CHAPTER XXXIX.
Proverbs: Santillana, Garay, Nuñez, Mal Lara, Palmireno, Oudin, Sorapan, Cejudo, Yriarte. — Didactic Prose: Torquemada, Acosta, Luis de Granada, Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, Malon de Chaide, Roxas, Figueroa, Marquez, Vera y Zuñiga, Navarrete, Saavedra, Quevedo, Antonio de Vega, Nieremberg, Guzman, Dantisco, Andrada, Villalobos, Paton, Aleman, Faria y Sousa, Francisco de Portugal. — Gongorism in Prose: Gracian, Zabaleta, Lozano, Heredia, Ramirez. — Failure of good Didactic Prose.
The last department in the literature of any country, that comes within the jurisdiction of criticism on account of its style, is that of Didactic Prose; since in this branch, so remote from every thing poetical, the ornaments of manner are more accidental than they are elsewhere, and, beyond it, are not at all to be exacted. In modern times, the French seem to have been more anxious than any other nation, not excepting even the Italians, to add the grace of an elegant style to their didactic prose, while, on the other hand, none have been more unsuccessful than the Spaniards in their attempts to cultivate it.
In one particular form of didactic composition, however, Spain stands in advance of all other countries; I mean that of Proverbs, which Cervantes has happily called “short sentences drawn from long experience.”[223] Spanish proverbs can be traced back to the earliest times. One of the best known—“Laws go where kings please they should”—is connected with an event of importance in the reign of Alfonso the Sixth, who died in the beginning of the twelfth century, when the language of Castile had hardly a distinct existence.[224] Another has been traced to a custom belonging to the days of the Infantes de Lara, and is itself probably of not much later date.[225] Others are found in the General Chronicle, which is one of the oldest of Spanish prose compositions, and among them is the happy one on disappointed expectations, cited in Don Quixote more than once: “He went for wool and came back shorn.”[226] Several occur in the “Conde Lucanor” of Don John Manuel,[227] and many in the poetry of the Archpriest of Hita,[228] both of whom lived in the time of Alfonso the Eleventh.
Thus far, however, we have only separate and isolated sayings, evidently belonging to the old Spanish race, and always used as if quite familiar and notorious. But in the reign of John the Second, and at his request, the Marquis of Santillana collected a hundred in rhyme, which we have already noticed, besides above six hundred, he says, such as the old women were wont to repeat in their chimney-corners. From this period, therefore, or rather from 1508, when this collection was published, the old and wise proverbs of the language may be regarded as having obtained a settled place in its didactic literature.[229]
The number of proverbs, indeed, was soon so great,—not only those floating about in the common talk of men, but those collected and printed,—that they began to be turned to account. Garay, who was attached to the cathedral of Toledo, and therefore lived in the centre of whatever was peculiarly Castilian, wrote a long letter, every sentence of which was a popular saying; to which he added two similar letters, found, as he says, by accident, and made up, in the same way, of proverbs.[230] But, in the middle of the century, a still higher honor awaited the old Spanish adages. Pedro Valles, who wrote the history of the great Marquis of Pescara, published an alphabetical series of four thousand three hundred of them in 1549; and the famous Greek scholar and distinguished nobleman, Hernan Nuñez de Guzman, Professor successively at Alcalá and at Salamanca, found amusement for his old age in making another series of them, which amounted in all to above six thousand. To some he added explanations; to others, various parallel sayings from different languages; but, finding his strength fail him, he gave the task to a friend, who, like himself, was a Professor in Salamanca, and who published the whole in 1555, two years after the death of Nuñez; rather, as he intimates, from respect to the person from whom he received it, than from regard to the dignity of the employment.[231]
Out of these proverbs, another of the friends of Hernan Nuñez—Mal Lara, a Sevilian—selected a thousand, and, adding a commentary to each, published them in 1568, under the not inappropriate title of “Philosophy of the Common People”; a volume which, notwithstanding its cumbersome learning, can be read with pleasure, both for the style in which many parts of it are written, and for the unusual historical anecdotes with which it abounds. Another collection, made by Palmireno, a Valencian, in 1569, consisting of above two hundred proverbs appropriate to the table, shows how abundant popular aphorisms must be in a language that can furnish so many on one subject. Yet another, by Oudin, was published at Paris in 1608, for the use of foreigners, and shows no less plainly how much the Spanish had become spread throughout Europe. Sorapan, in 1616 and 1617, published two collections, in which it was intended that the condensation of popular experience and wisdom should teach medicine, as, in the hands of Mal Lara, they had been made to teach the philosophy of life. And, finally, in 1675, Cejudo, a schoolmaster of Val de Peñas, gave the world about six thousand, with the corresponding Latin adages, whenever he could find them, and with explanations more satisfactory than had been furnished by his predecessors.[232]
Still, though so many thousands have been collected, many thousands still remain unpublished, known only among the traditions of the humbler classes of society, that have given birth to them all. Juan de Yriarte, a learned man, who was nearly forty years at the head of the King’s Library at Madrid, collected, about the middle of the eighteenth century, no less than twenty-four thousand; and yet it is not to be supposed that a single individual, however industrious, living in Madrid, could exhaust their number, as they belong rather to the provinces than to the capital, and are spread everywhere among the common people, and through all their dialects.[233]
Why proverbs should abound so much more in Spain than in any other country of Christendom, it is not possible to tell. Perhaps the Arabs, whose language is rich in such wisdom, may have furnished some of them; or perhaps the whole mass may have sprung from the original soil of the less cultivated classes of Spanish society. But however this may be, we know they are often among the pleasantest and most characteristic ornaments of the national literature; and those who are most familiar with them will be most ready to agree with the wise author of the “Dialogue on Languages,” when he says, and repeats the remark, that we must go to the old national proverbs for what is purest in his native Castilian.[234]
Turning now to the proper Didactic prose of Spanish literature, the first instance we find—after those formerly noticed as imitating the Italian philosophical discussions of the sixteenth century—is one that comes near to the borders of fiction. It is “The Garden of Curious Flowers,” by Torquemada, originally published in 1570, of which the curate, in the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library, says, that “he does not know whether it is more true, or, to speak strictly, less full of lies,” than the “Olivante de Laura,” a book of chivalry by the same author, which, for its peculiar absurdities, he sends at once to the bonfire in the court-yard. “The Garden of Curious Flowers,” however, is still a curious book. It consists of six colloquies between friends, who talk for their amusement on such subjects as the monstrous productions of nature, the terrestrial paradise, phantasms and enchantments, the influence of the stars, and the history and condition of those countries that lie nearest to the North Pole. It is, in fact, a collection of whatever strange and extravagant stories a learned man could make, beginning with such as he found in Aristotle, Pliny, Solinus, Olaus Magnus, and Albertus Magnus, and including those told by the most credulous of his own time. Being put into a form then popular, and related in a pleasing style, they had no little success. They were several times printed in the original, and, beside being translated into Italian and French, are well known to those who are curious in the literature of Queen Elizabeth’s time, under the much-abused name of “The Spanish Mandeville.” It may be added, that some of Torquemada’s accounts of spectres and visions are still pleasant reading; and that, though Cervantes spoke slightingly of the whole book in his “Don Quixote,” he afterwards resorted to it, both for facts and for fancies respecting the wonders of Friesland and Iceland, when he wrote the first part of his “Persiles and Sigismunda.”[235]
Christóval de Acosta, a Portuguese botanist,—who was accustomed to call himself “the African,” because he happened to be born in one of the African possessions of Portugal,—travelled much in the East, and after his return published, in 1578, a work on Oriental plants and drugs, to which he added at the end a treatise on the natural history of the Elephant. But, though he succeeded in attracting the attention of Europe to this publication, and though the early part of his life had been that of a soldier, an adventurer, and a captive among pirates and robbers, he spent many of his later years, if not all of them, in religious retirement at home, where, besides other things, he wrote a discourse on “The Benefits of Solitude,” and a treatise on “The Praise of Women.” The last was printed in 1592, and, except that it is too full of learning, may still be read with some interest, if not with pleasure.[236]
It was not, however, moral and philosophical writers, like Oliva and Guevara, nor writers on subjects connected with natural history, like Torquemada and Acosta, that were most favored in the reigns of Philip the Second and his immediate successors. It was the ascetics and mystics,—the natural produce of the soil of Spain, and, almost without exception, faithful to the old Castilian genius.
Among the most prominent of this class was Luis de Granada, distinguished as a Spanish preacher, but still more remarkable for his eloquence as a mystic. His “Meditations for the Seven Days and Nights of a Week,” his treatises “On Prayer” and “On Faith,” and his “Memorial of a Christian Life,” were early translated into Latin, Italian, French, and English,—one of them into Turkish, and one into Japanese,—and, like his other Spanish works, have continued to be printed and admired in the original down to our own times.
The most effective of them all was his “Guide for Sinners,” first published in 1556. It makes two moderate volumes, and portions of it are marked with a diffuse declamation, which is perhaps imitated from that of Juan de Avila, the Apostle of Andalusia, whose friend and follower he more than once boasts himself to have been. But its general tone is that of a moving and harmonious eloquence, which has made it a favorite book of devotion in Spain ever since it first appeared, and has spread its reputation so widely, that it has been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe, including the Greek and Polish, and, at one time, seemed likely to obtain a place, in the religious literature of Christendom, very near that of the great ascetic work which passes under the name of Thomas à Kempis. In its native country, however, the Guide for Sinners encountered at first not a little opposition. As early as the year after it was published, it had been placed on the Index Expurgatorius, and no edition except the first seems to have been permitted till we find that of Salamanca, in 1570. But the very Index that condemned it became itself the subject of condemnation; and, in the case of the Guide for Sinners, the ecclesiastical powers went so far in the opposite direction as to grant special indulgences by proclamation to all who should have read or heard a chapter of the very work they had earlier so harshly censured.
Luis de Granada passed all the latter part of his life in Lisbon,—perhaps because he had been repeatedly annoyed by the Inquisition at home, perhaps because his duties seemed to lead him there. But, whatever may have been the cause, it is certain that he enjoyed much more favor in Portugal than he did in Spain; and when he died, in 1588, eighty-four years old, he could boast that he had refused the highest honors of the Portuguese Church, and humbly devoted the whole of his long life to the reformation and advancement of the Order of Preachers, of which, during his best years, he had been the active and venerated head.[237]
San Juan de la Cruz, who was in some respects an imitator of Luis de Granada, was born in 1542, and, having spent the greater part of his life in reforming the discipline of the Carmelite monasteries, died in 1591, and was beatified in 1674. His works, which are chiefly contemplative, and obtained for him the title of the Ecstatic Doctor, are written with great fervor. The chief of them are the allegory of “The Ascent to Mount Carmel,” and “The Dark Night of the Soul,”—treatises which have given him much reputation for a mystical eloquence, that sometimes rises to the sublime, and sometimes is lost in the unintelligible. His poetry, of which a little is printed in some of the many editions of his works, is of the same general character, but marked by great felicity and richness of phraseology.[238]
Santa Teresa, who was associated with Juan de la Cruz in the work of reforming the Carmelites,—or rather with whom he was associated, since hers was the leading spirit,—died in 1582, sixty-seven years old. Her didactic works, the most remarkable of which are “The Path to Perfection” and “The Interior Castle,” are less obscure than those of her coadjutor, though more declamatory. But all she wrote, including an account of her own life, and several discussions connected with the religious duties to which she dedicated herself, were composed with apparent reluctance on her part, and in obedience to the commands of her superiors. She believed herself to be often in direct communion with God; and as those about her shared her faith on this point, she was continually urged by them to make known to the world what were thus regarded as revelations of the Divine will. On one occasion she says: “Far within, God appeared to me in a vision, as he has been wont to do, and gave me his right hand, and said,—Behold this print of the nail; it is a sign that, from this day forth, thou art my spouse. Hitherto, thou hast not deserved it; but hereafter not only shalt thou regard my honor as that of thy Creator, and King, and God, but as that of a true spouse;—for my honor is now thine, and thine is mine.”
Living, as she undoubtedly did, under the persuasion that she was favored with numberless revelations of this kind, she wrote boldly and rapidly, and corrected nothing. Her style, in consequence, is diffuse and open to objections, which, in Spain, the spirit of a merely literary criticism is too reverent to desire to remove. But whatever she wrote is full of earnestness, sincerity, and love; and therefore her works have never ceased to be read by those of her own nation and faith. During her life, she was persecuted by the Inquisition; but after her death, her manuscripts were collected with pious care, and published, in 1588, by Luis de Leon, who exhorts all men to follow in the bright path she has pointed out to them; adding, “She has seen God face to face, and she now shows him to you.”[239]
This school of spiritualists, to which belonged Juan de Avila and Luis de Leon, of whom we have before spoken, had, no doubt, a very considerable effect on Spanish didactic prose. They raised its tone, and did more towards placing it on the old foundations, where the chronicles and the earlier writers of the country, like Lucena, had left it, than had been done for nearly two centuries. Such efforts gave dignity, if not purity or an exact finish, to the proper Castilian style; so that, at the end of the reign of Philip the Second, it was not only of more consequence to an author’s reputation to write well upon any grave subject in prose than it had ever been before, but, with such examples before him, it was easier to do so. In all this, the movement made was in the right direction, and produced happy results. But, on the other hand, we should remember that it confirmed in the didactic literature of the country that tendency to a diffuse and florid declamation, which was early one of its blemishes, and from which, with such authority in its favor, Castilian prose has never since been able completely to emancipate itself.
A remarkable proof of this is to be found in “The Magdalen” of Malon de Chaide, first published in 1592, after the death of its author. It is a religious work, and is divided into four parts; the first being merely introductory, and the three others on the three characters of Mary Magdalen as a sinner, a penitent, and a saint. It has a very rhetorical air throughout, and sometimes reads almost like a romance;—so free is its conception of the character and conversations of the saint. But some of its discussions, like one on fashionable dress, and one on religious pictures, are curious; and some of its religious exhortations, like that to repent before old age comes on, are moving and powerful. The moral tone of the whole is severe. With a great deal of the spirit of a monk, the author is earnest against books of chivalry; and he not only rebukes the habit of reading the ancient classics, but even such Spanish poets as Garcilasso de la Vega, because he thinks admiration of them inconsistent with a preservation of the Christian character. Occasionally, he grows mystical; and then, though his style is more than ever prodigal, his meaning is not always plain. But, on the whole, and regarded as an exhortation to a religious life, the Conversion of Mary Magdalen is written with so much richness of language, and is often so eloquent, that it was much read when it first appeared, and has not, even in recent times, ceased to be reprinted and admired.[240]
Quite different from this is “The Amusing Journey” of Roxas,—a book that hardly falls within the strict limits of any class, but one which has always been popular in Spain. Its author was an actor; and his travels consist of an account of some of his personal adventures and experiences, thrown into the form of dialogues between three of his fellow-comedians and himself, as they visit some of the principal cities of Spain in the exercise of their profession as strolling players. They travel on foot; and their conversations, which are little molested by scruples of any sort, make up a very amusing book.
In some parts of it, we have sketches of the places they visit, with notices of the local history belonging to each. In others, Roxas himself, in a spirit that not unfrequently reminds us of Gil Blas, relates his own previous adventures, as a soldier, as a captive in France, and as a play-actor at home. In yet others, we have fictions, or what seem to be such, and among them, the story on which Shakspeare founded his Christopher Sly and the Induction to “The Taming of the Shrew.” But, in general, it is rather an account of what relates to the theatre and the affairs of the four gay companions at Seville, Toledo, Segovia, Valladolid, Granada, and on the roads between all of them, interspersed with forty or fifty loas, which Roxas wrote with recognized success, and of which he is evidently very proud. It is a pleasant book, loosely and carelessly put together, but important for the history of the Spanish drama, and with talent enough to attract the attention of Scarron, who took from it the hint for his “Roman Comique.” From internal evidence, “The Amusing Journey” was written in 1602, and, at the end, a continuation is announced; but, like so many other promises of the same sort in Spanish literature, it was never kept.[241]
Perhaps the work of Roxas served, also, as a hint for the “Pasagero,” or Traveller, of Suarez de Figueroa. At any rate, the well-known author of the “Amarillis,” published in 1617, a half-narrative, half-didactic work with this title, containing ten long discussions, on a great variety of subjects, held by four persons, as they journey from Madrid to Barcelona, in order to embark for Italy;—the discussions themselves being called alivios, or rests by the way. The chief conversation is in the hands of Figueroa, the principal person in his own drama; and so far as he is concerned, and so far as the discussions relate to the men of letters of his own time, the Pasagero is somewhat cynical. His autobiography, which is contained in the eighth dialogue, is interesting, and so are the ninth and tenth dialogues, in which he gives his view of the state of Spain at the time he wrote, and the means of leading an honest and honorable life there. But the most important conversations are the third, which relates to the theatre, and the fourth, which is on the popular and courtly mode of preaching. The whole work is too diffuse in its style, though less declamatory than much in the didactic prose of the period.[242]
Some of the best portions of the didactic literature of Spain during the seventeenth century were partly or wholly political. Marquez, a writer in the old style of the reign of Philip the Second, published in 1612 his “Christian Governor,” a work composed at the request of the Duke of Feria, then viceroy of Sicily, and intended to serve as an answer to Machiavelli’s “Prince.”[243] Vera y Zuñiga, author of a strange epic on the conquest of Seville, who was a better minister of Philip the Third than he was poet, published in 1620 a treatise, in four discourses, on the character and duties of an ambassador; full of learning, and occasionally illustrated with appropriate anecdotes drawn from Spanish history, but citing indiscriminately books of authority and no authority on the grave subjects he discusses, and relying apparently with as much confidence upon an opinion of Ovid as upon one of Comines.[244] Fernandez de Navarrete, a secretary of the same monarch, chose his subject a little higher up, and in 1625, under the disguise of an assumed name, and in a letter to a Polish prime-minister who never existed, gave the world his notions of what “a royal favorite” should be; but it is evident that Spain only was in his thoughts when he wrote, and his little treatise is so encumbered with ill-assorted learning and ungraceful conceits that it was soon forgotten.[245]
Not so the “Idea of a Christian Prince,” by Saavedra Faxardo, who died at Madrid in 1648, after having been long in the diplomatic service of the Spanish crown. It was a higher subject than either of those taken by Navarrete and Figueroa, and managed with more talent. Under the awkward arrangement of a hundred ingenious Emblems, with mottoes, that are generally well chosen and pointed, he has given a hundred essays on the education of a prince;—his relations with his ministers and subjects; his duties as the head of a state in its internal and external relations; and his duties to himself in old age and in preparation for death;—all intended for the instruction of Balthasar, son of Philip the Fourth, to whom it is dedicated, but who died too young to profit by its wisdom. It is written in a compact, sententious style, with much quaint and curious knowledge of history, and with a large and not always judicious display of learning. But in many points it reminds us of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Cabinet Council” and Owen Feltham’s “Resolves”;—a measure of praise that can be given to few such prose works in the Spanish language. Its success was great; nor is it yet fallen into neglect. The first edition was published in 1640, at Munster. Many others followed in the course of the century. It was translated into all the languages of Europe, and, in Spain at least, has continued to be printed and valued down to our own days.[246]
“The Divine Politics” of Quevedo, a part of which was published before the Christian Prince and a part after it, may have suggested his subject to Saavedra, but not the mode of treating it; and, in the same way, the great satirist may have had some influence in determining Antonio de Vega, the Portuguese, to write his “Political Dream of a Perfect Nobleman,” in 1620;[247] Nieremberg, the Jesuit, to write his “Manual for Gentlemen and Princes,” which appeared in 1629;[248] and Benavente, his “Advice for Kings, Princes, and Ambassadors,” which appeared in 1643.[249] But none of these works, nor any thing else in the nature of didactic prose that appeared in the seventeenth century, is equal to the Christian Prince of Saavedra; unless, indeed, we are to except his own vision of a state, which he calls “The Literary Republic,” and in which he discusses somewhat satirically, but in a vein of agreeable criticism, the merits of the principal writers of ancient and modern times, foreign and Spanish. The Literary Republic, however, was not published till after its author’s death, and never enjoyed a popularity like that enjoyed by his longer and elder work; a work which leaves far behind every thing in the class of books of emblems, that so long served to tax the ingenuity of the higher classes of society in Europe.[250]
To these writers of the end of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century a few more might be added, of less consequence. Juan de Guzman, in 1589, published a formal treatise on Rhetoric, in the seventh dialogue of which he makes an ingenious application of the rules of the Greek and Roman masters to the demands of modern sermonizing in Spain.[251] Gracian Dantisco, one of the secretaries of Philip the Second, published in 1599 a small discourse on the minor morals of life, which he called the “Galateo,” in imitation of Giovanni della Casa, whose classical Italian treatise bearing the same name was already translated into Spanish.[252] In the same year appeared a curious work by Pedro de Andrada, on “The Art of Horsemanship,” well written and learned, with amusing anecdotes of horses; and this was followed, in 1605, by a similar treatise of Simon de Villalobos, but one which, from its more military character, and from the exaggerated importance it gives to its subject, might well have been made a part of Don Quixote’s library.[253] Both of them bear marks of the state of society at the time they were written.
Paton, the author of several works of little value, published, in 1604, a crude treatise on “The Art of Spanish Eloquence,” founded on the rules of the ancients;[254] and, in Mexico, Aleman, while living there, printed, in 1609, a treatise on “Castilian Orthography,” which, besides what is appropriate to the title, contains pleasant discussions on other topics connected with the language, over which he has himself shown a great mastery in his “Guzman de Alfarache.”[255] A series of conversations on miscellaneous subjects, divided into seven nights, which their author, Faria y Sousa, intended to have called simply “Moral Dialogues,” but which his bookseller, without his knowledge, published in 1624 with the title of “Brilliant Nights,” are dull and pedantic, like nearly every thing this learned Portuguese wrote; and the second part, which he offered to the public, was never called for.[256] And, finally, another Portuguese, Francisco de Portugal, who died in 1632,[257] wrote a pleasant treatise on “The Art of Gallantry,” with anecdotes showing the state of fashionable, or rather courtly, society at the time; but it was not printed till long after its author’s death.[258]
During the period embraced by the works last mentioned, a false taste had invaded Spanish prose. It was the same unhappy taste which we have noticed in Spanish poetry by the name of “Gongorism,” but which its admirers called sometimes “the polite,” and sometimes “the cultivated,” style of writing. Traces of it have been sought in the sixteenth century among some of the best writers of the country; but for this there seems no foundation, except in the fact, that a rigorous taste never at any time prevailed in Spain, and that the luxuriant success of letters towards the end of the reign of Philip the Second, and the consequent difficulty of obtaining fashionable distinction by authorship, had led to occasional affectations even in the style of those who, like Cervantes and Mariana, stood foremost among the better writers of their time.
But now, the admiration that followed Góngora almost necessarily introduced conceits into prose writing, such as were thought so worthy of imitation in poetry. Those, therefore, who most coveted public favor, began to play with words, and seek to surprise by an unexpected opposition of ideas and quaintness of metaphor, little consistent with the old Castilian dignity, until at last they quite left the stately constructions in which resides so much of what is peculiar to the sonorous declamations of Luis de Leon and Luis de Granada, and by excessive efforts at brilliancy became so involved and obscure, that they were not always intelligible. Instances of such affectation may be found in Saavedra and Francisco de Portugal. But the innovation itself is older than either of their published works. It broke out with Paravicino, who, besides imitating Góngora’s poetry, as we have already seen, carried similar extravagances of metaphor and construction into his oratorical and didactic prose; intimating, in a characteristic phrase, that he claimed the honor of being the Columbus who had made this great discovery. As early as 1620, it was matter of censure and ridicule to Liñan, in his “Guide to Strangers in Madrid,” and soon afterwards to Mateo Velazquez, in his “Village Philosopher”; so that from this period we may consider cultismo nearly or quite as prevalent in Spanish prose as it was in Spanish poetry.[259]
The person, however, who settled its character, and in some respects gave it an air of philosophical pretension, was Balthazar Gracian, a Jesuit of Aragon, who lived between 1601 and 1658; exactly the period when the cultivated style took possession of Spanish prose, and rose to its greatest consideration. He began in 1630, by a tract called “The Hero,” which is not so much the description of a hero’s character as it is a recipe to form one, given in short, compact sentences, constructed in the new style. It was successful, and was followed by five or six other works, written in the same manner; after which, to confirm and justify them all, there appeared, in 1648, his “Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio”; a regular Art of Poetry, or rather system of rhetoric, accommodated to the school of Góngora, and showing great acuteness, especially in the ingenuity with which the author presses into his service the elder poets, such as Diego de Mendoza, the Argensolas, and even Luis de Leon and the Bachiller de la Torre.
The most remarkable work of Gracian, however, is his “Críticon,” published in three parts, between 1650 and 1653. It is an allegory on human life, and gives us the adventures of Critilus, a noble Spaniard, wrecked on the desert island of Saint Helena, where he finds a solitary savage, who knows nothing about himself, except that he has been nursed by a wild beast. After much communication in dumb show, they are able to understand each other in Spanish, and, being taken from the island, travel together through the world, talking often of the leading men of their time in Spain, but holding intercourse more with allegorical personages than with one another. The story of their adventures is long, and its three portions represent the three periods of human life; the first being called the Spring of Childhood, the second the Autumn of Manhood, and the third the Winter of Old Age. In some parts it shows much talent; and eloquent discussions on moral subjects, and glowing descriptions of events and natural scenery, can be taken from it, which are little infected with the extravagances of the Cultivated Style. Sometimes, we are reminded of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,”—as, for instance, in the scenes of the World’s Fair,—and might almost say, that the “Críticon” is to the Catholic religion and the notions of life in Spain during the reign of Philip the Fourth, what Bunyan’s fiction is to Puritanism and the English character in the age of Cromwell. But there is no vitality in the shadowy personages of Gracian. He bodies nothing forth to which our sympathies can attach themselves as they do to such sharply-defined creations as Christian and Mr. Greatheart, and, when we are moved at all by him, it is only by his acuteness and eloquence.
His other works are of little value, and are yet more deformed by bad taste; especially his “Politico-Fernando,” which is an extravagant eulogium on Ferdinand the Catholic, and his “Discreto,” which is a collection of prose miscellanies, including a few of his letters. It is singular, that, in consequence of being an ecclesiastic, he thought it proper that all his works should be printed under the name of his brother Lorenzo, who lived at Seville; and it is yet more singular, perhaps, that they were published, not by himself, but by his friend, Lastañosa, a gentleman of literary taste, and a collector of ancient works of art, who lived at Huesca in Aragon. But however indirectly and cautiously the works of Gracian won their way into the world, they enjoyed great favor there, and made much noise. His “Hero” went early through six editions, and his collected prose works, most of which were translated into French and Italian, and some of them into English and Latin, were often reprinted in the original Spanish, both at home and abroad.[260]
From this period, the rich old prose style of Luis de Leon and his contemporaries may be said to have been driven out of Spanish literature. Lope de Vega and Quevedo, after resisting the innovations of cultismo for a time, had long before yielded, and Calderon was now alternately assailing the depraved taste of his audiences and gratifying it by running into extravagances almost as great as those he ridiculed. The language of the most affected poetry passed into the prose of the age, and took from it the power and dignity which, even in its more declamatory portions, had constituted its prominent merit. Style became fantastic, and the very thoughts that were to be conveyed were not unfrequently covered up with ingenuities of illustration till they disappeared. In the phrase of Sancho, men wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, and rendered themselves ridiculous by attempting to obtain it. Tropes and figures of all kinds were settled into formulas of speech, and then were repeated appropriately and inappropriately, till the reader could often anticipate, from the beginning of a sentence, how it would inevitably end. Every thing, indeed, in prose composition, as in poetry, announced that corrupted taste which both precedes and hastens the decay of a literature; and which, in the case of Spain during the latter half of the seventeenth century, was but the concomitant of a general decline in the arts and the gradual degradation of the monarchy.
Among those who wrote best, though still infected with the prevailing influences, was Zabaleta. His “Moral Problems” and “Famous Errors,” but especially his “Feast Days at Madrid,” in which he gives lively satirical sketches of the manners of the metropolis at those periods when idleness brings the people into the streets and places of amusement, are worth reading. But he lived in the reign of Philip the Fourth; and so did Lozano, whose different ascetic works on the character of King David, if not so good as his historical romance on the New Kings of Toledo, are better than any thing else of the kind in the same period. They are, however, the last that can be read. The reign of Charles the Second does not offer examples even so favorable as these of the remains and ruins of a better taste. “The Labors of Hercules,” by Heredia, in 1682, and the “Moral Essays on Boëthius,” by Ramirez, in 1698, if they serve for nothing else, serve at least to mark the ultimate limits of dulness and affectation. Indeed, if it were not for the History of Solís, which has been already noticed, we should look in vain for an instance of respectable prose composition after this last and most degenerate descendant of the House of Austria had mounted the Spanish throne.[261]
Nor is this remarkable. On the contrary, it is rather to be considered worthy of notice, that didactic prose should have had any merit or obtained any success in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the end it proposes is not, like that of poetry, to amuse, but, like that of philosophy, to enlighten and amend; and how dangerous in Spain was the social position of any teacher or moral monitor, who claimed for himself that degree of independence of opinion without which instruction becomes a dead form, needs not now to be set forth. Few persons, in that unhappy country, were surrounded with more difficulties; none were more strictly watched, or, if they wandered from the permitted paths, were more severely punished.
Nor was it possible for such persons, by the most notorious earnestness in their convictions of the just control of the religion of the state, or any degree of faithfulness in their loyalty, to avoid sometimes falling under the rebuke of the jealousy that watched each step of their course; a fact sufficiently apparent, when we recollect that nearly all the didactic writers of merit during this period, such as Juan de Avila, Luis de Leon, Luis de Granada, Quevedo, San Juan de la Cruz, and Santa Teresa, were persecuted by the Inquisition or by the government, and the works of every one of them expurgated or forbidden.
Under such oppression, free and eloquent writers,—men destined to teach and advance their generation,—could not be expected to appear, and the few who ventured into ways so dangerous dwelt as much as possible in generals, and became mystical, like Juan de la Cruz, or extravagant and declamatory, like Luis de Granada. Nearly all,—strictly prevented from using the logic of a wise and liberal philosophy,—fell into pedantry, from an anxious desire, wherever it was possible, to lean upon authority; so that, from Luis de Leon down to the most ordinary writer, who, in a prefatory letter of approbation, wished to give currency to the opinions of a friend, no man seemed to feel at ease unless he could justify and sustain what he had to say by citations from the Scriptures, the fathers of the Church, and the ancient and scholastic philosophers. Thus, Spanish didactic prose, which, from its original elements and tendencies, seemed destined to wear the attractions of an elevated and eloquent style, gradually became so formal, awkward, and pedantic, that, with a few striking exceptions, it can only be said to have maintained a doubtful and difficult existence during the long period when the less suspected and less oppressed portions of the literature of the country—its drama and its lyric poetry—were in the meridian of their success.