CHAPTER XXXIV.
Romances in the Style of Rogues. — State of Manners that produced them. — Mendoza’s Lazarillo de Tormes. — Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache, with the Spurious Continuation of it by Sayavedra and the True One by Aleman. — Perez. — Espinel and his Marcos de Obregon. — Yañez. — Quevedo. — Solorzano. — Enriquez Gomez. — Estevanillo Gonzalez.
The next form of prose fiction produced in Spain, and the one which, from its greater truth, has enjoyed a more permanent regard than the last, is found in those stories that have commonly gone under the name of “tales in the gusto picaresco,” or tales in the style of rogues. Taken as a class, they constitute a singular exhibition of character, and are, in fact, as separate and national in their air as any thing in the whole body of modern literature.
Their origin is obvious, and the more so from what is most singular in their character. They sprang directly from the condition of some portions of society in Spain when they appeared;—a condition, it should be added, which has existed there ever since, and contributed to preserve for the stories that bear its impress no little of the favor they have always enjoyed. Before speaking of them in detail, we must, therefore, notice the peculiar circumstances of the country, and the peculiar state of manners that gave them birth.
The wars of the opposing races and religions, that had constituted so much of the business of life, and so long engrossed the thoughts of men, in Spain, had, indeed, nearly ceased from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. But the state of character they had produced in the Spanish people had by no means ceased with them. On the contrary, it had been kept in the freshest activity by those vast enterprises which Charles the Fifth had pushed forward in Italy, France, and Germany, with such success, that the Spanish nation, always marked by a sanguine enthusiasm, had become fully persuaded that it was destined to achieve an empire which, covering the whole of the New World and whatever was most desirable in the Old, should surpass in glory and power the empire of the Cæsars in the days of its palmiest supremacy.
This magnificent result was a matter of such general faith, that men often felt a desire to contribute their personal exertions to accomplish it. Not only the high nobility of Spain, therefore, but all cavaliers and men of honor who sought distinction, saw, with the exception of places in the civil administration of affairs or in the Church, no road open before them on which they were so much tempted to enter as that of military enterprise. Laborious occupation in the business of common life and practical and productive industry were, in consequence, discountenanced, or held in contempt, while the armies were thronged, and multitudes of gentlemen and men of culture, like Cervantes and Lope de Vega, gladly served in them as simple soldiers.
But large as were the armies of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second, all who desired it could not be soldiers. Many persons of decent condition, therefore, remained idle, because they found no occupation which was not deemed below their rank in society; while others, having made an experiment of military life sufficient to disgust them with its hardships, returned home unfitted for every thing else. These two sorts of persons formed a class of idlers that hung loose upon society in the principal cities of Spain, thriving at best by flattery and low intrigue, and sometimes driven for subsistence to crime. Their number was by no means small. They were known and marked wherever they went; and their characters, represented with much spirit, and often with great faithfulness, are still to be recognized in the proud, starving cavaliers of Mendoza and Quevedo, who stalk about the streets upon adventure, or crowd the antechamber of the minister, and weary his patience with their abject supplications for the meanest places it is in his power to bestow.
But there was yet another body of persons in Spain, nearly akin to the last in spirit, though differing from them in their original position, who figure no less in this peculiar form of fiction. They were the active, the shrewd, and the unscrupulous of the lower portions of society;—men who were able to perceive that the resources and power of the country, with all the advantages they desired to reach, were already in possession of an aristocratic caste, who looked to them for nothing but a sincere and faithful loyalty. During a long period,—the period of danger and trouble at home,—the fidelity of this class had been complete and unhesitating; bringing with it little feeling of wrong, and perhaps no sense of degradation; for such men, in such times, claimed from their superiors only protection, and, receiving this, asked for nothing else.
At last, however, other prospects opened upon them. Peace came gradually, as the Moors were driven out; and with it came a sense of independence and personal rights, which sometimes expressed itself in social restlessness, as in the frequent troubles at the universities; and sometimes, as in the wars of the Comuneros, in open rebellion. Contemporary, too, with these upward struggles of the masses of the people, which were always successfully rebuked and repressed, came the conquests in America, pouring such floods of wealth as the world had never before seen upon a country that had for ages been one of the poorest and most suffering in Europe. The easily got treasure—which was at first only in the hands of military adventurers or of those who had obtained grants of office and territory in the New World—was scattered as lightly as it was won. The shrewd and unprincipled of the less favored classes, therefore, soon learned to gather round its possessors, as they came home with their tempting burdens, and found ready means to profit by the golden shower that fell on all sides, with a profusion which carried an unhealthy action through every division of society. Little, however, could be obtained by men so humble and in a position so false, except by the arts of cunning and flattery. Cunning and flattery, therefore, were soon called forth among them in great abundance. The wealth of the Indies was a rich compost, that brought up parasites and rogues with other noxious weeds; and Paul, the son of a barber, and nephew of a hangman; Cortadillo, a young thief, whose father was a village tailor; and Little Lazarus, who could never settle his genealogy to his own satisfaction, became, in the literature of their country, the permanent representatives of their class;—a class well known under the degrading name of the Catariberas,[92] or the gayer one of Pícaros.
The first instance of a fiction founded on this state of things was, as we have already seen, the “Lazarillo de Tórmes” of Mendoza, which was published as early as 1554; a bold, unfinished sketch of the life of a rogue, from the very lowest condition in society. This was followed, forty-five years afterwards, by the “Guzman de Alfarache” of Mateo Aleman, the most ample portraiture of the class to which it belongs that is to be found in Spanish literature. What induced Aleman to write it we do not know. Indeed, we know little about him, except that he was a native of Seville, and wrote three or four other works of less consequence than this tale; that he was long employed in the treasury department of the government, and subjected to a vexatious suit at law in consequence of it; and that at last, retiring of his own choice to private life, he visited Mexico in 1609, and devoted the remainder of his days, either there or in Spain, to letters.[93] He may, at some period, have been a soldier; for one of his friends, in a eulogium prefixed to the second part of “Guzman de Alfarache,” sums up his character by saying that “never soldier had a poorer purse or a richer heart, or a life more unquiet and full of trouble, than his was; and all because he accounted it a greater honor to be a poor philosopher than a rich flatterer.”
But whatever he may have been, or whatever he may have suffered, his claims to be remembered are now centred in his “Guzman de Alfarache.” As it has reached us, it is divided into two parts, the first of which was published at Madrid, in 1599. Its hero, who supposed himself to be the son of a decayed and not very reputable Genoese merchant established at Seville, escapes, as a boy, from his mother, after his father’s ruin and death, and plunges into the world upon adventure. He soon finds himself at Madrid, though not till he has passed through the hands of the officers of justice; and there undergoes all sorts of suffering, serving as a scullion to a cook, and as a ragged errand-boy to whomsoever would employ him; until, seizing a good opportunity, he steals a large sum of money that had been intrusted to him, and escapes to Toledo, where he sets up for a gentleman. But there he becomes, in his turn, the victim of a cunning like his own; and, finding his money nearly gone, enlists for the Italian wars. His star is now on the wane. At Barcelona, he again turns sharper and thief. At Genoa and Rome, he sinks to the lowest conditions of a street beggar. But a cardinal picks him up in the last city and makes him his page; a place in which, but for his bold frauds and tricks, he might long have thriven, and which at last he leaves in great distress, from losses at play, and enters the service of the French ambassador.
Here the first part ends. It was very successful; falling in with the vices and humors of the times, just as the loose court of Philip the Third, and the corrupting influences of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma, came to offer a sort of carnival to folly and vice, after the hypocrisy and constraints of the last dark years of Philip the Second. The Guzman, therefore, within a twelve-month after it appeared, passed through three editions; and, in less than six years, through twenty-six, besides being translated into French and Italian.[94] It was imitated, too, in a second part by some unknown person, probably by Juan Marti, a Valencian advocate, who disguised himself under the name of Mateo Luxan de Sayavedra, and published in 1603 what he boldly called a continuation of the Guzman.[95] But it was a base attempt, which, though not without literary merit, brought upon its author the just reproaches of Aleman, who intimates that his own manuscripts had been improperly used in its composition, and the just sarcasm of Aleman’s friend, Luis de Valdes, who exposed the meanness of the whole fraud.
In 1605, the genuine second part appeared.[96] It begins with the life of Guzman in the house of the French ambassador at Rome, where he serves in some of the most dishonorable employments to which the great of that period degraded their mercenary dependants. But his own follies and crimes drive him away from a place for which he seems to have been in most respects well fitted, and he goes to Siena. At this point in his story, it seems to have occurred to Aleman to attack the Sayavedra who had endeavoured to impose upon the world with a false second part of the Guzman. He therefore introduces a person who is made thus to describe himself:—
“He told me,” says Guzman, who always writes in the style of autobiography, “he told me, that he was an Andalusian, born in Seville, my own native city, Sayavedra by name, with papers to show that he belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished families among us. Who would suspect fraud under such a fair outside? And yet it was all a lie. He was a Valencian. I do not give his true name, for good reasons; but what with his flowing Castilian, his good looks, and his agreeable manners, it was impossible for me to suspect that he was a thief, a sponge, and a cheat, who had dressed himself up in peacock’s feathers only to obtain by falsehood such an entrance into my apartments that he could rob me of whatever he liked.”[97]
This personage, his history and adventures, fill too large a space in the second part of the Guzman; for when once Aleman had seized him, he seemed not to tire of inflicting punishment so soon as the reader does of witnessing it. Sayavedra robs and cheats Guzman early in this portion of the story; but afterwards accompanies him, in an equivocal capacity, through Milan, Bologna, and Genoa, to Spain, where, partly perhaps to get rid of him, and partly perhaps, as Cervantes did afterwards in the case of Don Quixote and Avellaneda, in order to end his story and prevent his enemy from continuing it any further, Aleman brings his victim’s life to an end.
The remainder of the book is filled with the adventures of Guzman himself, which are as wild and various as possible. He becomes a merchant at Madrid, and cheats his creditors by a fraudulent bankruptcy. He marries, but his wife dies soon; and then he begins, as a student at Alcalá, to prepare himself for the Church;—a consummation of wickedness which is prevented only by his marriage a second time. His second wife, however, leaves him at Seville, where he had established himself, and elopes with a lover to Italy. After this, he is reduced again to abject poverty; and, unable to live with his old, wretched, and shameless mother, he becomes major-domo to a lady of fortune, robs her, and is sent to the galleys, where he has the good luck to reveal a conspiracy and is rewarded with his freedom and a full pardon.
With this announcement the second part abruptly ends, not without promising a third, which was never published, though the author, in his Preface, says it was already written. The work, therefore, as it has come to us, is imperfect. But it was not, on that account, the less favored and admired. On the contrary, it was translated and printed all over Europe, in French, in Italian, in German, in Portuguese, in English, in Dutch, and even in Latin; a rare success, whose secret lies partly in the age when the Guzman appeared, and still more in the power and talent of the author.[98] The long moralizing discourses with which it abounds, written in a pure Castilian style, with much quaintness and point, were then admired, and saved it from censures which it could otherwise hardly have failed to encounter. These are, no doubt, the passages that led Ben Jonson to speak of it as
“The Spanish Proteus, which, though writ
But in one tongue, was formed with the world’s wit,
And hath the noblest mark of a good booke,
That an ill man doth not securely looke
Upon it; but will loathe or let it passe,
As a deformed face doth a true glasse.”[99]
This, however, is not its real, or at least not its main character. The Guzman is chiefly curious and interesting because it shows us, in the costume of the times, the life of an ingenious, Machiavellian rogue, who is never at a loss for an expedient; who always treats himself and speaks of himself as an honest and respectable man; and who sometimes goes to mass and says his prayers just before he enters on an extraordinary scheme of roguery, as if on purpose to bring it out in more striking and brilliant relief. So far from being a moral book, therefore, it is a very immoral one, and Le Sage spoke in the spirit of its author, when, in the next century, undertaking to give a new French version of it, he boasted that he “had purged it of its superfluous moral reflections.”[100]
It has, naturally, a considerable number of episodes. That of Sayavedra has already been noticed, as occupying a space in the work disproportionate to every thing but the anger of its author. Another—the story of Osmyn and Daraxa, which occurs early—is a pleasing specimen of those half-Moorish, half-Christian fictions that are so characteristic a portion of Spanish literature.[101] And yet another, which is placed in Spain and in the time of the Great Constable, Alvaro de Luna, is, after all, an Italian tale of Masuccio, used subsequently by Beaumont and Fletcher in “The Little French Lawyer.”[102] But, on the whole, the attention of the reader is fairly kept either upon the hero or upon the long discussions in which the hero indulges himself, and in which he draws striking, though not unfrequently exaggerated and burlesque, sketches of all classes of society in Spain, as they successively pass in review before him. At first, Aleman thought of calling his work “A Beacon-light of Life.” The name would not have been inappropriate, and it is the qualities implied under it—the sagacity, the knowledge of life and character, and the acuteness of its reflections on men and manners—that have preserved for it somewhat of its original popularity down to our own times.
In 1605 another story of the same class appeared, the “Pícara Justina,” or the Crafty Justina,—again a seeming autobiography, and again a fiction of very doubtful morality. It was written by a Dominican monk, Andreas Perez of Leon, who was known, both before and after its appearance, as the author of works of Christian devotion, and who had so far a sense of the incongruity of the Pícara Justina with his religious position, that he printed it under the assumed name of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda. He claims to have written it when he was a student at the University of Alcalá, but admits, that, after the appearance of the “Guzman de Alfarache,” he made large additions to it. It is, however, in truth, a mere imitation, and a very poor one, of Aleman. The first book is filled with a tedious, rambling account of Justina’s ancestors, who are barbers and puppet-showmen; and the rest consists of her own life, brought down to the time of her first marriage, marked by few adventures, and ending with an intimation, that, at the time of writing it, she had already been married yet twice more; that she was then the wife of Guzman de Alfarache; and that she should continue her memoirs still further, in case the public should care to hear more about her.
The Justina discovers little power of invention in the incidents, which are few and not interesting. Indeed, the author himself declares that nearly all of them were actual occurrences within his own experience; and this circumstance, together with the meagre “improvements,” as they are called,—or warnings against the follies and guilt of the heroine, with which each chapter ends,—is regarded by him as a sufficient justification for publishing a work whose tendency is obviously mischievous. Nor is the style better than the incidents. There is a constant effort to say witty and brilliant things; but it is rarely successful; and besides this, there is an affectation of new words and singular phrases which do not belong to the genius and analogies of the language, and which have caused at least one Spanish critic to regard Perez as the first author who left the sober and dignified style of the elder times, and, from mere caprice, undertook to invent a new one.[103]
But though the “Pícara Justina” proved a failure, the overwhelming popularity of “Guzman de Alfarache,” when added to that of “Lazarillo,” rendered this form of fiction so generally welcome in Spain, that it made its way into the ductile drama, and into the style of the shorter tales, as we have already seen when treating of Lope de Vega and Cervantes, and as we shall see hereafter when we come to speak of Salas Barbadillo and Francisco de Santos. Meantime, however, the “Escudero Marcos de Obregon” appeared; a work which has, on many accounts, attracted attention, and which deserves to be remembered, as the best of its kind in Spanish literature, except “Lazarillo” and “Guzman.”
It was written by Vicente Espinel, who was born about 1540, at Ronda, a romantic town, boldly built in the mountain range that stretches through the southwestern portion of the kingdom of Granada, and picturesquely described by himself in one of the most striking of his poems.[104] He was educated at Salamanca, and, when Lope de Vega appeared as a poet before the public, Espinel was already so far advanced in his own career, that the young aspirant for public favor submitted his verses to the critical skill of his elder friend;[105]—a favor which Lope afterwards returned by praises in “The Laurel of Apollo,” more heart-felt and effective than he has usually given in that indiscriminate eulogium of the poets of his time.[106]
What was the course of Espinel’s life we do not know. It has generally been supposed that many of its events are related in his “Marcos de Obregon”; but though this is probable, and though some parts of that story are evidently true, yet many others are as evidently fictions, so that, on the whole, we are bound to regard it as a romance, and not as an autobiography. We know, however, that Espinel’s life in Italy was much like that of his hero; that he was a soldier in Flanders; that he wrote Latin verses; that he published a volume of Castilian poetry in 1591; and that he was a chaplain in Ronda, though he lived much in Madrid, and at last died there. He was regarded as the author of the form of verse called sometimes décimas, and sometimes, after himself, Espinelas; and he is said to have added a fifth string to the guitar, which soon led to the invention of the sixth, and thus completed that truly national instrument.[107] He died, according to Antonio, in 1634; but according to Lope de Vega, he was not alive in 1630. All accounts, however, represent him as having survived his ninetieth year,[108] and as having passed the latter part of his life in poverty and in unfriendly relations with Cervantes;—a fact the more observable, because both of them enjoyed pensions from the same distinguished ecclesiastic, the kindly old Archbishop of Toledo.[109]
The “Escudero Marcos de Obregon” was first published in 1618, and therefore appeared in the old age of its author.[110] He presents his hero, at once, as a person already past the middle years of life; one of the esquires of dames, who, at that period, were personages of humbler pretensions and graver character than those who, with the same title, had followed the men-at-arms of old.[111] The story of Marcos, however, though it opens upon us, at first, with scenes later in his life, soon returns to his youth, and nearly the whole volume is made up of his own account of his adventures, as he related them to a hermit whom he had known when he was a soldier in Flanders and Italy, and at whose cell he was now accidentally detained by a storm and flood, while on an excursion from Madrid.
In many particulars, his history resembles that of his predecessor, Guzman de Alfarache. It is the story of a youth who left his father’s house to seek his fortune; became first a student and afterwards a soldier; visited Italy; was a captive in Algiers; travelled over a large part of Spain; and after going through a great variety of dangers and trials, intrigues, follies, and crimes, sits down quietly in his old age to give an account of them all, with an air as grave and self-satisfied as if the greater part of them had not been of the most discreditable character. It contains a moderate number of wearisome, well-written moral reflections, intended to render its record of tricks, frauds, and crimes more savory to the reader by contrast; but though it falls below both the “Guzman de Alfarache” and the “Lazarillo” in the beauty and spirit of its style, it has more life in its action than either of them, and the series of its events is carried on with greater rapidity, and brought to a more regular conclusion.[112]
Ten years later, another romance of the same sort appeared. It was by Yañez y Rivera, a physician of Segovia; who, as if on purpose to show the variety of his talent, published two works on ascetic devotion, as well as this picaresque romance; all of them remote from the cares and studies of his regular profession. He calls his story “Alonso, the Servant of Many Masters”; and the name is a sort of index to its contents. For it is a history of the adventures of its hero, Alonso, in the service, first of a military officer, then of a sacristan, and afterwards of a gentleman, of a lawyer, and of not a few others, who happened to be willing to employ him; and it is, in fact, neither more nor less than a satire on the different orders and conditions of society, as he studies them all in the houses of his different masters. It is evidently written with experience of the world, and its Castilian style is good; but something of its spirit is diminished by the circumstance, that it is thrown into the form of a dialogue. When Yañez published the first part, in 1624, he said that he had already been a practising physician twenty-six years, and that he should print nothing more, unless it related to the profession he followed. His success, however, with his Alonso was too tempting. He printed, in 1626, a second part of it, containing his hero’s adventures among the Gypsies and in Algerine captivity, and died in 1632.[113]
Quevedo’s “Paul the Sharper,” which we have already noticed, was published the year after Yañez had completed his story, and did much to extend the favor with which works of this sort were received. Castillo Solorzano, therefore, well known at the time as a writer of popular tales and dramas, ventured to follow him, but with less good-fortune. His “Teresa, the Child of Tricks,” was published in 1632, and was succeeded immediately by “The Graduate in Frauds,” of which a continuation appeared in 1634, under the whimsical title of “The Seville Weasel, or a Hook to catch Purses.” This last, which is an account of the adventures of the Graduate’s daughter, proved, though it was never finished, the most popular of Solorzano’s works, and has not only been often reprinted, but was early translated into French, and gained a reputation in Europe generally. All three, however, are less strictly picaresque tales than the similar fictions that had preceded them;—not that they are wanting in coarse sketches of life and caricatures as broad as any in Guzman, but that romantic tales, ballads, and even farces, or parts of dramas, are introduced, showing that this form of romance was becoming mingled with others more poetical, if not more true to the condition of manners and society at the time.[114]
Another proof of this change is to be found in “The Pythagoric Age” of Enriquez Gomez, first published in 1644; a book of little value, which takes the old doctrine of transmigration as the means of introducing a succession of pictures to serve as subjects for its satire. It begins with a poem in irregular verse, describing the existence of the soul, first in the body of an ambitious man; then in that of a slanderer and informer, a coquette, a minister of state, and a favorite; and it ends with similar sketches, half in poetry and half in prose, of a knight, a schemer, and others. But in the middle of the book is “The Life of Don Gregorio Guadaña,” in prose, which is a tale in direct imitation of Quevedo and Aleman, sometimes as free and coarse as theirs are, but generally not offending against the proprieties of life; and occasionally, as in the scenes during a journey and in the town of Carmona, pleasant and interesting, because it evidently gives us sketches from the author’s own experience. Like the rest of its class, it is most successful when it deals with such realities, and least so when it wanders off into the regions of poetry and fiction.[115]
But the work which most plainly shows the condition of social life that produced all these tales, if not the work that best exhibits their character, is “The Life of Estevanillo Gonzalez,” first printed in 1646. It is the autobiography of a buffoon, who was long in the service of Ottavio Piccolomini, the great general of the Thirty Years’ war; but it is an autobiography so full of fiction, that Le Sage, sixty years after its appearance, easily changed it into a mere romance, which has continued to be republished as such with his works ever since.[116]
Both in the original and in the French translation, it is called “The Life and Achievements of Estevanillo Gonzalez, the Good-natured Fellow,” and gives an account of his travels all over Europe, and of his adventures as courier, cook, and valet of the different distinguished masters whom he at different times served, from the king of Poland down to the Duke of Ossuna. Nothing can exceed the coolness with which he exhibits himself as a liar by profession, a constitutional coward, and an accomplished cheat, whenever he can thus render his story more amusing;—but then, on the other hand, he is not without learning, writes gay verses, and gives us sketches of his times and of the great men to whom he was successively attached, that are any thing but dull. His life, indeed, would be worth reading, if it were only to compare his account of the battle of Nordlingen with that in De Foe’s “Cavalier,” and his drawing of Ottavio Piccolomini with the stately portrait of the same personage in Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” Its faults, on the other hand, are a vain display of his knowledge; occasional attempts at grandeur and eloquence of style, which never succeed; and numberless intolerable puns. But it shows distinctly, what we have already noticed, that the whole class of fictions to which it belongs had its foundation in the manners and society of Spain at the period when they appeared, and that to this they owed, not only their success at home, in the age of Philip the Third and Philip the Fourth, but that success abroad which subsequently produced the Gil Blas of Le Sage,—an imitation more brilliant than any of the originals it followed.