CHAPTER I.
Periods of Literary Success and National Glory. — Charles the Fifth. — Hopes of Universal Empire. — Luther. — Contest of the Romish Church with Protestantism. — Protestant Books. — The Inquisition. — Index Expurgatorius. — Suppression of Protestantism in Spain. — Persecution. — Religious Condition of the Country and its Effects.
In every country that has yet obtained a rank among those nations whose intellectual cultivation is the highest, the period in which it has produced the permanent body of its literature has been that of its glory as a state. The reason is obvious. There is then a spirit and activity abroad among the elements that constitute the national character, which naturally express themselves in such poetry and eloquence as, being the result of the excited condition of the people and bearing its impress, become for all future exertions a model and standard that can be approached only when the popular character is again stirred by a similar enthusiasm. Thus, the age of Pericles naturally followed the great Persian war; the age of Augustus was that of a universal tranquillity produced by universal conquest; the age of Molière and La Fontaine was that in which Louis the Fourteenth was carrying the outposts of his consolidated monarchy far into Germany; and the ages of Elizabeth and Anne were the ages of the Armada and of Marlborough.
Just so it was in Spain. The central point in Spanish history is the capture of Granada. During nearly eight centuries before that decisive event, the Christians of the Peninsula were occupied with conflicts at home, that gradually developed their energies, amidst the sternest trials and struggles, till the whole land was filled to overflowing with a power which had hardly yet been felt in the rest of Europe. But no sooner was the last Moorish fortress yielded up, than this accumulated flood broke loose from the mountains behind which it had so long been hidden, and threatened, at once, to overspread the best portions of the civilized world. In less than thirty years, Charles the Fifth, who had inherited, not only Spain, but Naples, Sicily, and the Low Countries, and into whose treasury the untold wealth of the Indies was already beginning to pour, was elected Emperor of Germany, and undertook a career of foreign conquest such as had not been imagined since the days of Charlemagne. Success and glory seemed to wait for him as he advanced. In Europe, he extended his empire, till it checked the hated power of Islamism in Turkey; in Africa, he garrisoned Tunis and overawed the whole coast of Barbary; in America, Cortés and Pizarro were his bloody lieutenants, and achieved for him conquests more vast than were conceived in the dreams of Alexander; while, beyond the wastes of the Pacific, he stretched his discoveries to the Philippines, and so completed the circuit of the globe.
This was the brilliant aspect which the fortunes of his country offered to an intelligent and imaginative Spaniard in the first half of the sixteenth century.[741] For, as we well know, such men then looked forward with confidence to the time when Spain would be the head of an empire more extensive than the Roman, and seem sometimes to have trusted that they themselves should live to witness and share its glory. But their forecast was imperfect. A moral power was at work, destined to divide Europe anew, and place the domestic policy and the external relations of its principal countries upon unwonted foundations. The monk Luther was already become a counterpoise to the military master of so many kingdoms; and from 1552, when Moritz of Saxony deserted the Imperial standard, and the convention of Passau asserted for the Protestants the free exercise of their religion, the clear-sighted conqueror may himself have understood, that his ambitious hopes of a universal empire, whose seat should be in the South of Europe and whose foundations should be laid in the religion of the Church of Rome, were at an end.
But the question, where the line should be drawn between the great contending parties, was long the subject of fierce wars. The struggle began with the enunciation of Luther’s ninety-five propositions, and his burning the Pope’s bulls at Wittenberg. It was ended, as far as it is yet ended, by the peace of Westphalia. During the hundred and thirty years that elapsed between these two points, Spain was indeed far removed from the fields where the most cruel battles of the religious wars were fought; but how deep was the interest the Spanish people took in the contest is plain from the bitterness of their struggle against the Protestant princes of Germany; from the vast efforts they made to crush the Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands; from the expedition of the Armada against Protestant England; and from the interference of Philip the Second in the affairs of Henry the Third and Henry the Fourth, when, during the League, Protestantism seemed to be gaining ground in France;—in short, it may be seen from the presence of Spain and her armies in every part of Europe, where it was possible to reach and assail the great movement of the Reformation.
Those, however, who were so eager to check the power of Protestantism when it was afar off would not be idle when the danger drew near to their own homes.[742] The first alarm seems to have come from Rome. In March, 1521, Papal briefs were sent to Spain, warning the Spanish government to prevent the further introduction of books written by Luther and his followers, which, it was believed, had been secretly penetrating into the country for about a year. These briefs, it should be observed, were addressed to the civil administration, which still, in form at least, kept an entire control over such subjects. But it was more natural, and more according to the ideas then prevalent in other countries as well as in Spain, to look to the ecclesiastical power for remedies in a matter connected with religion; and the great body of the Spanish people seems willingly to have done so. In less than a month, therefore, from the date of the briefs in question, and perhaps even before they were received in Spain, the Grand Inquisitor addressed an order to the tribunals under his jurisdiction, requiring them to search for and seize all books supposed to contain the doctrines of the new heresy. It was a bold measure, but it was a successful one.[743] The government gladly countenanced it; for, in whatever form Protestantism appeared, it came with more or less of the spirit of resistance to all the favorite projects of the Emperor; and the people countenanced it, because, except a few scattered individuals, all true Spaniards regarded Luther and his followers with hardly more favor than they did Mohammed or the Jews.
Meantime, the Supreme Council, as the highest body in the Inquisition was called, proceeded in their work with a firm and equal step. By successive decrees, between 1521 and 1535, it was ordained, that all persons who kept in their possession books infected with the doctrines of Luther, and even all who failed to denounce such persons, should be excommunicated and subjected to degrading punishments. This gave the Inquisition a right to inquire into the contents and character of whatever books were already printed. Next, they arrogated to themselves the power to determine what books might be sent to the press; claiming it gradually and with little noise, but effectually,[744] and if, at first, without any direct grant of authority from the Pope or from the king of Spain, still necessarily with the implied assent of both, and generally with means furnished by one or the other. At last, a sure expedient was found, which left no doubt of the process to be used, and very little as to the results that would follow.
In 1539, Charles the Fifth obtained a Papal bull authorizing him to procure from the University of Louvain, in Flanders, where the Lutheran controversy would naturally be better understood than in Spain, a list of books dangerous to be introduced into his dominions. It was printed in 1546, and was the first “Index Expurgatorius” published in Spain, and the second in the world. Subsequently it was submitted by the Emperor to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, under whose authority additions were made to it; after which it was promulgated anew in 1550, thus consummating the Inquisitorial jurisdiction over this great lever of modern progress and civilization,—a jurisdiction, it should be noted, which was confirmed and enforced by the most tremendous of all human penalties, when, in 1558, Philip the Second ordained the punishments of confiscation and death against any person who should sell, buy, or keep in his possession any book prohibited by the Index Expurgatorius of the Inquisition.[745]
The contest with Protestantism in Spain, under such auspices, was short. It began in earnest and in blood about 1559, and was substantially ended in 1570. At one period, the new doctrine had made some progress in the monasteries and among the clergy; and though it never became formidable from the numbers it enlisted, yet many of those who joined its standard were distinguished by their learning, their rank, or their general intelligence. But the higher and more shining the mark, the more it attracted notice and the more surely it was reached. The Inquisition had already existed seventy years and was at the height of its power and favor. Cardinal Ximenes, one of the boldest and most far-sighted statesmen, and one of the sternest bigots the world ever saw, had for a long period united in his own person the office of Civil Administrator of Spain with that of Grand Inquisitor, and had used the extraordinary powers such a position gave him to confirm the Inquisition at home and to spread it over the newly discovered continent of America.[746] His successor was Cardinal Adrien, the favored preceptor of Charles the Fifth, who filled nearly two years the places of Grand Inquisitor and of Pope; so that, for a season, the highest ecclesiastical authority was made to minister to the power of the Inquisition in Spain, as the highest political authority had done before.[747] And now, after an interval of twenty years, had come Philip the Second, wary, inflexible, unscrupulous, at the head of an empire on which, it was boasted, the sun never set, consecrating all his own great energies and all the resources of his vast dominions to the paramount object of extirpating every form of heresy from the countries under his control, and consolidating the whole into one grand religious empire.
Still, the Inquisition, regarded as the chief outward means of driving the Lutheran doctrines from Spain, might have failed to achieve its work, if the people, as well as the government, had not been its earnest allies. But, on all such subjects, the current in Spain had, from the first, taken only one direction. Spaniards had contended against misbelief with so implacable a hatred, for centuries, that the spirit of that old contest had become one of the elements of their national existence; and now, having expelled the Jews and reduced the Moors to submission, they turned themselves, with the same fervent zeal, to purify their soil from what they trusted would prove the last trace of heretical pollution. To achieve this great object, Pope Paul the Fourth, in 1558,—the same year in which Philip the Second had decreed the most odious and awful penalties of the civil government in aid of the Inquisition,—granted a brief, by which all the preceding dispositions of the Church against heretics were confirmed, and the tribunals of the Inquisition were authorized and required to proceed against all persons supposed to be infected with the new belief, even though such persons might be bishops, archbishops, or cardinals, dukes, princes, kings, or emperors;—a power which, taken in all its relations, was more formidable to the progress of intellectual improvement than had ever before been granted to any body of men, civil or ecclesiastical.[748]
The portentous authority thus given was at once freely exercised. The first public auto da fé of Protestants was held at Valladolid in 1559, and others followed, both there and elsewhere.[749] The royal family was occasionally present; several persons of rank suffered; and a general popular favor evidently followed the horrors that were perpetrated. The number of victims was not large when compared with earlier periods, seldom exceeding twenty burned at one time, and fifty or sixty subjected to cruel and degrading punishments; but many of those who suffered were, as the nature of the crimes alleged against them implied, among the leading and active minds of their age. Men of learning were particularly obnoxious to suspicion, since the cause of Protestantism appealed directly to learning for its support. Sanchez, the best classical scholar of his time in Spain, Luis de Leon, the best Hebrew critic and the most eloquent preacher, and Mariana, the chief Spanish historian, with other men of letters of inferior name and consideration, were summoned before the tribunals of the Inquisition, in order that they might at least avow their submission to its authority, even if they were not subjected to its censures.
Nor were persons of the holiest lives and the most ascetic tempers beyond the reach of its mistrust, if they but showed a tendency to inquiry. Thus, Juan de Avila, known under the title of the Apostle of Andalusia, and Luis de Granada, the devout mystic, with Teresa de Jesus and Juan de la Cruz, both of whom were afterwards canonized by the Church of Rome, all passed through its cells, or in some shape underwent its discipline. So did some of the ecclesiastics most distinguished by their rank and authority. Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, after being tormented eighteen years by its persecutions, died, at last, in craven submission to its power; and Cazella, who had been a favorite chaplain of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, perished in its fires. Even the faith of the principal personages of the kingdom was inquired into, and, at different times, proceedings, sufficient, at least, to assert its authority, were instituted in relation to Don John of Austria, and the formidable Duke of Alva;[750] proceedings, however, which must be regarded rather as matters of show than of substance, since the whole institution was connected with the government from the first, and became more and more subservient to the policy of the successive masters of the state, as its tendencies were developed in successive reigns.
The great purpose, therefore, of the government and the Inquisition may be considered as having been fulfilled in the latter part of the reign of Philip the Second,—farther, at least, than such a purpose was ever fulfilled in any other Christian country, and farther than it is ever likely to be again fulfilled elsewhere. The Spanish nation was then become, in the sense they themselves gave to the term, the most thoroughly religious nation in Europe; a fact signally illustrated in their own eyes a few years afterward, when it was deemed desirable to expel the remains of the Moorish race from the Peninsula, and six hundred thousand peaceable and industrious subjects were, from religious bigotry, cruelly driven out of their native country, amidst the devout exultation of the whole kingdom,—Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and others of the principal men of genius then alive, joining in the general jubilee.[751] From this time, the voice of religious dissent can hardly be said to have been heard in the land; and the Inquisition, therefore, down to its overthrow in 1808, was chiefly a political engine, much occupied about cases connected with the policy of the state, though under the pretence that they were cases of heresy or unbelief. The great body of the Spanish people rejoiced alike in their loyalty and their orthodoxy; and the few who differed in faith from the mass of their fellow-subjects were either held in silence by their fears, or else sunk away from the surface of society the moment their disaffection was suspected.
The results of such extraordinary traits in the national character could not fail to be impressed upon the literature of any country, and particularly upon a literature which, like that of Spain, had always been strongly marked by the popular temperament and peculiarities. But the period was not one in which such traits could be produced with poetical effect. The ancient loyalty, which had once been so generous an element in the Spanish character and cultivation, was now infected with the ambition of universal empire, and was lavished upon princes and nobles who, like the later Philips and their ministers, were unworthy of its homage; so that, in the Spanish historians and epic poets of this period, and even in more popular writers, like Quevedo and Calderon, we find a vainglorious admiration of their country, and a poor flattery of royalty and rank, that remind us of the old Castilian pride and deference only by showing how both had lost their dignity. And so it is with the ancient religious feeling that was so nearly akin to this loyalty. The Christian spirit, which gave an air of duty to the wildest forms of adventure throughout the country, during its long contest with the power of misbelief, was now fallen away into a low and anxious bigotry, fierce and intolerant towards every thing that differed from its own sharply defined faith, and yet so pervading and so popular, that the romances and tales of the time are full of it, and the national theatre, in more than one form, becomes its strange and grotesque monument.
Of course, the body of Spanish poetry and eloquent prose produced during this interval—the earlier part of which was the period of the greatest glory Spain ever enjoyed—was injuriously affected by so diseased a condition of the national character. That generous and manly spirit which is the breath of intellectual life to any people was restrained and stifled. Some departments of literature, such as forensic eloquence and eloquence of the pulpit, satirical poetry, and elegant didactic prose, hardly appeared at all; others, like epic poetry, were strangely perverted and misdirected; while yet others, like the drama, the ballads, and the lighter forms of lyrical verse, seemed to grow exuberant and lawless, from the very restraints imposed on the rest; restraints which, in fact, forced poetical genius into channels where it would otherwise have flowed much more scantily and with much less luxuriant results.
The books that were published during the whole period on which we are now entering, and indeed for a century later, bore everywhere marks of the subjection to which the press and those who wrote for it were alike reduced. From the abject title-pages and dedications of the authors themselves, through the crowd of certificates collected from their friends to establish the orthodoxy of works that were often as little connected with religion as fairy tales, down to the colophon, supplicating pardon for any unconscious neglect of the authority of the Church or any too free use of classical mythology, we are continually oppressed with painful proofs, not only how completely the human mind was enslaved in Spain, but how grievously it had become cramped and crippled by the chains it had so long worn.
But we shall be greatly in error, if, as we notice these deep marks and strange peculiarities in Spanish literature, we suppose they were produced by the direct action either of the Inquisition or of the civil government of the country, compressing, as if with a physical power, the whole circle of society. This would have been impossible. No nation would have submitted to it; much less so high-spirited and chivalrous a nation as the Spanish in the reign of Charles the Fifth and in the greater part of that of Philip the Second. This dark work was done earlier. Its foundations were laid deep and sure in the old Castilian character. It was the result of the excess and misdirection of that very Christian zeal which fought so fervently and gloriously against the intrusion of Mohammedanism into Europe, and of that military loyalty which sustained the Spanish princes so faithfully through the whole of that terrible contest;—both of them high and ennobling principles, which in Spain were more wrought into the popular character than they ever were in any other country.
Spanish submission to an unworthy despotism, and Spanish bigotry, were, therefore, not the results of the Inquisition and the modern appliances of a corrupting monarchy; but the Inquisition and the despotism were rather the results of a misdirection of the old religious faith and loyalty. The civilization that recognized such elements presented, no doubt, much that was brilliant, picturesque, and ennobling; but it was not without its darker side; for it failed to excite and cherish many of the most elevating qualities of our common nature,—those qualities which are produced in domestic life, and result in the cultivation of the arts of peace.
As we proceed, therefore, we shall find, in the full development of the Spanish character and literature, seeming contradictions, which can be reconciled only by looking back to the foundations on which they both rest. We shall find the Inquisition at the height of its power, and a free and immoral drama at the height of its popularity,—Philip the Second and his two immediate successors governing the country with the severest and most jealous despotism, while Quevedo was writing his witty and dangerous satires, and Cervantes his genial and wise Don Quixote. But the more carefully we consider such a state of things, the more we shall see that these are moral contradictions which draw after them grave moral mischiefs. The Spanish nation, and the men of genius who illustrated its best days, might be light-hearted because they did not perceive the limits within which they were confined, or did not, for a time, feel the restraints that were imposed upon them. What they gave up might be given up with cheerful hearts, and not with a sense of discouragement and degradation; it might be done in the spirit of loyalty and with the fervor of religious zeal; but it is not at all the less true that the hard limits were there, and that great sacrifices of the best elements of the national character must follow.
Of this time gave abundant proof. Only a little more than a century elapsed before the government that had threatened the world with a universal empire was hardly able to repel invasion from abroad, or maintain the allegiance of its own subjects at home. Life—the vigorous, poetical life which had been kindled through the country in its ages of trial and adversity—was evidently passing out of the whole Spanish character. As a people, they sunk away from being a first-rate power in Europe, till they became one of altogether inferior importance and consideration; and then, drawing back haughtily behind their mountains, rejected all equal intercourse with the rest of the world, in a spirit almost as exclusive and intolerant as that in which they had formerly refused intercourse with their Arab conquerors. The crude and gross wealth poured in from their American possessions sustained, indeed, for yet another century the forms of a miserable political existence in their government; but the earnest faith, the loyalty, the dignity of the Spanish people were gone; and little remained in their place, but a weak subserviency to the unworthy masters of the state, and a low, timid bigotry in whatever related to religion. The old enthusiasm, rarely directed by wisdom from the first, and often misdirected afterwards, faded away; and the poetry of the country, which had always depended more on the state of the popular feeling than any other poetry of modern times, faded and failed with it.