destined to take. _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ is a spirited
farce of low life, holding if from anything, then from the mediæval
comedy as it flourished in France. _Ralph Roister Doister_, as became
the work of a schoolmaster, is full of reminiscences of the Latin
comedy. _Gorboduc_ is an open imitation of the Senecan tragedy.
[SN: _Resistance to the classic influence._]
When the great and natural authority of the classic models is allowed
for--when we remember how many writers for the stage, not only here but
wherever the theatre nourished, were university wits--when the taste
of the time for moralising is taken into account, it is rather to be
wondered at that this pattern proved so unattractive as it did. The
predominance of the French drama of the seventeenth century must not
lead us into overestimating the rarity of the independence required
to reject the classic model in the time of the Renaissance. Corneille
and Racine did indeed establish a “correct” form of tragedy, largely
constructed on classic lines. But this was part of a general, and far
from inexcusable, reaction towards order, measure, and restraint in
literature. During the Renaissance the influence of the classic drama
was confined to producing a false dawn of the French tragedy. Italy
achieved no considerable drama. The classics, both the great Greek
and the lesser Latin, were presented to Spain in translations, and
by scholarly critics, only to be rejected. The _Nise Lastimosa_ of
Gerónimo Bermudez, with here and there a tentative effort in early
plays, is all that remains of the teaching of translators and men of
learning. Among ourselves _Gorboduc_ had little immediate following,
and when Daniel in the very early seventeenth century tried to succeed
where Sackville had failed, he wrote for the literary coterie of the
Countess of Pembroke and for nobody else. Between the two there is
Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s _Cornelia_ or so, and that is all.
[SN: _Advantages of this._]
For this we have undoubtedly reason to be thankful, and so have the
Spaniards. Both nations had the spirit to be themselves on their stage,
which is something; and then we have had a freer Shakespeare, a more
spontaneous Lope, than would have been possible if the three unities
and the complete separation of tragedy from comedy had been accepted
in the two countries. Yet we may be thankful with more moderation
than we commonly show. It is not to be taken for granted that the
choice lay between freedom and a convention. It was rather between
one convention and another. The Spanish stage is not unconventional.
It has a different convention from the French--that is all. Ours made
its own rules, less precise than the Spanish or the classical, but
none the less real. “Tanto se pierde por carta de mas, como por carta
de menos,” says the Spanish proverb. The card too much is a loss as
much as the card too little; and a convention which says “You shall”
is no less tyrannical than the convention which says “You shall not.”
[SN: _And the limitations._] A drama which will allow no mixture of
comedy with tragedy is unquestionably limited, and is condemned to give
no full picture of life. But a drama which is forced to insert comic
scenes is equally under an obligation. The clown who figures as porter
in _Macbeth_ is not necessarily more in place than the murder of a
king would have been in _The Taming of the Shrew_. To say that you may
fairly keep your comedy unmixed by tragedy, but must never allow your
tragedy to be unrelieved by comic scenes, is as arbitrary a rule as any
other. Undoubtedly the reaction from the strained emotion of tragedy
to lighter feeling is natural--and that is the sufficient artistic
justification for the jests of Hamlet. But this just observation does
not excuse the insertion into a tragic action of independent comic
scenes which have no necessary connection with the main personages and
action.
The history of the Elizabethan drama is the history of the formation of
an English dramatic convention. The questions are what it was, and what
were its merits. These questions are not settled by the answer that
Shakespeare was the greatest of dramatists. That he would have been
in any case. What is greatest in him--his universal sympathy with all
nature and his unerring truth to life--was wholly personal. He shared
it with nobody. If the Elizabethan drama is Shakespeare, and a ring of
men whom we are content to know wholly by “beauties,” which beauties,
again, are lyric poetry and not drama, then it is quite superfluous to
treat it as dramatic literature at all. The Bible does not belong to a
class, and neither does Shakespeare in those qualities which raise him
above all others. We must look at him as standing apart; and as for
the others, if that for which they are worth studying is their lyric
poetry, or their mighty line, or this or that touch of genuine pathos
or fine interpretation of character in flashes, it is unnecessary to
consider them as writers of plays. If there was an Elizabethan dramatic
literature in any other sense than this, that many poets wrote for the
stage and put noble poetry into a machinery not essentially dramatic,
it must be studied apart from what was purely Shakespeare. And that is
not difficult to do. On his predecessors he could have no effect, and
it is only necessary to turn from him to any contemporary or successor
to see how little they shared with him in all that was not mere
language and fashion of the time.
[SN: _The dramatic quality._]
I trust it will not be thought superfluous to attempt a definition of
what we ought to look for in judging dramatic literature. Dryden, whose
example cannot well be followed too closely in criticism, acknowledges
the need for a definition of a play early in his _Essay of Dramatic
Poesy_. Lisideius, one of the interlocutors in the conversation,
gives this, with the proviso that it is rather a description than a
definition: “A just and lively image of human nature, representing
its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is
subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Now this is
neither definition nor description of a play. There is not a word in
it which does not apply to _Gil Blas_. Dryden was himself well aware
of its insufficiency, for he makes Crites raise “a logical objection
against it”--that it is “only a _genere et fine_, and so not altogether
perfect.” Yet he leaves the matter standing there. That he, who
was himself a playwright, should have been content to do this when
dealing with the drama is one proof how much English literature had
lost “the sense of the theatre.” If Lisideius had not been thinking
of literature, but of literature as adapted to the stage, he would
have said (but in Dryden’s incomparably better way) something like
this: “A play is an action, put before an audience by dialogue and
representation, forming a coherent whole, in which all the parts
subserve a general purpose, and are dramatically good only in so far as
they do.” Lyric beauty, good moral reflection, vigorous deliveries of
human nature, are, however good in themselves, as little able to make a
good play as the most beautiful ornament is to make a fine building.
[SN: _Classic, Spanish, and French drama._]
It is the unity of the action which constitutes the good play, and it
may be obtained by different methods. A dramatist may obtain unity
by means of the passion or by the working out of a single situation.
Of the great Greek dramatists I cannot speak with expert authority,
but as far as they are visible in translations as in a glass darkly,
they appear to have achieved unity in this way to the full. The
chorus, which in inferior hands offers irresistible temptations for
wandering talk, always carries on the action, while what we see is
the outward and visible sign of some terrible force working behind.
This ever-present sense of the something reserved driving before it
what we are allowed to see, with an undeviating directness of aim,
gives by itself an awful unity of interest to the tragedy. The Spanish
dramatist gains his unity by artful construction of his story, and by
subordinating passion and character to the mere action. The French
stage in its great days aimed at using the same resources as the Greek,
though with certain mechanical changes, such as the dropping of the
chorus, and the division of its work among the personages, which in
itself was no great gain.
[SN: _Unity of the English play._]
Our own drama adopted neither device. It neither concentrated its
attention on the one situation or passion, nor did it subordinate
all to the march of an action. There remained to it to do this--to
secure unity by giving to the play the unity of life itself--by
showing us human nature working in all its manifestations, of love
and hate, heroism and cowardice, laughter and tears. Every rule
suffers exceptions. There are many pure comedies in our dramatic
literature, while Ben Jonson showed at least a strong leaning to accept
the unnecessary unities of time and place in order to attain more
effectually the indispensable unity of action. Yet the distinguishing
feature of our great dramatic literature on its constructive side is
that it threw tragedy and comedy together, and that it relied for its
unity on an inner binding force of life. This is the greatest skill of
all, but it is for that very reason the most difficult of attainment.
It presupposes in the dramatist a sympathy with all humanity from
Lear to Parolles, and with that a power of creation and construction
incomparably greater than is needed to build by the classic rules, or
to put together an artful story worked out by stock-figures on the
Spanish model. Its dangers are obvious. When the dramatist had no
natural tragic power he would be in constant peril of falling into
fustian. When he was deficient in a sense of humour, he would be
tempted to fall back for his comedy on mere grossness. His action,
being free to wander in time and space, would have a constant tendency
to straggle, and the play would become a mere succession of scenes
following one another “like geese on a common.” The strict following
of the classic rules, which work for concentration, helps to preserve
the dramatist from these errors, at the cost of limiting his freedom.
To Shakespeare they would have been a slavery, but it is not certain
that they would not have been a support to Marlowe or Middleton, who
stood much less in need of freedom than of discipline and direction.
So while feeling duly thankful for that resistance to the authority of
the classics which helped to give us Shakespeare, we may remember that
it also helped to give us many comic scenes which it is hardly possible
to read without feeling ashamed for the men who wrote them, and many
so-called plays which are only shapeless combinations of scenes, bound
together by no other nexus than thread and paper.
[SN: Ralph Roister Doister.]
_Ralph Roister Doister_, the earliest known English comedy, was written
apparently about 1530, and printed some fifteen or sixteen years later.
The date of the printing of a play is notoriously no test of its date
of composition or acting, but only of the time when the actors had no
further motive for keeping it in their own hands in manuscript--that
is, when it ceased to be popular on the stage. _Ralph Roister Doister_
was the work of Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton and Westminster,
and is full of reminiscences of Plautus. Ralph Roister Doister himself
is our old friend the _miles gloriosus_ adapted to the conditions of
London life in the time of Edward VI. Matthew Merrygreek, described
as a “needy humorist,” is our no less familiar friend the parasite.
Merrygreek feeds on the vanity and credulity of Ralph Roister Doister,
who is made up of conceit, bluster, and cowardice--who thinks that
every woman who sees him falls in love with him, and is of course
baffled and beaten in the end. It is written in sufficiently brisk
lines of no great regularity; and there are much duller plays. Ralph’s
courtship of Dame Christian Custance, who will have none of him,
is lively. On the whole, the play leaves the impression that Udall
was more than a mere imitator of Plautus, but it is only the school
exercise of a clever man.[70]
[SN: _Gammer Gurton’s Needle._]
“The right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy, entitled _Gammer Gurton’s
Needle_,” is believed, on good evidence, to have been written by John
Still (1543?-1608), a churchman, who died Bishop of Bath and Wells. It
was played at his college, Christ’s, Cambridge, in 1566, but may have
been written three years earlier. However that may be, it was certainly
written in his youth. Nothing could well be less academic or clerical.
Though divided into five acts, it is, in fact, a farce not unlike much
mediæval French comedy. The plot is one of a familiar class which
will always hold the stage under new forms, and the working out is of
the simplest. Gammer Gurton loses her needle, and then finds it, just
where she ought to have looked for it, after upsetting the house by
searching in unlikely places, and disturbing the village by unjustly
suspecting her neighbours of theft. It is unquestionably too long, but
it is very far from dull. There is a directness of purpose in Still
which is decidedly dramatic, and with it a power of characterisation by
no means contemptible. All the personages, and notably the wandering
beggar, Deccon the Bedlam, have a marked truth to humble human nature.
They are coarse, but not wilfully and unnecessarily coarse. There are
none of those strings of mere nasty words and images which serve as
foil to the poetry of the true Elizabethan comedy. Still is honestly
naturalistic, neither toning down the truth of the rough talk of rude
people, nor lavishing bad language from an apparent wish to startle. If
he had not entered the Church, which made it indecent for him to work
for the stage, he might have given us a series of spirited naturalistic
comedies. As it is, _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ stands alone. The facts
that it contains the capital drinking-song, “Back and side go bare, go
bare,” and that it is written in the prevailing seven-foot metre, are
all that connect it with the later comedy.[71]
[SN: Gorboduc.]
We have seen that the Latin comedy had much to do with _Ralph Roister
Doister_. The Latin tragedy is directly responsible for a much more
ambitious effort, the play variously named _Gorboduc_, or _Ferrex and
Porrex_, generally attributed to Sir Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord
Buckhurst, though a claim is made for the part-authorship at least of
Thomas Norton. If it had been the intention of the author to establish
a prejudice against the regular tragedy in the minds of his audience,
he could hardly have done better than write this painfully dull play.
The very metre, which is the heroic couplet, moves by jerky steps of
the same length, and is inexpressibly wooden. Nor is that by any means
all. _Gorboduc_ has all the faults and none of the possible merits
of its kind. The “regular” tragedy on the classic model needs the
concentration of the interest on one strong situation. But _Gorboduc_
is a long story of how the king of that name divides his kingdom
between his sons; how they quarrel, and one kills the other; how the
mother slays the slayer; how the people kill her and her husband, and
are then killed by the nobles. It is all told in speeches of cruel
length, and is necessarily full of repetitions. A very curious feature
of the play is the insertion between the acts of dumb shows intended to
enforce the excellence of union, the evils of flattery or of anarchy,
which have a decided flavour of the morality. The _Induction_ to _The
Mirror of Magistrates_ and _The Complaint of Buckingham_ remain to show
that Sir T. Sackville was a poet; but _Gorboduc_ is the very ample
proof that he was no dramatist. The play, which one thinks must have
bored her extremely, was given before the queen by the gentlemen of the
Inner Temple in 1561.[72]
[SN: _Formation of the theatre._]
The suspension--not, indeed, of activity but of growth--in literature
which marks the first years of the queen’s reign was as marked in drama
as in pure poetry. Udall, Still, and Sir T. Sackville had no following
to speak of, and it was not until a new generation had grown up that
the first signs of the real Elizabethan drama became visible. The
production of pieces for the theatre did not cease, but they belong to
the past not to the coming time. The taste for shows was strong, and
it was served. But the pieces of this interval are the descendants of
the morality, not the ancestors of Shakespeare’s drama. We can leave
them aside, for they had no following. There is no _Auto Sacramental_
in English literature. Before that could come it was first necessary to
have a theatre, in the sense of a place of public amusement, managed
by professional actors, and not only an occasional stage on which
corporations and societies performed from time to time. The formation
of the theatre in the material sense was the work of these earlier
years; but this, which is, moreover, very obscure, does not belong
properly to the history of literature. It is enough to note that a body
of men working together did here what Lope de Rueda did in Spain. A
class of actors was formed. Like him, they often wrote themselves. In
both countries the theatre was thoroughly popular, which was not, it
may be, altogether an advantage. At least the fact that the same man
might be manager of a theatre and keeper of a bear-garden--as Alleyn
was--points to the existence of influences which did not visibly work
for the production of good literature in the theatre. In England, as
in Spain, much was inevitably written to please what may be called the
bear-garden element of the audience. In Spain this tended to separate
itself into the _pasos_, _mojigangas_, _entremeses_, dances, and so
forth, which were given between the three _jornadas_ of the _comedia_.
With us all was thrown into the five acts of the play, and this
difference in mechanical arrangement was not without its influence on
literary form.
The flowering of the Elizabethan drama dates from the middle years of
the queen’s reign. By this time the theatre was formed, and the taste
for it was strong. It naturally attracted many writers, if only because
it was the most direct and effective way in which they could make
themselves heard, to say nothing of the fact that it was by far the
most certainly lucrative of all forms of literature, and therefore had
an intelligible attraction for all who lived by their pens. Among them
it was inevitable that there should be not a few who had no natural
faculty for dramatic literature--Lodge, for instance, and Nash. Both
lived much about the theatre, and their relations with it, and the
writers for it, figure largely in the gossiping pamphlets of the time.
But they wrote for it only by necessity or accident, and their dramatic
work is altogether subordinate. As much might be not unfairly said of
John Lyly; but his plays are so curious, and held so considerable a
place in the estimation of his time, that he cannot be put wholly aside.
[SN: _Lyly._]
Custom has ruled that the name of Lyly shall be followed by the words
“the author of _Euphues_.” Custom has in this case decided rightly.
Lyly was always the author of _Euphues_. This didactic tale falls to
be discussed with the prose of the time, but we may note that it is
composed of a very slight framework of story, from which blow out
clouds of words arranged in quaint and not inelegant patterns. No drama
can be made out of such materials, and, properly speaking, the plays
of Lyly are not dramatic.[73] Unlike most of his contemporaries, he
was attached to the Court, though, according to his own melancholy
summing-up of the results of his labours, he obtained nothing as a
reward. He was born in Kent about 1554, and was educated at Oxford.
It may be that he went on to Cambridge, according to what was then
a common custom. So little is known of the rest of his life that
biographers have been driven to make matter by identifying him with
a certain Mr Lilly, a bold, witty atheist, who harassed Hall in his
first living, and whose sudden death from the plague is recorded by
the satirist and future Bishop of Norwich, with pious satisfaction,
among the various examples of divine intervention on his own behalf.
If he sat in several Parliaments, Lyly cannot have altogether wanted
means and friends. He may have lived into the reign of James I., and
died in 1606. His plays were part of his service as a courtier. They
were not written for the vulgar theatre, but to be performed by the
“children of Paul’s” or “of the Queen’s Chapel” before the queen at
the New Year feasts. Here he would have an audience which already
admired his _Euphues_, published in 1580, and was well content to hear
him “parle Euphuism.” To this we may partly attribute the fact that,
while his contemporaries were making blank verse the vehicle of the
higher English drama, he showed a marked preference for the use of
prose, and also for mythological and classical subjects. The names of
his undoubted plays are _Alexander and Campaspe_; _Sapho and Phao_;
_Endimion, or The Man in the Moon_; _Gallathea_; _Mydas_; _Mother
Bombie_; _The Woman in the Moon_; and _Love’s Metamorphosis_. They were
written between 1584 and the end of the century. Lyly, as has been
said, was no dramatist. His plays do not advance in any coherent story.
They rotate or straggle. When, as in _Mother Bombie_, he did attempt
to construct a comedy of intrigue, the result is mere confusion.
The faults of his style have been made familiar to all the world by
Falstaff’s immortal address to Prince Hal: “For though the camomile,
the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it
is wasted the sooner it wears.... There is a thing, Harry, which thou
hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name
of pitch: this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile,” and
so on. The antitheses work with the regularity of pistons; there is
a steady march past of similes, drawn as often as not from a natural
history worthy of Sir John Mandeville, and arranged in twos or threes.
His humour is of the kind which makes a reader imitate the example of
Sancho when he saw his master cutting capers in his shirt on the slope
of the Sierra Morena--retire in order to escape the spectacle of a
good gentleman making an exhibition of himself. Yet in his grave and
poetic moments there is a prim charm about Lyly, and a frosty moonlight
glitter which is attractive. His snatches of song are among the best
in an age of lyric poetry.
[SN: _Greene._]
Lyric poet tempted or driven by necessity on to the stage is the
description which must be given of two of his contemporaries, who in
other respects differed from him very widely--Robert Greene and George
Peele. If we are bound to take his own confessions, and the abuse
poured on his grave by that bad-blooded pedant Gabriel Harvey, quite
seriously, we are compelled to believe that Greene ended a thoroughly
despicable life by a very sordid death. But a little wholesome
scepticism may well be applied both to Greene’s deathbed repentance
and to the abuse of his implacable enemy. There was in the Elizabethan
time a taste for a rather maundering morality, and for a loud-mouthed
scolding style of abuse. The pamphleteers talked a great deal about
themselves, and conducted wit combats, which were redolent of the
bear-garden and backsword combats. La Rochefoucauld’s observation,
that there are men who would rather speak evil of themselves than
not speak of themselves at all, may also be kept in mind. A weak,
conceited, self-indulgent man, with a genuine vein of lyric poetry and
of tenderness, is perhaps as accurate a summing up as can be given of
Greene. He was born in 1560 and died in 1592, worn out by a Bohemian
life led in a very exuberant time. There seems to be no doubt that the
end was very miserable. Greene has enjoyed an unfortunate notoriety
on the strength of a passage in his last pamphlet, _The Groat’s Worth
of Wit_, in which he abuses Shakespeare. Everybody has heard of the
“only Shake-scene in the country,” the player adorned with the feathers
of Greene himself and other real poets. Historically it is of some
value as proving that Shakespeare was known and prosperous in 1592. It
also helps to give the measure of Greene, that while he was affecting
for the press all the agony of a deathbed repentance--partly no doubt
sincere enough--and was exhorting his friends to flee destruction,
he could break out, with all the venom of wounded vanity, against
the man who had succeeded where he himself had failed. If we had the
good fortune to know nothing of the life of Greene, he would rank
as a respectable writer who had a share in a time of preparation
for a far greater than himself or any of his associates. His prose
stories--largely adapted from the Italian--include one, _Pandosto_,
which had the honour in its turn to be adapted and made into poetic
drama by Shakespeare in _The Winter’s Tale_. His undoubted work for
the stage which survives was all published after his death with bad
or little editing. The first printed, _Orlando Furioso_, taken from
a passage in Ariosto, is hopelessly corrupt. The others are--_A
Looking-Glass for London and England_; _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_;
_Scottish Story of James IV._; the _Comical History of Alphonsus,
King of Aragon_; and the doubtful _George-a-Green, the Pinner of
Wakefield_.[74] With Greene we come to something at once very different
from Lyly, and quite new,--to the vehement exuberant Elizabethan drama,
which in strong hands reaches the loftiest heights of poetry and
passion, but in others falls to the lowest depths of rant, or runs to
the very madness of fustian. It is not the greater achievement that
we must look for in Greene. His heroics are “comical,” in a sense
not designed by the printer of _Alphonsus_. Drawcansir is hardly an
exaggeration of that hero, and is incomparably more coherent. His
comic scenes have too commonly the air of mere hack work put in to
supply parts for the clowns of the theatre, while his plots are mere
successions of events frequently unconnected with one another. But in
the midst of all is the undeniable vein of tenderness and lyric poetry.
All the scenes in his best play, _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, in
which Margaret the Fair Maid of Fressingfield is introduced, are
charmingly fresh and natural. With more discipline, and no temptation
to serve the taste of the time for King Cambyses’ vein, Greene might
have been the author of pleasant little plays of a poetic sentimental
order written in a charming simple style.
[SN: _Peele._]
His contemporary George Peele was slightly the older man, and outlived
Greene a very few years. He was born about 1558, and was dead by
1598, in a very sordid way. Of his life very little is known except
that he was the son of the “clerk” of Christ’s Hospital, that he was
educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and that
he was a thorough Bohemian. His reputation in this respect was so
solidly founded that he was made the hero of a book of “jests,” which,
in fact, are tales of roguery mostly reprinted from older French
originals. Peele worked regularly for a company of actors, and no
doubt did much which cannot now be traced. Commentators, who have
striven hard to prove the unprovable in the history of the Elizabethan
Drama, have assigned him portions of the First and Second Parts of
_Henry VI._[75] His undoubted plays are--_The Arraignment of Paris_,
_The famous Chronicle of King Edward I._, _The Battle of Alcazar_,
_The Old Wives’ Tale_, and _David and Fair Bethsabe_. To these may
be added _Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes_, which is written in the old
seven-foot metre, and differs from the others greatly. But custom
has assigned it to Peele, who indeed uses the long line elsewhere.
Peele was a decidedly stronger man than Greene, but a writer of the
same stamp and limitations. What is best in him is the lyric note
and the tenderness. The first is well shown in not a few passages of
the _Arraignment of Paris_, a somewhat overgrown masque, written for
the Court and to flatter Elizabeth; and the second in the _David and
Bethsabe_. His chronicle play, _Edward I._, has a certain historical
value as illustrating the growth of the class, and it is notorious for
the hideous libel it contains on the character of Eleanor of Castile;
while _The Battle of Alcazar_ is interesting in another way, as an
example of the boyish “blood and thunder” popular at the time, of which
Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_ is the masterpiece. It is the equivalent to
Greene’s _Alphonsus_; but if not more sane it is more substantial, and
does really contain lines which are poetry and not rant, though the
rant is there in profusion.
[SN: _Kyd._]
Thomas Kyd need hardly be mentioned here except for the purpose of
leading on to the master of the school, Marlowe. He is a very shadowy
figure, who may have been born in 1557, and may have died in 1595.
His voice is still audible in _The Spanish Tragedy_, and perhaps in
_Jeronimo_. The first-named is a continuation of the second--if the
second were not written to supply an introduction to the first. They
too are “blood and thunder,” with the occasional flash of real poetry,
which is found wellnigh everywhere in that wondrous time.
Greene, Peele, and Kyd, in spite of the independent merit of parts of
their work, are mainly interesting because they were forerunners of
Shakespeare, and aided in the formation of the English drama. If it
had wanted _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, or _David and Bethsabe_,
it would no doubt have been the poorer, but by things not great in
themselves, and still less indispensable. [SN: _Marlowe._] If it had
wanted the author of _Doctor Faustus_, it would have been the poorer by
a very great poet. Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, in the same
year as Shakespeare and was the son of a shoemaker. Probably by the
help of patrons he was educated at the grammar-school of the town, and
went from it to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge. The other events
of his life are mainly matter of guesswork till we come to the fact
that he was stabbed in a tavern brawl at Deptford on the 1st June 1593.
He was accused of exceeding even the large Bohemian licence of life
of his contemporaries, and of atheism. The evidence is neither direct
nor good, but it is certain that a warrant for his arrest, and that
of several of his friends, on the charge of disseminating irreligious
opinions, was issued by the Privy Council about a fortnight before
he was killed. At a time when all the once accepted foundations of
religion were being called in question, sheer denial was naturally not
unknown. Given the vehement spirit of all his work, it is as probable
that Marlowe went this length as that he stopped short of it. The truth
is in this case of little importance, for Marlowe’s place is among the
poets, not the controversialists, of the sixteenth century.
As a poet Marlowe stands immediately below Spenser and Shakespeare, but
between them and every other contemporary. He fails to rank with them
because he wanted their range, and also because there was something
in him not only unbridled, but incapable of submitting to order and
measure. For a moment, and from time to time, he shoots up to the
utmost height of poetry, but only in a beam of light, which lasts for
a very brief space and then sinks out of view. In these happy passages
of inspiration he showed what could be done with English blank verse.
It had been written before him, since it was first used by Surrey
in his translation of the _Æneid_, but Marlowe was its real creator
as an instrument of English poetry. This was his great achievement.
His fragment of _Hero and Leander_, though a beautiful poem of the
mythological and rather lascivious order popular at the time, and
full of a most passionate love of beauty, nowhere attains to the
height of the constantly quoted “purple patches” from the first part
of _Tamburlaine_, from _Dr Faustus_, or from _The Jew of Malta_. In
themselves they are unsurpassable, yet his plays cannot by any possible
stretch of charity be called good. What we remember of them is always
the passage of poetry, expressing in the most magnificent language
some extreme passion of ambition, greed, fear, or grasping arrogance,
or some sheer revel of delight in the splendour of jewels and the
possibilities of wealth. There are few scenes, in the proper sense of
the word, and there is much monotonous repetition. The second part
of _Tamburlaine_ is the same thing over and over. The first two acts
of _The Jew of Malta_ promise well, and then the play falls off into
incoherence and absurdity. Marlowe, though an incomparably greater
man, seems to have been as blind as Greene or Peele ever were to what
is meant by consistency. His Barabas, for instance, who is represented
as a wicked able man, is suddenly found putting his neck in the power
of a new-bought slave in a fashion hardly conceivable in the case of a
mere fool. _Dr Faustus_ holds together no better than Barabas. There
is something more astonishing still. A poet may be able to express
passion in splendid verse, and yet be able neither to construct a story
nor create a character, but we do not expect to find him dropping into
what, as mere language, is childishly inept. Now that is what Marlowe
did. The difference is not that between Wordsworth at his best and
his worst. It is the difference between Dryden and the bellman’s
verses--between poetry and rank fustian, or commonplace. His short
life, and the conditions in which it was passed, made it inevitable
that the bulk of Marlowe’s work should be but little. _Tamburlaine_,
_Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward II._, and _The Massacre of
Paris_ sum up the list of the plays which we can be sure were wholly
his. _The Tragedy of Dido_ was written in collaboration with Nash.
Beyond this there is a supposition, supported by greater or less
probability, that he had a share in _Lust’s Dominion_ and in _Titus
Andronicus_ and _Henry VI._ To the plays are to be added the fragment
of _Hero and Leander_, _The Passionate Shepherd_, and the translations
from Ovid written in his earlier days.[76]
[SN: _Character of these writers._]
If the question is asked what this body of poets had done to advance
the development of the English drama, the answer must be that they had
done something to improve its language. More can hardly be claimed for
them. They certainly give no example of how to construct a dramatic
story, nor did they create a consistent interesting character, unless
Greene’s Fair Margaret be allowed as an exception. That you did very
well as long as you took care that something happened, whether it was
what the personage would have done, or what would follow from what went
before, or not, was apparently an accepted rule with all of them. It
was somewhat strange that it should have been so, for all were educated
men, and were deeply conscious of their learning. Even if they did not
take the classic model, which, as they were all far better qualified
to write a chorus than to construct a plot, it would have been to their
advantage to do, they might have learnt, without going beyond Horace,
to avoid their grosser faults. It must not be forgotten that none of
their surviving plays were published in favourable circumstances. All
may have been, and some certainly were, subject to manipulation while
in the hands of the actors. But even when allowance is made for this,
it is undeniable that the writers of the school of Marlowe, to use a
not very accurate but convenient expression, were totally wanting in
any sense of proportion. To judge by much that they were content to
write, they cannot have known the difference between good and bad. The
incoherent movement of their plays was perhaps partly due to the want
of scenery. When the audience would take a curtain for Syracuse, they
would also take it for Ephesus or for twenty different places, indoors
and out, in one act. There was, therefore, no check on the playwright,
who could move with all the licence of the story-teller. But then they
did not give their plays even the coherence of a story. As they were
all dependent on companies of actors, they may often have put in what
their employers told them was needed to please a part of the audience.
It is to this necessity that we may attribute the comic scenes of _Dr
Faustus_ if we wish to find an excuse for Marlowe--and if, indeed, they
were his, and not written in by others at the orders of Henslowe the
manager. But this does not account for all. When it is allowed for,
enough remains to show that all these predecessors of Shakespeare were
unable to see the difference between horseplay and humour, and were
almost equally blind to the immense distinction between the “grand
manner” and mere fustian. This last, indeed, had an irresistible
attraction for them, and not less for Marlowe than for the others. If
it had not he would never have put the rant of _Tamburlaine_ into the
mouth which spoke the superb lines beginning “If all the pens that ever
poets held,” nor would he have allowed Barabas to sink from the gloomy
magnificence of his beginning into a mere grotesque puppet Jew with a
big nose.
[SN: _Shakespeare._]
“All that is known with any degree of certainty concerning Shakespeare
is,--that he was born at Stratford-upon-Avon--married and had children
there--went to London, where he commenced actor, and wrote poems and
plays--returned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was buried.”
This summary, which Steevens put in a note to the ninety-third sonnet,
is as true as when it was written in the last century. It is not quite
exhaustive, for we know that Shakespeare had the respect and affection
of his contemporaries from Chettle to Ben Jonson, and also that he
was a very prosperous man. Yet Steevens included nearly all that the
most extreme industry has been able to discover of Shakespeare’s life.
The date of his birth was on or just before the 23rd April 1564, and
he died on that day in 1616. From the age of about twenty till he was
nearly forty he lived in London as actor or manager. In his youth
he wrote two poems in the prevailing fashion, _Venus and Adonis_
and _The Rape of Lucrece_. The sonnets published in 1609 belong to a
later period, but it is impossible to fix their date. His chief work
was always done for the company to which he belonged. For that he
recast old plays or wrote new ones. The poems alone were published by
himself. His sonnets appeared in a pirated edition during his life,
and his plays after his death, when his fellow-actors had no longer an
overpowering motive to keep them for themselves. On this very slight
framework there has been built a vast superstructure of guesswork of
which very little need be said here.
[SN: _Guesses about his life._]
It is not only the large element of sheer folly in these guesses,
the imbecile attempt to prove that the man of whom Ben Jonson spoke
and wrote the well-known words was not the author of his own plays,
which may be put aside. Nor is it even the hardly less imbecile effort
to find political journalism, or other things didactic, social, and
scientific, in his dramas. Don M. Menendez, speaking of the very
similar race of Cervantistas, has said that this is the resource of
people, often respectable for other reasons, who being unable to enjoy
literature as literature, but being also conscious that they ought to
enjoy it, have been driven to look for something else in their author.
These good people have fixed on Shakespeare, as their like have settled
on Molière in France and Cervantes in Spain. Some great names may be
quoted to give a certain authority to the supposition that Shakespeare
unlocked his heart with the key of the sonnet. For their sake we must
not dismiss this guess as unceremoniously as we may well turn out the
egregious Bacon theory and its like. Yet it is perhaps not essentially
wiser. Even if we accept it, nothing is proved except this, that
Shakespeare experienced some of the common fortunes of men of letters
and other men, and then this, that he carried the indelicacy of his
time to its possible extreme. We know that his “sugared sonnets” were
handed about among his friends so freely that they got into print.
So much is certain. If they did unlock his heart, and if the sonnet
beginning “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” did refer to
a particular person who must have been perfectly well known to many
of its readers, then this very great poet and dramatist must have
been singularly destitute of the beginnings of a sense of shame, even
according to the standard of the sixteenth century. It is impossible
to prove that those who take this view are wrong--and if the word
evidence has any meaning, equally impossible to prove that they are
right. But be their belief right or wrong, the value of the sonnets is
not affected. They are valuable, not because they reveal the passing
fortunes of one man, however great, but because they express what is
permanent in mankind in language of everlasting excellence.
[SN: _Order of his work._]
The work by which Shakespeare was first known in his time were the
poems _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_, which appeared
respectively in 1593 and 1594. Though the dates of composition and
order of succession of his plays are obscure, it is certain that he
was working for the stage before the first of these years. But as yet
he was rather redoing the work of others than producing for himself.
The sonnets were widely known by 1598, and were in all probability
inspired, as so many other collections of the same class, though of
very different degrees of merit, were, by the example of _Astrophel
and Stella_. The chronology of the plays is, it may be repeated,
difficult to settle, but on the whole they may be asserted to have
followed the order in which it would appear natural to assign them on
internal evidence. First come those in which his hand, though never to
be mistaken, is seen in least power--_Pericles_ and _Henry VI._ Then
come others in which we get most of the mere fashion of the time, its
euphuism and other affectations--_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, _Love’s
Labour Lost_, &c. Next follow the long series of romantic plays and
chronicle plays, darkened by tragedy and irradiated by humour--_The
Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _Henry IV._, _As You Like
It_. The great tragedies with what it is perhaps more accurate to call
the greater drama, _The Tempest_ and _The Winter’s Tale_, belong to the
later years.
[SN: _Estimates of Shakespeare._]
The difficulty which meets the critic who wishes to speak, after so
many others, of Cervantes, stands in an even more formidable shape on
the path of him who wishes to speak of Shakespeare. Most generations
have produced those who have spoken badly. When they were honest, and
were not also incapable of literature, which has sometimes been the
case, they were enslaved to some fashion, some pedantry of their own
time. With these have been the merely inept, and there has not been
wanting the buffoon, straining after singularity. The gutter and the
green-room have been audible. But by the side of these there has been
an unbroken testimony to Shakespeare borne by the greatest masters
of English literature. It began with Ben Jonson, and has lasted till
it has become wellnigh superfluous amid the general agreement of the
world. As in the case of Cervantes, this agreement of the competent
judges, this universal acceptance, are by themselves enough to dispense
us from proving that in him there was something more than was merely
national. Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, all the Elizabethans, belong
to us and to others only as objects of literary study, as Garcilaso,
Lope, Calderon, all the others of Spain’s great time, belong to the
Spaniards. But Shakespeare and Cervantes, though the first is very
English and the second very Spanish, belong to the whole world. Their
countrymen may understand them best, but there is that in them which
is common to all humanity. The one star differs from the other in
glory; for if Cervantes brought the matter of his masterpiece under
the “species of eternity,” he brought much less than Shakespeare, who
included everything except religion, and leaves us persuaded of his
power to deal with that. _Don Quixote_ is equivalent to one of the
great dramas. Yet they meet in this supreme quality of universality. So
much can be said of only one among their contemporaries, the Frenchman
Montaigne, in whom also there was something which speaks to all men at
all times.
[SN: _Divisions of his work._]
The work of Shakespeare falls into two classes--the pure poetry and
the drama. The second is, indeed, intensely poetic, both in form and
spirit, so that the division becomes unintelligent if we push it too
far. But when his poetry is dramatic--when it is employed to set forth
an action by talk--it is used for another purpose, and is found in
combination with other qualities than are to be found in the pure
poems. These are the _Venus and Adonis_, _The Rape of Lucrece_, the
sonnets, and the lyrics, which are mostly to be found in the plays,
but can be detached from them. [SN: _The poems._] It is a sufficient
proof of the vast sweep of Shakespeare’s genius that if we had nothing
of him but these, the loss to the literature of the world would be
irreparable, but he would still be a great poet. The _Venus and Adonis_
and _The Rape of Lucrece_ are greater poems than Marlowe’s _Hero and
Leander_, more intense in passion, more uniformly magnificent in
expression. Marlowe may reach their level when he is speaking to the
full extent of his power, but he is not always there. Shakespeare
always leaves the impression that he is within the limit of what he
could do. The lyrics are the most perfect achievements of an age of
lyric poetry. It is the presence of this note which atones for the much
that is wanting in Lyly, Peele, and Greene. But if their best is put
beside Shakespeare it suffers, as a pretty water-colour would suffer if
hung by the side of a Velasquez. They lose colour by the comparison.
The age was rich in sonnets. It produced the passion and melody of
Sidney, the beauty of Spenser, the accomplishment of Daniel, and the
vigour of Drayton. Yet Shakespeare’s sonnets are no less distinctly
the greatest than his lyrics. It is even here that his pre-eminence is
the most marked, for he has triumphed over more. The lyric is free and
is brief. The sonnet is bound by rigid laws, and a cycle of sonnets
is peculiarly liable to become monotonous, to be redundant, to be
mechanical and frigid. But Shakespeare’s sonnets, whether or no they
be in the order in which he would have put them, or were written to
fall into any particular order, gave a varied yet consistent play of
thought and passion, overshadowed by the ever-present consciousness of
“the barren rage of death’s eternal cold.” In them, too, we always feel
the superiority of the faculty to the work done. There is no toil, no
struggle to express. What would have made another poet immortal, if
said with manifest effort, is all poured out in “a first fine careless
rapture.”
[SN: _The dramas._]
And beyond this ample forecourt and noble portico lies the
far-spreading palace of the plays. The dramatic work of Shakespeare
is greater than the purely poetic, mainly because of its vastly
greater scope. It contains all that is in the poems, and so much more
that they are, as it were, lost in the abundance. In this stately
pleasure-house there are no doubt parts which diligent examination will
show to bear the traces of inexperience in the builder, fragments of
the work of others, and ornaments in the passing taste of the time.
Shakespeare laboured for the Globe Theatre. He rearranged stock plays,
and now and then he passed what he found in them, not because it was
good but because it would suffice. He was an Elizabethan, and like
others, he let his spirits and his energies relax in mere playing
with words, in full-mouthed uproarious noise, and the quibbles which
made Dr Johnson shake his head. In common with every other dramatist
from Sophocles downwards, he had to consider his theatre and his
audience. The mere man of letters writing “closet” plays can forget
the stage, and be punished by the discovery that his masterpiece
won’t act. Shakespeare aimed at being acted. His stage had no change
of scenery, and his audience loved action. Therefore he could put
in more words than can be admitted when time must be found for the
operations of the stage-carpenter and the scene-shifter. Therefore
also he could allow himself a licence in the change of scene, which
is impossible when it carries with it a change of scenery. But all
this is either easily separable or can be amended by rearrangement.
And therein lies the absolute difference between Shakespeare and his
contemporaries. _The Jew of Malta_ could not be made an acting play by
any process of manipulation. Take from the best of the others--even
from Ben Jonson--what was purely Elizabethan, and how much remains?
They are excellent to read, and were good to act before an audience
which accepted their convention, but before that only. For purely
stage purposes, too, their convention is inferior to the Spanish. The
_Dama Melindrosa_ would be easily intelligible and interesting to any
audience to-day, but not _Every Man in his Humour_, or _Epicene_. With
Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have
been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains--not
in all cases, indeed, but in most--a play--that is, a consistent
action--carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking
differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in
perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with
unchanging human nature.
[SN: _The reality of Shakespeare’s characters._]
It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shakespeare’s plays
their unity and their enduring vitality. The superb verse, the
faultless expression of every human emotion, from the love of Romeo
or the intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque devotion of
Bardolph, “Would I were with him wheresome’er he is, either in Heaven
or in Hell,” are the outward and visible signs of this inward and
spiritual truth to nature. _Henry IV._ and _Henry V._ may seem to be
but straggling plays when they are compared with the exactly fitted
plots of Lope de Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action
of Racine. So the free-growing forest-tree is less trim and balanced
than the clipped yew. But it has a higher life and the finer unity. The
Henry V. who meets Falstaff with--
“I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”
is the same man as he who said--
“I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness....
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.”
Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent archbishop to provide him
with an excuse for a war of aggression, and so having provided for both
worlds, takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the responsibility
for the miseries of the war on the French. In the tavern, in the
council-chamber, on the battlefield, by the sick-bed of his father,
he is always the same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able
selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magnanimity which costs
him nothing--a perfect portrait of the “unconscious hypocrite.” The
circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward
show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as
consistent as the king’s. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor
cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously,
and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity.
Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral. He is only exterior to
morals. If he were cruel or treacherous he would be horrible, but he
is neither. He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and ease-loving
animal. Given these two, and around them a crowd of others, heroic,
grotesque, or even only commonplace, all doing credible things on the
green earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made on the
model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent, because being real and
true to life, the characters act intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused,
unnatural, or inconsequent.
The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the real nature of
some of Shakespeare’s characters is a tribute to their reality. We are
never in the least doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille
or Racine, or the _galanes_, _damas_, and jealous husbands of Lope and
Calderon. In them we have certain qualities, certain manifestations
of character, selected and kept so well before us that they explain
themselves, as a Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. Even Molière,
who comes nearest to Shakespeare, is simple and transparent, because
he also is, in comparison, narrow and arbitrary. We may differ as to
his purpose in writing _Don Juan_ or _Tartuffe_. Was he only drawing
infidelity and hypocrisy to make them hateful? Was he speaking for
the _libertins_ of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of the
philosophy of the eighteenth, who were in revolt against the claim
of religion to be a guide of life and to control conduct? But the
personages explain themselves. Again, when we meet one of those
sudden, unexplained, or insufficiently explained alterations of the
whole nature of a man or woman, so common with the other Elizabethan
dramatists, and not very rare with the Spaniards, we know it to be
false to life, and put it down at once as a clumsy playwright’s device.
But the characters of Shakespeare are like the great figures of
history, real, and yet not always to be understood at once, because
they have the variety, the complexity, and the mystery of nature.
The men who grew up around Shakespeare in the last years of the
sixteenth century, and who outlived him, do not belong to our
subject. It is enough to point out how unlikely it was that they
would continue him. Ben Jonson, who was by far the strongest of
them, tacitly confessed that there could be no Shakespearian drama
without Shakespeare, when he deliberately sacrificed character to the
convenient simplicity of the “humour,” and looked for the structural
coherence of his plays to the unities. Other men who were less wise
preferred to keep the freedom which they had not the strength to bear.
FOOTNOTES:
[70] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.
[71] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.
[72] Dodsley’s _Old Plays_, 1825.
[73] _Dramatic Works of John Lyly._ Edited by F. W. Fairholt, 1858.
[74] _Dramatic Works of Robert Greene._ Dyce, 1883.
[75] _Dramatic Works of George Peele._ Dyce, 1883.
[76] _Works of Christopher Marlowe._ Dyce, 1865.
CHAPTER IX. THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS.
ELIZABETHAN PROSE--TWO SCHOOLS OF WRITERS--ROGER ASCHAM--HIS
BOOKS AND STYLE--WEBBE AND PUTTENHAM--THE SENTENCE--EUPHUISM--THE
‘ARCADIA’--SIDNEY’S STYLE--SHORT STORIES--NASH’S ‘UNFORTUNATE
TRAVELLER’--NASH AND THE PAMPHLETEERS--MARTIN MARPRELATE--ORIGIN
OF THE MARPRELATE TRACTS--THE ‘DIOTREPHES’--COURSE OF THE
CONTROVERSY--ITS PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY--HOOKER--‘THE
ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.’
[SN: _Elizabethan prose._]
The reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James, which cover the
period of the Later Renaissance in England, were times of poetry
and not of prose. It is true that much prose was written, that some
of it is admirable, and that more is interesting. It is also true
that some of the greatest masters of English prose were alive, and
were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon,
belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their
greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and
Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very great
name among prose-writers, that of Hooker; while before him and around
him there are many whose work was meritorious, or interesting, or
curious--anything, in fact, but great--and of not a few of them it has
to be said that in the long-run they were not profitable.
The difficulty of marshalling these men of letters in an orderly way is
not small. The chronological arrangement, besides being ill-adapted to
contemporaries, does not show their real relations to one another, or
their place in English literature. The division by subject is utterly
mechanical, when very different matter was handled in the same style
and often by the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he was writing
_Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem_, or _Have with you to Saffron Walden_,
or _The Unfortunate Traveller_. We shall be better able to make a
survey of this side of the literature of the Later Renaissance in
England if we class its prose-writers by their spirit and their style,
and treat their dates and their matter (which, however, are not to be
dismissed as of no importance) as subordinate.
[SN: _Two schools of writers._]
If this classification, then, is permitted, we may divide the
Elizabethan prose-writers into those whose aim it was to give “English
matter in the English tongue for Englishmen,” and those who strove for
something better, more ornate, lofty, peculiar, and, as they held,
more literary, than was to be reached by the pursuit of this modest
purpose. The chief of the first in order of time was Ascham, who,
however, belonged to an earlier generation, though he died in the
queen’s reign, and part of his work was published after his death.
The great exemplar of the second was Lyly. In neither case did the
followers merely imitate their leader. There is much in Hooker which
is not in Ascham. The _enredados razones_--the roundabout affectations
of the authors of the Spanish _Libros de Caballerías_--may have had
some influence on Sidney, who certainly knew them. Rabelais and Aretino
were much read and imitated by some who also “parled Euphues.” But the
distinction holds good none the less. On the one side are those who,
having something to say, were content to say it perspicuously. On the
other were those who, whether they had something to say or whether
they were simply determined to be talking, were careful to give their
utterances some stamp of distinction. If the first were liable to
become pedestrian, the second were threatened by an obvious danger.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for
the writer who has got tired of milking the cow, and wants to milk the
bull, to escape sheer affectation--which affectation, again, is in the
great majority of cases a trick, a juggle with words repeated over and
over again.
The prose which was first written for literary purposes in Elizabeth’s
time was an inheritance from the reign of Henry VIII. It was the plain
downright style of Ascham--the style of a man who thought in Latin, and
turned it into good current English.
[SN: _Webbe and Puttenham._]
Yet the writers who were content to be as plain and downright as Ascham
do not require many words. Such treatises as Webbe’s _Discourse of
English Poetrie_, printed in 1586, or the _Arte of English Poesie_,
published in 1589, and attributed to George Puttenham by Carew in 1614,
are interesting, but it cannot be said that they hold an important
place in English literature, or had any considerable effect. The
_Arte of English Poesie_ is indeed a very sane and thorough critical
treatise, one proof among others that if so many of the Elizabethan
writers were wild and shapeless, it was not because none in their
time thought wisely on questions of literary principle and of form.
The explanation of their extravagance may be more safely looked for
elsewhere. When Nash was reproached for his “boisterous compound
words,” he answered, “That no wind that blows strong but is boisterous,
no speech or words of any power or force to confute, or persuade,
but must be swelling and boisterous.” This is Brantôme’s excuse for
the rodomontade, that superb and swelling words go well with daring
deeds. The Elizabethans were so vehement and headlong, that they sought
naturally for the “word of power,” for the altisonant and ear-filling
in language, and were more tolerant of bombast than of the pedestrian.
[SN: _The sentence._] Their general inability to confine themselves
to the sentence may be excused on the same ground. They felt so much,
and so strongly, that they could not stop to disentangle and arrange.
Certainly if Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the
light. Models were not wanting to them, and they were not unaware
of the virtue of being clear and coherent. Whoever the author of
Martin Marprelate’s _Epistle_ may have been--Penry, Udall, Barrow,
or another--he knew a bad sentence as well as any of the Queen Anne
men. He fixes, as any of them might have done, on the confused heap of
clauses which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges’s _Defence
of the Government of the Church of England_. “And learned brother
Bridges,” he writes, “a man might almost run himself out of breath
before he could come to a full point in many places in your book. Page
69, line 3, speaking of the extraordinary gifts in the Apostles’ time,
you have this sweet learning,[77] ‘Yea some of them have for a great
part of the time, continued even till our times, and yet continue, as
the operation of great works, or if they mean miracles, which were not
ordinary, no not in that extraordinary time, and as the hypocrites
had them, so might and had divers of the Papists, and yet their cause
never the better, and the like may we say of the gifts of speaking with
tongues which have not been with study before learned, as Anthony, &c.,
and divers also among the ancient fathers, and some among the Papists,
and some among us, have not been destitute of the gifts of prophesying,
and much more may I say this of the gift of healing, for none of those
gifts or graces given then or since, or yet to men, infer the grace of
God’s election to be of necessity to salvation.’”
The Dean’s meaning reveals itself at the third or fourth reading, but
this is the style of Mrs Nickleby. Martin Marprelate saw its vices, and
noted on the margin, “Hoo hoo, Dean, take breath and then to it again,”
as Swift himself might have done. Dr Bridges is no authority in English
literature, but he was a learned man, and must have had some practice
in preaching. Yet we see that he fell into a confusion which at any
time after the seventeenth century would have been a proof either of
extreme ignorance, or of some such defect of power to express himself
as accounts for the obscurity of Castlereagh. Dean Bridges shows only
the disastrous consequences of that disregard of the proper limit of
the sentence which was common with some of the greatest writers of
his time. Take, for instance, this passage from Sir Walter Raleigh’s
account of the loss of the Revenge, published in 1591. He begins
admirably: “All the powder of the Revenge was now spent, all her pikes
were broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest
hurt.” Several rapid sentences follow, and then we come to:[78] “Sir
Richard finding himself in this distress, and unable any longer to make
resistance having endured in this fifteen hours’ fight, the assault of
fifteen several Armadoes, all by turns aboard him, and by estimation
eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and
entries, and that himself and the ship must needs be possessed by the
enemy, who were now all cast in a ring about him; the Revenge not able
to move one way or other but as she was moved with the waves and billow
of the sea, commanded the Master Gunner, whom he knew to be a most
resolute man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might
remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards, seeing in so many hours’
fight, and with so great a navy they were not able to take her, having
had fifteen hours’ time, fifteen thousand men, and fifty and three sail
of men of war to perform it withal. And persuaded the company or as
many as he could induce to yield themselves unto God, and to the mercy
of none else, but as they had like valiant resolute men repulsed so
many enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of their nation,
by prolonging their own lives for a few hours or a few days.”
This is the style of a writer who does not know when a sentence
has come to an end, and who, when he writes one which is properly
constructed, does it mainly by good fortune. If it is more intelligible
than Dr Bridges, the cause of the superiority lies at least partly in
this, that Raleigh had the easier task to perform. He had only to state
facts, not to expound doctrine.
While making allowance for the inward and spiritual cause of the
invasion of English by the long, confused, overladen sentence, it must
also be confessed that the evil was largely due to the prevalence of
affected styles of writing, which lent themselves to over-elaboration.
Two bad models were set before Englishmen about the middle of the
queen’s reign, and they unfortunately became, and remained for long,
exceedingly popular--Lyly’s euphuism, and the wiredrawn finicking style
of Sidney’s _Arcadia_, to which no name has ever been given. The lives
of these authors have already been dealt with under another head. Their
style, as shown in their stories, and its effect on English literature,
are the matters in hand. Euphuism and the manner of the _Arcadia_
appear to have been elaborated by their authors about the same time,
though Lyly takes precedence in the order of publication. _Euphues, the
Anatomy of Wit_, was printed in 1579, _Euphues and his England_ in the
following year.[79]
[SN: _Euphuism._]
Euphuism has become a name for literary affectation, and is in that
sense often used with very little precision. It is a very peculiar form
of affectation. The two main features of the style--the mechanical
antitheses and the abuse of similes--have been described already.
_Euphues_, in so far as it is a story, is as near as may be naught. The
hero from whom it takes its name is the grandfather of all virtuous,
solemn, and didactic prigs. He makes two excursions into the world
from his native Athens. In the first he induces a lady at Naples to
jilt her lover Philautus, and is by her most justly jilted in turn.
He floods southern Italy with antithetical platitude, and retires to
Athens. Then Euphues and Philautus come to England, where the second,
after philandering with one lady, marries another. Euphues remains
didactic and superior. At last he goes back to a cave in Silexedra.
There is a great deal of praise of Queen Elizabeth in the second
part, as indeed there was in all the literature of her time as high
as Shakespeare’s plays and the _Ecclesiastical Polity_. There are
also pages of such matter as this: “But as the cypress-tree the more
it is watered the more it withereth, and the oftener it is lopped
the sooner it dieth, so unbridled youth the more it is also by grave
advice counselled or due correction controlled, the sooner it falleth
to confusion, hating all reasons that would bring it from folly, as
that tree doeth all remedies, that should make it fertile.” Unbridled
youth might have answered that if lopping and watering are bad for
the cypress he must be a poor forester who persists in lopping and
watering. But the youth of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which was unbridled
enough, was also more respectful. It listened to the due correction and
grave counsel of Euphues with deference. It did more, for it imitated
him. The unbridled Nash euphuised, and so did many another. Alongside
the fire from heaven, and elsewhere, of the Elizabethan time, there was
an unending wishy-washy, though frequently turbid, flow of copy-book
heading, which came from the great Lylyan source. It looks strange that
a time which loved _Tamburlaine_ and produced the great lyric, should
also have delighted in this square-toed finical vacuity. But perhaps,
again, it is not so wonderful. There was also in the Elizabethan time
a liking for what looked superior to the common herd. About the Court
there was much foppery, and there were many who wished to resemble
the fine gentlemen of the Court, while the reviving morality of the
age, compatible as it was with much individual profligacy, made men
respectful of virtuous commonplace. With the minority of Edward VI.
and the brutality of the Court of Henry VIII. close behind them, it
was as yet hardly the case that “the cardinal virtues were to be taken
for granted among English gentlemen.” Surrey may have been jesting
when he told his sister to make herself the king’s mistress, but what
a society that must have been in which a brother, and he “a mirror of
chivalry,” thought this a mere jest. Now Lyly was very moral, a fop
to his fingers’ ends, and with all his oddity and his pedantry, there
is a real, though very artificial, distinction about him. Finally,
there were as yet few and insignificant rivals. It is not then at all
surprising that his style was taken up at Court as “the thing,” and
accepted by the honest admiration, to say nothing of the snobbery, of
the outer world.
Lyly sinned by setting an example of a stilted style; but his sentence
(for he had but one) is as complete as the constant use of the formula,
“As the A is B, so the C is D, and the more E is F the more G is H,”
can make it. [SN: _The_ Arcadia.] With Sidney’s _Arcadia_[80] we come
to another kind of affectation. The circumstances in which it was
written must be taken into account. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to please
his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a lady who was somewhat of a
_précieuse_, and who was all her life the centre of some literary
coterie. Her patronage of the Senecan play shows that her leanings were
towards the superfine, and away from what was natural to Englishmen.
The _Arcadia_, therefore, is coterie work, and does not seem to have
been looked upon as very serious by Sir Philip himself. It was written
by fits and starts, and sent off to his sister in instalments. The
date of composition must have been about 1580 and later, but it was
not published till after the author’s death in 1584, and remains a
fragment, though a large one. The _Arcadia_ is much longer than the
“tedious brief” masterpiece of Lyly, even without taking into account
the verse, of which much is written in the classic metres. It is
also far more interesting. Although we are accustomed to speak of it
as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength of the name, it
is much more a _Libro de Caballerías_. There is a pastoral element
in it unquestionably, as there is in the stories of Feliciano de
Silva, but in the main its matter is that of the books of “Knightly
Deeds”--challenges and defiances, combats of champions, loves of
cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs of plebeians by the single
arm of the knight. There are wicked knights who drag off ladies on
the pommel of their saddles and beat them, good knights who rescue
these victims, captures and deliverances of damsels, and everywhere
the finest sentiments or the most extreme wickedness, just as in the
_Amadis_ or the _Palmerin_. It is a very entangled book, and is not
made clearer by the fact that one of the heroes, who is disguised as
an amazon, figures alternately as “he” and as “she.” Yet Sidney does
achieve the great end of the story-teller, which is to keep alive his
reader’s desire to know what is going to happen next. The morality of
the book has been very differently judged. It has been called “a vain
and amatorious poem,” a “cobweb across the face of nature,” and it has
also been described as noble and elevating. Yet it would be a curious
morality which could be affected by the doings of personages who are
either too seraphic for flesh and blood, or so wicked that the most
shameless of mankind would resent being compared to them.
[SN: _Sidney’s style._]
The “vanity” of the book lies in the wordy amatoriousness of its
style. We have perhaps pushed the practice of accounting for all
fashions in literature by imitation too far. It is quite as possible
to explain Lyly without Guevara as it would be to account for Góngora
without Lyly. Given the desire to write in a fine peculiar form, and
the adoption of some trick with words follows naturally, while the
number of tricks which can be played is not indefinite. Yet it is at
least as likely that Sir Philip Sidney was set on his peculiar form
of affectation by the _Libros de Caballerías_, published from thirty
to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him. Such sentences as
these send us back at once to Feliciano de Silva: “Most beloved lady,
the incomparable excellences of yourself, waited on by the greatness
of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life
consisteth, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning
and many circumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold and
fearful.” And, “Since no words can carry with them the life of the
inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances
of honour, and let Virtue hold them; for if the highest love in no base
person may aspire to grace, then may I hope your beauty will not be
without pity.” Turn to the first chapter of Shelton’s _Don Quixote_,
and you meet with those “intricate sentences” from Feliciano: “The
reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth
so weaken my reason as with all reason I doe justly complaine on your
beauty.” And, “The High Heavens which with your divinity doe fortifie
you divinely with the starres, and make you deserveresse of the deserts
that your greatnesse deserves,” &c.[81]
We must not push the comparison too far. Sidney had qualities of
imagination which raised him far above the Spaniard, and he never rings
the changes on the same word so fatuously as Feliciano and other later
authors of _Libros de Caballerías_. Yet the juggle on the two forces
of the word “desire” is quite in the Spanish taste. The immediate
success of _Don Quixote_ in England may be explained not only by the
permanent merits of Cervantes’ romance, but by the fact that we had our
examples of the literary affectation which he attacked. The practice of
labouring the expression of sentiment, of repeating, qualifying, and
counterbalancing, would inevitably lead to long straggling sentences,
while it was also a direct invitation to the frigid conceits in which
Sidney abounds.
[SN: _Short Stories._]
Stories of a kind, translations from or adaptations of the Italians,
and notably Bandello, with imitations of _Euphues_ and the Pastorals,
were common in Elizabethan literature. But, perhaps because it suffered
from the overpowering rivalry of poetry and the stage, the prose
tale is rarely among the good things of the time. Greene, Lodge, and
Breton[82] are interesting to the student, but it cannot be said, with
any measure of accuracy, that they have a place in the history of the
English novel. They were part of the literary production of their time,
but were mostly imitation, and were too completely forgotten, and too
soon, to produce any effect. An exceptional interest attaches to Nash’s
_Unfortunate Traveller_, to which attention has again been attracted
of late. It is curious that a story which has considerable intrinsic
force should have put the model of the _Novela de Pícaros_ before
English readers five years earlier than the publication of _Guzman
de Alfarache_ in Spain, and that it should have been so completely
forgotten that when this model was again introduced among us by Defoe,
his inspiration came from Le Sage.[83]
[SN: _Nash’s_ Unfortunate Traveller.]
Thomas Nash (1567-1601), who was chiefly known as a pamphleteer,
published _The Unfortunate Traveller_ in 1594. It is difficult to read,
at any rate the earlier parts of the story, and we doubt that the
author had seen, if not the original of the _Lazarillo de Tormes_, then
at any rate the French version of Jean Saugrain, published in 1561. If
his work is quite independent, then we have a very remarkable instance
of exact similarity in the method and spirit of two writers separated
from one another in race and by an interval of nearly half a century,
during which the first had enjoyed a wide popularity. This is difficult
to believe. Nothing can be more like Lazarillo’s doings than the tricks
which Nash’s hero, Jack Wilton, plays on the old cider-selling lord and
the captain. It would seem, however, that the time had not come when
the picaresque method was to be really congenial to Englishmen. Nash
wanders away from it when he introduces the story of Surrey and the
Fair Geraldine. Yet he comes back to it with the hero’s love-affairs
with Diamante, the wife of a Venetian, whom he meets in prison at
Venice. He keeps to it very close when Wilton runs away with his
“courtezan,” and gives himself out to be the Earl of Surrey. From the
time the hero and Diamante reach Rome the picaresque tone disappears,
and Nash drops into familiar Elizabethan “blood and thunder.” With the
inconsequence of his time he gives at the end a defiant last dying
speech and confession of an Italian malefactor, who bears the English
name of Cutwolf. Perhaps a certain want of finish, and an air there
is about it of being hasty work done to make a little money, injured
its effect. Yet _The Unfortunate Traveller_ did show Englishmen a way
they were to follow in the future, and it came before the _Guzman de
Alfarache_.
[SN: _Nash and the pamphleteers._]
Thomas Nash was himself perhaps intrinsically the most able, and
certainly not the least typical, member of a whole class of Elizabethan
men of letters. He was born at Lowestoft, “a son of the manse,” in
1567, and was educated at St John’s, Cambridge. It has been supposed
on the strength of some passages in his writings that he travelled
abroad in his youth, though he does not write in his _Unfortunate
Traveller_ like a man who had seen Venice and Rome. He was settled
in London by 1588, and lived the very necessitous life of a man of
letters who depended wholly on his pen, till his early death in 1601.
It was the misfortune of Nash and of many of his contemporaries that
they were born too soon for the magazine or newspaper. His work
consists mainly of matter written to please prevailing tastes of the
time. _Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem_, a long, wordy, and decidedly
pretentious collection of preachment, and denunciation of the sins
of London, his violent quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, or rather with
the whole Harvey family, which was rolled out in pamphlets for the
amusement of the world, his collection of ghost stories, _The Terrors
of the Night_, and what he called _Toys for Gentlemen_, which are lost,
and into the nature of which it is perhaps better not to inquire, were
journalism before its time. His _Have with you to Saffron Walden_, a
piece of vigorous literary horseplay at the expense of Gabriel Harvey,
is an excellent pamphlet of its kind--in the kind of Mr Pott and Mr
Slurk; while his burlesque almanac, called _A wonderful strange and
miraculous Astronomical Prognostication_, though undoubtedly suggested
by Rabelais, and therefore not quite original, is a piece of solemn
fun worthy of the irony and the good sense of Swift. Nash had ideas
of style which sometimes led him into involved pomposity, but which
also supplied him with an effective, though blackguard, controversial
manner. Nobody was a greater master of loud-mouthed bragging, of the
fashion of telling an opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful
things you are going to do with him. Consciously, or unconsciously, the
Elizabethans were great believers in the maxim that if you throw mud
enough some will stick, and it was one of the signs of their youth and
primitive simplicity of nature that when they were angry they gave way
to the instinct which leads men to scream vituperation and curses, with
no regard to their application to the subject. To call a very eminent
man on his trial for treason--and on the most flimsy evidence too--“a
spider of hell” would now be thought not less silly than ignoble.
But that is what Coke called Raleigh, and it is a very fair specimen
of Elizabethan satirical controversy. Around Nash was a whole class
of men engaged in the same work of writing little stories--pastoral
or euphuistic--and pamphlets moral, satirical, political, which were
often in verse. When they dealt with the low life of London, as in
the case of Dekker (1570?-1641?), they possess a certain value as
illustrations of contemporary manners. It is curious, when their bulk
and their popularity are considered, that no London printer thought of
bringing out a miscellany of them at regular intervals. He would have
found abundant matter ready to his hand, and the magazine, if not the
newspaper, would have been founded at once.
[SN: _Martin Marprelate._]
One section of the pamphlet literature of the time possesses an
enduring interest, if not for its intrinsic value, though that is not
inconsiderable, then for historical reasons. This was the famous Martin
Marprelate controversy, which was not the first example of an appeal
to the people by the press on religious and political questions, for
that had been done on the Continent by the Huguenots, but was the
earliest effective instance among us. It grew out of the conflict
between the Church, which was fighting for uniformity with the hearty
support of the queen--at least from the day on which she found her
power sufficiently established to allow her to disregard the Calvinist
princes of the Continent--and a body of Englishmen who were desirous
to adopt the Calvinist Presbyterian model.[84] According to our view
the question was one to be argued peacefully, and those who could not
believe the same things ought to have agreed to differ. That was not
the opinion of any country, or of either side in the sixteenth century.
The Puritans were as convinced of the need for uniformity as the Church
or the Spanish Inquisition, and would have enforced it with no sparing
hand if they had had the power. They complained quite as bitterly of
the toleration which they alleged was shown to the Papists (who for
their part cried out loudly of persecution), as of the severities
exercised on themselves. As the power was with the bishops, those who
would not conform were expelled from the universities and from their
livings. The persecution to which they were subjected was enough to
exasperate, but not to crush, and the embittered Puritans cast about
for a weapon to use against their opponents. The pamphlet lay ready to
their hand.[85]
[SN: _Origin of the Marprelate Tracts._]
The chief dates in the controversy were these. In 1587 Dr John Bridges,
Dean of Salisbury, and afterwards Bishop of Oxford, published _A
Defence of the Government established in the Church of England for
Ecclesiastical Matters_, in answer to the Puritan controversialists
Cartwright and Travers--a very long, well-meant, and learned,
but lumbering book. Just at this time the Act of Uniformity was
pressing heavily on the Puritans. There were two who were especially
aggrieved,--John Udall, who had been expelled from his pulpit at
Kingston because, as his friends alleged, he had denounced a local
money-lender from whom the archdeacon of the diocese wanted to borrow
£100; and John Penry, an able, honest, but headlong Welshman. In or
about March 1587 Penry published at Oxford a tract with a long-winded
title, which is called for short _The Equity of a Humble Supplication_.
It was an address to Parliament representing the undeniably neglected
state of the Welsh parishes. Unfortunately for Penry, it contained
one passage which, with no more unfairness than was usual in State
prosecutions, whether conducted for the king or the Long Parliament,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, might be represented to
be treasonable. It insinuated plainly that the queen consented to
leave Wales in religious ignorance and immorality. The press was then
under censorship. Only two printers were allowed out of London--one
at Oxford, another at Cambridge. In London the number was limited. No
press could be held except by a member of the Stationers’ Company, and
any one could be confiscated by the Warden, over whom the Bishop of
London had general powers of control as censor. Penry’s treatise was
suppressed, and he was in great peril.
Here then were two men, both angry, both able, both accustomed to
appeal directly to ignorant audiences with whom it was necessary to
make things clear. Both, too, were bold men, and honest in the sense
that they were ready to risk their lives for their cause. It would
have been strange if they had not seized on the pamphlet, as their
one remaining weapon against the bishops. [SN: _The_ Diotrephes.]
Udall began by publishing, in April 1588, his dialogue commonly called
_Diotrephes_.[86] The choice of the name was not the worst stroke of
satire in the controversy. Diotrephes was that person mentioned in the
ninth verse of the Third Epistle of St John “who loveth to have the
pre-eminence” and who “receiveth us not.” It was a great belief among
the Puritans that no minister should have authority over another, and
that the bishops who had “pre-eminence” were “antichrists” and “petty
popes.” The dialogue tells how a bishop, a papist, a money-lender, and
an innkeeper were all rebuked by Paul, a preacher. The usurer alone
shows signs of compunction, while the bishop goes off thirsting for
the blood of the saints, with the hearty approval of the papist,
and of the tavern-keeper, who explains that he lives by the vices of
his neighbours, and is like to be ruined by the preaching of such
men as Paul. This pamphlet was printed by John Waldegrave, a Puritan
printer in London, who was deprived of his licence in consequence. His
press was broken up, but he contrived to conceal a fount of type. A
printing-press was smuggled in by Penry, and a campaign of unlicensed
pamphlets was begun.
[SN: _Course of the controversy._]
The details are obscure. The names of the authors can only be guessed
at. The controversy lasted from the end of 1588 to the end of 1590.
At first the Puritans swept all before them. They had many friends
at Court, where indeed their doctrine that the bishops’ lands should
be taken and given to gentlemen who could serve the queen was not
likely “to want for favourable or attentive hearers.” Some country
gentlemen gave them help--notably Sir R. Knightley of Fawsley, in
Northamptonshire (always a Puritan county), and Job Throckmorton, who
appears to have been what we should now call a bitter anti-clerical.
The press was concealed by them in different parts of the country till
it was captured by the Earl of Derby. Penry was probably the leader of
the fight on the Puritan side. It began by the publication of Martin
Marprelate’s _Epistle_ directed against Dr John Bridges, in November
1588. This drew a grave _Admonition to the People of England_ from Dr
Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, in or about January 1589. Martin
followed up his attack on Dr Bridges by the _Epitome_, printed before
the _Epistle_, but not issued till February of 1589. Then he turned on
the Bishop of Winchester in _Hay any Work for Cooper_.[87]
The success of those pamphlets was great. A well-known story tells how
when order was issued that they were not to be read, the Earl of Oxford
pulled one of them out of his pocket, and presented it to the queen.
Solemn “admonitions” were found to be too awkward in such a conflict,
and counter-pamphleteers were called in on the bishops’ side. This
part of the controversy is no less obscure than the other. It has been
guessed that Lyly and Nash struck in for the bishops. Both have been
credited with the authorship of a _Pappe with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond
for a Parrot_, which appeared respectively at the end of 1589 and the
beginning of 1590. They are now generally attributed to Lyly. Then
third parties struck in and denounced both houses, or endeavoured to
hush the clamour, by such appeals as _Plain Perceval the Peace-Maker of
England_.
Although they naturally fell into neglect so soon as the occasion
had passed, the Martin Marprelate pamphlets are of great importance
in the history of English literature. The euphuistic, pastoral, and
other tales of the time served a mere fashion of the day, and are
forgettable as well as forgotten. But when Martin Marprelate published
his unlicensed _Epistle_ he set an example which has been excellently
well followed. His pamphlet stands at the head of the long list which
includes the _Areopagitica_, the _Anatomy of an Equivalent_, the
_Public Spirit of the Whigs_, the _Shortest Way with the Dissenters_,
the _Letters of Junius_, the _Regicide Peace_, and it is not absurd
to say the _Reflections on the Revolution in France_, which is a very
long, great, and eloquent pamphlet, but a pamphlet still. The _Epistle_
and its immediate successors were not unworthy to be the beginners of
so vital a part of English literature.
“Si nous avions l’ambition d’être complet, et si c’était l’être que
de tout dire,” it would be necessary to examine all the pamphlets in
detail. But many are practically inaccessible, and there is so much
repetition among them that they can be adequately judged by selected
examples. The vital examples are those which set the model. On the
Puritan side there are four,--the _Diotrephes_, which, though strictly
speaking antecedent to Martin, gave tone and marked the lines, the
_Epistle_, the _Epitome_, and the _Hay any Work for Cooper_. The _Pappe
with a Hatchet_ and _An_ _Almond for a Parrot_ may stand as examples
of the anti-Martinist pamphlets. The peacemakers were of less account.
The proposition that there is a great deal to be said on both sides,
and the appeal “Why cannot you be reasonable?” may be full of good
sense, but they seldom inspire men to words or deeds of a decisive
character. Looking at the leading things on either side, one sees that
they have one feature in common. They are extremely unfair. But there
is a great difference in their way of being unjust, and on that depends
their literary value. The distinction is all to the honour of the
Puritan pamphlets. _Diotrephes_ shows both the doctrine and the spirit
of the writers. They started by laying down the law to the effect
that whoever exercises pre-eminence over his brethren in the ministry
is an “antichrist” and a “petty pope,” and that no church office not
explicitly mentioned in the New Testament is Christian. Therefore they
endeavoured to discredit the bishops by showing that they habitually
did such acts as an antichrist and petty pope might be expected to do.
We need not stop to argue that this was unjust. Of course it was, but
from the literary point of view the interesting question is, How was
the injustice worded? The Martin Marprelate men had a firm grip of the
pamphlet style. The ridicule they poured on the long-winded sentences
of Dr Bridges and Bishop Cooper shows that they were perfectly well
aware of the advantages of a simple direct manner. Their own sentences
are brief, and stab with a rapid alert movement. Their abuse is
furious, but it is seldom mere scream. “Sodden-headed ass” is bad
language, but if it is ever to be pardonable, it is when you have
caught your adversary reasoning badly, and this the Martinists at least
tried to do. It was indecent to call the Bishop of Winchester “Mistress
Cooper’s husband.” It is a foul hit to remind your opponent that his
wife is a profligate termagant, but more ingenuity is needed to do
that, by naming what it would have been more fair to pass in silence,
than merely to bawl the slang name for the husband of an unfaithful
wife, and apply it to a whole class of men at large. And Martin had
intelligence enough to understand that a show of fairness can be
effective. He could bring himself to allow that if John of Canterbury
(Dr Whitgift) did ever marry, he would no doubt choose a Christian
woman.
When we turn to the anti-Martinist pamphlets we find the same
unfairness of spirit, with little and often none of the cleverness and
the ingenious form. If Lyly wrote the _Pappe with a Hatchet_, he was
in a better place when he was in Euphues his lonely cave in Silexedra.
The elegance, real of its artificial kind, is gone, and in place of it
we get a loud vaunting howl of abuse. One-half of the qualification of
the “slating reviewer” was wanting to the anti-Martinists. They hated
the man, but they did not know the subject. The Royalist general who
answered Fairfax’s self-righteous boasting of the good discipline of
the Parliamentary soldiers by telling him that the Puritan had the sins
of the Devil, “which are spiritual pride and rebellion,” struck him
harder, and showed a finer wit than all the pamphleteers whom it has
been in my power to see. They miss his vulnerable points, they bellow
bad language and accusations of the kind of misconduct from which the
Puritan was as free as the universal passions of humanity permitted.
The difference between the two may be quite fairly put this way. The
worst calumny of the Martinists can be quoted, but the anti-Martinists
are naught when they are not using language which is nearly as
unquotable as any written by the worst scribblers of the Restoration.
The least nauseous passages are those in which these defenders of the
Church gloat over the whips, branding-irons, and mutilating knife of
Ball the Hangman. Now Martin rarely goes beyond threatening the bishops
with a _premunire_, and when he does he stops at a “hemp collar.”
[SN: _Its place in literary history._] The Martin Marprelate men were
fighting in a now obsolete cause, in a style which has manifest faults
of taste and temper. But they were on the right path, they set the
example of pamphlet controversy from which the press was to come in
time, and they did it in a way which only needed amending. The author
of the _Anatomy of an Equivalent_ had learnt that when you have proved
your opponent to be “a sodden-headed ass,” it is superfluous to pelt
him with the name. Yet he was truly the successor of Martin, while the
line of the anti-Martinists ended in Ned Ward.
[SN: _Hooker._]
It is sometimes said that the Martinists were routed by Lyly and Nash,
which is certainly unfair to the Earl of Derby, and not quite just to
Ball the Hangman. As far as they were routed by literary weapons, the
honour of defeating them is due to a very different hand. The doctrine
of the Puritans was confuted in the _Ecclesiastical Polity_ of Richard
Hooker--the greatest masterpiece of Elizabethan prose.[88] Hooker was
born at Heavitree, near Exeter, in 1553. His family was poor, and,
like many of his contemporaries, he was educated by the kindness of
patrons. Dr Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury, and Edwin Sandys, then
Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of York, successively
protected him at Oxford. He was tutor to Sandys’ sons. If Isaac Walton
was correctly informed, he was somewhat tamely annexed by a scheming
landlady as husband for her daughter. He had to resign his fellowship
upon his marriage in 1584, and was appointed to the living of Drayton
Beauchamp, in Buckinghamshire. In the following year he was appointed
Master of the Temple. Here he became widely known by a controversy
with the Puritan Walter Travers, conducted on both sides with more
moderation than was usual in those times. After holding the Mastership
for seven years, he resigned it for a living in Wiltshire. He died at
Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, in 1600.
[SN: _The_ Ecclesiastical Polity.]
In the chapter of his _Constitutional History_ which deals with
Elizabeth’s laws against the Non-Conformists, Mr Hallam has written:
“But while these scenes of pride and persecution on one hand, and of
sectarian insolence on the other, were deforming the bosom of the
English Church, she found a defender of her institutions in one who
mingled in these vulgar controversies like a knight of romance among
caitiff brawlers, with arms of finer temper and worthy to be proved
in a nobler field.” If this sentence is to be understood to mean--as
from the context it perhaps must--that Hooker mingled in the Martin
Marprelate conflict, it is inaccurate. He answered Cartwright and
Travers, as Dr Bridges had done, and whatever may be said of these
men it would be silly to call them caitiff brawlers, while it would
be difficult to say what nobler field Hooker could have found for
his arms than that in which he justified the faith and religious
practices of Englishmen. Yet Mr Hallam has fairly singled out the
predominant characteristic of Hooker. There is something knightly about
him, something of the chivalry of Sir Galahad. He could strike with
telling force, as he does in the one passage of fine scorn devoted
to the jeering Puritan pamphlets--beside which all the scolding of
their proper opponents is mere brutal noise. Yet what prevails with
him so completely that the exceptions are hardly noticeable is the
moderation which has earned him his name of “Judicious.” It is not the
easy moderation of one who does not care much, but of a man who was
very convinced, very earnest, and also very good. The _Ecclesiastical
Polity_ is not chiefly valuable as a piece of reasoning. It has for one
thing not reached us complete. The first four books, which must have
been begun while he was at the Temple, were published in 1594. The long
fifth book appeared in 1597. The three, which make up the total number
of eight, were left unfinished at his death, and passed into careless,
if not unfaithful, hands. But the five undoubted books were enough to
do Hooker’s work for the Church of England, and they did not do it by
presenting his readers with such a closely reasoned and compact system
as they might have found in the _Institutions_ of Calvin. Englishmen
have never cared much for consistency of system. It was enough for
them that Hooker justified usages, ceremonies, and forms of Church
government to which they were accustomed, against the “Disciplinarians”
who condemned them for wanting the express authority of the New
Testament, by proving that they had prevailed among pious men of former
times, were in themselves innocent, and could therefore be accepted by
sincere Christians as convenient, pious, and of good example, even if
they had no “divine right,” when they were imposed by authority. In
substance this was no new doctrine. Her Majesty in Council had been
saying as much for years, and so had Whitgift and Bridges, and all the
defenders of the Establishment. But what they did by dry injunction
or laboured scholastic argument, Hooker did by persuasion, by pathos,
and by noble rhetoric. The criticism that he sometimes gives eloquence
where he ought to give argument, does not go far when the purpose of
his book is allowed for. It was not by logic that God elected to save
His Church in former centuries, nor yet in the sixteenth. In Hooker’s
case, as fully as in the case of any poet, literature vindicated
itself. The beauty of the style, always essentially pure English in
spite of an occasional Latin turn of the sentence, is the great merit
of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_. The famous eloquent passages arise
naturally because they always correspond to the greater pathos, or
sanctity, or the deeper passion of that part of his subject which he
is handling at the moment. The Englishman stood between the Calvinist
on the one hand and the Roman Catholic on the other, both appealing to
him on religious grounds. There was a real danger that his own Church
would find nothing to tell him except that decency was decent, that he
had better not trouble himself about debatable matters he would never
understand, and that he must obey the Queen. If this was all it could
find to say, Englishmen who were concerned about religion--the majority
of thinking men, whether ignorant or learned--would assuredly have gone
either to Geneva or to Rome, while the unthinking mass alone would have
remained to the Church. In that case it would have gone down for ever
in the Civil War. From that fate it was saved by Hooker.
FOOTNOTES:
[77] These two sentences are reprinted as one by Petheram, but it is
obvious that the want of a full stop after “book” is a printer’s error.
No changes in the punctuation can reduce Dean Bridges to order. It
would be necessary to treat him as Cobbett did Castlereagh.
[78] _Last Fight of the Revenge_ in Arber’s English Reprints. I have
suppressed the full stop after “assaults and entries,” which is
plainly a printer’s error. Raleigh would have been as inarticulate as
Dr Bridges if he thought that a new sentence could begin at “and that
himself.” When the full stop is replaced by a comma, what we have is a
grammatical though overladen and redundant sentence.
[79] Arber’s English Reprints. John Lyly, M.A., _Euphues_. 1868.
[80] We still await a good edition of the _Arcadia_. The old are
numerous. Dr Sommer’s reprint (London, 1891) is useful.
[81] The first of these sentences hardly gives the full absurdity
of the Spanish. “La razon de la sinrazon que á mi razon se hace de
tal manera mi razon enflaquece, que con razon me quejo de la vuestra
fermosura”--_i.e._, “The cause of the wrong, which is done to my right,
so weakens my reason, that with reason I complain of your beauty.” The
Spaniard punned on the different meanings of the word _razon_. Accurate
translation does not diminish the likeness to Sidney, who must have
known the original.
[82] Greene and Breton have been reprinted by Dr Grosart. Lodge’s
_Euphues’ Golden Legacy_ is in the Shakespeare’s Library, vol. ii.
[83] Complete works of Thomas Nash, in six vols. Dr Grosart in “The
Huth Library,” 1883-1884. _Guzman de Alfarache_ was translated into
English by Mabbe, the translator of the _Celestina_, in 1623, and was
imitated in _The English Rogue_, but the inspiration for _Colonel Jack_
and _Moll Flanders_ did not come from either.
[84] The Puritan position is very clearly stated in John Udall’s
_Demonstration of Discipline_. Arber’s “English Scholar’s Library.”
[85] Maskell’s _History of the Martin Marprelate Controversy_, 1845,
and Mr Arber’s “Introduction,” give accounts of the conflict from very
different points of view. Mr Arber has reprinted Udall’s _Diotrephes_
and _Demonstration of Discipline_ in his “English Scholar’s Library.”
The chief among the succeeding tracts were reprinted in 1845-1846 by
Petheram under the title of _Puritan Discipline Tracts_.
[86] The full title is, “The state of the Church of England, laid
open in a Conference between Diotrephes a Bishop, Tertullus a Papist,
Demetrius a Usurer, Pandochus an Inn-Keeper, and Paul a Preacher of the
Word of God”; with quotations from Psalm cxxii. 6 and Revelations xiv.
9, 10. The titles of all these pamphlets are long, and commonly also
abusive.
[87] The titles of these pamphlets were very important parts of them,
and this may be quoted as an example: “Hay any Work for Cooper, or a
briefe Pistle directed by way of hublication to the reverend Byshopps,
counselling them if they will needs be barrelled up, for fear of
smelling in the nostrels of her Magestie and the State, that they would
use the advice of reverend Martin, for the providing of their Cooper.
Because the reverend T. C. (by which mystical letters is meant either
the bouncing Parson of _Eastmeane_, or Tom Coakes his Chaplaine) hath
showne himself in his late Admonition to the people of England to bee
an unskilfull and deceytfull tub-trimmer. Wherein worthy Martin quits
himselfe like a man, I warrant you, in the modest defences of his self
and his learned Pistles, and makes the Cooper’s hoops to fly off, and
the Bishops’ tubs to leake out of all crye. Penned and compiled by
_Martin_ the Metropolitane. Printed in Europe, not farre from some of
the Bounsing Priests.”
[88] Works of Richard Hooker. Oxford, 1841.
CHAPTER X. FRANCE. POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE.
THE PLÉIADE--RONSARD--THE LESSER STARS--‘THE DÉFENSE ET
ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE’--THE WORK OF RONSARD--HIS
PLACE IN POETRY--JOACHIM DU BELLAY--REMI BELLEAU--BAÏF--DU
BARTAS--D’AUBIGNÉ--THE DRAMATIC WORK OF THE PLÉIADE--JODELLE--GREVIN
AND LA TAILLE--MONTCHRESTIEN--THE COMEDY--‘LA RECONNUE’--CAUSES OF
FAILURE OF EARLY DRAMATIC LITERATURE.
The French literature of the later Renaissance is divided, almost as
it were by visible mechanical barriers, from what had gone before, and
from what was to come after. The distinction is less marked in prose,
but even here it is real, while the poetry of the time is the work of
a school, with a creed and a set of formulas all its own. It has ever
been much the custom of the French, whether in politics, in art, or
in literature, to move altogether, and to make a clean sweep. Every
new school rejects its predecessor with more or less indiscriminate
contempt, becomes a tyranny in its turn, and is, in the fulness of
time, rebelled against, and destroyed. The process has never been shown
more fully and with fewer disturbing elements than in the history
of the Pléiade. Exactly in the middle of the century a small body of
young writers took possession of French poetry, dismissed the forms of
their elders as “grocery” (_épiceries_), just as the romantic writers
of this century labelled the classic style as “wig” (_perruque_), and
ruled without opposition, till one fine day they were scored out by
the equally irreverent, though more pedantic, and less generous pen of
Malherbe.
[SN: _The Pléiade._]
The poets of the Pléiade are entitled to the respect of the historian
of literature for several reasons, and to his gratitude for this,
that they formed a compact body which he need be at no trouble to
disentangle, because they stood deliberately apart, or to define,
because they did the work for him, by publishing an exhaustive
manifesto of their principles. There is nowhere a better example of
that _situation nette_ which the French love. The Pléiade knew its
own mind, and what it wanted to do. Moreover, if it did not always
achieve its purpose, at least it knew how the work was to be done.
Some slight doubt exists as to the names of the seven forming the
original constellation. The most orthodox list gives Daurat, Ronsard,
Du Bellay, Belleau, Baïf, Jodelle, and Pontus de Thyard, but another
of less authority replaces the sixth and seventh by Scévole de Sainte
Marthe and Muret. It does not matter which of the two is taken, since
both include the important names. Jodelle has a notable place in French
dramatic literature, but the drama is subordinate in the history of the
Pléiade. Pontus de Thyard (1521-1603), though the first-born and the
last survivor of the fellowship, is not an essential member, and may
pass behind his leaders, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, and Baïf.
[SN: _Ronsard._]
All these poets were by birth gentlemen, and several of them were
highly connected. Pierre de Ronsard, the master of them all, and the
“Prince of Poets” of his century, not only in the opinion of his
countrymen, but by the consent of many foreigners, was the son of the
_maître d’hôtel_ (steward of the household) of Francis I. He was born
at Vendôme in 1524, and entered the service of the Duke of Orleans as
page. When James V. brought back his second wife, Mary of Lorraine,
to Scotland, Ronsard followed them, and spent thirty months in their
service, returning to France by way of England. When _hors de page_, he
was attached to the suite of more than one ambassador. Among them was
Lazare de Baïf, whose natural son, Jean Antoine de Baïf, was receiving
his education under the care of the humanist, Jean Dorat, Daurat,
or D’Aurat (1508-1588). Ronsard showed a taste for reading from his
early years, and if he rejected the forms of Clement Marot, it was not
without knowing them. An illness, which may have been the result of
his sufferings during a shipwreck on the coast of Scotland, left him
deaf in 1546. He now, and as it would seem not unwillingly, left the
service of the Court, and betook himself to study at the college of
Coqueret under the direction of Daurat, and in company of Jean Antoine
de Baïf. Remi Belleau was a pupil at the same college. An accidental
meeting between Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay added this latter to
the fellowship. [SN: _The lesser stars._] The four, Daurat advising
and approving, undertook to revolutionise French poetry, and they did
it. The later dates in their biographies may be briefly noted. Ronsard
enjoyed great favour at Court, earned not only by admiration of his
poetry, but by his singularly amiable personal character. On the death
of Charles IX., himself a fair verse-writer, Ronsard retired to the
Abbey of Croix Val, of which he was lay abbot, and died in 1584. Remi
Belleau (1528-1577) passed a peaceful life in the service of the house
of Lorraine, and was carried to his grave by brother poets. Joachim
du Bellay (1525?-1560), member of a very distinguished family of
soldiers and statesmen, some of whom made their mark in French memoir
literature, accompanied his kinsman the Cardinal du Bellay to Rome,
but fell out of favour and returned to France. He was of weak health,
and appears to have suffered from family troubles. He died suddenly of
apoplexy at the age of thirty-six. Jean Antoine de Baïf (1532-1589)
had a busy life in public affairs, and suffered changes of fortune.
Characteristically enough he founded an early French Academy, for
which he received a patent from Charles IX. in 1570.[89] It lasted for
several years.
[SN: _The_ Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française.]
The _Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française_, which is the
manifesto of the school, was written by Joachim du Bellay. It was
published in February 1550, according to the modern calendar, but
1549 in the old, which made the year begin on Lady Day. If Boileau,
before dismissing Ronsard and his friends so contemptuously, had
taken the trouble to read this treatise, he would have learnt that
it was not their intention to speak Latin and Greek in French, or
to make a new art after their own fashion. Their purpose was very
different. It was their aim to write good French, but to use all the
resources of the language in order to reproduce the forms of the great
classic literatures--the Epic, the Drama, the Satire, the Ode, and
the Italian models--the Canzone and the Sonnet. They held, and not
unjustly, that the French verse of Marot’s school was poor in rhythm,
and “frivolous.” It had come to be satisfied with turning out nine
insignificant verses, if it can put “le petit mot pour rire” into the
tenth. A sham Middle Age was lingering on--the mere remnants and echo
of the _Roman de la Rose_ allegory. Du Bellay speaks of the _Roman_ and
of its authors--Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung--with respect.
He was sufficiently an admirer of French mediæval literature to quote
the stories of Lancelot as fit to be used for epic. But he insists
that the prosaic language used by the school of Marot was not adequate
for poetry, and that a new poetic tongue must be formed, which could
only be done by the ardent study of Greek and Latin. What the student
learnt he was to assimilate and make French. There was nothing in this
which was not at once inevitable when the immense influence of the
classic literatures in that generation is allowed for, and was not also
in itself sound. It was a misfortune that the Pléiade cut itself off
so completely from the mediæval tradition; and there is unanswerable
force in Sainte-Beuve’s criticism that if Ronsard and his school were
looking for _épiceries_, they had as good cause to condemn the sonnet
as the “rondeau” or the “ballade.” Yet it was not the great mediæval
literature which they had before them. That was already forgotten. They
did a work by which the seventeenth century, while treating them with
contempt, profited. If they did not achieve all they aimed at, it was
because no one among them--not even Ronsard--was a man of the first
rank of poetic genius, not because their principles and method were at
fault. And there is this to be said--that if some of their followers
fell into extravagances of language (the poets of the Pléiade proper
and their contemporaries were not, at least in their earlier years,
open to the reproach), they did not impoverish the French tongue. They
did not reduce it, when used for literary purposes, to colourless
general terms; nor did they tie the Alexandrine into sets of two lines
by making a meaningless rule that the sense was never to be carried
over into a third. Their revolution was more fruitful, and less merely
destructive, than Malherbe’s.
[SN: _The work of Ronsard._]
Although Du Bellay appeared as the spokesman of the school, he was
instantly eclipsed by Ronsard. The Odes of the “Prince of Poets” were
published in 1550, at about the same time as the Sonnets to Olive
(an anagram of Mlle. de Viole) of Du Bellay. He was at once accepted
as _the_ poet of his time, and his supremacy endured till his death
without question, except for one moment in his later years when it
appeared to be shaken by the popularity of Du Bartas. The _Amours de
Cassandre_[90] followed in 1552, with a second edition in the following
years, which contains the famous “Mignonne allons voir si la rose.” In
1555 appeared the Hymns, and in 1560 he collected all he had as yet
written in a complete edition at the request of Queen Mary, who was
his ardent admirer, as was also Queen Elizabeth. Between 1561 and 1574
he was attached to the service of Charles IX., who treated him with
kindness, and whose “virtues” he celebrated, even after his death, in
terms which sound strange to us. As Court poet he wrote “by command,”
which is not a favourable source of inspiration. It was to please the
king that he wrote his fragmentary epic, _Franciade_, which his most
sincere admirers have to confess is “dull.” It had the misfortune to be
published on the eve of the Saint Bartholomew. Yet his _Discours des
Misères du Temps_ (1562) and his _Remonstrance au Peuple de France_
(1563) belong to these years, and they were drawn from him by the
shocking miseries of the time. Henri III., though generous to some,
was less a favourer of poets than his brother, and Ronsard was free
to express himself in the lyrics and melancholy sonnets of his last
years. At the very end, when his health was broken down and his mind
affected, he made an unfortunate and negligible revision of his work,
published in 1584.
[SN: _His place in poetry._]
It is perhaps some excuse for the sweeping condemnation of Ronsard
by Malherbe that even the Romantic reaction of this century has not
succeeded in regaining favour for the part of the poetry of the chief
of the Pléiade for which he was most admired by his contemporaries, and
of which he was most proud. In the vigorous sonnet beginning “Ils ont
menty, d’Aurat,” written against Du Bartas--or at least against his
admirers--Ronsard appealed to his own Francus, and
“Les neuf belles sœurs
Qui trempèrent mes vers dans leurs graves douceurs,”
as witnesses that he was not less than the author of the _Semaine_.
Now it is precisely this part of his poetry, that in which he would be
an epic poet, or wear the Pindaric robe, which is dead, and can by no
effort be brought to life again. When Malherbe condemned it he passed a
sentence which no later admirer of the poetry of the sixteenth century
has been able to reverse. The gross error of the later school was
that it did not make allowance for the passing and temporary fashion
of imitation of the classic models, and did shut its eyes to the fact
that, besides Ronsard le Pindarique, there was Ronsard the author of
“Mignonne allons voir si la Rose,” and the beautiful sonnet to Hélène,
“Quand tu seras bien vieille.” This Ronsard was a very genuine, and
elegant, if not very great, poet. That he would not himself have been
pleased to know that he was to be admired for these themes, and not
for his _Franciade_ and his Pindaric ode to Michel de L’Hospital,
is possible. Yet his erroneous estimate of the relative values of
different parts of his work does not affect his real glory, which is
that he raised French verse from the condition of prose tagged with
rhyme, into which it had fallen, gave it a new melody, and breathed
into it a new poetic spirit. He did for France what Surrey and Wyatt
began, and Spenser and Sidney completed for us, what the Spanish poets
of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso attempted for Castilian. He
set up a model of sweeter and statelier measures, and he brought the
ancient classic inspiration out of pure scholarship into literature.
If he had far less power than his English contemporaries, he was
infinitely more original than the Spaniards. There is no mere slavish
repetition of foreign models in him, but the constant and successful
effort to give a genuine French equivalent, which is quite another
thing.
[SN: _Joachim du Bellay._]
The followers of “a prince” are inevitably eclipsed by their leader,
and that is the more likely to be the case when a body of poets are
memorable for their accomplishment, their general poetic spirit, their
scholarship--for anything, in short, rather than for power. Power,
indeed, is not what can be attributed to the poets of the Pléiade. When
it appears among the younger men it is in the verse of the Huguenots
Du Bartas and D’Aubigné, in whom there is again less scholarly
accomplishment. Among the other poets of Ronsard’s school, from his
brother in literature Joachim du Bellay down to his last follower
Jean Bertaut (1532-1611), the best is commonly what is melancholy or
what is gay and graceful. Joachim du Bellay[91] published his first
volume, which contained the Sonnets to Olive, the _Musagnæomachie_,
or “Battle between the Muses and Ignorance,” and some Odes in 1550, a
little before Ronsard. The sonnet had already been written in French
by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, but Du Bellay claimed, and was allowed,
the honour of having first “acclimatised” it. The model adopted and
constantly followed in France was the Petrarchan. His most memorable
work was born of his new experiences in Italy. It was there that he
wrote the _Antiquités de Rome_--the sonnets translated by Spenser under
the name of _The Ruins_--his _Regrets_, in which he gives expression to
his disgust at the papal capital and his home-sickness, and his _Jeux
Rustiques_, inspired by the Latin poetry of Navagiero, the Venetian who
advised Boscan to write in the Italian manner. Du Bellay himself wrote
Latin verse. The _Jeux Rustiques_, published at the same time as the
_Regrets_, 1558, contain his best known pieces, the perfectly gay and
graceful _Vanneur_ (“the Winnower”), and the lines to Venus, in which
he has done all there was to be done with that very artificial product
the pastoral poetry of learned poets. Withal Du Bellay carried beak and
claws. He was praised for having put the epigram into the sonnet, and
there are certainly few better examples how that can be achieved than
in the numbers of the _Regrets_ which contrast the outward courtesy and
dignity with the inward treason and meanness of the Roman court. Du
Bellay is more uniformly excellent than Ronsard, but the bulk of his
work is far smaller and he tried less.
[SN: _Remi Belleau._]
The _gentil_ Belleau was a less strong man than Du Bellay, and it is
to the honour of his critical faculty that he recognised the truth. He
left the ode, Pindaric or Horatian, alone, and devoted himself either
to translation (he translated Anacreon) or to poetry of the style of
the _Jeux Rustiques_. His _Bergerie_, 1565, and his _Deuxième Journée
de la Bergerie_, 1572, are of this order, while his _Amours et Nouveau
Eschanges des pierres précieuses vertus et propriétés d’icelles_ is an
imitation, or adaptation, of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ and the poets of
the Greek decadence, based on a book about the properties of precious
stones, written by a Bishop of Rennes in the eleventh century. Our
own Euphuists must have gone to the same source. The first _Bergerie_
contains the really delightful
“Avril l’honneur et des Bois
Et des Mois,”
which ranks with Du Bellay’s _Vanneur_ as the masterpiece of the style.
It is a curious comment on the theory which accounts for literature by
the “circumstances” that all this light verse about graceful things
belongs to the years of the conspiracy of Amboise, when the streets
of that town were, in the vehement words of Regnier de la Planche,
tapestried with the corpses of executed Huguenots, and while the wars
of Religion, the Saint Bartholomew, and the League were deluging France
in blood.
[SN: _Baïf._]
Like Belleau, J. B. de Baïf was a translator. His versions of the
_Antigone_, and of the _Eunuchus_ of Terence, were published in 1565,
and other translations of Greek and Latin drama were left unpublished
by him at his death, and have been lost. Baïf was also the author
of a comedy imitated from Plautus, _Le Brave_, acted in 1567. His
poetry includes the _Ravissement d’Europe_ and _Les Amours de Méline_,
1552, _Les Amours de Francine_, 1555--these are sonnet cycles--the
_Météores_ of 1567, his _Étrennes de Poesie Française_, 1574, and the
_Mimes_, 1576. Baïf, who was more scholar than poet, took the lead in
an attempt to reform French spelling, which indeed at that time stood
in no small need of being reduced to order, and he also was one of a
small body of writers who repeated in France the hopeless attempt to
force the poetry of modern languages to conform to classic metres. His
Academy has already been mentioned. Jean Daurat and Pontus de Thyard
are chiefly worth mention because their names are associated with those
of more original men. Daurat was a humanist, whose share in producing
the poetry of the Pléiade was to direct the reading of his pupils at
the college of Coqueret, and to write Greek and Latin verse in praise
of them. His French verse is insignificant. Pontus de Thyard could
claim to be a forerunner of the Pléiade, for his _Erreurs Amoureuses_
appeared shortly before the first published verse of Ronsard and Du
Bellay. But he soon renounced verse for theology and mathematics.[92]
Of most of the poets who followed “the conquering banner” of their
Prince, Ronsard, as of the lesser learned poets of Spain, no detailed
mention can be made here. The abundance of literary talent which has
seldom been wanting in France accounts sufficiently for the “crop of
poets” which sprang up “at the summons of Du Bellay, and under the
hand of Ronsard.” That time of war, oppression, and conspiracy might
have seemed to be “wholly consecrated to the Muses.” Olivier de Magny
(d. 1560), Jacques Tahureau (1527-1555), Nicolas Denisot (1515-1559),
called “le Comte d’Alsinois” by anagram, Louis le Caron (1536-1617),
who called himself Charondas, Estienne de la Boetie (1530-1563), the
friend of Montaigne, who indeed saved him from oblivion, and others
whom it were tedious to mention, were men of talent, respectable
members of the army of minor poets, which in nations of considerable
literary faculty, and in times of literary vigour, has never been
wanting. One really original poet usually makes many who are
accomplished, but who without the example might never have written,
and would certainly not have written so well. It was perhaps the
necessity for finding a rhyme to _haut_ which induced Boileau to quote,
from among all the followers of Ronsard, the names of “Desportes and
Bertaut.” His dogmatic assertion that they were made “more restrained”
by the fall of Ronsard is perfectly unfounded. Desportes (1546-1606),
who in character was a courtier of the baser kind, owed his great
popularity at Court to the fact that he was an echo of one part of
Ronsard.[93] Bertaut (1552-1611), another courtier, was also another
Desportes. Their greater measure was mainly due to the fact that they
represented the decadence of their school.
There are, however, three poets of the later sixteenth century in
France who stand apart, though all are fairly describable as followers
of Ronsard, and to one of them it was given, in the French phrase, to
“tell its fact” to the meticulous criticism of Malherbe. They are Du
Bartas, Aubigné, and Regnier.
[SN: _Du Bartas._]
Guillaume Salluste, Seigneur du Bartas, was born in or about 1544, at
Montfort, near Auch, in Gascony. He served Henry IV. both in diplomacy
and in war, and died in 1590 of wounds received at the battle of Ivry.
Du Bartas was one of the many of his time who in a once favourite
phrase were “tam Marte quam Mercurio,” equally devoted to arms and to
letters. On the suggestion of Jeanne d’Albret, the Queen of Navarre, he
began by writing a poem on the story of Judith; but his fame was gained
by the _Semaine_, or “Week of Creation,” published in 1579. It was
followed by the _Uranie_, the _Triomphe de la Foi_, and the _Seconde
Semaine_, of which part was published in 1584, and which remained
unfinished at his death. Du Bartas is an interesting figure, and his
literary fortune has been curious. With men of his class in France
a profession of Protestantism was commonly only a form of political
opposition. They were “of the Religion” because they were the enemies
of the House of Guise, and the great majority of them fell away from
it in the following generations. But with Du Bartas the religious
enthusiasm was manifestly real. He was of the Puritan type, and in that
lies part, at least, of the explanation of his strange literary fortune
in his own country. He was at first extraordinarily popular. Even
Ronsard praised him, and sent him a present of a pen. But his party
began to claim that he was the superior of the courtier poet. This not
unnaturally drew from Ronsard the emphatic denial of the sonnet to
Daurat, and the opinion of Frenchmen has been favourable to the older
poet. Du Bartas has been treated with neglect, and even contempt, by
his own countrymen.[94] Abroad he has had better fortune. He was widely
translated. The English version of Joshua Sylvester was long popular
with us, and in comparatively recent times he has been praised by
Goethe for showing qualities wanting in other Frenchmen. But Frenchmen,
to whom the Puritan type has always been uncongenial, have disliked him
on those very grounds. They have always insisted on looking exclusively
at his faults, his want of taste, his provincialism, and his pedantry.
All are undeniable, but the critics who have endeavoured to secure
justice for the Pléiade ought to have remembered that this last was
only an exaggeration of the teaching of Ronsard and Du Bellay. They had
recommended adaptation of the language of classic poetry, Greek and
Latin. They had used inversions, and had argued that French writers
were entitled to form compound words on the Greek model. Du Bellay,
for example, justifies the construction of such a word as “fervêtu.”
Du Bartas certainly took a very wide licence in this respect. He wrote
such lines as--
“Le feu donne-clarté, porte-chaud jette-flamme;”
and careful examiners have found more than three hundred examples of
such words in his verse. As the French have not chosen to make use of
a freedom legitimate enough in a language which contains such words as
_marche-pied_ and _aigredoux_, Du Bartas has suffered for his boldness.
It is easy enough to find pedantry and bad taste in him; and it would
be easy, by confining attention to the “Pindaric” side of Ronsard, to
show that he was a stilted and pompous writer. But it is no less the
case that there is a vehement grandeur in Du Bartas which is painfully
rare in the correct poetry of France. It may be fairly said that if
the quality of the French mind, which Frenchmen call “le bon sens
français,” achieved one of its triumphs when it wholly rejected Du
Bartas, it also condemned its literature to possess no Milton. When it
is your exclusive ambition to be without fault, to be merely correct,
your safest course is to abstain. If you will keep from the “wine cup”
and “the red gold,” from love, adventure, and ambition, then you may
“easy live and quiet die”; but you will hardly do anything passionate.
Nothing is so “correct” as cold water.
[SN: _Agrippa D’Aubigné._]
Theodore Agrippa D’Aubigné, the contemporary, friend, and kindred
spirit of Du Bartas, was a gentleman of an ancient family in Saintonge.
His long life was full of agitation and many-sided activity. Jean
D’Aubigné, his father, was Chancellor of Navarre. The son was born in
1550, and received a careful education, by which he unquestionably
profited, though we may doubt the exact accuracy of his own assertion
that he could read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew at the age of six. Jean
D’Aubigné was a vehement Calvinist. It is one of the best-known stories
of the time that he made his son, then a mere boy, swear, in the
presence of the decapitated heads of La Renaudie and the other chiefs
of the conspiracy of Amboise, to revenge their deaths. D’Aubigné kept
this “oath of Hannibal” to the end of his life. When only nine years
old he risked the stake, “his horror of the Mass having overcome his
fear of the fire.” He took part in the defence of Orleans in the first
war of Religion, and from thence escaped to Geneva, where he studied
under Theodore Beza. At a later time he served under Condé, and then
attached himself to Henry of Navarre. It was his good fortune to be in
hiding for a duel when the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew took place.
He remained with Henry at the French Court. During this period he
seems to have so far departed from the rigidity of his principles as
to bow down with his master “in the temple of Rimmon.” At this time he
certainly met Ronsard, and fell under his influence. He wrote court
poetry, composed a tragedy, and belonged to the Academy of Baïf. When
Henry of Navarre made his escape, D’Aubigné accompanied him. The
Bearnais had no more daring or faithful servant, and none who spoke to
him with a ruder frankness. The abjuration of Henry IV. was a bitter
blow to D’Aubigné, and he risked his master’s favour by his blunt
condemnation of that politic act. Yet Henry knew the essential fidelity
of D’Aubigné, and left him the possession of his offices of Governor
of Saintonge and Vice-Admiral of Poitou. After the murder of the king
he took part in the unfortunate opposition to Marie de Medici. The
publication of his _Histoire Universelle_ aroused enemies against him,
and in 1620 he fled to Geneva, where he died in 1630, energetic to the
last--“lassé de vains travaux, rassasié, et non ennuyé de vivre,” as
he describes himself in his will. The prose work of D’Aubigné is very
large, and will be dealt with elsewhere.[95] His poetry is divided
into the lighter verse which he wrote under the influence of Ronsard,
and _Les Tragiques_, which unquestionably show the influence of Du
Bartas. If his own words are to be taken in the literal sense, they
were written in the very stress of the war with the League; but there
is internal evidence that this can only be true of the three first.
The others were at least largely written after the peace of Vervins
in 1598. There are seven poems in _Les Tragiques_, called Misères,
Princes, La Chambre Dorée, Les Feux, Les Fers, Vengeances, Jugement.
They are historical poems, written in verse which is sometimes heavy,
but often magnificent, and always animated by a grim force. D’Aubigné
denounces wickedness in the form of a Latin satirist; but the spirit
comes from the Hebrew prophet, and that is perhaps belittled if we call
it satire.
It would be difficult to find a sharper contrast than is shown between
the long restless life of D’Aubigné and the career of Mathurin Regnier.
He was born at Chartres in 1573, in a family of the middle class, and
was nephew to the prosperous court poet Desportes. His family destined
him to the Church, and he was tonsured at the age of eleven. By the
influence, in all probability, of his uncle, he was appointed to a
place in the suite of the Cardinal Joyeuse, French Ambassador in Italy.
Later on he was provided for by a canonry in his native town, and died
there in 1613. The character of Regnier may unfortunately be described
nearly in the terms which the Duke of Wellington used of an English
military adventurer who had served under him in the Peninsula. He was,
said the Duke, “a brave fellow, but a sad drunken dog.” A considerable
poet, but a sad drunken dog, is, it is to be feared, the description
of Regnier. His habits rather than the quality of his verse justify
the epithet of “cynical” which has been applied to him.[96] Although
he wrote other verse, including some fine lyrics, Regnier is chiefly
memorable as a satirist. This he was in the proper sense of the word.
He attacked vices, and did not only say savage things about people whom
he disliked. In the form of his verse Regnier was so far correct that
he escaped the condemnation which the school of Malherbe passed on all
the other poets of his century. Yet he kept much of the freedom of the
earlier time, and in his ninth satire he pointed out with admirable
precision exactly what were the weaknesses of the reform of Malherbe.
There is an individuality and an air of sincerity in Regnier which
saves his work from the too common fault of modern satire--which is to
be a mere echo of Juvenal, verse written not because the author feels
any indignation, but only because he thought it a distinguished action
to imitate the classics and scold his contemporaries.
The ambition of the Pléiade included the reform of dramatic as well
as of other literature. Its poets wished to replace the Mysteries,
Moralities, “Sotties,” and “Farces” by tragedy and comedy. Their
chances of success in this field might have seemed, if anything, more
promising than elsewhere. The taste for the theatre was very strong in
France. In Paris there existed a guild, established by charter from the
king in 1402, for the performance of mysteries and moralities, which
possessed a theatre at the Hospital de la Trinité, near the gate of St
Denis. Two other societies, the Clercs de la Bazoche, or Clerks of the
Parliament of Paris, and the Enfants sans Souci, a body of volunteers
who performed farces, existed by the side of, and to some extent under
the control of, the chief guild, which was called the Confrérie de la
Passion. In the provinces there were numerous societies named _puys_
which existed to produce plays. And while the stage enjoyed so much
popularity, a number of causes were at work to render it no longer
possible to continue the religious plays of the Middle Ages. The
influence of the Renaissance helped to discredit their form, while the
spread of the Reformation began to make their old downright realistic
piety look ridiculous. As early as 1540 the Parliament of Paris had
protested against the performances of the Confrérie de la Passion
as leading to scandal. In 1548 it was strictly forbidden to present
religious mysteries.
[SN: _The dramatic work of the Pléiade._]
As the poets of the Pléiade were just about organising themselves in
those years, and were to present their first attempt to repeat the
classic models in French in 1552, it would seem on the face of it that
they had a singularly favourable opportunity. They had only to step
into the place left vacant. But that was in reality far from being
the case. Although the Confrérie de la Passion was forbidden to play
sacred mysteries, it was left in possession of its exclusive privilege
to open a theatre in Paris, and was thus able to silence all rivals.
The tradesmen and artisans who formed the guild were little likely
to favour their contemptuous literary rivals, while the poets were
as little disposed to go cap in hand to such masters. Thus the men
of letters were practically shut out from the real stage, and were
driven to seek a chance of getting their pieces acted at Court or
in colleges. They had no access to any body of actors. We need not
attach too great importance to this exclusion from the real theatre.
If Jodelle and Garnier had possessed dramatic genius of a high order,
their works would bear witness for them. In time, too--the date is
1588--the Confrérie de la Passion did consent to the establishment of
an independent theatre. After the restoration of peace in 1593 there
was always one in Paris. Thenceforward it was within the power of any
Frenchman who possessed the necessary faculties to be the Lope de Vega
or the Shakespeare of his country. If none appeared, it was doubtless
because no such Frenchman was born; and perhaps in the long-run the
non-appearance of the right man is the one adequate explanation of
the want of any form of literature in any country. Yet it may be
allowed that the monopoly of the Confrérie did have a certain effect
on the dramatic work of the Pléiade by confining them to coteries and
colleges, and so intensifying whatever tendency there was in them
to produce mere school exercises on a classic model. It must also
be kept in mind that the sacred mysteries continued to be acted in
the provinces. A few traces of them are to be found to this day in
the form of the religious marionette plays performed in Brittany. In
Paris itself the Confrérie de la Passion continued to give profane
mysteries, which appear to have been long straggling successions of
scenes taken from history, or from the tales of chivalry through
Ariosto. Its stage has this much vitality, that it was used for
political purposes by the League. But all this belongs to the history
of the stage proper or to curiosity, not to literature.
Whatever causes may be held to be responsible, the fact remains that
the dramatic is the weakest part of the work of the poets of the
Pléiade. Here they made little effort to assimilate and reproduce in
genuine French form. They repeated the shape slavishly. In tragedy they
did not try at all to go beyond the model given them by Buchanan in the
Latin plays written for his pupils at Bordeaux, which again were taken
from Seneca. In comedy there was less slavery, and less break with the
mediæval literature. But the poets did comparatively little in comedy;
and the liveliest comic writer of the later sixteenth century in
France, Larivey, who was of Italian descent, did not achieve more than
to give bold adaptations of Italian originals.
[SN: _Jodelle._]
The title of father of modern French dramatic literature, tragic and
comic, belongs to Estienne Jodelle, Seigneur de Lymodin. He was born
at Paris in 1532. Jodelle was a copious miscellaneous writer; but
only two tragedies, one comedy, and some poetry written in his youth,
survive.[97] His _Cléopâtre Captive_, and the comedy _Eugène_, were
performed before King Henry II. in 1552 by Jodelle himself and his
friends. The king was so pleased that he gave the dramatist five
hundred crowns, a handsome sum of money at the time. In the pardonable
joy of their hearts, Jodelle and his friends celebrated their success
by a supper at Arcueil, which became the excuse for a scandal. Being
full of a classic zeal, not always according to knowledge, the poets
impounded a goat, crowned it, and chanted some nonsense verses, largely
composed of Greek words, the work of Baïf. The New Learning had always
been open to the reproach of paganism, and the Reformers accused the
party of having performed a heathen sacrifice. The Confrérie de la
Passion, glad of an excuse to bring rivals into trouble, joined in
the cry. Jodelle’s second tragedy, _Didon se sacrifiant_, was written
later, and apparently never played. In 1558 he fell into disgrace
through the failure of a mask on the Argonauts, provided for the
reception of Henry II. at the Hôtel de Ville. It is said that the stage
carpenter mistook the word _rochers_ for _clochers_, and provided
bell-towers instead of rocks in the properties. Jodelle never recovered
favour; but this accident is not accountable for the misfortunes of his
later years. There is evidence that “much bad living kill’d Teste Noire
at last,” for Jodelle, unlike his brother poets, who seem to have been
orderly people, was of the character of our own Bohemian forerunners of
Shakespeare. He died worn out, and in great distress, in 1573.
[SN: _The Senecan plays._]
Jodelle is of importance rather because of his date, and on the ground
that he indicated the road which French literary drama was to follow,
than for his intrinsic merits. His tragedies are little more than
school exercises. His model was the Latin tragedy of Seneca, which in
itself is a thin dry copy of the mere machinery of the Greeks. The
popularity of these very tiresome pieces during the Renaissance can be
partly accounted for by the fact that Greek was far less familiar than
Latin. But it is easy to make too much of this. Sophocles and Euripides
were not unknown. Buchanan caused Greek plays to be performed by his
pupils at Bordeaux; while, if Jodelle could not read Greek himself,
he might have had the help of Daurat, and he had the translations of
Sophocles by Lazare de Baïf and others to guide him to a better model
than Seneca. They would have been quite enough for a writer who had any
dramatic instinct. But Seneca was easy to imitate. A well-known story,
told mostly in long speeches, by a messenger or other “utility,” no
play of character, and a chorus which chants commonplaces, having only
a very general relation to the story these are the notes of the Senecan
tragedy. It is obvious that they are easy to reproduce. The opening
they afforded for serious moral reflection must have had an attraction
for the poets of the Pléiade, who had a very definite purpose to expel
“frivolity” from poetry.
A tragedy which began in such conditions as those described here could
hardly hope to become a national drama. It is certainly the fact that
very little which was written before the seventeenth century has much
interest except as a curiosity. Jodelle and his immediate successors
can hardly be said even to have written for the stage in the proper
sense of the word. When they were acted at all, it was at the Court
or in colleges. They had so far an influence that they succeeded
in establishing the chorus as a necessity. It was introduced even
into the wild anti-Royalist pieces of the League; but these writers
understood the classic model so little that they treated the chorus
as a mere means of filling in the intervals between the acts, and not
as an integral part of the play. They in fact exaggerated one of the
defects of Seneca, as is the way with the mere imitator. We have to
wait for the generation of Rotrou and Corneille before seeing how an
intelligent attempt could be made to give a new form to the principles
of the classic drama. As for the earlier poets, as they chose to allow
themselves to be bound by the pedantic rules laid down by Joseph
Scaliger in his _De Tragediis et Comediis_ (1560), which said that this
and the other must be done by every right-minded man because Seneca had
done them, their plays were doomed to want life.
Of Jodelle’s two tragedies, the _Cléopâtre_ possesses, though by no
merit of his, the better plot. The story of the death of the Queen of
Egypt is in itself so picturesque and so complete that it would be
difficult to spoil it altogether. His second tragedy is rather better
written. There is more force in the dialogue, more poetry in the moral
reflections of the chorus of _Didon_; but then the plot is inevitably
inferior. It is difficult indeed to see what could be done with the
story of Dido and Æneas on the stage, unless the intention is to make
the hero odious or ridiculous. It is true that Jodelle does not fail to
attain to a comic effect, which is, however, too obviously undesigned.
The last words he puts into the mouth of Æneas are--
“Pauvre Didon, hélas! mettras-tu l’assurance
Sur les vaisseaux marins, que n’ont point de constance.”
These are too like the sailor’s traditional excuse to be worthy of the
son of Anchises, who at least had the grace to sail “multa gemens,
magnoque animum labefactus amore.” It is but just to add that not
dissimilar plunges into the ridiculous where what was called for was
the sublime, might be found in the great, the truly great, Corneille.
It must also be remembered that Jodelle established the Alexandrine as
the metre of French tragedy, though he did not submit to the strict
rules enforced in the next century.
[SN: _Grévin and La Taille._]
The names of Jacques Grévin and Jean de la Taille are entitled to
little more than bare mention among the followers of Jodelle. Grevin
(1540?-1570) was for a time a favourite with Ronsard; but he was a
strong Calvinist, and broke with the Prince of Poets in resentment
against the _Discours sur les Misères du Temps_. Ronsard retaliated
by cancelling his praise of Grévin. One tragedy, _César_, and two
comedies, _La Trésorière_ and _Les Esbahis_, all three written in
his youth, still survive.[98] Jacques de la Taille (1540?-1608), a
soldier, and in poetry a follower of Ronsard, lives in all literary
histories by a piece of unjust ill-luck. He wrote the two famous lines
at which everybody has laughed--
“Ma mère et mes enfans aye en recommanda ...
Il ne put achever car la mort l’engarda (l’empêcha).”
M. Suard, who habitually took a contemptuous tone to the early
dramatists of his country, made the remark--a very fair example of
the silly would-be clever--that La Taille found it easier to shorten
his words than to lengthen his line. Yet such a stroke of mistaken
realism as this is less essentially foolish than the flat absurdity
which Jodelle puts into the mouth of Æneas. The attempt to be true
to life was at least meritorious in intention, and there is force in
La Taille’s tragedy of _Les Gabaonites_, on the story of the sons of
Rizpah.[99]
[SN: _Garnier._]
Robert Garnier (1545-1601) was a far stronger man than any of these
three. He was born at La Ferté-Bernard, was a magistrate all his life,
and was finally made Counsellor of State by Henry IV. Garnier was much
less open to the reproach of being “a barren rascal” than Jodelle,
Grevin, or La Taille. His list of plays is of respectable length.
_Porcie_ was written in 1568, _Cornélie_ (translated into English by
Kyd) in 1574, and _Marc Antoine_ in 1578. _L’Hippolyte_, the _Troade_,
and the _Antigone_ are translations or adaptations of Sophocles and
Euripides. There are two other plays more original than either of
these--_Les Juives_ (1583), a “Sacred Tragedy” founded on the story of
Zedekiah; and _Bradamante_ (1582), a romantic drama founded on passages
in Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_.[100] These two plays are of special
interest. _Les Juives_ is an example of all that could be done with
Garnier’s model. The story supplies just such a catastrophe as was fit
to be treated in the measured, and, when good, stately Senecan fashion.
The prophet, to whom Garnier gives no name, Zedekiah and his mother
Amutal (Sédécie and Amital in the French), the King of Babylon and his
general Nabuzardan, are exactly the characters required; while the
chorus is abundantly provided with matter for lamentations, reflections
on the instability of all human things, the justice of God, and the
cruelty of the wicked. In this case also the chorus of Jewesses, to
which the play owes its name, though less truly a personage in the
drama than it is in the _Œdipus the King_ or the _Agamemnon_, is not a
mere voice used to fill up the intervals between the acts. Garnier was
very free from the want of taste which allowed Jodelle to drop into
vulgarity. He had an instinct for the “grand manner,” and does not fall
below his subject. The _Bradamante_ is a still more interesting play
than _Les Juives_. There is something almost pathetic about it, for in
the _Bradamante_ Garnier may be said to have brought French literary
drama to within touch of emancipation from the tyranny of Seneca’s
form. If he had gone a step further, or had found a worthy follower,
the work of Corneille might have been antedated by half a century,
and in happier circumstances. The subject is neither classical nor
Biblical, and this perhaps gave Garnier the courage to drop the chorus.
As the _Bradamante_ is not, in the full sense of the word, a tragedy,
since it has a happy ending, the chorus was not strictly necessary; but
as it was not meant to be a comic piece, the natural course at the time
would have been to supply one. As has been noted above, the chorus was
habitually introduced into pieces which were meant to be serious even
when the subject was not classical. At the same time Garnier showed, by
introducing a “confidant,” that he had a real sense of the theatre. He
knew that over and above the main personages there must always be some
who explain, or to whom explanations are made, and to whom it falls
to render the action intelligible. The name does not alter the nature
of the thing. Horatio is a confidant, and Mercutio is not much else,
though we do not call them by the title. That they are also interesting
human beings is an argument for incorporating the chorus in the play,
not a proof that some such wheel in the machinery is superfluous.[101]
Then, as he was not under the obligation to maintain the perpetual
gravity proper to classical and Biblical subjects, Garnier felt free to
relieve the heroic passages by comedy. Aymon, the father of Bradamante,
is a human, peppery, and peremptory old gentleman, very much the
_barba_ of the Spanish _comedia_, and a true figure of comedy. This, it
need hardly be said, is quite a different thing from the introduction
of scenes of clowns who have nothing to do with the action. It is a
detail worth noting that Garnier, who does not seem to have cared much
whether his play was acted or not, adds a note to his preliminary
argument to tell any manager who chooses to bring it out that he is
free to replace the absent chorus by interludes between the acts, “in
order that they may not be confounded, and not to join together what
requires a certain interval of time.” This, besides proving how fully
the French dramatists of the day accepted Scaliger’s most disputable
theory, that the chorus served only to separate the acts, is an
example of what has already been said of the Spanish and the English
stages--namely, that an audience expected something more than the play,
which the Spaniards gave in _saynetes_ and dances between the acts, and
the English inserted in the body of the piece.
[SN: _Montchrestien._]
Antoine de Montchrestien, the last survivor of the French dramatists of
the sixteenth century, may by a slight stretch of charity be described
as the Racine of the epoch in which Garnier was the Corneille. The
date of his birth is unknown, but he was killed in a skirmish during a
Huguenot rising in 1621, after a very agitated life. At one time he
was an exile in England on a charge of homicide, and owed his pardon
to the intercession of James I., whose favour he had earned by a play
on the death of Mary Queen of Scots, called _L’Écossaise_. It is sad
to relate that he was afterwards accused of coining false money. In
1615 he published a _Traité de l’Économie Politique_, and was indeed
the first to use the term. Montchrestien wrote a poem _Suzanne_, and a
Bergerie, or Pastoral, in addition to his six tragedies--_Sophonisbe_,
or _La Cartagénoise_ (translated from Trissino), _Les Lacènes_,
_David_, _Aman_, _Hector_, and _L’Écossaise_. Montchrestien was an
accomplished writer of the school to which he belonged, but his plays
show no great originality. They were published in 1601, and were
probably all written in his youth. It does not appear that they were
ever acted.
[SN: _The comedy._]
The comedy of this school was less a pure imitation of classic models,
but it was also on the whole less interesting, and cannot be described
as original, since it took freely from the Italians. Every one of the
nine surviving plays of Pierre Larivey (1540?-1611?) has an Italian
original. He was descended from the family of the Giunti, printers
at Florence and Venice.[102] His father had settled at Troyes, and
had translated his name into L’Arrivé, which was again corrupted into
Larivey. Pierre was a copious translator from his father’s native
language. The nine comedies he left are adaptations as well as
translations. He subjected his originals to the revision which the
English playwright has so often applied to French plays, but it was
not for the purpose of forcing them to become decent. Through Larivey
much of the common matter of comedy was handed on to Molière, who may
also have owed his predecessor something on the side of the technical
skill. It is, however, mainly on this ground that they belong to French
literature. The comedy of the later sixteenth century is on the whole
unimportant. It cannot be said to have had any particular character of
its own. One piece has indeed some promise and considerable merit of
execution. This is the _Reconnue_ of Belleau.[103]
[SN: La Reconnue.]
The story has the merit of being drawn from the real life of the
time. A young lady named Henriette has been placed while a child in a
religious house at Poitiers. She has no vocation, and escapes from the
convent to become a Huguenot. In the storm of the city by the king’s
army she is made prize by a certain Captain Rodomont, whom (a pleasing
touch of the manners of the age) she fully recognises as her lawful
master. The captain is a very honest man, who is well disposed to marry
his captive. But he is summoned away to take part in the recovery of
Havre from the English, and leaves her, having always “treated her
as a sister,” in charge of an old lawyer in Paris. At this point the
play begins. The old lawyer falls in love with Henriette, and thereby
arouses the jealousy of his wife. To quiet her he arranges to marry
Henriette to his clerk, Jehan, who is likely to prove a complacent
husband. He tells Henriette that the captain has been killed at Havre.
In the meantime we learn that a certain young advocate has fallen
in love with Henriette. She, who would willingly marry either the
captain or the advocate--for she is a downright though honest young
person--nevertheless resigns herself to marry Jehan, seeing that the
captain is dead, and she dare not go home. At this crisis the captain
turns up enriched by booty, and immediately afterwards Henriette’s
father. The “recognition” gives its name to the play. Henriette is
married to the advocate. The captain is consoled with the promise of
another wife, and all ends happily. Here are the elements of a very
lively play, and one can imagine what Lope de Vega or Dekker would have
made of them. Belleau falls much short of what was possible, largely
because his respect for classic models made him feel it incumbent on
him to tell his story, not by dialogue and action, but by narratives.
The return of the captain, for instance, which might have made an
excellent scene, is only described by the old lawyer’s servant. The
merits of the comedy are none the less considerable. They lie in the
brisk flowing verse of the dialogue, which, as was to be expected of
“le gentil Belleau,” is wholly free from mere grossness, and in the
human truth of the characters. Even the author’s excessive deference
to the classics is partly atoned for. His descriptions of what it
would have been better to tell by action are mostly given by Jeanne,
the lawyer’s servant, who is an excellent study of that very French
personage, the _Bonne à tout faire_, the general servant, who is partly
the drudge, but also partly the friend, and a little the tyrant, of the
family. Jeanne is truly the ancestress of the _servante_ of Molière.
With _La Reconnue_, as with Garnier’s _Bradamante_, we feel that only a
little was wanted to make a complete success. But that little was not
supplied, and the difference between the complete and the incomplete
is in itself infinite. [SN: _Causes of failure of the early dramatic
literature._] Of the dramatic work of the French poets of the later
sixteenth century it has to be said that on the whole it was lost
labour. The tragedy is too artificial, too slavishly imitated from a
poor model. The comedy, as all can see who will look at the _Eugène_
of Jodelle, or the _Esbahis_ of Grévin, was incoherent, being partly a
rehandling of the “sotties” and the “farces” of the Middle Ages, partly
an imitation of Plautus and Terence, nowhere an original growth. Its
authors were men of letters, doing exercises in kinds of literature to
which they were attracted by their prestige. They did not really work
for the stage. Now the theatre, in the material sense, is as necessary
to the dramatist as the model is to the painter. The most “learned” of
artists will soon find that his work loses life and reality unless he
keeps the living figure constantly before his eyes. A play is meant
to be talked and acted to an audience. When it is written only to
be read, it soon loses life. From “the cart of Thespis” down to the
“four boards” of Lope de Rueda in the Spanish market-place, there has
always been the stage first, and then the dramatic literature. That is
equally true in France. The history of the French stage is continuous
from the Confrérie de la Passion, through the Enfants sans Souci, and
the professional actors who succeeded them at the Hôtel de Bourgogne,
down to the “maison de Molière.” But in the sixteenth century it
skirted literature, and the alliance was not made between them till
the time of Rotrou and Corneille. So the earlier dramatic literature
remains a curiosity, or at the most an indication of what was to come.
Its best tragedy is an “essai pâle et noble,” and its comedy a rough
experiment, too often the very reverse of noble. In order to show how
the writers of the great time, and of the eighteenth century classic
school, while working on the same fund of principles, and with similar
aims, differed from their predecessors, it would be necessary to go
beyond the scope of this book.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] Sainte-Beuve, _Tableau historique et critique de la Poesie
Française et du Théâtre Français au XVI^{me.} Siècle. Le Seizième
Siècle en France._ Par MM. Darmsteter et Hatzfeld.
[90] _Œuvres complètes de P. de Ronsard_, edited by M. Prosper
Blanchemain. Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, 1858.
[91] Ed. Marty-Laveaux. 2 vols.
[92] A Selection of Baïf’s verse has been made by M. Becq de
Fonquières, 1874, and his _Mimes_ have been reprinted by M. Blanchemain.
[93] Ed. M. Alfred Michiels. 1858.
[94] There is still no modern edition of Du Bartas. The standard
edition is that of 1610-1611, in 2 vols. folio.
[95] An edition of the works of D’Aubigné, complete with the exception
of _L’Histoire Universelle_, was published in Paris, 1873-1892, by MM.
Réaume et de Caussade. Partial reprints are numerous.
[96] Ed. M. Prosper Poitévin.
[97] Ed. Marty Laveaux, 1868-1870; and _Ancien Théâtre François_ in the
“Bibliothèque Elzévirienne,” vol. iv.
[98] Ed. 1562, but _Les Esbahis_ is in the _Ancien Théâtre Français_.
[99] Ed. M. René de Maulde. 4 vols., 1878-1882.
[100] Ed. of 1585 reprinted in _Sammlung Französischer Neudrucke_.
Heilbronn, by Herr Wendelin Förster.
[101] It is advisable not to burden one’s page with illustrations, but
it may be pointed out that the modern “well-made play” supplies copious
examples of what is said above. The Jalin of Alexandre Dumas fils, in
the _Demi Monde_, or the Duc de Montmeyran in _Le Gendre de M. Poirier_
of Emile Angier, are chorus; and it may be added that they are also
legion.
[102] _Ancien Théâtre Français._ Bibliothèque Elzévirienne. Vols. v.
and vi.
[103] _Ancien Théâtre Français_, vol. iv.
CHAPTER XI. FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS OF THE LATER SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
ABUNDANCE OF LATER SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE--A
DISTINCTION--SULLY--BODIN--THE GREAT MEMOIR-WRITERS--CARLOIX--LA
NOUE--D’AUBIGNÉ--MONLUC--BRANTÔME--THE ‘SATYRE MÉNIPÉE’--ITS
ORIGIN--ITS AUTHORS--ITS FORM AND SPIRIT--MONTAIGNE--HIS
‘ESSAYS’--THE SCEPTICISM OF MONTAIGNE--HIS STYLE--CHARRON AND DU VAIR.
[SN: _Abundance of later sixteenth-century prose._]
No race has ever allowed less of what it has done, suffered, or even
only seen, to be lost than the French. It has ever been the ambition
of the men of that people to leave some record of themselves. We have
to thank what an ill-conditioned critic might call its vanity for a
memoir-literature which would be inadequately praised if it were only
called the first in the world. The world has not only no equal, but no
second, to be used as a comparison. The France of the wars of Religion,
agitated as it was, was exceptionally rich in these delightful books.
For that we have good reason to be grateful, since this time, full
as it was of colour, of ability, of passion, and of the most remote
extremes in character, has left us the means of knowing it more fully
than we can know our own generation. As it was also an age of great
political and religious strife, treatises on politics and religion
were naturally written, seeing that amid all the turmoil and fury men
continued to write. There is more cause for surprise when we meet also
with works of science, or on the arts--though the surprise is not
perhaps fully justified, since even in the wildest times the great mass
of men live their lives very much as in peace. When commotions have
reached the point of causing universal disturbance, they soon end.
Mankind would starve if they were not suspended.
[SN: _A distinction._]
Out of all the mass of writing produced in the second half of the
sixteenth century in France (or by men who must be assigned to that
period but who lived into the seventeenth), which is valuable for one
reason or another, all is not literature. Only a part can be read from
any other motive than interest in the matter. The historians Palma
Cayet, Jean de Serres, and his brother Olivier de Serres, author of
the _Théâtre d’Agriculture_, for instance, will hardly be read for
their style, or except by students. [SN: _Sully._] As much must be said
of the memoirs of Sully, which are called for short _Les Œconomies
Royales_.[104] It is not because this book began to be published
at the Château de Sully in 1638 that we must leave it aside, for in
matter and spirit it belongs to the previous century. Nor is it because
_Les Œconomies Royales_ are wanting in interest. They are of great
historical value, and the form is attractive from its mere oddity.
Sully employed four secretaries to tell him his own life, so that they
are found informing their master, “Monsieur your father had four sons,
for whom he had no other ambition than to make them such gallant men
that they might raise their house to its ancient splendour, from which
the fall of the elder line to the distaff [_i.e._, to female heirs]
three times, and the unthrifty courses of his ancestors, and especially
of his father, had much diminished it in goods.” Or a little further
on, “This [viz., to be a faithful and obedient servant] you also swore
to him in such fair terms, with so much confidence, and in so agreeable
a tone of voice, that he at once conceived great hopes of you.” Yet
the oddity and the matter are the virtues of the _Œconomies Royales_.
Something equivalent must needs be said of the memoirs of Castelnau,
of Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes--written by his son Jean--of Condé, of
François de Guise, and many others.[105]
[SN: _Bodin._]
Jean Bodin (1530-1596) is a great name in political science. His
_République_, first published in French in 1578 and then enlarged
and translated into Latin by the author in 1586, must always remain
of value, if for no other reason than because it shows how it was
possible for men of the sixteenth century who were not merely servile
courtiers, to believe in the “right divine” of kings and the excellence
of despotism. Bodin’s influence, even among ourselves, was strong in
the seventeenth century. Strafford was almost certainly thinking of him
when he told the Council that the king was entitled, as representative
of the State, to act _legibus solutus_; and his doctrine was taught
in incomparable English by Hobbes. Yet Bodin will hardly be read for
his French, and what we cannot read for the form cannot be called
literature.
[SN: _The great memoir-writers._]
It shows, as fully as anything well could, the wealth of French prose
that we can leave aside so many writers, even in what is not one of the
great periods, and yet retain a considerable body of literature in the
very fullest sense of the word. Montaigne, who is pre-eminent, stands
by himself, alike in form and in matter, and so for other reasons does
the _Satyre Ménippée_. But among the memoir-writers who also were in
some cases historians, there are five who would of themselves be enough
to make the wealth of any other literature in this kind--Carloix, La
Noue, D’Aubigné, Monluc, and Brantôme. They came indeed in a happy
hour. The generation was full of strong and violent characters, and of
sudden picturesque events to supply them with matter. The language had
been developed and shaped by Rabelais, Calvin, and the translators with
Amyot at their head, while it had not yet been pruned by the pedantry
of the seventeenth century. It still kept its colour. In history the
classics and the Italians had supplied models of more capability than
the chronicles which Comines had followed. For the model of the memoir,
a people who could look back to Joinville and Villehardouin had no need
of foreign influence.
[SN: _Carloix._]
The five writers just named are not only excellent in themselves,
but each of them is either in his own person the representative of a
class, or makes us acquainted with one. Vincent Carloix wrote, not
his own life, but that of his master, François de Scépeaux, Marshal
de Vieilleville (1509-1571).[106] Carloix was the Marshal’s secretary
for thirty-five years, and was fully trusted by him. It was by
Vieilleville’s direction that the secretary undertook the memoirs,
for which he was supplied with ample materials. He gives, as to the
matter, the picture of a very important member of the party called
“Les Politiques”--that is, those Frenchmen who, with no wish to
separate from the Church of Rome, had yet no fanatical enmity to the
Huguenots on religious grounds, but who were the enemies of the Dukes
of Guise of the house of Lorraine. “Les Politiques” conquered in the
end by alliance with Henry IV., and from them, years after the death
of Vieilleville, came one of the most remarkable of political satires,
the _Satyre Ménippée_. The style of Carloix is one of singular life
and colour, “although,” as the editor of the edition of 1757 says, “it
is full of Gaulish, and antiquated, phrases and expressions.” It would
now appear more proper to put “because.” Carloix has been said to have
taken “Le Loyal Serviteur,” who wrote the life of Bayard, as his model.
But if so, he followed him only in his plain narrative. Carloix has a
wit and a share of the quality called by the French _malice_, wanting
to Bayard’s simple-hearted squire. Under his air of candour he is a
shrewd experienced man of the world.
[SN: _La Noue._]
François de la Noue, called Iron Arm, was born in Brittany of a
well-connected family in 1531, and was killed at the siege of Lamballe
in 1591. His character was drawn in the concise words of Henry IV.:
“He was a thorough good soldier, and, still more, a thorough good
man.” “C’était un grand homme de guerre, encore plus un grand homme
de bien.” What are called his memoirs form the twenty-sixth book of
his _Discours Politiques et Militaires_, a great work of description,
criticism, and reflection, rather than history, composed while he was
a prisoner in the hands of the Spaniards in the Low Countries.[107] La
Noue, who was converted to “the religion” by the chaplain of Coligny,
was a type of all that was best among the Huguenots. He did not embrace
the fanaticism together with the principles of his party. The memoirs,
which are in fact an account of the wars of Religion, from the first
“taking up of arms” in 1562 till 1570, are remarkably impartial. La
Noue was one of the small body of men who can be perfectly loyal to
their own party, and yet never falsify the story in its favour. He is
just to the chiefs on the other side. Though a profoundly moral man, he
was saved from priggery by a very real sense of humour. He could see
the laughable side of things. His style wants the inimitable flash of
Monluc, and it has not got the very peculiar flavour of the prose of
D’Aubigné, but it is nervous, clear, exact, and thoroughly excellent in
its own way--the way of a wise temperate man, a quiet gentleman, and
modest valiant soldier.
[SN: _D’Aubigné._]
The title of memoir-writer must be understood in a very wide sense when
it is applied to D’Aubigné. Strictly speaking, the short _Vie à ses
Enfants_ is his memoir.[108] The _Histoire Universelle_, his main work
in prose, is a great general history of contemporary events at home
and abroad. But then it is also a history of events in which D’Aubigné
himself played an active part, and which he tells from an intensely
personal point of view. It is to be noted that it ends with the wars
of Religion, and the peace which was brought about by the abjuration
of the king--that is to say, when D’Aubigné himself ceased to take a
prominent share in public affairs. To judge by his other prose work,
which is considerable,[109] D’Aubigné was by nature a vehement--or even
virulent--pamphleteer. His _Baron de Fœneste_ and his _Confession de
Sancy_ are fiercely satirical. They are also rather obscure, and not
easily readable. It was on the suggestion of Henry IV. that he first
began to think of writing the history of his time. He was to have
worked in co-operation with the President Jeannin, an ex-Leaguer, and
another thorough-going partisan. It is difficult to imagine what they
could have produced between them. This fantastic scheme was dropped,
and the _Histoire Universelle_ was written after the king’s death. The
style of D’Aubigné shows the influence of his learned education, and of
his practice in the poetic school of Ronsard. He sometimes uses purely
pedantic words, as when he says that his father put him under the
charge of a tutor, “Jean Costin, homme astorge et impiteux.” Astorge is
a Greek word (ἄστοργος), which would never have been used by Carloix,
La Noue, or Monluc. Again, he deliberately followed classic models in
the long speeches, frequently delivered by himself, which abound in his
History, and are the most carefully written parts. When he tells Henry
IV. in one of these addresses that it is useless for him to endeavour
to make peace with the Court, because “you are guilty of your birth,
and of the wrongs which have been done you,” the echo of Sallust and
of Tacitus is distinctly audible; yet he can also be colloquial, and
has no scruple in using idiomatic and proverbial phrases which a later
generation would have rejected as unworthy of the “dignity of history.”
Dignity is not wanting to D’Aubigné, but it is given by the force of
his thoughts and of his character, which is that of a man who might
be a tyrannical friend and an exacting servant, but who was brave and
high-minded.
[SN: _Monluc._]
For a perfect picture of a partisan on the other side we have only
to go to the _Commentaries_ of one whom D’Aubigné describes as “ce
vieux renard de Monluc.” Yet Blaise de Lasseran-Massencome, Seigneur
de Monluc, is perhaps hardly to be called a party man. Like the Lord
Byron of our own civil war, he “was passionately the king’s.” He was
born in or about 1503, near Condom, of an ancient and impoverished
family of Gascony. Though the eldest son, he had even less than the
traditional cadet’s portion. He could boast that, though a gentleman
born, he had fought his way up from the lowest rank. After serving in
the wars of Italy, he was named Governor of Guyenne by the king, and
there distinguished himself by a ferocity exceptional even in those
times. An arquebuse-wound in the face at the siege of Rabastens in
1570 disabled him for active service. His _Commentaries_ were dictated
in his last years, and he died in 1577.[110] It is one of the many
sayings attributed to Henry IV. that the _Commentaries_ of Monluc
are “the Soldier’s Bible.” Whether the king said it or not, no truer
description of this delightful book could be given. Monluc was a man
of his time and his race. He “had the honour to be a Gascon” in every
sense of the word, having all the valour, enterprise, craft, humour,
and expansive vanity of the type. But he was also a perfect soldier,
and profoundly convinced that his business was the greatest a man could
follow. His _Commentaries_ were avowedly written to show the “captains
and lieutenants of France” what a soldier ought to be, by the example
of Blaise de Monluc. The very thoroughness of his vanity gives the
book a sincere tone. We feel that he was far too well pleased with
himself to think it necessary to lie. That he saw things through the
colouring medium of his self-sufficiency is possible--even certain--but
at least he gives them as he saw them. Monluc was also a very able man,
who was not wanting in appreciation of the humorous side of his own
_gasconnades_, and therefore his vanity is never silly. The style is
that of a book dictated by a man with a boundless _faconde_--that is to
say, command of ready language; but it is too vivid and has too much
substance ever to be garrulous. At times he can strike out images of
great force.
[SN: _Brantôme._]
Different though they were in life and character, there is a certain
resemblance between Monluc and Brantôme. Both have the same air of
perfect satisfaction with themselves, and both pour out the fruits
of their varied experience with the same appearance of colloquial
confidence.[111] Pierre de Bourdeilles, called Brantôme from the name
of an abbey of which he was lay abbot--that is to say, of which he
drew the abbot’s portion by favour of the king, without taking the
vows--was a younger son of a distinguished family of Perigord. He was
born about 1540, and died in 1614. During many years he travelled much,
fought more or less, and lived at Court in the intervals of journeys or
campaigns. Being disappointed of a place which the king had promised
him, he was preparing to revenge himself by treason, when his horse
fell with him, and crippled him for life. Brantôme now betook himself
to writing his reminiscences as a consolation. Though he professed a
certain contempt for letters, he spent great pains on his work, and
its bulk is considerable. In addition to some minor treatises--the
so-called _Discours des Duels_, the _Rodomontades Espaignolles_, and a
few others--he made two great collections, which he named _Des Hommes_
and _Des Femmes_. These he rewrote and revised not a little. It was
his wish that they should be published as he left them, but his heirs
neglected his directions. His manuscripts were copied, handed about,
and finally straggled into print by fragments, to which the booksellers
gave fancy names, such as _Les Grandes Dames_, _Les Dames Galantes_,
and so forth. The admiration which Monluc felt for his own business
of soldiering, Brantôme extended to every manifestation of energetic
character by deed or word, moral or immoral, with a marked, but mainly
artistic, preference for good sayings and immorality. He is not to
be trusted in details, but he is in himself an invaluable witness to
the time which produced him. Nowhere else can we see so fully the
combination of the French love of showy action, and indifference to
what we call morality, with the cruel wickedness of Italy, which
distinguished the Court of the later Valois. He does not seem to have
been in himself a bad man, and yet it does not appear that he saw
any difference between right and wrong. Murders, and breaches of the
seventh commandment, committed by ladies and gentlemen in a spirited
way, have his admiration quite as easily as the most honourable
actions. He tells all in the same brightly coloured, rapid, gossipping
style, and stops to rejoice over every striking story which runs from
his pen, whether it be a trait of magnanimity on the part of the Duke
of Guise, or the brutal murder of three unarmed traders by one of his
own friends, who was angry, and relieved his feelings by a butchery.
The attempt to enumerate all the writers who may be classed with one or
another of the five just named could lead to nothing but a catalogue
of mere names. Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the wife whom Henry
IV. married at the “red wedding” of Saint Bartholomew, and afterwards
repudiated, wrote memoirs under the direct inspiration of her friend
and admirer Brantôme. Pierre de l’Estoile (1545-1611)[112] wrote
_Mémoires-Journaux_--_i.e._, a diary of his time. The _Correspondence_
of Catherine de Medici--recently edited by M. de Ferrière--of
Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623), and of the Cardinal D’Ossat (1557-1604),
which have long been known, the _Negotiations_ of Pierre Jeannin
(1546-1632), the great _History_ of De Thou, written in Latin, are all
of value, and are all well written. The list could easily be swollen,
but it would be to little purpose where space does not allow of more
than mention. From the literary point of view they are notable as
showing that the autobiographical, anecdotic, historical, and, in
short, average practical writing faculty of the French, which has
given their literature its unrivalled continuity, was in full vigour
during these generations, when, as one is tempted to think, men must
have been far too intent on keeping themselves alive in the prevailing
anarchy to have leisure for the use of the pen. Spain, in its happier
days, produced something approaching the French historical and memoir
work of the later sixteenth century. Elizabethan England, rich beyond
comparison in poetic genius, has nothing like it to show. It could not
be, of course; and yet we could have spared, not Marlowe, but perhaps
Greene and Peele, and certainly Nash, Lodge (the lyrics apart), and
Breton, to see the Armada, and the voyages to the Isles, through the
eyes of an English Monluc, or the pacification of Ireland as told by
a La Noue of our own, or such a picture of the Court of Elizabeth as
could have been painted by the nearest conceivable English approach to
Brantôme.
[SN: _The_ Satyre Ménippée.]
There is, however, one piece of French prose of what may be called the
practical order--written, that is to say, to secure a definite business
end--which is far too good in itself, as well as too important in its
consequences, to be passed with a mere mention. This is the famous,
and in some ways still unrivalled, _Satyre Ménippée_.[113] The book is
a small collection of pamphlets, burlesques, and satiric verse. When
due precaution is taken to avoid exaggeration and misunderstanding, it
may be compared to our own Martin Mar-Prelate pamphlets. Both were the
work of a body of men not individually of importance, who yet produced
a great effect by combined action for a cause. Each is the beginning
of journalism in its own country. They were nearly contemporary, but
Martin Mar-Prelate came a little earlier. His dates are 1589-1592, and
the _Satyre Ménippée_ belongs to 1593 and 1594. The comparison must not
be pushed further, since the _Satyre Ménippée_ is markedly superior
to Martin in artistic skill, and, it must be allowed, in dignity of
purpose also, however kindly we may wish to think of the Puritan
writers. Neither is there any reason to suppose that any connection
existed between the two. If the writers of the _Satyre Ménippée_ had
any inspiration other than their own desire to answer the virulent
sermons and speeches of the League, they probably found it in Erasmus,
and in the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_ of Ulrich von Hutten. The fact
that the _Satyre_ and Martin appeared almost side by side, only shows
that the causes which were making for the establishment of journalism
were working in France as well as in England. Use had already been
made of the printing-press, the pulpit, and, in France at least,
of the stage, for controversy. But much had been written in Latin,
whether of the study or of the kennel. The anti-papal “sotties” of
Gringore, played by the encouragement of Louis XII., the anti-Church
farces of the Reformers, the sermons and the pamphlets of the League,
were individual work, the still uncollected raw material of possible
journalism. The next step was to organise collective action. It was
done roughly, and unhappily for a party purpose, in England, but in
France with skill, with much literary finish, and for a national cause.
[SN: _Its origin._]
In order to appreciate the full merit of the _Satyre Ménippée_, the
reader must call to mind that after the murder of Henry III. his
cousin of Navarre became King of France by inheritance. Henry IV. had
the support not only of his own subjects and the Huguenots, but of
the “Politiques,”--the moderate men, as we might say, among the Roman
Catholics. The ardent partisans of the Church turned against him, and
banded themselves with the princes of the house of Guise. The Catholic
League, which had been first founded by Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes
nearly thirty years before, after the conspiracy of Amboise, was
extended, and became a great organisation for the purpose of setting
aside the heretic King of Navarre, and putting some assured Romanist
on the throne. In reality it was little more than a cloak for the
ambition of the Guises, and the partisans who saw a chance of profiting
by anarchy. It had the support of the King of Spain. Paris was held,
partly by the help of the more fanatical Roman Catholic clergy and
the mob, partly by a so-called Spanish garrison--Moors, Neapolitans,
and what not--made up out of the sweepings of Philip II.’s army. Even
the conversion of Henry did not disarm the League. It called a sham
meeting of the Estates of the realm to debate the question of setting
him aside. At this moment a body of men in Paris combined to assail
these so-called États with ridicule; and when we remember how brutally
the “Guisards” had disposed of opponents and critics, it is hard to
exaggerate the courage they showed.
[SN: _Its authors._]
The leader of the band was Pierre Leroy, canon of the Sainte
Chapelle. It was to him that the idea first suggested itself, and
he drew about him his friends Gillot, Passerat, Rapin, Chrestien,
Pithou, and Durant. As may well be supposed, the early history of an
anonymous work is somewhat obscure. It was at first a small manuscript
pamphlet, handed about quietly. Additions were made. The verse seems
to have been introduced at the later stages. Whether it was actually
printed in 1593 appears very doubtful. The first known example is
of 1594, and, as was natural enough, the _Satyre_ was subject to a
good deal of modification. The names of men who had been attacked,
and who passed over later to Henry IV., were dropped out. Even the
title was altered. The first chosen was “Abbrégé et l’Ame des Estatz
convoquez à Paris en l’an 1593 le 10 Febvrier. Jouxte la relation de
Mademoiselle de la Lande, Messieurs Domay et Victon Penitens blancqs.”
An alternative title was “Le Catholicum de la Ligue, 1593.” The name
of _Satyre Ménippée_ (taken from Lucian) seems to have been given by
common consent rather than by the authors, and the first undoubted
edition is called “La Vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne, avec un Abrégé
de la tenue des Estats de Paris convoquez aux de Febvrier 1593 par
les chefs de la Ligue. Tiré des mémoires de Mademoiselle de la Lande,
alias la Bayonnoise, et des secrettes confabulations d’elle et du Père
Commelaid.”
[SN: _Its form and spirit._]
In its final form the _Satyre Ménippée_ has some resemblance in form,
and a marked likeness in spirit, to our own _Anti-Jacobin_ as it was in
the first and most militant stage. The authors of both were fighting
with a combination of ridicule and argument against anarchy, and in
the name of common-sense and patriotism. There is the same resistance
to the foreigner in both. The Gallican clergy of the stamp of Leroy
were no friends to the interference of the Pope in French affairs. That
Philip II. was a foreigner could be disputed by nobody; and though the
Lorraine princes had played a great part in France, and were connected
with the Valois by marriage, they were still considered strangers.
The _Satyre Ménippée_ opens by a burlesque speech delivered by a quack
in praise of the Catholicon or universal cure of Spain--of the bribes
which Philip II. was lavishing in order to promote the misfortunes
of his neighbours. Then comes a description of the procession at the
opening of the Estates, and of the tapestry on the walls, in which
the different chiefs of the League are ridiculed, and the misfortunes
they were bringing on the country shown. Then Mayenne makes a speech
as Lieutenant-General of the kingdom--the sort of speech he would have
made if he had told the truth. Various churchmen then speak--Italian or
Italianate priests who were prepared to sacrifice France to the Pope,
or mere beaters of the drum ecclesiastic. Then comes what is perhaps
the best single thing in the _Satyre_, the speech of M. des Rieux,
who speaks for the noblesse. The choice of this man--an historical
character who was finally hanged as a brigand--to speak for the nobles
is in itself a most ingenious stroke. He was a thorough military
ruffian of the worst stamp, low-born and ignorant, who had obtained
command of a castle, and who lived by plundering his neighbours. Des
Rieux begins by giving it as his opinion that nothing could prove the
excellence of the League more fully than just this, that the like
of him could come to speak for the nobles. He goes on in the same
tone, which is the swagger of a vulgar adventurer who feels himself
safe. No more artful way of showing to what the League was reducing
France could have been chosen. The speech of Des Rieux is attributed
to Jacques Gillot, clerk to the Parliament of Paris. Then the tone
of burlesque is dropped, and a vigorous denunciation of the League
is delivered by M. d’Aubray as the spokesman of the Third Estate,
the Burgesses. This, the longest of all, is said to be the work of
Pierre Pithou. The verse, partly scattered through the book and partly
collected at the end, belongs to Jean Passerat, the successor of Ramus
at the Collége Royal, and to Gilles Durant, a lawyer and country
gentleman. Both Passerat and Durant wrote other verse of excellence.
All this memoir, history, and satire is interesting, but no part of it
belongs to the literature which every thinking man in every country
has read, or knows that it would be good to read. They may be all left
aside, not without loss indeed, yet without irreparable loss. But
whoever has not read the _Essays_ of Montaigne has missed something
necessary for the “criticism of life”--the exposition of a habit
of thought, a way of looking at things, of discussing and deciding
questions of conduct and principle, which are not only French and
peculiar to one time, but human and universal.
[SN: _Montaigne._]
Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, was born at the Château de
Montaigne in Perigord, near Bordeaux, in 1533. A legend, which appears
to have no foundation, asserts that the family was of English origin.
It had risen by the salt-fish trade, and its nobility was of recent
origin, facts which Montaigne did not recognise so calmly as a
philosopher should. His father served under Francis I. in the wars of
Italy, and increased the considerable fortune he had inherited, by a
rich marriage with Antoinette de Louppes, or Lopes, a Spanish Jewess by
descent. Michel was educated at the College of Bordeaux by Buchanan,
Muretus, and other famous scholars. By a fad of his father’s, he was
surrounded from the beginning by people who only spoke Latin, and so
learned the language naturally. His schooling came to an end when he
was thirteen. Although he inherited a strong frame from his father,
and did possibly serve one or two campaigns, he applied himself to the
law, and not to arms, as a profession. He held a judicial post, first
at Périgueux, then at Bordeaux, but resigned it early, and retired
to his own house. Montaigne was known at Court, which he visited
several times, even before he published the first two books of his
_Essays_ in 1580. During one visit to Paris in 1588 to superintend the
publication of the third book, he was an eye-witness of the “day of
the barricades,” and was imprisoned in the Bastille by Leaguers. He
travelled abroad, and returned to hold municipal office at Bordeaux,
where he showed more caution than courage during a visitation of the
plague. He died at his own house of Montaigne in 1592, just as the long
anarchy of the wars of Religion, which he had never allowed to ruffle
the calm of his life, was coming to an end.[114]
The fame of Montaigne was great in his own time, and has never suffered
eclipse. Nor is it possible that it ever should, since, in addition
to personal qualities of an amusing and attractive kind, he was the
thorough type of a certain stamp of intellect. He was as complete a
Gascon as his countryman Monluc, and may even be said to have carried
the peculiar quality of his race to a yet higher pitch. Monluc was
resolved that all the world should know him for the astute and intrepid
soldier he was. Montaigne did not condescend to justify himself by his
deeds. He asked the world to be interested in him, not as a soldier,
nor indeed as anything, except just a thinking man. And the world has
never denied that the man and his thoughts were worth knowing. [SN:
_His_ Essays.] The subject of his _Essays_ is always substantially
Michel of Montaigne, his health, his reading, his views of men, things,
and opinions, his habits of mind and body. In matter, in form, and in
intellectual scope he is all the world apart from Brantôme, and yet
he is not wholly unlike the old disappointed courtier of the Valois,
discoursing _Des Hommes_ and _Des Femmes_. Both talk out all that was
in them, with a certain affectation of carelessness, but in reality
with thought, and no small toil over the manner of saying. During his
later years Montaigne employed himself much in covering the margins of
a copy of the so-called fifth edition of his _Essays_ with corrections
and additions. The book still exists in the library at Bordeaux.
After his death his widow intrusted his friend, Pierre de Brach, with
the task of editing a revised edition. Brach, who had the help of
Montaigne’s adopted daughter, Mdlle. de Gournay, produced what was
for long the accepted text in the edition of 1595. But though Pierre
de Brach and Mdlle. de Gournay worked with care, they omitted a good
deal, and misunderstood something. Successive editors in this century
have laboured to correct their errors of omission and commission, but
the text of Montaigne has never yet been fixed to the satisfaction of
exacting critics.
[SN: _The scepticism of Montaigne._]
It is but natural that a writer who deals with permanently interesting
questions of principle and conduct, and who has always been read,
should have been diversely judged during the very different centuries
which have passed since his death. The judgments of the seventeenth
and the eighteenth centuries on the scepticism of Montaigne are
in fact examples of a truth which he has himself most excellently
stated--namely, that we read much of ourselves into our authors.
During the strong Roman Catholic reaction of the seventeenth century
his amused interest in both sides of all questions, and his favourite
thesis that no doctrine is so sure that we are justified in killing
men for it, were found exasperating by those who were terribly in
earnest. In the eighteenth century he was praised, and accepted as
a forerunner of Voltaire, on these very grounds. What one body of
critics called poorness of spirit and coldness of heart, another called
wisdom. For that he would himself have been prepared. In the first of
his _Essays_, “By divers meanes men come unto a like end,” he states
what was perhaps the firmest of his convictions--to wit, that “surely
man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers, and wavering subject; it is very
hard to ground any directly-constant and uniforme judgement upon him.”
We shall perhaps not go far wrong if we describe the scepticism of
Montaigne as a constant recollection that whatever men have said,
thought, or done, has been necessarily the work of this “vaine, divers,
and wavering subject,” and is not to be taken too seriously. A wise
man will accept the social and religious order of his country, even
with its vices, since we have so little wisdom that our efforts at
amendment will probably produce more mischief than they will correct.
In any case, what has existed and stood the test of experience has more
claim on our loyalty than the mere guesses of the reformer. Yet, while
accepting existing order, he need not believe in it too much, and he
certainly need not deny himself the pleasure of noting the innumerable
absurdities of even the most respectable parts of man’s handiwork.
Science is vain, since it is but speculation on subjects we shall
never really understand. Conduct is the important thing. Do not lie,
do not be cruel, do not be a pedant (on these points indeed there was
no scepticism in Montaigne); do not strive after unattainable ideals
of truth (for what is truth except what we think about the causes and
nature of things, and what are we but “vaine, diverse, and wavering
subjects”?), or of virtue, or of chastity. Let us live our lives,
exercising all our faculties of body and mind--in prudent moderation,
and with due regard to our time of life. It is not the greatest
advice which can be given to man. If the human race had acted up to
Montaigne’s standard of wisdom, there would have been no prophets, no
saints, no martyrs, hardly any great thinkers, or great explorers.
It would be possible to follow Montaigne and be a haberdasher of
small-wares. One could not follow him and be a bigot, “une bonne
ligne droite de ferocité sotte,” in any cause, or disgrace knowledge
by pedantry, or conquest and discovery by cruelty and avarice. But
it is an idle question whether he was better or worse than Luther or
Saint Francis de Sales. He was different, and he is a perfect example
of a stamp of man who will never fail while the human race lasts and
thinks--the sagacious man who is naturally kind and honest, but is not
virtuous in any lofty sense, or capable of strong conviction. Amid the
clash of dogmatists, all fanatically sure they were right, and all
cruel, which filled the sixteenth century with tumult, the voice of
Montaigne supplied something which was sorely needed.
[SN: _His style._]
As a writer the importance of Montaigne can hardly be exaggerated. To
him modern literature owes the essay, which of itself would be a claim
to immortality. He first set the example of discussing great questions
in the tone of the man of the world speaking to men of the world. His
style, which can be eloquent to the highest degree, is more commonly
easy and “savoury”--full, that is to say, of colour and character.
His amplifications, and his constant use of quotations, his lawless
wanderings away from his subject, and then through many turnings
back to it--when he has a subject at all--his amazing indiscretions
concerning his health, his morals, and his family history, his frequent
sudden appeals to the reader, as of one speaking in confidence and on
the spur of the moment, make up a combination which cannot be defined
in its inexhaustible variety. It is not the least charm of the _Essays_
that they invite desultory reading. If advice in this matter were
ever of much value, we might recommend the reader who has Montaigne
to begin, to start with the “Apologie for Raymond of Sebonde,” which
will give him the whole spirit and way of thinking, and then to read as
accident dictates. Orderly study is quite unnecessary with an author
who starts from no premiss to arrive at no conclusion, whose unity
is due not to doctrine but to character, and who “rays out curious
observations on life” all illuminated by a vast learning and by humour.
[SN: _Charron and Du Vair._]
The teaching of Montaigne was expounded by Pierre Charron (1541-1603),
a lawyer, who took orders, and had written against the League and
the Protestants, before he fell under the influence of the author of
the _Essays_. His most famous--or rather, his one surviving--work,
the _Traité de la Sagesse_ (1601),[115] is a restatement in more
scholastic form of the ideas of Montaigne. Charron also drew largely,
for he was not by any means an original writer, on Guillaume du Vair
(1556-1621). Du Vair, who is considered one of the best prose-writers
of his time, was the author of many treatises on philosophical
subjects;[116] but he is remembered mainly for his famous _Suasion_, or
plea for the Salic Law, delivered before the Estates summoned by the
League in 1593. He represented the magistracy, and it is said that his
argument persuaded the Estates to reject the candidature of the Infanta
of Spain, who had been brought forward by the extreme Catholic party as
rival to Henry IV.
FOOTNOTES:
[104] The true title, which is too characteristic not to be given in
full, is, “Des Sages et Royales Œconomies domestiques, politiques, et
militaires de Henri le Grand, le prince des vertus, des armes, et des
lois, et le père en effet [i.e., _en realité_] de ses peuples françois.
Et des servitudes utiles, obéissantes, convenables, et administrations
loyales de Maximilien de Béthune, l’un des plus confidents familiers
et utiles soldats et serviteurs du grand Mars des François. Dédiés à
la France, à tous les bons soldats et tous peuples François.” It is
described as printed at Amestelredam (Amsterdam), at the sign of the
three immortal virtues crowned with amaranth--_i.e._, Faith, Hope,
Charity (of which last Sully had no great share), by Alethinosgraphe of
Clearétimélée, and Graphexechon of Pistariste--_i.e._, Veracious-Writer
of Glory-Virtue-Care, and Emeritus Secretary of High Probity. The
_Œconomies Royales_ are included by M. Petitot in his collection of
memoirs, 2nd series, vols. i.-ix.
[105] These memoirs are included in the great collections of Petitot,
and Michaud and Poujoulat. M. Zeller, in two volumes of his excellent
_Histoire de France racontée par les contemporains_, has made up a
consecutive story by extracts from the writers named above and others.
No other literature could supply so much good reading of the same kind,
and they are to be obtained for the “ridiculous sum” of tenpence each.
[106] Petitot, vols. xxvi.-xxviii.
[107] The memoirs are printed in the thirty-fourth volume of Petitot.
[108] Ed. of M. L. Lalanne, 1854.
[109] Much remained unprinted till it was published by MM. Réaume and
Caussade.
[110] The _Commentaries_ of Monluc are included in Petitot’s
Collection, vols. xx.-xxii., but the definitive edition is that of M.
Alphonse de Ruble, published by the Société de l’Histoire de France.
The first three volumes contain the _Commentaries_; the fourth and
fifth the _Letters_, which M. de Ruble discovered in Russia.
[111] The best edition of Brantôme is that of the Société de l’Histoire
de France. Prosper Mérimée edited an incomplete edition in the
“Bibliothèque Elzévirienne.” Partial reprints are numerous.
[112] Ed. Brunet et Champollion, 1875-1881.
[113] Ed. M. Ch. Read, Paris, 1880, in Jouaust’s “Librairie des
Bibliophiles.”
[114] The standard edition of Montaigne’s _Essays_ is still that of Le
Clerc, reprinted in 1865-66. There have been two recent reprints of our
own excellent and contemporary translation by John Florio; one, very
handsome, in Mr Henley’s “Tudor Translations”; and another, cheap and
pretty, edited by Mr Waller, in six small volumes.
[115] Ed. Amaury Duval, 1828.
[116] Œuvres Complètes, 1641.
CHAPTER XII. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY--TORQUATO TASSO--HIS WORK--THE
‘GERUSALEMME LIBERATA’--GIORDANO BRUNO--LITERARY CHARACTER OF HIS
WORK--GIAMBATTISTA GUARINI.
The Later Renaissance, which was so great in Spain and in England,
and in France was important, was elsewhere a time of decline, of
silence, or of very faint beginnings. The literature of Germany has
been broken into periods of vigour, with long intervals of silence
between. The second half of the sixteenth century was one of these.
Among the smaller peoples, with Holland at their head, there was as yet
little more than the attempt to produce literature. [SN: _The Later
Renaissance in Italy._] The case of Italy was more fortunate than that
of Germany. She at least can count two of her most interesting sons
among the men of letters of this time, Tasso and Bruno. But here the
decadence had begun, and had made no small progress towards the sheer
dexterous futility which was to be personified in Marini. The spirit of
the Renaissance was worn out, and was replaced by mere accomplishment,
and by the nervous fear which is visible all through the life of
Tasso. The Roman Catholic reaction was not favourable to literature.
It brought with it the tyranny, or at least the predominance, of
a religion which could no longer inspire. The Popes of the time
endeavoured to make Rome moral by methods which might have commended
themselves to the strictest sect of the Puritans; and commendable as
this effort to restrain the licence of the earlier Renaissance and
the period of the Italian wars may have been, still it was an example
of the attempt to repress which was being made everywhere in Italy,
and which succeeded, since it had only to deal with men of a weak
generation. Giordano Bruno was, indeed, indisciplined enough; but he
spent the active part of his life out of Italy, and when he did return,
his fate was a severe warning against independence of character.
[SN: _Torquato Tasso._]
The life of Torquato Tasso is of itself enough to show under what a
gloomy cloud literature had to work in Italy all through the later
sixteenth century. It was a life of dependence, and was dominated by
fear--fear of rivals, of envy, of accusations of heresy, and even of
murder. That this fear was not quite sane in Tasso’s case is true; but
though his contemporaries saw it to be unfounded, they do not seem to
have thought it absurd. He was born in 1544, the third son of Bernardo
Tasso of Bergamo, who was secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of
Salerno. His mother was Porzia de Rossi, a lady of a distinguished
Neapolitan family. Bernardo Tasso, who was himself a verse-writer,
and who gained some fame in his time as the author of a long epic
founded on the _Amadis of Gaul_, was compelled to fly when his patron
was driven from his principality of Salerno. Porzia, his wife, was
detained in Naples by her family, which was meanly anxious not to pay
her dowry. She died without again seeing her husband, but the young
Torquato was allowed to return to his father. Bernardo, who found a
refuge in the service of the Dukes of Urbino, sent his son to the
famous legal university of Padua. Here Torquato read, but not at the
law, and wrote his epic poem the _Rinaldo_--little to the satisfaction
of his father, who, though a verse-writer himself, wished his son to
qualify for a lucrative trade. But the son was resolved to be a poet,
and not a lawyer, which decision brought with it the absolute necessity
of finding a patron. The Cardinal Luigi d’Este introduced him to the
Court of Ferrara. Tasso had already begun his _Jerusalem Delivered_
and his play of _Torrismondo_, and had written his _Discourses on Epic
Poetry_. Alphonso II. d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, received him, and
seems to have treated him in the main with great kindness. The story
of Tasso’s stay at this typical Italian Court, of his passion for
Leonora d’Este, of the Duke’s discovery, and of the false accusation
of madness, on which the poet was imprisoned for years, is one of the
best known romances of literary history; but that it is a romance there
can be no doubt. From his early years Tasso seems to have suffered
from a continual fear of persecution and the plots of enemies. When he
accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d’Este to Paris, he imagined that some
treason was being plotted against him at home. Later he thought he had
been accused of heresy, and refused to be pacified by the assurances
of the Duke and the head of the Inquisition, to whom he subjected his
writings. He fled twice from Ferrara, and twice came back. He began to
accuse the Duke of intending to have him murdered, and finally drew his
dagger in the Palace on a servant whom he suspected of trying to poison
him. Duke Alphonso vindicated his own character, and also gave the
exact measure of the morality of the time by saying that it was absurd
to suppose that he thought of killing “il Signor Tasso,” since if he
wished to do so he had only to give the order. At last, and not until
the Duke had displayed a patience which is sufficient evidence that
he had no animosity against his servant, Tasso in 1579 was imprisoned
as mad in the hospital of Saint Anne. The treatment of the mad was
everywhere harsh at that time, but the poet appears to have received
exceptional kindness. Friends exerted themselves for him, some from
pity, others moved by the desire to be thought patrons of literature.
In 1586 he was released, on condition that he would not return to
Ferrara. During the last years of his life he wandered from one Italian
Court to another, always quarrelling with his patrons, but always
finding protectors. He died at Rome in 1595, when he was about to be
crowned as Poet Laureate on the Capitol. His _Jerusalem Delivered_ was
printed in a pirated edition during his imprisonment.[117]
[SN: _His work._]
The bulk of Tasso’s work is very great. In addition to the _Rinaldo_,
and two forms of the _Jerusalem_, he wrote the pastoral play _Aminta_,
the tragedy of _Torrismondo_, much minor verse, many sonnets, and many
treatises in prose. A large number of his letters have been preserved.
In his latter years, and in the undeniable decadence of his powers, he
wrote a long poem in blank verse on the _Seven Days of Creation_.
Tasso’s minor work is no doubt of value for the study of his genius.
His philosophic treatises, mostly in dialogue, would, I presume, for
I cannot profess to speak of them with knowledge, be useful to the
student of Italian thought under the Roman Catholic reaction. Even
his play of _Torrismondo_, begun in his youth, and finished after
his imprisonment in the hospital of Saint Anne, has a place in the
history of the “classic” drama. In itself it is not attractive. It
is an unpleasant, and even rather commonplace, story of suicide and
accidental incest, frigidly told, with all the Senecan apparatus.
The pastoral poem of _Aminta_ is of more historical importance, and
has some biographical interest, while the subject suited Tasso’s
faculty for tender images and luscious verse. But he owes his place in
literature to his _Jerusalem Delivered_.
Something has been said of the history of this poem. It was begun
in his youth, was continued during his stay at the Court of Ferrara,
was read in parts to his patrons, and subjected to the criticism of
friends. The desire to secure the honour of the dedication for the
house of Este, which had already patronised Ariosto, is said, very
plausibly, to have had a good deal to do with the Duke’s long-suffering
towards the author. When published it was made the excuse for a
dispute between the Academies which overran all Italy in the sixteenth
century, and were already become the homes of mere word-splitting. The
_Jerusalem_ in fact became almost an affair of State at Ferrara. Its
publication in a very inaccurate form in a pirated edition during his
imprisonment was one of the most bitter, and certainly not the least
genuine, of the grievances of a poet who had an artistic care about the
execution of the work he published. The pirated edition bore the name
which Tasso had chosen, _Godfrey of Boulogne_, but which he changed
for _Gerusalemme Liberata_ in the first authorised edition of 1581.
Under the influence of the fretful piety of his later years he made
his ill-advised recension, to which he gave the name of _Gerusalemme
Conquistata_.
[SN: _The_ Gerusalemme Liberata.]
The enduring popularity of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ in Italy has been
vouched for by such well-known stories as that which tells how it was
sung by gondoliers and country people even into this century. Ugo
Foscolo has recorded that he heard a passage chanted by galley-slaves.
Its acceptance among poets and men of letters, both in the sixteenth
century and since, is not a matter of legend. Milton admired Tasso,
and Spenser did him the signal honour of direct imitation. Acrasia’s
Bower of Bliss, and indeed the final adventure of Sir Guyon and the
Palmer in the Second Book of the _Faërie Queen_, are modelled on, and
in some passages are taken directly from, the description of the garden
of Armida, and the rescue of Rinaldo in the fifteenth and sixteenth
cantos of the _Jerusalem_. The poem was three times translated in
whole or in part into English before 1600, and one of these versions,
Fairfax’s, has been given rank as a classic.[118]
The popularity of Tasso’s epic with those Italians, who would
inevitably know nothing of Dante, and very little of Ariosto, and the
admiration expressed for it by poets or men of letters, are both well
justified, though for different reasons. The _Jerusalem Delivered_
has a beauty of form which naturally delights people who have a real
love of melody, while the matter is no less acceptable to all who are
attracted rather by the pretty and the sympathetic than by the great
or brilliant. The allegory, which Tasso himself afterwards expounded
at length, is of the order which “bites” nobody, and we can watch the
fortunes of Tancred and Clorinda, of Rinaldo and Armida, of Godfrey
and the crusaders, “as if we looked on that scene through an inverted
telescope, whereby the whole was carried far away into the distance,
the life-large figures compressed into brilliant miniatures, so
clear, so real, yet tiny elf-like and beautified as well as lessened,
their colours being now closer and brighter, the shadows and trivial
features no longer visible.” Carlyle was kinder and less critical
than when he classed the _Jerusalem Delivered_ with the _Nibelungen
Lied_--for Dresden china shepherdesses are not more unlike the statues
of Michelangelo than are the personages of Tasso to Kriemhilda or Hagen
von Tronegk. Yet he has summed up the general impression left by the
poem, as of a small, graceful, and, in spite of its great historical
original, unimportant series of events transacting itself without
passion. There is little life in its heroes and heroines. We never
hear the “dreadful clamour” of battle, and the duels of the champions
smack of the school of arms, for Tasso, though no fighter, was an
accomplished swordsman. Yet the story is unquestionably pretty, and the
tiny elf-like figures have charm. To the poet and the man of letters,
though his fame is less in the world than it was, Tasso must always
be admirable, because he was a thorough workman. He was the poet of a
decline. The choice of words, the use of the file, the avoidance of
improprieties of metre, are more with him than inspiration. But he did
at least reap the benefit of all that his predecessors had done for the
language, and he left a finished example of the “learned” poetry of
Southern Europe in the later sixteenth century.
[SN: _Giordano Bruno._]
It would tax the power of the greatest creative dramatist to draw two
conceivable human beings who should differ so widely as Tasso and his
only Italian contemporary who can be said to stand on a corresponding
level of genius--Giordano Bruno. The Nolan, to give him the title which
he habitually used, was probably the more considerable man of the two
in intrinsic power, while both his life and his character are more
interesting. But then he is incomparably more difficult to understand.
I cannot profess to deal with what, to the majority of those who
have paid much attention to his work, is most valuable in him--his
philosophic ideas, and the influence he may have had on later thinkers.
His life is of the kind which it is a pleasure to tell, in spite of
the final tragedy, so full is it of incident and of manifestations of
a certain stamp of character.[119] Giordano Bruno was born at Nola,
near Naples, in 1548. His father was a soldier, and his mother a German
woman. He became a Dominican friar very early, and his unruly character
brought him speedily into difficulties with his superiors. Before he
was twenty he fled from his Order, and escaped to Geneva by way of
Genoa. This was in 1576. For fourteen years he led a wandering life.
His movements can be traced from Geneva to Lyons, thence to Toulouse,
Paris, England, once more to Paris, and from thence to Wittenberg,
Prague, and Frankfort. Wherever he went he asked leave to teach, and
he speedily entangled himself in a quarrel with the authorities. He
defended the doctrines of Copernicus, and he expounded, more or less
obscurely, his doctrines on the soul and the nature of man. Bruno had
an “art of memory” which was founded upon, or was an adaptation of,
the curious reasoning machine invented by Raymond Lully, the Catalan
scholastic and mystic of the thirteenth century. Even if I could
profess to understand his doctrines, which I do not, this would not
be the place to expound them. What does appear very clearly is, that
he was a man of extreme and passionate arrogance. The doctrine he
most certainly held is, that the Nolan was the one man who had even a
glimpse of the only important truths, and that official teachers who
did not accept him at his own valuation were pigs, dogs, brutes, and
beasts. He poured these epithets over the heads of houses at Oxford,
whither he had been taken by Sir Philip Sidney, who was kind to him,
and on whom he may have had some influence. The only place in which he
escaped a violent quarrel with authority was at Wittenberg. Even there
he could not rest, and he committed himself to a public and sweeping
denunciation of the Papacy. At last he received an invitation from
a Venetian _magnifico_ of the house of Mocenigo to come and be his
teacher. Mocenigo had heard of Bruno’s “art of memory,” and probably
also believed him to be a wizard who could make gold. In an evil hour
Bruno accepted the invitation, and went to Venice on the hopeless
errand of making Mocenigo so wise that the Council of Ten would no
longer be able to treat him as a person of no importance. Within a
very few months this strange bargain bore its fruit. The _magnifico_
discovered that he was no wiser than before, and that so far from being
richer, he had given money to the Nolan for which no equivalent had
been returned. He accused his teacher of being a cheat; and Bruno,
whose temper had never been under restraint, answered, with more truth
than prudence, that his employer was a fool. Mocenigo denounced him
to the Inquisition. The Pope claimed him, and after some demur he was
surrendered by the Serene Republic. On his trial before the Inquisition
Bruno protested that he was a loyal son of the Church, and that if he
had spoken heresy it was when he was speaking philosophically, and not
theologically. The distinction would not serve, and he was condemned
to death. Whether he was burnt in the body or only in effigy has been
disputed. The balance of evidence is in favour of the contention that
he actually suffered. In that case the date of his death is 1599.
[SN: _Literary character of his work._]
Some anti-clerical writers on the Continent, and a few Englishmen
who sympathise with them, have been attracted to Bruno because they
can use his name as a weapon in their warfare with ecclesiastical
authority. It is needless to add that numbers quote him as an example
of papal tyranny who have never made the certainly not inconsiderable
effort required to read any one of his treatises. We can speak of him
here only as a man of letters, and can put aside his Latin treatises
and purely philosophic work. His wandering life, and perhaps the
restless explosive nature of the man, made it impossible for him to
produce books on a large scale. Bruno was essentially a writer of
pamphlets, which he produced as opportunity served. Three of these may
be mentioned here as especially characteristic of the Nolan’s genius
and spirit--_La Cena del le Ceneri_ (‘The Ash Wednesday Supper’),
dedicated to Castelnau de Mauvissière, French ambassador in London; the
_Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante_ (‘The Driving out of the Triumphant
Beast’); and _Gli Eroici Furori_ (‘The Heroic Furies’), the latter two
dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. All are in dialogue, and the last-named
contains much verse. Although he excuses himself for part of what
appears in _Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante_ by saying that it is the
personages who speak in their character, not he, the dialogue form
(the most difficult perhaps of all in literature) does not appear to
me to be well managed. There is too much of the Nolan, and the other
personages are apt to be too obviously dummies, who either repeat him,
or are put up merely to be knocked over. But this in itself is typical
of the author. The dialogues are the literary expression of the very
remarkable human being who was Giordano Bruno, the most volcanic and
fuliginous of men. He is for ever bursting into rockets of rhetoric,
while the epithets fly out in sheets as of sparks from an anvil.
What he means or is endeavouring to prove is far from being always
clear, not because his language is obscure, for on the contrary his
sentences are commonly simple enough, but because there was always far
more passion and emotion in Giordano Bruno than reasoning power. The
title of his dialogues, ‘The Heroic Furies,’ is in a way a description
of his whole work. There is in him a constant heroic fury of effort
towards some vaguely indicated manifestations of individual force and
greatness. This of itself is attractive. With all his smoky obscurity
there is a very real fire in Giordano Bruno, which finds its best
expression in verse. Whether he is profitable to read is perhaps
doubtful, but he is most interesting to look at. He was a real Faust,
who strove to grasp--
“Was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält;”
who thought he had read the riddle, and who justified an illimitable
intellectual arrogance, often superbly expressed, by his imaginary
discovery.
The fall from Tasso and Bruno to any of their contemporaries is very
great. There was abundant interest of a kind in literary matters, there
was no want of criticism, and the Academies were active. The long
controversy over the _Jerusalem_ in which Tasso allowed himself to
be entangled is, if valuable for nothing else, at least a proof that
Italians read poetry, and could talk about it.[120] What they could not
at this period do was to produce anything original and valuable--with
the exception of Tasso himself, and of Bruno. The once famous _Pastor
Fido_ of Giambattista Guarini (1537-1612) is in fact a terrible example
of what may happen to a literature when its writers have become
extremely cultivated in all that is mere matter of language, but have
unfortunately nothing to say--or, if they have something to say, are
cowed into insignificance by the fear of compromising themselves.[121]
Guarini was a man of character, a little querulous, and afflicted by
a vanity which caused him to be for ever comparing himself to Tasso,
and complaining of his contemporary’s greater fame, but by no means
without parts or knowledge. Yet his _Pastor Fido_ is a mere echo of the
_Aminta_. Guarini’s play--if play it can be called--was first acted at
Turin in 1585, and was published in Venice in 1590. From the _Aminta_,
and through the _Pastor Fido_, came the line of the Italian literary
opera of later times. The verse is flowing with touches of a somewhat
sensual lusciousness--but withal it is nerveless and imitative.
FOOTNOTES:
[117] _Opere._ Edited by Giov. Rosini. Pisa, 33 vols., 1821-1832.
[118] The _Godfrey of Bulloigne_ of Fairfax has been praised well
beyond the full extent of its merits. The sober fact concerning it is
that though the language has a real interest, the translation has not
the merit of great accuracy, and it is wanting in those flashes of
original power with which Fairfax’s contemporaries seldom failed to
redeem their infidelity to their author. He, on the contrary, is too
often far below Tasso, and he is addicted to the detestable practice of
replacing the simplicity of the Italian by classic commonplaces. Now
and then he is inept, or shirks a difficulty which he ought to have
faced. Examples of all three vices may be found in the beginning of the
fifteenth canto. Tasso opens with the simple and direct words--
“Già richiamava il bel nascente raggio
All’ opere ogni animal che ’n terra alberga.”
For this Fairfax writes--
“The rosy-fingered morn with gladsome ray
Rose to her task from old Tithonus’ lap”--
the commonplace of a boy doing a copy of Latin verse. In the second
stanza, where the Italian has--
“Erano essi già sorti, e l’arme intorno
Alle robuste membra avean già messe”--
Fairfax renders--
“They started up, and every tender limb
In sturdy steel and stubborn plate they dight.”
The _tender_ limbs of two hardened old soldiers is surely weak.
At the end of the next stanza, we have in the Italian--
“E in poppa quella
Che guidar gli dovea, fatal donzella.”
The word “fatal,” an appropriate epithet for Fortune, who sits in
the stern to steer the boat, disappears in Fairfax, and we get the
colourless line--
“Wherein a damsel sate the stern to guide.”
And these are not exceptions. Fairfax constantly gives the inapplicable
adjective, or the vague general term, where Tasso is faultless in his
precision.
[119] _Life of Giordano Bruno_, by Mr L. Frith: London, 1897. _Opere de
Giordano Bruno_, ed. Wagner: Leipzig, 1830.
[120] This controversy has its place in every life of Tasso, and is
told at length by Serassi, _Vita de Tasso_: Bergamo, 1790. My own
trifling acquaintance with it has given me the impression that it can
be profitable to no mortal, except perhaps a historian of criticism.
[121] _Il Pastor Fido._ Verona, 1735.
CHAPTER XIII. CONCLUSION.
The wealth of the period which we here call the Later Renaissance
makes the task of giving the results of a survey of its manifold
activities one of extreme difficulty. It is, indeed, sufficiently easy
to point out the common element of the time--namely, the revival or
the development of the literary genius of Spain, England, and France,
under the influence of the classic models, and of Italy. In Italy
itself the classic impulse had been felt earlier and had borne its
best fruits before the middle of the sixteenth century. The time there
was one of decadence. Tasso and Giordano Bruno are unquestionably,
though in widely different ways, writers of original force. But the
author of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ was a survivor,--one, too, who had
lived into an unhappy time. His weakness of health and character may
have--or rather must have--made him suffer with exaggerated acuteness
from the forces which were weighing on the intellect of Italy. Yet on
that very account he shows only the more clearly the exhaustion of the
race, and the deadening influence of the Roman Catholic revival. As for
Bruno, interesting, and in a way attractive, figure as he is, it is
doubtful whether he can be said to have had any literary influence at
all. His modern fame is even not quite legitimate, since he owes it in
some measure to the circumstances of his death. In his own age he fell
rapidly into obscurity. He also had lived into an unhappy time, though
he bore himself in it very differently from Tasso. Too Italian to
reconcile himself to Calvinism or Lutheranism, too independent in mind
to be an obedient son of the Church, from the moment he was asked for
more than mere outward conformity to ceremonies, he was destined to be
crushed between hammer and anvil in an age of religious strife. There
was no room for independence of mind in Italy, and there was to be none
for long, as the lives of Galileo and of Fra Paolo Sarpi were to show.
It required all the power, and the strong political anti-papal spirit
of Venice, to preserve Fra Paolo. In literature nothing was any longer
quite safe except the more or less elegant presentment of harmless
matter. Tasso did the utmost which it was now allowed to an Italian
poet to achieve. Beyond him there could only be mere echo, as in the
case of Guarini. Beyond Guarini the downward path of Italian literature
led only to the preciosities and affectations of Marini.
The difficulty of summing up and defining becomes really sensible
when an attempt has to be made to estimate the different ways, and
the different degrees, in which the influence of the Renaissance made
itself felt in Spain, England, and France. In all three countries it
met a strong national genius which it could stimulate, but could not
affect in essentials. Garcilaso, Spenser, and Ronsard were all equally
intent on making a new poetry for their countries, and all three
succeeded. Yet they remained respectively a Spaniard, an Englishman,
and a Frenchman, and in their works were as unlike one another as they
were to their common models.
It is, I think, fairly accurate to say that the Renaissance influenced
each of the three Western countries with increasing force in the order
in which they are arranged here. Spain felt it least and France most.
The case is emphatically one for the use of the _distinguo_. When we
wish to measure the influence which one literature has had on another,
it is surely very necessary to keep the form and the spirit well apart.
When only the bulk of what was written, and the bare form, and the mere
language, are allowed for, then it is obvious that the Renaissance did
affect Spain very much. The hendecasyllabic, the prevailing use of the
double rhyme, the _ottava rima_, the _capitolo_, and the _canzone_,
were all taken by the Spaniards with slavish fidelity. The very close
connection between the languages and the peoples may have made this
minute imitation inevitable. Again, it is not to be denied that Italian
had a marked influence on literary Castilian as it was written in the
later sixteenth century. Very strict critics have noted the presence
of Italian constructions in Cervantes. The point is not one on which I
care to speak as having authority, and for two reasons. Experience only
increases my sense of the danger of expressing opinions as to what is
legitimate in a language which is not one’s own--and even in one which
is. Then, too, before a new phrase is condemned for being foreign, we
have to settle the preliminary questions, Was it taken from a sister
tongue or not? Was it superfluous or not? The Spaniard who wishes to
say, “Of two things the one,” &c., and who uses the words “De dos
cosas, una,” is guilty of a Gallicism, and is wrong, because his own
Castilian supplies him with the terser and equally lucid formula, “De
dos, una.” Yet the French original might have been taken with profit,
and very legitimately, if it had been wanted, since it comes from a
kindred tongue, and does no violence to the genius of Spanish. Such a
word as “reliable” is an offence mainly because it is displacing an
excellent equivalent, and because in itself it is a barbarism only to
be excused on the ground of necessity.
Yet while noting that Italian models were profusely imitated in Spain
and Portugal, and that Castilian was perfected as a literary instrument
by Italian influence, we can still maintain that the Renaissance bore
less fruit in the Peninsula than in France or England. By “fruit” we
ought to mean not mere writing, be its mechanical dexterity what it
may, but that combination of form and matter which makes literature,
and which before we can call it “national” must savour of the qualities
of some one race. Now, when we look at the literary activity of the
Peninsula during the Golden Age, we can find very little which will
stand the triple test in matter, form, and national character, and
of which we can yet say that it shows the spirit of the Renaissance.
Portugal can be left aside with the due passing salute to the great
name, and the real, though hardly proportionate, merit of Camoens. What
else we find there[122] is no more than a somewhat weaker version of
the learned poetry of Spain, of which it has to be said that it might
be deducted without reducing the place of Spanish literature in the
world. All men who have written well are entitled to their honour. They
were skilful workmen, and that too in no mean matter. Yet there is a
wide difference between the man of whom we can say that if he had never
taken pen in hand, his form and his matter might yet be found in equal
perfection elsewhere and in foreign tongues, and that other of whom we
are bound to say that if he had remained silent then something would
have been missing which no other race could have supplied. Now, if
Boscan had never taken the advice of Navagiero, if Garcilaso had never
written, if all the learned poets had remained silent, then Spain would
not have shown her capacity to produce men who could handle Italian
metres competently--and yet her place in the literature of the world
would be essentially what it is. The _Celestina_, from which, through
the _Novela de Pícaros_, came Le Sage and Smollett and Dickens,
would remain, and so would the _Amadis of Gaul_, the _romances_, the
_comedia_, _Don Quixote_, the great adventurers, and Santa Teresa--all
in short that makes Spain in literature.
And now, allowing that there was something Spanish which found
adequate expression in the Golden Age, and is also the best of the
national literature, there comes the difficulty, which I dread to find
insuperable, of finding a definition of that something. To say that
there is Spanish quality in _las cosas de España_, and that this is
why they are Spanish, is the explanation of Molière’s doctors. Again,
it is mere reasoning in a circle to begin by taking it for granted
that the learned poets who copied the Italian forms were not truly
Spanish, and that therefore Spain was not in essentials influenced by
the Renaissance. Either form of absurdity is to be avoided. Perhaps
the only way of escape lies in defining what we mean by the spirit
of the Renaissance. Without professing to be equal to so great a
task, it is permissible to assert that there are certain notes which
we describe as of the Renaissance, and to which the Italian, the
Frenchman, or the Englishman gave expression in forms proper to
himself. A love of beauty, a sense of joy, a vehement longing for
strong expressions of individual character and of passion, a delight
in the exercise of a bold, inquisitive intellect--all these, and the
reaction from them, which is a deep melancholy, are the notes of the
Renaissance. In the learned poetry of Spain they are rarely heard. The
commonplaces of form, with here and there a piety and patriotism which
are mediæval and Spanish, are given in their stead. Therefore it is
quite fair to say that the Spaniard was not greatly influenced by the
Renaissance--that there was something in it not congenial to him.
There remains the difficulty of saying exactly what is the Spanish
quality of the true _cosas de España_. Mr Ford, who knew the flavour
well, gave it a name--the _borracha_--which, being interpreted, is
the wine-skin, and the smack it lends to the juice of the grape. The
Spaniards say that there are three natural perfumes, and the first of
them is the smell of the dry earth after rain. The _borracha_, and
the pungent scent of the “dura tellus Iberiæ” when wet, are not to
everybody’s taste. Neither is their equivalent in literature, except
where we find it purified and humanised by the genius of Cervantes.
There has at all times been little love of beauty in the Spaniard, and
not much faculty for ideal perfection of form. His greatest painting
is realistic, the exact forcible rendering of the things seen with the
eye of the flesh, selected, arranged, kept in their proper proportions
in the picture, but rarely imagined. The things seen need not be the
vulgar realities of life only. Velasquez is every whit as real in his
presentment of the frigid dignity of the King, or in the “Lances,” as
he is in the “Spinners” or the “Water-Seller.” Zurbaran’s friars are
perfectly real, and their ecstatic devotion was also _chose vue_. It is
the extent of his range of vision which gives Velasquez his solitary
eminence among Spanish painters. Among their brother artists, the men
of letters, there is the same faculty for seeing and reproducing the
common life, though this must be understood to include that devotion
to the Church which was far from being the least genuine thing in
Spain. All did not see with the same breadth of vision. A Velasquez is
rare. It is comparatively easy to be Zurbaran. As a rule the Spaniard
could express types better than individuals. The jealous husband, the
adventurer, heroic as in _Amadis_, or rascally as in _Lazarillo_, a
rigid ideal of honour, an orthodox pattern of piety, are what the
Spaniard gives us--these, and the stirring action of which they form
a part. He drew from the world he saw around him, and fitted his
materials into a pattern for the stage, or for the story. The _goût
du terroir_, the essentially Spanish _borracha_, is on it all. The
flavour is not delicate. There is little gaiety in the Spaniard, but
instead of it a hard jocularity. He very rarely says the profound
and universally true thing. It would be hard to make a collection of
“beauties” from his literature. In so far as he has helped the general
literature of the world, it has been by supplying a model of machinery
for the play and the prose story. Therefore his literature stands apart
in the modern world. If you are to enjoy it you must be prepared to
be satisfied with the action, the ideal of honour, the enthusiastic
piety which he can give. And to enjoy them you must read them in his
own Castilian. All translation is as the back of the tapestry, but no
original loses more than does the Spaniard when he is divested of his
own language and lets slip the merits of its terse gravity, its varied
picturesque force.
In Spain, then, the Renaissance met something on which it could secure
no hold, something in a sense barbarous, not quite European, and
recalcitrant to all classic influences. In England it met a strong
national genius, but not one which was entirely alien. Sidney, Spenser,
and Marlowe showed the influence of the Renaissance, not as mere
imitators of forms, but as Englishmen, and yet fully. In Shakespeare
it was included with much more. Its love of beauty and its sense of
form were never better expressed than in the lyrics. The difference
between the two nations is profound. The Spaniard either copied the
mere form, or produced what one feels would have come as a natural
growth from the Middle Ages, the _Libro de Caballerías_, the _Novela de
Pícaros_, the _Auto Sacramental_, and even the _comedia_, in which no
trace of the classic influence is to be seen. A drama which is in no
sense classic might have developed from the morality and the farce. As
much might be said of the form of the English drama. Seneca might have
been forgotten, and Tansillo might never have written (without Seneca
he never would have written as he did), as far as the construction
of the English play is concerned. But then much of the Renaissance
spirit did pass into Elizabethan literature. We could not deduct what
it shared with Italy without fatal loss. The genius of Spenser could
perhaps have dispensed with a teacher, but as a matter of fact it did
not. With no model save Chaucer he would yet have been one of the
greatest of poets. He would not have been exactly the poet he was
without Ariosto, Tasso, and Du Bellay. Shakespeare had, of all sons of
Adam, the least need to borrow, and yet without the influence of the
Renaissance we should not have the _Sonnets_, _Venus and Adonis_, _The
Rape of Lucrece_, or many passages in the plays. The English genius, in
fact, accepted and absorbed the Renaissance without losing its native
independence. All the manifestations of its freedom were not equally
admirable. The wild incoherence of the early dramatists is not good in
itself. When we see it at its worst, we are half tempted to wish that
Greene and Marlowe had been more subservient. Yet it was good in so
far as it was a striving after an ideal both national and good. It was
the necessary preparation for Shakespeare and the great things of the
Elizabethan drama. If the time was less mighty in prose than in verse,
yet the germs of all that was to come were in Hooker. He had the secret
of lucid arrangement, the art of dealing with the greatest questions
in his own tongue, and in a form at once unaffected, instantly
intelligible to the average thoughtful man, and yet eloquent where the
occasion required him to rise above the usual level of speech.
The natural aptitude of the French for discipline in literature, and
their tendency to form schools, to set up a doctrine, and to reject all
that is not compatible with it, have never been more strongly shown
than during the Later Renaissance. Other influences were at work. It
would be very rash to say that classic or Italian models had a visible
influence on Carloix’s memoirs of Vielleville, or the commentaries
of Monluc, or even the vast unnamed, or misnamed, compilation of
Brantôme. Yet the Renaissance did, on the whole, dominate France,
though it could not eliminate, or suppress, what was essentially
French. Its intense interest in the life and the character of man was
never better shown than by Montaigne. In poetry the attempt to adapt
the classic and Italian models to French use swept all before it.
Nowhere was the French disposition to find its freedom in the service
of a classic model more clearly seen than in the drama of the Pléiade.
It is true that Jodelle, Garnier, Belleau, Grévin, and the others may
be said to have failed. They did not produce any dramatic literature
which has much more than an interest of curiosity. Yet the later
history of the French stage proves that they were making their efforts
on lines congenial to their nation. The dramatists of the Augustan age
did no more than work in the same spirit, and to the same ends as their
forgotten predecessors, with altered--and but slightly altered--means.
A comparison between the three literatures will go far to explain
their respective fates. For the Spanish there could not well be any
future. A strong national character, unchanging, and so close in the
fibre that it never really admits a foreign influence, could not well
do more than express itself once. The time came when it had said its
say--and nothing then remained except, first mere juggling with words,
and then silence--Góngorism and Decadence. In England and in France
there was the hope, and even the assurance, of far more to come. Though
the Spanish story has been carried beyond the dates allowed for France
and England, there is no unfairness in this sentence. In 1616 Lope had
still much of his best work to do. Quevedo, Calderon, and Góngora were
to come; but the first and second brought nothing, or at least very
little, absolutely new, and the third brought destruction. Lope was
only to do what he had done already. When Shakespeare died in England
and Mathurin Regnier in France, a long succession was to follow them.
Englishmen and Frenchmen had learnt their lesson from the Renaissance,
and were to use their knowledge.
FOOTNOTE:
[122] The names of Corte-Real (1540-1593), P. de Andrade (1576-1660),
Sá de Menezes (----?-1664), may represent this class. Others, with the
classical prose of Vieira and G. de Andrade, which continued the work
of Barros (1496-1570), may be referred to in the next volume.
INDEX.
Acuña, Ferdinand de, 43.
Alarcon, Juan Ruiz de, 83, 93, 102-105.
Aleman, Mateo, 7, 137, 141.
_Amadis of Gaul_, 127 _sq._
Antonio, _Biblioteca Hispana_, 3.
Argensola, Bartolomé de, 48, 170.
Argensola, Lupercio de, 48.
_Arte of English Poesie, The_, 188.
Aubertin, Mr, 57 note, 58 note.
Aubigné, Theodore Agrippa D’, 306-308, 332 _sq._
Ávila, Juan de, 180.
Ávila, Luis de, 158.
Baïf, Jean Antoine de, 293, 301.
_Barons’ War, The_, 210.
Bartas, Du, 303-306.
Bellay, Joachim du, 24, 293 _sq._, 298-300.
Belleau, Remi, 293, 300.
Bertaut, Jean, 299.
_Biblioteca de Aribau_ or _de Ribadeneyra_, 40 note.
Bodin, Jean, 329.
Borrow, George, 26.
Boscan, Juan, 10, 30 _sq._, 41.
Brantôme, Pierre de, 336.
Breton, 272.
Bruno, Giordano, 360-365.
Burton, Sir Richard, 58 note.
Calderon, 80, 83-90, 93, 94, 111-120.
Caminha, Pedro de Andrade, 55.
Camoens, Luiz da, 57-59.
Campion, Thomas, 189.
_Cancioneros_, the, 10 _sq._
Cano, Dominican Melchior, 46.
Carloix, Vincent, 330.
Carvajal, Micael de, 65.
Casas, Bartolomé de las, 162.
Castellanos, Juan de, 53.
Castillejo, Cristobal de, 10, 25, 35.
Castillo, Hernan del, 11, 15.
Castro, Guillen de, 82.
_Celestina_, 6, 64, 138, 139.
Cervantes, 5, 61, 120 _sq._, 145-156.
Cetina, Gutierre de, 32, 43.
Chaide, Malon de, 179.
Charron, Pierre, 350.
Coloma, Carlos, Marquis of Espinar, 159.
Cruz, Juan de la, 179, 183.
Cueva, Juan de la, 37 _sq._, 71, 92.
Daniel, Samuel, 213-215.
Daurat, Jean, 292, 301.
Dekker, 276.
_Diálogo de la Lengua_, 23.
Diaz, Bernal, 160.
Drayton, 210, 216-219.
Encina, Juan del, 8, 10, 64 _sq._
Ercilla, Alonso de, 54 _sq._
Espinel, Vicente, 143.
Estella, Diego de, 177.
Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 58 note.
_Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja_, 63.
Ferreira, Antonio, 55, 66.
Figueroa, Francisco de, 48.
Figueroa, Suarez de, 174.
Figueroa, Vera y, 174.
Fitz-Geoffrey, Charles, 211.
Fontaine, 27.
Garcilaso, 10, 31, 41 _sq._
Garnier, Robert, 317-320.
Gascoigne, George, 191.
Gómara, Francisco Lopez de, 161.
Gomez, Enriquez, 138.
Góngora and Góngorism, 34, 48 _sq._
Googe, Barnabe, 191.
_Gorboduc_, 232.
Gosson, Stephen, 201.
Gracian, Baltasar, 172.
Granada, Luis de, 176, 181.
Grant-Duff, Sir M. E., 172.
Greene, Robert, 238-240, 272.
Grévin, Jacques, 316.
Guarini, Giambattista, 365.
Guevara, Antonio de, 26 _sq._
Guevara, Luis Velez de, 156 note.
Hall, Joseph, 219 _sq._
Hallam, 286.
Harvey, Gabriel, 186.
Herrera, Antonio de, 163.
Herrera, Hernan de, 10, 41, 42, 45, 47.
_History of the Civil War_, 210.
Hita, Ginés Perez de, 136.
Hooker, Richard, 286-289.
Inca Garcilaso, the, 163.
Jerez, Francisco de, 161.
Jodelle, Estienne, 312-316.
John II., 7.
Johnson, Dr, 46.
Kyd, Thomas, 242.
Larivey, Pierre, 321-324.
_Lazarillo de Tormés_, 7, 140.
Ledesma, Alonso de, 51.
Leon, Luis de, 34, 45 _sq._, 181.
Leon, Pedro Cieza de, 161.
Lewes, G. H., 86 note.
_Libros de Caballerías_, 125 _sq._
Lockhart, J. G., 18 _sq._
Lodge, 219, 235, 272.
Longfellow, H. W., 9.
Lyly, John, 235, 266 _sq._
Manrique, Jorge, 42.
Mardones, Cristobal de Salazar, 49 _sq._
Mariana, Juan de, 167-169.
Markham, Gervase, 211.
Marlowe, Christopher, 242-245.
Marprelate, Martin, 263 _sq._, 276-285.
Marston, 219 _sq._
Melo, Francisco Manuel de, 166.
Mena, Juan de, 7 _sq._, 35.
Mendoza, Bernardino de, 159.
Mendoza, Diego de, 32, 43 _sq._, 140, 164.
Menendez, Don M., 40, 61, 86 note.
Molina, Tirso de, 29, 81, 105-110, 125.
Molinos, Miguel de, 176.
Moncada, Francisco de, 165.
Monluc, Blaise de, 334.
Montaigne, Michel de, 344-350.
Montalvo, Garcia Ordoñez de, 128.
Montchrestien, Antoine de, 320.
Montemayor, Jorge de, 124.
Morales, Ambrosio de, 166.
Morel-Fatio, M. Alfred, 43 note.
Moreto, 90.
Morley, Mr John, 173.
Naharro, Bartolomé de Torres, 67.
Nash, Thomas, 235, 273-276.
Nebrissensis, 22.
Noue, François de la, 331.
Ocampo, Florian de, 166.
Oliva, Fernan Perez de, 22.
Ortega, Fray Juan de, 140.
Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernandez de, 161.
“Palmerines,” the, 130 _sq._
Pedroso, Eduardo Gonzalez, 62 note.
Peele, George, 240-242.
Perez, Andreas, 143.
Pléiade, the, 291, 310 _sq._
Puttenham, George, 188, 262.
Quevedo, 51, 144 _sq._
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 264 _sq._
Regnier, Mathurin, 308.
Rengifo, Juan Diaz, 36.
Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 169.
_Romanceros_, the, 14 _sq._
Ronsard, Pierre de, 34, 292, 295-298.
Roxas, Agustin de, 175.
Roxas, Francisco de, 90.
Rueda, Lope de, 68 _sq._
Sa de Miranda, Francisco de, 55.
Saavedra-Fajardo, Diego de, 170, 173.
Sackville, Sir Thomas, 189, 232.
Sanchez, Francisco, 42.
Sandoval, Prudencio de, 170.
Santillana, Marquis of, 8, 25, 35.
_Satyre Ménippée_, the, 339-344.
Schlegel, A. W., 122.
Sempere, Hierónimo, 52.
Shakespeare, 247-258.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 37, 200-204, 269-272.
Silva, Feliciano de, 131.
Solis, Antonio de, 170.
Sommelsdyck, Aarsens van, 6.
Song-books, Elizabethan, 208.
Sonneteers, Elizabethan, 206.
Southey, Robert, 55 _sq._
Spenser, Edmund, 185, 192-199.
Still, John, 231.
Sully, 327.
Taille, Jacques de la, 317.
Tasso, Torquato, 353-360.
Teresa, Santa, 177-182.
Thyard, Pontus de, 301.
Ticknor, Mr, 28, 30, 40, 64 note, 87.
Timoneda, Juan de, 63, 70, 125.
_Tirant lo Blanch_, 126.
Turberville, George, 190 _sq._
Udall, Nicholas, 230.
Vaca, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de, 160.
Vair, Guillaume du, 351.
Váldes, Juan de, 23.
Valera, Don Juan, 4.
Valois, Marguerite de, 337.
Vega, Lope de, 28, 48, 53, 61, 64, 72-80, 92, 94-102.
Vicente, Gil, 62.
Villalobos, Francisco de, 22.
Virues, Cristobal de, 71.
Warner, William, 211-213.
Watson, Thomas, 204-206.
Webbe, 187, 190, 262.
Zapata, Luis de, 52.
Zarate, Augustin de, 161.
Zurita, Gerónimo de, 167.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled
consecutively through the document.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.
p. 168: 1501 changed to 1601 (in 1601, was)
p. 205: παλιλλογἱα transliterates into English as palillogia (called
παλιλλογἱα or)
p. 205: ἀναδἰπλωσις transliterates into English as anadiplôsis (or
ἀναδἰπλωσις, of)
p. 333: ἄστοργος transliterates into English as astorgos (word
(ἄστοργος), which)
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Later Renaissance" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.