CHAPTER XXXV.
Serious and Historical Romances. — Juan de Flores, Reinoso, Luzindaro, Contreras, Hita and the Wars of Granada, Flegetonte, Noydens, Céspedes, Cervantes, Lamarca, Valladares, Texada, Lozano. — Failure of this Form of Fiction in Spain.
It was inevitable that grave fiction suited to the changed times should appear in Spain, as well as fiction founded on the satire of prevalent manners. But there were obstacles in its way, and it came late. The old chronicles, so full of the same romantic spirit, and the more interesting because they were sometimes built up out of the older and longer-loved ballads; the old ballads themselves, still oftener made out of the chronicles; the romances of chivalry, which had not yet lost a popularity that, at the present day, seems nearly incredible;—all contributed, in their respective proportions, to satisfy the demand for books of amusement, and to repress the appearance and limit the success of serious and historical fiction. But it was inevitable that it should come, even if it should win little favor.
We have already noticed the attempts to introduce it, made in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, by Diego de San Pedro and his imitator, the anonymous author of “The Question of Love.” Others followed, in the reign of Charles the Fifth. The story, that very imperfectly connects the discussions between Aurelio and Isabella, on the inquiry, whether man gives more occasion for sin to woman, or woman to man, is one of them. It is a slight and meagre fiction, by Juan de Mores, which dates as far back as 1521, and which, in an early English translation, was at one time thought to have furnished hints for Shakspeare’s “Tempest.”[117] “The Loves of Clareo and Florisea,” published in 1552, by Nuñez de Reinoso, at Venice, where he then lived, is another;—a fiction partly allegorical, partly sentimental, and partly in the manner of the romances of chivalry, but of no value for the invention of its incidents, and of very little for its style.[118] The story of “Luzindaro and Medusina,” printed as early as 1553, which, in the midst of enchantments and allegories, preserves the tone and air of a series of complaints against love, and ends tragically with the death of Luzindaro, is yet a third of these crude attempts;[119]—all of which are of consequence only because they led the way to better things. But excepting these and two or three more trifles of the same kind, and of even less value, the reign of Charles the Fifth, so far as grave fiction was concerned, was entirely given up to the romances of chivalry.[120]
In the reign of Philip the Second, when the literature of the country began to develop itself on all sides, serious romances appeared in better forms, or at least with higher pretensions and attributes. Two instances of attempts in new directions, and with more considerable success, present themselves at once.
The first was by Hierónimo de Contreras, and bears the affected title of “A Thicket of Adventures.” It was published in 1573, and is the story of Luzuman, a gentleman of Seville, who had been bred from childhood in great intimacy with Arboleda, a lady of equal condition with himself; but when, as he grows up, this intimacy ripens into love, the lady rejects his suit, on the ground that she prefers a religious life. The refusal is gentle and tender; but he is so disheartened by it, that he secretly leaves his home in sorrow and mortification, and goes to Italy, where he meets with abundance of adventures, and travels through the whole peninsula, down to Naples. Wearied with this mode of life, he then embarks for Spain, but on his passage is taken by a corsair and carried to Algiers. There he remains in cruel slavery for five years. His master then gives him his freedom, and he returns to his home as secretly as he left it; but finding that Arboleda had taken the veil, and that the society to which he belonged had forgotten him, and had closed over the place he had once filled, he avoids making himself known to any body, and retires to a hermitage, with the purpose of ending his days in devotion.[121]
The whole story, somewhat solemnly divided into seven books, is dull, from want both of sufficient variety in the details, and of sufficient spirit in the style. But it is of some importance, because it is the first in a class of fictions, afterwards numerous, which—relying on the curiosity then felt in Spain about Italy, as a country full of Spaniards enjoying luxuries and refinements not yet known at home, and about Algiers, crowded with thousands of other Spaniards suffering the most severe forms of captivity—trusted, for no small part of their interest, to the accounts they gave of their heroes as adventurers in Italy, and as slaves on the coast of Barbary. Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and several more among the most popular authors of the seventeenth century, are among the writers of fictions like these.
The other form of grave fiction, which appeared in the time of Philip the Second, was the proper historical romance; and the earliest specimen of it, except such unsuccessful and slight attempts as we have already noticed, is to be found in “The Civil Wars of Granada,” by Ginés Perez de Hita. The author of this striking book was an inhabitant of Murcia, and, from the little he tells us of himself, must not only have been familiar with the wild mountains and rich valleys of the neighbouring kingdom of Granada, but must have had an intimate personal acquaintance with many of the old Moorish families that still lingered in the homes of their fathers, repeating the traditions of their ancient glory and its disastrous overthrow. Perhaps these circumstances led him to the choice of a subject for his romance. Certainly they furnished him with its best materials; for the story he relates is founded on the fall of Granada, regarded rather from within, amidst the feuds of the Moors themselves, than, as we are accustomed to consider it, from the Christian portion of Spain, gradually gathered in military array outside of its walls.
He begins his story by seeking a safe basis for it in the origin and history of the kingdom of Granada, according to the best authorities within his reach. This part of his work is formal and dry, and shows how imperfect were the notions, at the time he lived, of what an historical romance should be. But as he advances and enters upon the main subject he had proposed to himself, his tone changes. We are, indeed, still surrounded with personages that are familiar to us, like the heroic Muza on one side and the Master of Calatrava on the other; we are present with Boabdil, the last of the long line of Moorish sovereigns, as he carries on a fierce war against his own father in the midst of the city, and with Ferdinand and his knights, as they lay waste all the kingdom without. But to these historical figures are added the more imaginative and fabulous sketches of the Zegris and Abencerrages, Reduan, Abenamar, and Gazul, as full of knightly virtues as any of the Christian cavaliers opposed to them; and of Haja, Zayda, and Fatima, as fair and winning as the dames whom Isabella had brought with her to Santa Fé to cheer on the conquest.
But while he is thus mingling the creations of his own fancy with the facts of history, Hita has been particularly skilful in giving to the whole the manners and coloring of the time. He shows us a luxurious empire tottering to its fall, and yet, while the streets of its capital are filled with war-cries and blood, its princes and nobles abate not one jot of their accustomed revelry and riot. Marriage festivals and midnight dances in the Alhambra, and gorgeous tournaments and games in presence of the court, alternate with duels and feuds between the two great preponderating families that are destroying the state, and with skirmishes and single combats against the advancing Christians. Then come the cruel accusation of the Sultana by the false Zegris, and her defence in arms by both Moors and Christians; the atrocious murder of his sister Morayma by Boabdil, who suddenly breaks out with all the jealous violence of an Oriental despot; and the mournful and scandalous spectacle of three kings contending daily for empire in the squares and palaces of a city destined in a few short weeks to fall into the hands of the enemy that already surrounded its walls.
Much of this, of course, is fiction, so far as the details are concerned; but it is not a fiction false to the spirit of the real events on which it is founded. When, therefore, we approach the end of the story, we come again without violence upon historical ground as true as that on which it opened, though almost as wild and romantic as any of the tales of feuds or festivals through which we have been led to it. In this way, the temporary captivity of Boabdil and his cowardly submission, the siege and surrender of Alhama and Malaga, and the fall of Granada, are brought before us neither unexpectedly nor in a manner out of keeping with what had preceded them; and the story ends, if not with a regular catastrophe, which such materials might easily have furnished, at least with a tale in the tone of all the rest,—that which records the sad fate of Don Alonso de Aguilar. It should be added, that not a few of the finest of the old Spanish ballads are scattered through the work, furnishing materials for the story, rich and appropriate in themselves, and giving an air of reality to the events described, that could hardly have been given to them by any thing else.
This first part, as it is commonly called, of the Wars of Granada was written between 1589 and 1595.[122] It claims to be a translation from the Arabic of a Moor of Granada, and, in the last chapter, Hita gives a circumstantial account of the way in which he obtained it from Africa, where, as he would have us believe, it had been carried in the dispersion of the Moorish race. But though it is not unlikely, that, in his wanderings through the kingdom of Granada, he may have obtained Arabic materials for parts of his story, and though, in the last century, it was more than once attempted to make out an Arabic origin for the whole of it,[123] still his account, upon the face of it, is not at all probable; besides which, he repeatedly appeals to the chronicles of Garibay and Moncayo as authorities for his statements, and gives to the main current of his work—especially in such passages as the conversion of the Sultana—a Christian air, which does not permit us to suppose that any but a Christian could have written it. Notwithstanding his denial, therefore, we must give to Hita the honor of being the true author of one of the most attractive books in the prose literature of Spain; a book written in a pure, rich, and picturesque style, which seems in some respects to be in advance of the age, and in all to be worthy of the best models of the best period.
In 1604, he published the second part, on a subject nearly connected with the first. Seventy-seven years after the conquest of Granada, the Moors of that kingdom, unable any longer to bear the oppressions to which they were subjected by the rigorous government of Philip the Second, took refuge in the bold range of the Alpuxarras, on the coast of the Mediterranean, and there, electing a king, broke out into open rebellion. They maintained themselves bravely in their mountain fastnesses nearly four years, and were not finally defeated till three armies had been sent against them; the last of which was commanded by no less a general than Don John of Austria. Hita served through the whole of this war; and the second part of his romance contains its history. Much of what he relates is true; and, indeed, of much he had been an eye-witness, as we can see in his accounts of the atrocities committed in the villages of Felix and Huescar, as well as in all the details of the siege of Galera and the death and funeral honors of Luis de Quijada. But other portions, like the imprisonment of Albexari, with his love for Almanzora, and the jealousies and conspiracy of Benalguacil, must be chiefly or wholly drawn from his own imagination. The most interesting part is the story of Tuzani, which he relates with great minuteness, and which he declares he received from Tuzani himself and other persons concerned in it;—a wild tale of Oriental passion, which, as we have seen, Calderon made the subject of one of his most powerful and characteristic dramas.
If the rest of the second division of Hita’s romance had been like this story, it might have been worthy of the first. But it is not. The ballads with which it is diversified, and which are probably all his own, are much inferior in merit to the older ballads he had inserted before; and his narrative is given in a much less rich and glowing style. Perhaps Hita felt the want of the old Moorish traditions that had before inspired him, or perhaps he found himself awkwardly constrained when dealing with facts too recent and notorious to be manageable for the purposes of fiction. But whatever may have been the cause of its inferiority, the fact is plain. His second part, regarded as genuine history, is not to be compared with the account of the same events by Diego de Mendoza; while, regarded as a romance, he had already far surpassed it himself.[124]
The path, however, which Hita by these two works had opened for historical fiction amidst the old traditions and picturesque manners of the Moors, tempting as it may now seem, did not, in his time, seem so to others. His own romance, it is true, was often reprinted and much read. But, from the nature of his subject, he showed the Moorish character on its favorable side, and even went so far as to express his horror at the cruelties inflicted by his countrymen on their hated enemies, and his sense of the injustice done to the vanquished by the bad faith that kept neither the promises of Ferdinand and Isabella nor those of Don John.[125] Such sympathy with the infidel enemy that had so long held Spain in fee was not according to the spirit of the times. Only five years after Hita had published his account of the rebellion of the Alpuxarras, the remainder of the Moors against whom he had there fought were violently expelled from Spain by Philip the Third, amidst the rejoicings of the whole Spanish people; few even of the most humane spirits looking upon the sufferings they thus inflicted as any thing but the just retributions of an offended Heaven.
Of course, while this was the state of feeling throughout the nation, it was not to be expected that works of fiction representing the Moors in romantic and attractive colors, and filled with adventures drawn from their traditions, should find favor in Spain. A century later, indeed, a third part of the Wars of Granada—whether written by Hita or somebody else we are not told—was licensed for the press, though never published;[126] and, in France, Madame de Scudéri soon began, in “The Almahide,” a series of fictions on this foundation, that has been continued down, through the “Gonsalve de Cordoue” of Florian, to “The Abencerrage” of Chateaubriand, without giving any token that it is likely soon to cease.[127] But in Spain it struck no root, and had no success.
Perhaps other circumstances, besides a national feeling of unwillingness that romantic fiction should occupy the debatable ground between the Moors and the Christians, contributed to check its progress in Spain. Perhaps the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, destroying, by its ridicule, the only form of romance much known or regarded at the time, was not without an effect on the other forms, by exciting a prejudice against all grave prose works of invention, and still more by furnishing a substitute much more amusing than they could aspire to be. But whether this were so or not, attacks on all of them followed in the same spirit. “The Cryselia of Lidaceli,” which appeared in 1609,—and which, as well as a dull prose satire on the fantastic Academies then in fashion, bears the name of Captain Flegetonte,—assails freely whatever of prose fiction had till then enjoyed regard in Spain, whether the pastoral, the historical, or the chivalrous.[128] Its attack, however, was so ineffectual, as to show only the tendency of opinion to discourage romance-writing in Spain;—a tendency yet more apparent a little later, not only in some of the best ascetic writers of the seventeenth century, but in such works as “The Moral History of the God Momus,” by Noydens, published in 1666, which, as its author tells us distinctly in the Prologue, was intended to drive out of society all novels and books of adventure whose subject was love.[129]
Still, serious romance was written in Spain during the whole of the seventeenth century, and written in several varieties of form and tone, though with no real success. Thus, Gonzalo de Céspedes, a native of Madrid, and author of several other works, published the first part of his “Gerardo” in 1615, and the second in 1617. He calls it a Tragic Poem, and divides it into discourses instead of chapters. But it is, in fact, a prose romance, consisting of a series of slightly connected adventures in the life of its hero, Gerardo, and episodes of the adventures of different persons more or less associated with him; in all which, amidst much that is sentimental and romantic, there is more that is tragic than is common in such Spanish stories. It was several times reprinted, and was succeeded, in 1626, by his “Various Fortunes of the Soldier Píndaro,” a similar work, but less interesting, and perhaps, on that account, never finished according to the original purpose of its author. Both, however, show a power of invention which is hardly to be found in works of the same class produced so early, either in France or England, and both make pretensions to style, though rather in their lighter than in their more serious portions.[130]
Again in 1617,—the same year, it will be recollected, in which the “Persiles and Sigismunda” of Cervantes appeared,—Francisco Loubayssin de Lamarca, a Biscayan by birth, published his “Tragicomic History of Don Enrique de Castro”; in which known facts and fanciful adventures are mingled in the wildest confusion. The scene is carried back, by means of the story of the hero’s uncle, who has become a hermit in his old age, to the Italian wars of Charles the Eighth of France, and forward, in the person of the hero himself, to the conquest of Chili by the Spaniards; covering meanwhile any intermediate space that seems convenient to its author’s purposes. As an historical novel, it is an entire failure.[131]
A similar remark may be made on another work published in 1625, which takes in part the guise of imaginary travels, and is called “The History of Two Faithful Friends”; a story founded on the supposed adventures of a Frenchman and a Spaniard in Persia, and consisting chiefly of incredible accounts of their intrigues with Persian ladies of rank. Much of it is given in the shape of a correspondence, and it ends with the promise of a continuation, which never appeared.[132]
Many, indeed, of the works of fiction begun in Spain, during the seventeenth century, remained, like the Two Faithful Friends, unfinished, from want of encouragement and popularity; while others that were written were never published at all.[133] One of these last, called “The Fortunate Knight,” by Juan Valladares de Valdelomar, of Córdova, was quite prepared for the press in 1617, and is still extant in the original manuscript, with the proper licenses for printing and the autograph approbation of Lope de Vega. It is an historical novel, divided into forty-five “Adventures”; and the hero, like many others of his class, is a soldier in Italy, and a captive in Africa; serving first under Don John of Austria, and afterwards under Sebastian of Portugal. How much of it is true is uncertain. Regular dates are given for many of its events, some of which can be verified; but it is full of poetry and poetical fancies, and several of the stories, like that of the loves of the knight himself and the fair Mayorinda, must have been taken from the author’s imagination. Still, in the Prologue, all books of fiction are treated with contempt, as if the whole class were so little favored, that it was discreditable to avow the intention of publishing another, even at the moment of doing it. In the style of its prose, the Fortunate Knight is as good as other similar works of the same period; but the poems with which it is crowded, to the number of about a hundred and fifty, are of less merit.[134]
The discouragement just alluded to, whether proceeding from the ridicule thrown on long works of fiction by Cervantes, or from the watchfulness of the ecclesiastical authorities, or from both causes combined, was probably one of the reasons that led persons writing serious romances to seek new directions and unwonted forms in their composition; sometimes going as far as possible from the truth of fact, and sometimes coming down almost to plain history. Two instances of such deviations from the beaten paths—probably the only examples in their time of the class to which each belonged—should be noticed, for their singularity, if not for their literary merit.
The first is by Cosmé de Texada, and is called “The Marvellous Lion.” It was originally published in 1636, and consists of the history of “the great Lion Auricrino,” his wonderful adventures, and, at last, his marriage with Crisaura, his lady-love. It is divided into fifty-four Apologues, which might rather have been called chapters; and if, instead of the names of animals given to its personages, it had such poetical names as usually occur in romantic fiction, it would—except where it involves satirical sketches of the follies of the times—be a mere love-romance, neither more unnatural nor more extravagant than many of its fellows.
Such as it is, however, it did not entirely satisfy its author. The early portions had been written in his youth, while he was a student in theology at Salamanca; and when, somewhat later, he resumed his task, and brought it to a regular conclusion, he was already far advanced in the composition of another romance still more grave and spiritualized and still farther removed from the realities of life. This more carefully matured fiction is called “Understanding and Truth, the Philosophical Lovers”; and all its personages are allegorical, filling up, with their dreams and trials, a shadowy picture of human life, from the creation to the general judgment. How long Texada was employed about this cold and unsatisfactory allegory, we are not told; but it was not published till 1673, nearly forty years after it was begun, and then it was given to the public by his brother as a posthumous work, with the inappropriate title of “The Second Part of the Marvellous Lion.” Neither romance had a living interest capable of insuring it a permanent success, but both are written in a purer style than was common in such works at the same period, and the first of them occasionally attacks the faults of the contemporary literature with spirit and good-humor.[135]
Quite different from both of them, “The New Kings of Toledo,” by Christóval Lozano, introduces only real personages, and contains little but the facts of known history and old tradition, slightly embellished by the spirit of romance. Its author was attached to the metropolitan cathedral of Toledo, and, with Calderon, served in the chapel set apart for the burial of the New Kings, as the monarchs of Castile were called from the time of Henry of Trastamara, who there established for himself a cemetery, separate from that in which the race ending with the dishonored Don Pedro had been entombed.
The pious chaplain, who was thus called to pray daily for the souls of the line of sovereigns that had constituted the house of Trastamara, determined to illustrate their memories by a romantic history; and, beginning with the old national traditions of the origin of Toledo, the cave of Hercules, the marriage of Charlemagne with a Moorish princess whom he converted, and the refusal of a Christian princess to marry a Moor whom she could not convert, he gives us an account of the building of the chapel, and the adventures of the kings who sleep under its altars, down as late as the death of Henry the Third, in 1406. From internal evidence, it was written at the end of the reign of Philip the Fourth, when Spanish prose had lost much both of its purity and of its dignity; but Lozano, though not free from the affectations of his age, wrote so much more simply than his contemporaries generally did, and his story, though little indebted to his own invention, was yet found so attractive, that, in about half a century, eleven editions of it were published, and it obtained for itself a place in Spanish literature which it has never entirely lost.[136]
After all, however, the serious and historical fictions produced in Spain, that merit the name of full-length romances, were, from the first, few in number, and, with the exception of Hita’s “Civil Wars of Granada,” deserved little favor. Subsequent to the reign of Philip the Fourth, they almost disappeared for above a century; and even at the end of that period, they occurred rarely, and obtained little regard.[137]