CHAPTER XXXIII.
Romantic Fiction. — Change of Manners produces a Change of the Fictions founded upon them. — Pastoral Romance and its Origin: Montemayor and his Diana, with its Continuations by Perez and Polo: Lo Frasso, Montalvo, Cervantes, Enciso, Bovadilla, Bernardo de la Vega, Lope de Vega, Balbuena, Figueroa, Adorno, Botelho, Quintana, Corral, Saavedra. — Characteristics of Pastoral Fiction.
The romances of chivalry, like the institutions on which they were founded, lingered long in Spain. Their grave fictions were suited to the air of the stern old castles with which the Moorish contest had studded large portions of the country, while their general tone harmonized no less happily with the stately manners which the spirit of knighthood had helped to impress on the higher classes of society, from the mountains of Biscay to the shores of the Mediterranean. Their influence, therefore, was great; and, as one natural result of its long continuance, other and better forms of prose fiction were discountenanced in Spain, or appeared later than they might have done under different circumstances;—a fact to which Cervantes alludes, when, even at the opening of the seventeenth century, he complains that Spanish books of the latter character were still rarely to be found.[57]
Fifty years, however, before that period, signs of a coming change are perceptible. The magnificent successes of Charles the Fifth had already filled the minds of men with a spirit of adventure very different from that of Amadis and his descendants, though sometimes hardly less wild and extravagant. The cruel wars unceasingly kept up with the Barbary powers, and the miseries of the thousands of captives who returned from Africa, to amaze their countrymen with tragical stories of their own trials and those of their fellow-sufferers, were full of that bitter romance of real life which outruns all fiction. Manners, too,—the old, formal, knightly manners of the nobility,—were beginning to be modified by intercourse with the rest of the world, and especially with Italy, then the most refined and least military country of Christendom; so that romantic fiction—the department of elegant literature, which, above every other, depends on the state of society—was naturally modified in Spain by the great changes going on in the external relations and general culture of the kingdom. Of this state of things, and of its workings in the new forms of fiction produced by it, we shall find frequent proofs as we advance.
The first form, however, in which a change in the national taste manifested itself with well-defined success—that of prose pastorals—is perhaps not one which would have been anticipated even by the more sagacious; though, when we now look back upon its history, we can easily discover some of the foundations on which it was originally built.
From the Middle Ages the occupations of a shepherd’s life had prevailed in Spain and Portugal to a greater extent than elsewhere in Europe;[58] and, probably in consequence of this circumstance, eclogues and bucolics were early known in the poetry of both countries, and became connected in both with the origin of the popular drama. On the other hand, the military spirit of such a civilization as existed in Spain down to the sixteenth century may have gladly turned away from such a monotonous exaggeration of its own character as is found in the romances of chivalry, and sought refreshment and repose in the peace and simplicity of a fabulous Arcadia. At least, these are the two obvious circumstances in the condition and culture of Spain, that favored the appearance of so singular a form of fiction as that of prose pastorals, though how much influence either exercised it may now be impossible to determine.
On one point, however, we are not left in doubt. We know whence the impulse came that called forth such a work for the first time in Castilian literature, and when it appeared there. It was Sannazaro,—a Neapolitan gentleman, whose family had been carried from Spain to Naples by the political revolutions of the preceding century,—who is the true father of the modern prose pastoral, which, from him, passed directly to Spain, and, during a long period of success in that country, never entirely lost the character its author had originally impressed upon it. His “Arcadia”—written, probably, without any reference to the Greek pastoral of Longus, but hardly without a knowledge of the “Ameto” of Boccaccio and the Eclogues of Bembo—was first published entire, at Naples, in 1504.[59] It is a genuine pastoral romance in prose and verse, in which, with a slight connecting narrative, and under the disguise of the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses, Sannazaro relates adventures that really occurred to him and to some of his friends;—he himself appearing under the name of Sincero, who is its principal personage. Such a work, of course, is somewhat fantastic from its very nature; but the fiction of Sannazaro was written in the purest and most graceful Italian, and had a great success;—a success which, perhaps, from the Spanish connections of his family, was early extended to Spain. At any rate, Spain was the first foreign country where the Arcadia was imitated, and was afterwards the only one where such works appeared in large numbers, and established a lasting influence.
It is singular, however, that, like the romances of chivalry, pastoral romance was first introduced into Spain by a Portuguese,—by George of Montemayor, a native of the town of that name, near Coimbra. When he was born we are not told; probably it was before 1520. In his youth he was a soldier; but later, from his skill in music, he became attached to the travelling chapel of the prince of Spain, afterwards Philip the Second, and thus enjoyed an opportunity of visiting foreign countries, especially Italy and Flanders. But his mind was little cultivated by study. He knew no Latin, which even those of the humblest literary attainments were wont to acquire, in the age when he lived; so that his success is due to his own genius and to the promptings of that passion which gave its color to his life. Probably he left Spain from disappointment in love; probably, too, he perished in a duel at Turin, in 1561. But we know nothing more of him with any tolerable certainty.[60]
His “Diana Enamorada,” the chief of his works, was first printed at Valencia, in 1542.[61] It is written in good Castilian, like his poetry, which is published separately, though, like that, with some intermixture of his native Portuguese;[62] and it contains, as he tells us, stories of adventures which really occurred.[63] We know, too, that, under the name of Sereno, he was himself its hero; and Lope de Vega adds, that Diana, its heroine, was a lady of Valencia de Don Juan, a town near the city of Leon.[64] Montemayor’s purpose, therefore, like that of Sannazaro, is to give, in the forms of a pastoral romance, an account of some events in his own life and in the lives of a few of his friends. To effect this, he brings together on the banks of the Ezla, at the foot of the mountains of Leon, a number of shepherds and shepherdesses, who relate their respective stories through seven books of prose, intermingled with verse. But the two principal personages, Sereno and Diana, who are introduced at first as lovers, are separated by magic; and the romance is brought to an abrupt conclusion, little conformable to all the previous intimations, by the marriage of Diana to Delio, the unworthy rival of Sereno.
On first reading the Diana of Montemayor, it is not easy to understand it. The separate stories of which it is composed are so involved with each other, and so inartificially united, that we are constantly losing the thread of the principal narration;—a difficulty which is much increased by the mixture of true and false geography, heathenism, magic, Christianity, and all the various contradictory impossibilities that naturally follow an attempt to place in the heart of Spain, and near one of its best-known cities, a poetical Arcadia, that never existed anywhere. The Diana, however, better merits the name of a romance than the Arcadia, which served for its model. Its principal fiction is ampler and more ingeniously constructed. Its episodes are more interesting. Much of it is warm with the tenderness of a disappointed attachment, which, no doubt, caused the whole to be written. Some of the poetry is beautiful, especially the lyric poetry; and if its prose style is not so pure as that of Sannazaro, it is still to be remarked for its grace and richness. Notwithstanding its many defects, therefore, the Diana is not without an interest for us even at this remote period, when the whole class of fictions to which it belongs is discountenanced and almost forgotten; and we feel that only poetical justice was done to it when it was saved, by the good taste of the curate, in the destruction of Don Quixote’s library.
The Diana, as has been intimated, was left unfinished by its author; but in 1564, three years after his death, Alonso Perez, a physician of Salamanca, to whom Montemayor, before he finally left Spain, had communicated his plan for completing it, published a second part, which opens in the enchanted palace of Felicia, where the first ends, and gives us the adventures and stories of several shepherds and shepherdesses, not introduced before, as well as a continuation of the original fiction. But this second part, like the first, fails to complete the romance. It advances no farther than to the death of Delio, the husband of Diana,—which, according to the purpose of Montemayor, was to have been followed by her union with Sereno, her first and true lover,—and then stops abruptly, with the promise of yet a third part, which never appeared. Nor was it, probably, demanded with any earnestness; for the second, protracted through seven books, and considerably longer than its predecessor, is much inferior to it in merit. It lacks, in all its many stories, the tenderness which the disappointment of Montemayor had given to the first portion of the work; and, what perhaps is of no less consequence in this kind of composition, the prose is heavy and monotonous, and the verse worse.[65]
But this unfortunate attempt was not the only consequence of Montemayor’s success. The same year with that in which the work of Perez was published, another continuation appeared at Valencia, by Gaspar Gil Polo, a gentleman of that city, who was a Professor of Greek in its University.[66] The Diana of Polo has the merit of being shorter than either of its predecessors. It is divided into five books, and contains an account of the falsehood and death of Delio, and the marriage of Diana to Sereno, whom she finds when she is seeking the husband who had basely abandoned her for another shepherdess. Several episodes and much pastoral poetry of different kinds are skilfully inserted; but though the original plan of Montemayor seems to be completed, the book ends with the promise of a still further continuation, which, though the author lived nearly thirty years after he made it, seems never to have been written.[67] His work, however, was successful. Its prose has always found favor, and so have some portions of its verse; especially the cancion of Nerea in the third book, and several of the shorter poems in the last.[68]
The “Ten Books of Fortune and Love,” by Antonio de Lo Frasso, a Sardinian and a soldier, published in 1573, is the next Spanish romance of the same class with the Diana; but it is without merit, and was forgotten soon after it appeared.[69] Nine years later, in 1582, a better one was published,—the “Fílida,”—which passed early through five editions, and is still valued and read.[70] Its author, Luis Galvez de Montalvo, was born in Guadalaxara, a town near Alcalá, the birthplace of Cervantes; and, perhaps from this circumstance, they soon became acquainted, for they were long friends, and often praised each other in their respective works.[71] They seem, however, to have had very different characters; for, instead of the life of adventure led by Cervantes, Montalvo attached himself to the great family of Infantado, descended from the Marquis of Santillana, and passed most of his life as a sort of idle courtier and retainer in their ducal halls, near the place of his nativity. Subsequently he went to Italy, where he translated and published, in 1587, “The Tears of Saint Peter,” by Tansillo, and had begun a translation of the “Jerusalem Delivered” of Tasso, when he was cut off in the midst of his labors by an accidental death, in Sicily, about the year 1591.[72]
His “Fílida,” in seven parts, was written while he was attached to the Duke of Infantado; for he announces himself on the title-page as “a gentleman and a courtier,” and, in his Dedication to one of the family, says that “his greatest labor is to live idle, contented, and honored as one of the servants of their house.” The romance contains, as was usual in such works, the adventures of living and known personages, among whom were Montalvo himself, Cervantes, and the nobleman to whom it is dedicated. But the tone of pastoral life is not better preserved than it is in the other fictions of the same class. Indeed, in the sixth part, there is a most inappropriate critical discussion on the merits of the two schools of Spanish poetry then contending for fashionable mastery; and in the seventh is a courtly festival, with running at the ring, in which the shepherds appear on horseback with lances and armorial bearings, like knights. The prose style of the whole is pure and good; and among the poems with which it abounds, a few in the old Spanish measure may be selected that are nearly, if not quite, equal to the similar poems of Montemayor.
Cervantes, too, as we have already noticed, was led by the spirit of the times, rather, perhaps, than by his own taste, to begin—as an offering to the lady of his love—the “Galatea,” of which the first six books, published in 1584, were all that ever appeared.[73] This was followed, in 1586, by “Truth for the Jealous”; again a romance in six books, and, like the last, unfinished. It was written by Bartolomé Lopez de Enciso, of whom we know from himself that he was a young man when he wrote it, and that it was his purpose to publish a second part, of which, however, nothing more was heard. Nor can we regret that he failed to fulfil his promise. His fictions, which are occupied chiefly with the nymphs and shepherds of the Tagus, are among the most confused and unmeaning that have ever been attempted. His scene is laid, from its opening, in the days of the most ancient Greek mythology; but the Genius of Spain, in the fifth book, carries the same shepherds who thus figure in the first to a magnificent temple, and shows them the statues of Charles the Fifth, of Philip the Second, and even of Philip the Third, who was not yet on the throne;—thus confounding the earliest times of classical antiquity with an age which, at the end of the sixteenth century, was yet to come. Other inconsequences follow, in great numbers, as matters of course, while nothing in either the prose or the poetry is of value enough to compensate for the absurdities in the story. Indeed, few portions of Spanish literature show any thing more stiff and wearisome than the long declamations and discussions in this dull fiction.[74]
Another pastoral romance in six books, entitled “The Nymphs of the Henares,” by Bernardo Gonzalez de Bovadilla, was printed in 1587. The author, who was a native of the Canary Islands, confesses that he has placed the scene of his story on the banks of the Henares without having ever seen them; but both he and his romance have long since been forgotten. So has “The Shepherds of Iberia,” in four books, by Bernardo de la Vega, supposed to have been a native of Madrid, and certainly a canon of Tucuman, in Peru, whose ill-written story appeared in 1591. But that these, and all that preceded them, enjoyed for a time the public favor is made plain by the fact, that they are all found in the library of Don Quixote, and that three of them receive high praise from Cervantes;—much higher than has been confirmed by the decision of subsequent generations.[75]
Some time, however, elapsed before another came to continue the series, except the “Arcadia” of Lope de Vega, which, though written long before, was not printed till 1598.[76] At last, “The Age of Gold,” by Bernardo de Balbuena, appeared. Its author, born on the vine-clad declivities of the Val de Peñas, in 1568, early accompanied his family to Mexico, where he was educated, and where, when only seventeen years old, he was already known as a poet. Once, at least, he visited his native country, and perhaps oftener; but he seems to have spent most of his life, either in Jamaica, where he enjoyed an ecclesiastical benefice, or in Puerto Rico, of which he was afterwards bishop, and where he died in 1627.
Of the manners of the New World, however, or of its magnificent scenery, his “Age of Gold in the Woods of Eriphile” shows no trace. It was printed at Madrid, in 1608, and might have been written, if its author had never been in any other city. But it is not without merit. The poetry with which it abounds is generally of the Italian school, but is much better than can be found in most of these doubtful romances; and its prose, though sometimes affected, is oftener sweet and flowing. Probably nothing in the nine eclogues—as its divisions are unsuitably called—is connected with either the history or the scandal of the times; and if this be the case, we have, perhaps, an explanation of the fact that it was less regarded by those contemporary with its publication than were similar works of inferior merit. But whatever may have been the cause, it was long overlooked; no second edition of it being demanded till 1821, when it received the rare honor of being published anew by the Spanish Academy.[77]
The very next year after the first appearance of “The Age of Gold,” Christóval Suarez de Figueroa, a native of Valladolid, a jurist and a soldier, published his “Constant Amaryllis, in Four Discourses,” crowded, like all its predecessors, with short poems, and, like most of them, claiming to tell a tale not a little of which was true.[78] Its author, who lived a great deal in Italy, was already known by an excellent translation of Guarini’s “Pastor Fido,”[79] and published, at different times afterwards, several original works which enjoyed much reputation.[80]
But he seems to have been a man of an unkind and unfaithful character. In a curious account of his own life which appeared in his “Traveller,” he speaks harshly and insidiously of many of his contemporaries; and towards Cervantes—who had just died, after praising every body most generously during his whole life—he is absolutely malignant.[81] His last work is dated in 1621, and this is the last fact we know in relation to him. His “Amaryllis,” which, as he intimates, was composed to please a person of great consideration, did not satisfy its author.[82] It is, however, written in an easy and tolerably pure style; and though it contains formal and wearisome discussions, like that in the first part on Poetry, and awkward machinery, such as a vision of Venus and her court in the second, it is the only one of his works that has been reprinted or much read within the last century.
A few pastoral romances appeared in Spain after the Amaryllis, but none of so much merit, and none that enjoyed any considerable degree of favor. Espinel Adorno;[83] Botelho, a Portuguese;[84] Quintana, who assumed the name of Cuevas;[85] Corral;[86] and Saavedra,[87] close up the series;—the last bringing us down to just about a century from the first appearance of such fictions in the time of Montemayor, and all of them infected with the false taste of the period. Taken together, they leave no doubt that pastoral romance was the first substitute in Spain for the romances of chivalry, and that it inherited no small degree of their popularity. Most of the works we have noticed were several times reprinted, and the “Diana” of Montemayor, the first and best of them all, was probably more read in Spain during the sixteenth century than any Spanish work of amusement except the “Celestina.”
All this seems remarkable and strange, when we consider only the absurdities and inconsequences with which such fictions necessarily abound. But there is another side to the question, which should not be overlooked. Pastoral romance, after all, has its foundation in one of the truest and deepest principles of our common nature,—that love of rural beauty, of rural peace, in short, of whatever goes to constitute a country life, as distinguished from the constrained life of a city, which few are too dull to feel, and fewer still so artificial as wholly to reject. It has, therefore, prevailed more or less in all modern countries, as we may see in Italy, from the success that followed Sannazaro; in France, from the “Astrea” of Durfé; and in England, from the “Arcadia” of Sir Philip Sidney;—the two latter being pastoral romances of enormous length, compared with any in Spanish; and the very last enjoying for above a century a popularity which may well be compared with that of the “Diana” of Montemayor, if, indeed, it did not equal it.[88]
No doubt, in Spain, as elsewhere, the incongruities of such fictions were soon perceived. Even some of those who most indulged in them showed that it was not entirely from a misapprehension of their nature. Cervantes, who died regretting that he should leave his “Galatea” unfinished, still makes himself merry more than once in his “Don Quixote” with all such fancies; and, in his “Colloquy of the Dogs,” permits one of them, who had been in shepherd service, to satirize the false exhibition of life in the best pastorals of his time, not forgetting his own among the rest.[89] Lope de Vega, too, though he published his “Arcadia” under circumstances which show that he set a permanent value upon its gentle tales, could still, in a play where shepherds are introduced, make one of them—who found a real life among flocks and herds in rough weather much less agreeable than the life he had read of in the pastorals—say, when suffering in a storm,—
And I should like just now to see those men
Who write such books about a shepherd’s life,
Where all is spring and flowers and trees and brooks.[90]
Still, neither Cervantes, nor Lope, nor any body else in their time, thought seriously of discountenancing pastoral fictions. On the contrary, there was in their very style—which was generally an imitation of the Italian, that gave birth to them all—something attractive to a cultivated Castilian ear, at a time when the school of Garcilasso was at the height of its popularity and favor. Besides this, the real events they recorded, and the love-stories of persons in high life that they were known to conceal, made them sometimes riddles and sometimes masquerades, which engaged the curiosity of those who moved in the circles either of their authors or of their heroes and heroines.[91] But more than all, the glimpses they afforded of nature and truth—such genuine and deep tenderness as is shown by Montemayor, and such graceful descriptions of natural scenery as abound in Balbuena—were, no doubt, refreshing in a state of society stiff and formal as was that at the Spanish court in the times of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, and in the midst of a culture more founded on military virtues and the spirit of knighthood than any other of modern times. As long, therefore, as this state of things continued, pastoral fictions and fancies, filled with the dreams of a poetical Arcadia, enjoyed a degree of favor in Spain which they never enjoyed anywhere else. But when this disappeared, they disappeared with it.