Be all that as it may, we are on firm ground when we come to the proved facts concerning the actual writing of the Spanish Amadis. It belongs to the years between 1492 and 1504. The first known edition, that of Rome, is dated 1519; but it is unlikely, though not impossible, that there had not been a Spanish predecessor. There is a known edition of the first of the rival Palmerin series, which is dated 1511. What is beyond doubt is that its popularity was immediate and widespread. Spain produced twelve editions in fifty years. It was translated in French and Italian with immense acceptance. One of the best known stories of lost labour and disappointment in literature is that Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato, founded a considerable reputation on the fact that he had undertaken to make the Amadis the foundation of an epic, which reputation endured until the appearance of the poem.
As if in direct imitation of the mediæval custom, Amadis was made the founder of a family. Montalvo gave the world the deeds of his son Esplandian in 1526, and from another hand came in the same year his nephew, Florisando, and then a long line, reaching to the twelfth book. The succession in France was even longer, for it reached the twenty-fourth. Beside the house of Amadis, there arose and flourished the distinguished family known as the Palmerines. The first two of this series, the Primaleon and the Palmerin de Oliva, are said to have been the work of a lady of “Augustobriga, a town in Portugal.” But her name and very existence are uncertain, while neither of the places called Augustobriga in the time of the Roman dominion in the Peninsula is in Portugal. The most famous of this line, the Palmerin of England, was for long attributed to a Portuguese, Francisco de Moraes, who after a rather distinguished public career was murdered at Evora in 1572; but it was probably the work of a Spaniard, Luis Hurtado of Toledo. It was the confusing habit of the authors of these tales to call them the fifth, or sixth, or other, “book” of Amadis, or of Primaleon. Sometimes rival fifths or sixths appeared, and translators did not follow the Spanish numeration. Hence much trouble to the faithful historian. Yet the family history can be followed with tolerable accuracy. Don Pascual de Gayangos has been at the pains to make a regular pedigree for both, showing the main lines and collateral branches. It is a satisfaction to be able to state with confidence that the lady Flérida, daughter of Palmerin de Oliva, married Don Duardos (Edward), son of Frederick, King of England, and of a sister of Melèadus, King of Scotland, and that Palmerin of England was their son. He again married Polinarda, and was the father of Don Duardos de Bretaña II., who was the father of Don Clarisel. The Palmerin series, by the way, is much less rich than the Amadis in those superb names which are not the least of the pleasures of the Tales of Chivalry. It rarely rises to the height of Cadragante, or Manete the Measured, or Angriote de Estravaus, and never to the level of the Queen Pintiquinestra, or the Giant Famongomadan, whom Cervantes had in his mind when he imagined Brandabarbaran de Boliche. The stories independent of these two series are numerous, though less numerous than the reader who has not looked into the matter may suppose. Their names—and that is all which survives of some—will be found in their proper places in the lists of Don Pascual de Gayangos.
It will be seen that much of this work is either anonymous, or is attributed on vague evidence to authors of whom the name only is known. The chief exception is the Feliciano de Silva at whose style Cervantes laughed. It happens that something is known of Feliciano, and that it is to his honour. He was page to the sixth Duke of Medina Sidonia, and he saved the Duchess from being drowned in the Guadalquivir at the risk of his own life; which, it will be allowed, was an action not unworthy of the author of Libros de Caballerías. He wrote the Lisuarte de Grecia, the Amadis de Grecia, and several others, including the Florisel de Niquea. Feliciano was an industrious man of letters, who would have been a useful collaborator with, and fairly successful imitator of, Dumas, had time and chance suited. He adulterated his tales of knightly deeds by imitations of the pastoral model, and his style certainly laid him open to the ridicule of Cervantes. Yet it is not more pompous and mechanical than our own Lyly, and is better than the manner of some of the Novelas de Pícaros.
Influence and character of these Tales.
None of the commonplaces in the history of literature are better established than these: that the Libros de Caballerías were tiresome and absurd; that they appeared in immense numbers, and flooded out all better and more wholesome reading; and that they were killed by Don Quixote. Yet there are probably not three worse founded commonplaces. That these books can be tedious, and that the worst of them can be very tedious, is true. But none are more long-winded than the Golden Epistles, which had an equally great popularity, or than some well-accepted reading of any generation is apt to look to later times, when fashion has changed. They were certainly neither more tiresome nor more essentially absurd than the Novela de Pícaros. Their number was not very great. The whole body is not nearly as numerous as the yearly output of novels to-day in England; and even when their inordinate length is allowed for, their total bulk is not greater, though they were written during a century. As for their supposed predominance, it must be remembered that the great time of the Libros de Caballerías was also the time of the “learned poetry” of Spain, of the growth of the drama, of most of the romances, and of some of the best work of the historians and the mystic writers. That Don Quixote destroyed them may seem to be a truth too firmly established to be shaken, and yet the contrary proposition, that it was the waning popularity of the Tales of Knightly Deeds which made Don Quixote possible, is on the whole more consistent with fact. They had been less and less written for a generation before Cervantes produced his famous First Part. The Novela de Pícaros was taking their place. Readers were predisposed to find them laughable, and therefore enjoyed the burlesque. Cervantes’ own half-humorous boast has been taken too seriously. The ridicule of the Libros de Caballerías is the least valuable part of Don Quixote, and is not in itself better than much satire which has yet failed to destroy things more deserving of destruction than the family of Amadis.
Neither the popularity nor the decline of the Libros de Caballerías was in the least unintelligible. These books supplied the Spaniards with stories of fighting and adventure in a fighting adventurous time, when the taste for reading, or at least hearing others read, was spreading, and when the theatre—the only possible rival—was still in its feeble beginnings. And what they gave was not only suited to the time but not inferior to what came after. The English reader who wishes to put it to the test has an easy way open to him. Let him take the adaptations which Southey made of Amadis of Gaul, or Palmerin of England, and compare them, not with Sir Walter Scott, who showed what a great genius could do with a motive not unlike that of the Libros de Caballerías; not with Gil Blas, which shows what genius could do with the machinery of the Novela de Pícaros; not with Don Quixote, which is for all time,—but with an English version of the Guzman de Alfarache, the book which first firmly established the gusto picaresco at the very close of the sixteenth century. He will find much repetition (though Southey, who made one or two notable additions, has suppressed largely) in both, but in the Guzman it is endless sordid roguery, in which there is no general human truth, and in place of it a mechanical exaggeration of a temporary form of Spanish vagabondage, while in the Amadis or Palmerin it is something not unlike the noble fancies of the Arthurian legend.
The real cause of their decline.
The decline of the Libros de Caballerías is easily accounted for. They ended by wearying the world with monotony, and the increasing extravagance of incident and language, which was their one resource for avoiding monotony. The Spaniard’s tendency to repeat stock types in the same kind of action was visible here as elsewhere. The Amadis gave the pattern, and it was followed. A hero who is the son of a king, and is also a model of knightly prowess and virtues, with a brother in arms who, while no less valiant, is decidedly less virtuous, are the chief figures. Amadis, the Beltenebros—the lovely dark man—is the pink of loyalty to his peerless Oriana, who is the fairest and most loving of women. Galaor is gay and volatile, light of love, but loyal in friendship. Amadis is born out of wedlock, and left to fortune by his mother, or for some other reason brought up far away from the throne which is lawfully his, and fights his way to his crown without ever failing for an instant in his devotion to Oriana. Galaor helps him, and loves what ladies he meets on the road. Amadis breathes out his mistress’s name as he lays his lance in rest, Galaor throws a defiant jest in front of him; Amadis has the gift of tears, but Galaor laughs in the jaws of death, laughs in fact at everything except the honour of a gentleman—and on that he smiles. It is a brotherhood between Sir Charles Grandison and Mercutio. Combats, giants, fairy ladies, enchanters good and bad, make up the matter of the story. If it is essentially unwholesome, so is the Round Table legend; and if it is necessarily absurd, so is the Faërie Queen. But when it had been done once in Amadis, and for a second time in Palmerin, it was done for good. To take the machinery of the Libros de Caballerías, and put a new spirit into it, which, as Cervantes saw, was possible, was not given to any Spaniard. All they could do was to repeat, and then endeavour to hide the repetition by multiplying everything on a fixed scale. The giants grew bigger, the sword-cuts more terrific, the combats more numerous, the monsters more hideous, the exalted sentiments swelled till they were less credible than the giants. The fine Castilian of Garcia Ordoñez was tortured into the absurdities which bad writers think to be style. The Libros de Caballerías, which had been a natural survival, and revival, of the Middle Ages in the early sixteenth century, were unnatural at its close. Don Quixote did but hasten their end. They would have perished in any case before the Novelas de Pícaros, which in turn ran much the same course, and were extinguished without the intervention of satire. That the taste of the time was tending away from the higher forms of romance is shown by the little following found for the Civil Wars of Granada by Ginés Perez de Hita, of whom little or nothing is known.[40] This book, of which the first part was published in 1598 and the second in 1604, is the original source of all the stories of the Zegries and Abencerrages. It gave the Spaniards a model for the historical novel proper, but though it was popular at the time—so popular that it was taken for real history—Perez de Hita founded no school. The Spanish character was becoming too impoverished for a large and poetic romance. What imagination there was, was becoming concentrated in the theatre before withering entirely.
Character of the Novelas de Pícaros.
The fate of the Novelas de Pícaros is one of the most curious in literature. But for them, and their popularity outside of Spain, there could not well have been any Gil Blas, and without him the history of modern prose fiction must have been very different. Yet apart from the example they set, and the machinery they supplied, their worth is small. We find in them the same monotony of type and incident as in the comedia and the Libros de Caballerías, while they have neither the fine theatrical qualities of the first (which was, we may allow, inevitable) nor the manly spirit of the second. Poetry, heroic sentiment, or deep religious feeling we could not expect from what only professed to deal with the common and animal side of life. But they do not give what might have compensated for these things, average sensual human nature, acting credibly and drawn with humour. Their fun—and they strained at jocularity—is of the kind which delights to pull the chair from below you when you are about to sit down, and laughs consumedly at your bruises. To make the jest complete you must be old, ugly, sickly, and very poor. There is no laugh in the Novelas de Pícaros, only at their best a loud hard guffaw, and when they do not rise to that, a perpetual forced giggle. Truth to life is as far from them as from the Libros de Caballerías, but the two are on opposite sides. In mere tediousness they equal the heroic absurdity, for—and this is not their least offensive feature—they are obtrusively didactic. The larger half of the Guzman de Alfarache is composed of preachment of an incredibly platitudinous order. Boredom for boredom, the endless combats of the knight-errant are better. And withal we find the same childish effort to attain originality by mere exaggeration. The Lazarillo de Tormés forces the tone of the Celestina, Guzman de Alfarache advances, more particularly in bulk, beyond Lazarillo, Marcos de Obregon improves on Guzman, and so it goes on to the grinning and sardonic brutality of Quevedo’s Pablo de Segovia and the jerking capers of Don Gregorio Guadaña. This last is the work of an exiled Spanish Jew, Enriquez Gomez (f. 1638-1660). Imagine Villon’s Ballade des Pendus without the verse, without the pathos, spun out in prose, growing ever more affected through endless repetitions of sordid incident, and you have the Novela de Pícaros.[41]