CHAPTER XIX.
Quevedo. — His Life, Public Service, and Persecutions. — His Works, Published and Unpublished. — His Poetry. — The Bachiller Francisco de la Torre. — His Prose Works, Religious and Didactic. — His Paul the Sharper, Prose Satires, and Visions. — His Character.
Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas, the contemporary of both Lope de Vega and Cervantes, was born at Madrid, in 1580.[462] His family came from that mountainous region at the northwest, to which, like other Spaniards, he was well pleased to trace his origin;[463] but his father held an office of some dignity at the court of Philip the Second, which led to his residence in the capital at the period of his son’s birth;—a circumstance which was no doubt favorable to the development of the young man’s talents. But whatever were his opportunities, we know, that, when he was only fifteen years old, he was graduated in theology at the University of Alcalá, where he not only made himself master of such of the ancient and modern languages as would be most useful to him, but extended his studies into the civil and canon law, mathematics, medicine, politics, and other still more various branches of knowledge, showing that he was thus early possessed with the ambition of becoming a universal scholar. His accumulations, in fact, were vast, as the learning scattered through his works plainly proves, and bear witness, not less to his extreme industry than to his extraordinary natural endowments.
On his return to Madrid, he seems to have been associated both with the distinguished scholars and with the fashionable cavaliers of the time; and an adventure, in which, as a man of honor, he found himself accidentally involved, had wellnigh proved fatal to his better aspirations. A woman of respectable appearance, while at her devotions in one of the parish churches of Madrid, during Holy Week, was grossly insulted in his presence. He defended her, though both parties were quite unknown to him. A duel followed on the spot; and, at its conclusion, it was found he had killed a person of rank. He fled, of course, and, taking refuge in Sicily, was invited to the splendid court then held there by the Duke of Ossuna, viceroy of Philip the Third, and was soon afterwards employed in important affairs of state,—sometimes, as we are told by his nephew, in such as required personal courage and involved danger to his life.
At the conclusion of the Duke of Ossuna’s administration of Sicily, Quevedo was sent, in 1615, to Madrid, as a sort of plenipotentiary to confirm to the crown all past grants of revenue from the island, and to offer still further subsidies. So welcome a messenger was not ungraciously received. His former offence was overlooked; a pension of four hundred ducats was given him; and he returned, in great honor, to the Duke, his patron, who was already transferred to the more important and agreeable viceroyalty of Naples.
Quevedo now became minister of finance at Naples, and fulfilled the duties of his place so skilfully and honestly, that, without increasing the burdens of the people, he added to the revenues of the state. An important negotiation with Rome was also intrusted to his management; and in 1617 he was again in Madrid, and stood before the king with such favor, that he was made a knight of the Order of Santiago. On his return to Naples, or, at least, during the nine years he was absent from Spain, he made treaties with Venice and Savoy, as well as with the Pope, and was almost constantly occupied in difficult and delicate affairs connected with the administration of the Duke of Ossuna.
But in 1620 all this was changed. The Duke fell from power, and those who had been his ministers shared his fate. Quevedo was exiled to his patrimonial estate of Torre de Juan Abad, where he endured an imprisonment or detention of three years and a half; and then was released without trial and without having had any definite offence laid to his charge. He was, however, cured of all desire for public honors or royal favor. He refused the place of Secretary of State, and that of Ambassador to Genoa, both of which were offered him, accepting the merely titular rank of Secretary to the King. He, in fact, was now determined to give himself to letters; and did so for the rest of his life.
In 1634, he was married; but his wife soon died, and left him to contend alone with the troubles of life that still pursued him. In 1639, some satirical verses were placed under the king’s napkin at dinner-time; and, without proper inquiry, they were attributed to Quevedo. In consequence of this he was seized, late at night, with great suddenness and secrecy, in the palace of the Duke of Medina-Cœli, and thrown into rigorous confinement in the royal convent of San Márcos de Leon. There, in a damp and unwholesome cell, his health was soon broken down by diseases from which he never recovered; and the little that remained to him of his property was wasted away till he was obliged to depend on charity for support. With all these cruelties the unprincipled favorite of the time, the Count Duke Olivares, seems to have been connected; and the anger they naturally excited in the mind of Quevedo may well account for two papers against that minister which have generally been attributed to him, and which are full of personal severity and bitterness.[464] A heart-rending letter, too, which, when he had been nearly two years in prison, he wrote to Olivares, should be taken into the account, in which he in vain appeals to his persecutor’s sense of justice, telling him, in his despair, “No clemency can add many years to my life; no rigor can take many away.”[465] At last, the hour of the favorite’s disgrace arrived; and, amidst the jubilee of Madrid, he was driven into exile. The release of Quevedo followed as a matter of course, since it was already admitted that another had written the verses[466] for which he had been punished by above four years of the most unjust suffering.
But justice came too late. Quevedo remained, indeed, a little time at Madrid, among his friends, endeavouring to recover some of his lost property; but failing in this, and unable to subsist in the capital, he retired to the mountains from which his race had descended. His infirmities, however, accompanied him wherever he went; his spirits sunk under his trials and sorrows; and he died, wearied out with life, in 1645.[467]
Quevedo sought success, as a man of letters, in a great number of departments,—from theology and metaphysics down to stories of vulgar life and Gypsy ballads. But many of his manuscripts were taken from him when his papers were twice seized by the government, and many others seem to have been accidentally lost in the course of a life full of change and adventure. In consequence of this, his friend Antonio de Tarsia tells us that the greater part of his works could not be published; and we know that many are still to be found in his own handwriting, both in the National Library of Madrid and in other collections, public and private.[468] Those already printed fill eleven considerable volumes, eight of prose and three of poetry; leaving us probably little to regret concerning the fate of the rest, unless, perhaps, it be the loss of his dramas, of which two are said to have been represented with applause at Madrid, during his lifetime.[469]
Of his poetry, so far as we know, he himself published nothing with his name, except such as occurs in his poor translations from Epictetus and Phocylides; but in the tasteful and curious collection of his friend Pedro de Espinosa, called “Flowers of Illustrious Poets,” printed when Quevedo was only twenty-five years old, a few of his minor poems are to be found. This was, probably, his first appearance as an author; and it is worthy of notice, that, taken together, these few poems announce much of his future poetical character, and that two or three of them, like the one beginning,
A wight of might
Is Don Money, the knight,[470]
are among his happy efforts. But though he himself published scarcely any of them, the amount of his verses found after his death is represented to have been very great; much greater, we are assured, than could be discovered among his papers a few years later,[471]—probably because, just before he died, “he denounced,” as we are told, “all his works to the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, in order that the parts less becoming a modest reserve might be reduced, as they were, to just measure by serious and prudent reflection.”[472]
Such of his poetry as was easily found was, however, published;—the first part by his friend Gonzalez de Salas, in 1648, and the rest, in a most careless and crude manner, by his nephew, Pedro Alderete, in 1670, under the conceited title of “The Spanish Parnassus, divided into its Two Summits, with the Nine Castilian Muses.” The collection itself is very miscellaneous, and it is not always easy to determine why the particular pieces of which it is composed were assigned rather to the protection of one Muse than of another. In general, they are short. Sonnets and ballads are far more numerous than any thing else; though canciones, odes, elegies, epistles, satires of all kinds, idyls, quintillas, and redondillas are in great abundance. There are, besides, four entremeses of little value, and the fragment of a poem on the subject of Orlando Furioso, intended to be in the manner of Berni, but running too much into caricature.
The longest of the nine divisions is that which passes under the name and authority of Thalia, the goddess who presided over rustic wit, as well as over comedy. Indeed, the more prominent characteristics of the whole collection are a broad, grotesque humor, and a satire sometimes marked with imitations of the ancients, especially of Juvenal and Persius, but oftener overrun with puns, and crowded with conceits and allusions, not easily understood at the time they first appeared, and now quite unintelligible.[473] His burlesque sonnets, in imitation of the Italian poems of that class, are the best in the language, and have a bitterness rarely found in company with so much wit. Some of his lighter ballads, too, are to be placed in the very first rank, and fifteen that he wrote in the wild dialect of the Gypsies have been ever since the delight of the lower classes of his countrymen, and are still, or were lately, to be heard, among their other popular poetry, sung to the guitars of the peasants and the soldiery throughout Spain.[474] In regular satire he has generally followed the path trodden by Juvenal; and, in the instances of his complaint “Against the existing Manners of the Castilians,” and “The Dangers of Marriage,” has proved himself a bold and successful disciple.[475] Some of his amatory poems, and some of those on religious subjects, especially when they are in a melancholy tone, are full of beauty and tenderness;[476] and once or twice, when most didactic, he is no less powerful than grave and lofty.[477]
His chief fault—besides the indecency of some of his poetry, and the obscurity and extravagance that pervade yet more of it—is the use of words and phrases that are low and essentially unpoetical. This, as far as we can now judge, was the result partly of haste and carelessness, and partly of a false theory. He sought for strength, and he became affected and rude. But we should not judge him too severely. He wrote a great deal, and with extraordinary facility, but refused to print; professing his intention to correct and prepare his poems for the press when he should have more leisure and a less anxious mind. That time, however, never came. We should, therefore, rather wonder that we find in his works so many passages of the purest and most brilliant wit and poetry, than complain that they are scattered through so very large a mass of what is idle, unsatisfactory, and sometimes unintelligible.
Once, and once only, Quevedo published a small volume of poetry, which has been supposed to be his own, though not originally appearing as such. The occasion was worthy of his genius, and his success was equal to the occasion. For some time, Spanish literature had been overrun with a species of affectation resembling the euphuism that prevailed in England a little earlier. It passed under the name of cultismo, or the polite style; and when we come to speak of its more distinguished votaries, we shall have occasion fully to explain its characteristic extravagances. At present, it is enough to say, that, in Quevedo’s time, this fashionable fanaticism was at the height of its folly; and that, perceiving its absurdity, he launched against it the shafts of his unsparing ridicule, in several shorter pieces of poetry, as well as in a trifle called “A Compass for the Polite to steer by,” and in a prose satire called “A Catechism of Phrases to teach Ladies how to talk Latinized Spanish.”[478]
But finding the disease deeply fixed in the national taste, and models of a purer style of poetry wanting to resist it, he printed, in 1631,—the same year in which, for the same purpose, he published a collection of the poetry of Luis de Leon,—a small volume which he announced as “Poems by the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre,”—a person of whom he professed, in his Preface, to know nothing, except that he had accidentally found his manuscripts in the hands of a bookseller, with the Approbation of Alonso de Ercilla attached to them; and that he supposed him to be the ancient Spanish poet referred to by Boscan nearly a hundred years before. But this little volume is a work of no small consequence. It contains sonnets, odes, canciones, elegies, and eclogues; many of them written with antique grace and simplicity, and all in a style of thought easy and natural, and in a versification of great exactness and harmony. It is, in short, one of the best volumes of miscellaneous poems in the Spanish language.[479]
No suspicion seems to have been whispered, either at the moment of their first publication, or for a long time afterwards, that these poems were the productions of any other than the unknown personage whose name appeared on their title-page. In 1753, however, a second edition of them was published by Velazquez, the author of the “Essay on Spanish Poetry,” claiming them to be entirely the work of Quevedo;[480]—a claim which has been frequently noticed since, some admitting and some denying it, but none, in any instance, fairly discussing the grounds on which it is placed by Velazquez, or settling their validity.[481]
The question certainly is among the more curious of those that involve literary authorship; but it can hardly be brought to an absolute decision. The argument, that the poems thus published by Quevedo are really the work of an unknown Bachiller de la Torre, is founded, first, on the alleged approbation of them by Ercilla,[482] which, though referred to by Valdivielso, as well as by Quevedo, has never been printed; and, secondly, on the fact, that, in their general tone, they are unlike the recognized poetry of Quevedo, being all on grave subjects and in a severely simple and pure style, whereas he himself not unfrequently runs into the affected style he undoubtedly intended by this work to counteract and condemn.
On the other hand, it may be alleged, that the pretended Bachiller de la Torre is clearly not the Bachiller de la Torre referred to by Boscan and Quevedo, who lived in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, and whose rude verses are found in the old Cancioneros from 1511 to 1573;[483] that, on the contrary, the forms of the poems published by Quevedo, their tone, their thoughts, their imitations of Petrarch and of the ancients, their versification, and their language,—except a few antiquated words which could easily have been inserted,—all belong to his own age; that among Quevedo’s recognized poems are some, at least, which prove he was capable of writing any one among those attributed to the Bachiller de la Torre; and finally, that the name of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre is merely an ingenious disguise of his own, since he was himself a Bachelor at Alcalá, had been baptized Francisco, and was the owner of Torre de la Abad, in which he sometimes resided, and which was twice the place of his exile.[484]
There is, therefore, no doubt, a mystery about the whole matter which will probably never be cleared up; and we can now come to only one of two conclusions:—either that the poems in question are the work of some contemporary and friend of Quevedo, whose name he knew and concealed; or that they were selected by himself out of the great mass of his own unpublished manuscripts, choosing such as would be least likely to betray their origin, and most likely, by their exact finish and good taste, to rebuke the folly of the affected and fashionable poetry of his time. But whoever may be their author, one thing is certain,—they are not unworthy the genius of any poet belonging to the brilliant age in which they appeared.[485]
Quevedo’s principal works, however,—those on which his reputation mainly rests, both at home and abroad,—are in prose. The more grave will hardly come under our cognizance. They consist of a treatise on the Providence of God, including an essay on the Immortality of the Soul; a treatise addressed to Philip the Fourth, singularly called “God’s Politics and Christ’s Government,” in which he endeavours to collect a complete body of political philosophy from the example of the Saviour; treatises on a Holy Life and on the Militant Life of a Christian; and biographies of Saint Paul and Saint Thomas of Villanueva. These, with translations of Epictetus and the false Phocylides, of Anacreon, of Seneca “De Remediis utriusque Fortunæ,” of Plutarch’s “Marcus Brutus,” and other similar works, seem to have been chiefly produced by his sufferings, and to have constituted the occupation of his weary hours during his different imprisonments. As their titles indicate, they belong to theology and metaphysics rather than to elegant literature. They, however, sometimes show the spirit and the style that mark his serious poetry;—the same love of brilliancy, and the same extravagance and hyperbole, with occasional didactic passages full of dignity and eloquence. Their learning is generally abundant, but it is, at the same time, often very pedantic and cumbersome.[486]
Not so his prose satires. By these he is remembered and will always be remembered throughout the world. The longest of them, called “The History and Life of the Great Sharper, Paul of Segovia,” was first printed in 1627. It belongs to the style of fiction invented by Mendoza, in his “Lazarillo,” and has most of the characteristics of its class; showing, notwithstanding the evident haste and carelessness with which it was written, more talent and spirit than any of them, except its prototype. Like the rest, it sets forth the life of an adventurer, cowardly, insolent, and full of resources, who begins in the lowest and most infamous ranks of society, but, unlike most others of his class, never fairly rises above his original condition; for all his ingenuity, wit, and spirit only enable him to struggle up, as it were by accident, to some brilliant success, from which he is immediately precipitated by the discovery of his true character. Parts of it are very coarse. Once or twice it becomes—at least, according to the notions of the Romish Church—blasphemous. And almost always it is of the nature of a caricature, overrun with conceits, puns, and a reckless, fierce humor. But everywhere it teems with wit and the most cruel sarcasm against all orders and conditions of society. Some of its love adventures are excellent. Many of the disasters it records are extremely ludicrous. But there is nothing genial in it; and it is hardly possible to read even its scenes of frolic and riot at the University, or those among the gay rogues of the capital or the gayer vagabonds of a strolling company of actors, with any thing like real satisfaction. It is a satire too hard, coarse, and unrelenting to be amusing.[487]
This, too, is the character of most of his other prose satires, which were chiefly written, or at least published, nearly at the same period of his life;—the interval between his two great imprisonments, when the first had roused up all his indignation against a condition of society which could permit such intolerable injustice as he had suffered, and before the crushing severity of the last had broken down alike his health and his courage. Among them are the treatise “On all Things and many more,”—an attack on pretension and cant; “The Tale of Tales,” which is in ridicule of the too frequent use of proverbs; and “Time’s Proclamation,” which is apparently directed against whatever came uppermost in its author’s thoughts when he was writing it. These, however, with several more of the same sort, may be passed over to speak of a few better known and of more importance.[488]
The first is called the “Letters of the Knight of the Forceps,” and consists of two-and-twenty notes of a miser to his lady-love, refusing all her applications and hints for money, or for amusements that involve the slightest expense. Nothing can exceed their dexterity, or the ingenuity and wit that seem anxious to defend and vindicate the mean vice, which, after all, they are only making so much the more ridiculous and odious.[489]
The next is called “Fortune no Fool, and the Hour of All”;—a long apologue, in which Jupiter, surrounded by the deities of Heaven, calls Fortune to account for her gross injustice in the affairs of the world; and, having received from her a defence no less spirited than amusing, determines to try the experiment, for a single hour, of apportioning to every human being exactly what he deserves. The substance of the fiction, therefore, is an exhibition of the scenes of intolerable confusion which this single hour brings into the affairs of the world; turning a physician instantly into an executioner; marrying a match-maker to the ugly phantom she was endeavouring to pass off upon another; and, in the larger concerns of nations, like France and Muscovy, introducing such violence and uproar, that, at last, by the decision of Jupiter and with the consent of all, the empire of Fortune is restored, and things are allowed to go on as they always had done. Many parts of it are written in the gayest spirit, and show a great happiness of invention; but, from the absence of much of Quevedo’s accustomed bitterness, it may be suspected, that, though it was not printed till several years after his death, it was probably written before either of his imprisonments.[490]
But what is wanting of severity in this whimsical fiction is fully made up in his Visions, six or seven in number, some of which seem to have been published separately soon after his first persecution, and all of them in 1635.[491] Nothing can well be more free and miscellaneous than their subjects and contents. One, called “El Alguazil alguazilado,” or The Catchpole Caught, is a satire on the inferior officers of justice, one of whom being possessed, the demon complains bitterly of his disgrace in being sent to inhabit the body of a creature so infamous. Another, called “Visita de los Chistes,” A Visit in Jest, is a visit to the empire of Death, who comes sweeping in surrounded by physicians, surgeons, and especially a great crowd of idle talkers and slanderers, and leads them all to a sight of the infernal regions, with which Quevedo at once declares he is already familiar, in the crimes and follies to which he has long been accustomed on earth. But a more distinct idea of his free and bold manner will probably be obtained from the opening of his “Dream of Skulls,” or “Dream of the Judgment,” than from any enumeration of the subjects and contents of his Visions; especially since, in this instance, it is a specimen of that mixture of the solemn and the ludicrous in which he so much delighted.
“Methought I saw,” he says, “a fair youth borne with prodigious speed through the heavens, who gave a blast to his trumpet so violent, that the radiant beauty of his countenance was in part disfigured by it. But the sound was of such power, that it found obedience in marble and hearing among the dead; for the whole earth began straightway to move, and to give free permission to the bones it contained to come forth in search of each other. And thereupon I presently saw those who had been soldiers and captains start fiercely from their graves, thinking it a signal for battle; and misers coming forth, full of anxiety and alarm, dreading some onslaught; while those who were given to vanity and feasting thought, from the shrillness of the sound, that it was a call to the dance or the chase. At least, so I interpreted the looks of each of them, as they started forth; nor did I see one, to whose ears the sound of that trumpet came, who understood it to be what it really was. Soon, however, I noted the way in which certain souls fled from their former bodies; some with loathing, and others with fear. In one an arm was missing, in another an eye; and while I was moved to laughter as I saw the varieties of their appearance, I was filled with wonder at the wise providence which prevented any one of them, all shuffled together as they were, from putting on the legs or other limbs of his neighbours. In one grave-yard alone I thought that there was some changing of heads, and I saw a notary whose soul did not quite suit him, and who wanted to get rid of it by declaring it to be none of his.
“But when it was fairly understood of all that this was the Day of Judgment, it was worth seeing how the voluptuous tried to avoid having their eyes found for them, that they need not bring into court witnesses against themselves,—how the malicious tried to avoid their own tongues, and how robbers and assassins seemed willing to wear out their feet in running away from their hands. And turning partly round, I saw one miser asking another, (who, having been embalmed and his bowels left at a distance, was waiting silently till they should arrive), whether, because the dead were to rise that day, certain money-bags of his must also rise. I should have laughed heartily at this, if I had not, on the other side, pitied the eagerness with which a great rout of notaries rushed by, flying from their own ears, in order to avoid hearing what awaited them, though none succeeded in escaping, except those who in this world had lost their ears as thieves, which, owing to the neglect of justice, was by no means the majority. But what I most wondered at was, to see the bodies of two or three shop-keepers, that had put on their souls wrong side out, and crowded all five of their senses under the nails of their right hands.”
The “Casa de los Locos de Amor,” the Lovers’ Mad-house,—which is placed among Quevedo’s Visions, though it is the work of his friend Lorenzo Vander Hammen, to whom it is dedicated,—lacks, no doubt, the freedom and force which characterize the Vision of the Judgment.[492] But this is a remark that can by no means be extended to the Vision of “Las Zahurdas de Pluton,” Pluto’s Pigsties, which is a show of what may be called the rabble of Pandemonium; “El Mundo por de Dentro,” The World Inside Out; and “El Entremetido, la Dueña, y el Soplon,” The Busy-body, the Duenna, and the Informer;—all of which are full of the most truculent sarcasm, recklessly cast about, by one to whom the world had not been a friend, nor the world’s law.
In these Visions, as well as in nearly all that Quevedo wrote, much is to be found that indicates a bold, original, and independent spirit. His age and the circumstances amidst which he was placed have, however, left their traces both on his poetry and on his prose. Thus, his long residence in Italy is seen in his frequent imitations of the Italian poets, and once, at least, in the composition of an original Italian sonnet;[493]—his cruel sufferings during his different persecutions are apparent in the bitterness of his invectives everywhere, and especially in one of his Visions, dated from his prison, against the administration of justice and the order of society;—while the influence of the false taste of his times, which, in some of its forms, he manfully resisted, is yet no less apparent in others, and persecutes him with a perpetual desire to be brilliant, to say something quaint or startling, and to be pointed and epigrammatic. But over these, and over all his other defects, his genius from time to time rises, and reveals itself with great power. He has not, indeed, that sure perception of the ridiculous which leads Cervantes, as if by instinct, to the exact measure of satirical retribution; but he perceives quickly and strongly; and though he often errs, from the exaggeration and coarseness to which he so much tended, yet, even in the passages where these faults most occur, we often find touches of a solemn and tender beauty, that show he had higher powers and better qualities than his extraordinary wit, and add to the effect of the whole, though without reconciling us to the broad and gross farce that is too often mingled with his satire.[494]