The Celestina.
Yet they started from what might well have been the beginning of better. The Celestina had a certain truth to life in its really valuable parts, and it did not strive to amuse with mere callous practical joking.[42] This curious dialogue story was written perhaps before, or it may be about, the time of the conquest of Granada—1492—and both the identity of its author and its date of publication are obscure. It is divided into twenty-one so-called acts, of which the first is very long and the others are very short. Fernando Rojas of Montalvan, by whom it was published, says that the first act was the work of Rodrigo Cota of Toledo, a Jew, the known author of some tolerable verses in the style of the Court school; and that he himself finished it at the request of friends. This account has been disputed by the criticism which delights in disputing the attribution of everything to everybody. It is neither supported by internal, nor contradicted by external, evidence. The literary importance of the tale is not affected by it in the least. There are two elements in the Celestina. It contains a love-story of the headlong southern order, sudden and violent in action, inflated, and frequently insufferably pedantic in expression, withal somewhat commonplace. With this, and subservient to this, there is a background, a subordinate, busy, scheming world of procuresses, prostitutes, dishonest servants, male and female, and bullies, which is amazingly vivid. Celestina, whose name has replaced the pompous original title of the story, Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibœa, is the ancestress of the two characters of similar trade in Pamela and Clarissa. She had many forerunners in mediæval literature, in and out of Spain. But she has never been surpassed in vividness of portraiture, while her household of loose women and bullies, with their intrigues and jealousies, their hangers-on, and their arts of temptation, is drawn with no less truth than gusto. The quality of their talk is admirable, and the personages are not described from the outside, or presented to us as puppet types, but allowed to manifest themselves, and to grow, with a convincing reality rare indeed in Spanish literature.
Though the popularity of the Celestina, not only in Spain but abroad, was great, it did not produce any marked effect on Spanish literature until a generation had passed. It was adapted on the stage, but there it left few traces except on the racy dialogue of the prose entremeses. The poetic form of the Spanish comedy did not, and even perhaps could not, adapt itself to the alert naturalistic tone of the Celestina, and the subjects of the plays grew ever more romantic and more remote from the vulgar world. But this answered too well to a natural taste of the Spaniards to remain without a following. |The Lazarillo de Tormés.| Its first real successor (apart from rifacimentos or mere echoes, of which there were several) was the Vida de Lazarillo de Tormés; sus Fortunas y Adversidades,[43] attributed on very dubious evidence to the famous Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and with not much greater probability to Fray Juan de Ortega, of the Order of St. Jerome. The date of its composition is uncertain. The first known edition is of 1553, but it may have been read in manuscript before that. In the Lazarillo we have the Novela de Pícaros already complete, differing only from those which were to come after in the greater simplicity of its style and in freshness. The hero is a poor boy of Tormés, in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, none too honest by nature, and made perfectly unscrupulous by a life of dependence on harsh, or poverty-stricken, masters. The story tells how he passes from one service to another, generally after playing some more or less ferocious trick on his employer. It is a scheme which affords a good opening for satirical sketches of life, and the author, whoever he was, clearly adopted it for that among other reasons. Lazarillo’s master, the poor cavalier who keeps up a show of living like a gentleman while in fact he is starving at home—too proud either to work or beg, but not too proud to cherish schemes of entrapping a wife with a dowry, and not spirited enough to serve as a soldier—was no doubt a familiar figure in Spain, and he became a stock puppet of the Novelas de gusto Pícaresco. Another scene of real, though not peculiarly Spanish, satire deals with a dishonest seller of pardons and his sham miracles. The Reformation had imposed limits on the freedom of orthodox writers to deal with the sins, or even absurdities, of churchmen, and this passage was suppressed, as of bad example, by the Inquisition. The majority of the figures are, however, less satirical than grotesque. We find in the Lazarillo, though not to the extent which afterwards become common, the love of dwelling on starvation, poverty, and physical infirmities as if they were things amusing in themselves. But this is less the case than in its successors, and being nearly the first, or even the actual first, in the fully developed form, it has a certain freshness. It has the merit of being short, and leaves its hero dishonourably married, with a promise of a continuation, which was never written by the author.
Guzman de Alfarache.
Putting aside spurious “second parts” of the Lazarillo, the next event in the advance—we cannot say the development—of the Novela de Pícaros is the publication of the Guzman de Alfarache of Mateo Aleman, a Sevillian of whose birth, life, and death nothing certain is known. This book, appearing just as the Libros de Caballerías were dying of exhaustion, set the example to a swarm of followers. Yet it was itself but an imitation of Lazarillo, greatly enlarged, and over-burdened with what Le Sage, who translated it, most justly called “superfluous moral reflections.” The second title of the book, La Atalaya de la Vida—‘The Beacon of Life’ indicates Aleman’s didactic intention, which even without it is obtrusive. But a beacon of life, to be other than a useless blaze, must be set to warn us off real dangers in real life: it must flame with satire on possible human errors. The satire of Aleman is akin to Marston’s, and Marston’s many followers among ourselves,—it is a loud bullying shout at mere basenesses made incredible by being abstracted from average human nature, and kneaded into dummies. Celestina, besides being an impudent, greedy servant of vice, is also a woman with humour and an amusing tongue. Her household are the scum of the earth, but they are human scum, with a capacity for enjoying themselves as men and women without dragging their humour of vice in, when no cause sets it in motion. They can laugh and cry, like and dislike, as other human beings do. But the personages of Mateo Aleman are grinning puppets, galvanised to imitate the gestures of greed, cowardice, mendacity, and cruelty, abstracted from humanity. Then, they are set to play a wild fantasia in vacuo. What is true of Mateo Aleman applies equally to his followers.
Followers of Mateo Aleman.
A brief outline must suffice for his successors. A spurious second part of Guzman de Alfarache was published in 1603, written, as it would seem by one Marti, a Valencian, who assumed the noble name of Luxan. This, by the way, is one proof among many that the Libros de Caballerías were not the prevailing taste of readers when Cervantes published his first part of Don Quixote in 1605, or else it would have suggested itself to nobody to trade on the popularity of Guzman. In 1605 Aleman wrote a second part, in which he victimises the plagiarist in a fashion afterwards followed by Cervantes when provoked in the same fashion. In the same year came out the Pícara Justina of Andreas Perez, a Dominican who wrote under the name of Francisco Lopez de Ubeda, with a she rogue as heroine, with exactly the same spirit and machinery, and an identical didactic purpose, but written in a tortured style. Vicente Espinel (?1551-?1630), who was otherwise notable for adding the fifth string to the guitar and as a verse-writer, published El Escudero (i.e., Squire) Marcos de Obregon in 1618. This squire is of the class of the Biscayan whom Don Quixote overthrew, an elderly man who waited on ladies—the forerunner of the footman with the gold-headed stick, familiar to ourselves till very recent times. He has led the usual life. The Marcos de Obregon had the honour of contributing a few incidents to Le Sage. The soul of Pedro Garcia is not taken from the introduction, but put in place of what Espinel had written. In the Spanish story two students find a tombstone on which are written the words “Unio, unio,” a pun on pearl and union. One sees nothing in the riddle, and goes on. The other digs and finds—the skeletons of the lovers of Antequera, who threw themselves together from a precipice to escape capture by the Moors. Here we see what Le Sage did with the framework supplied him by the Spaniards. He took what was only Spanish, and made it universal. We can all laugh over the bag of coin which was the soul of Pedro Garcia, but who understands the story of the Spanish lovers without a commentary? After Marcos de Obregon there follow mainly repetitions.
Quevedo.
An exception must, however, be made for the Gran Tacaño—‘The Great Sharper,’ Paul of Segovia, by Quevedo.[44] Don Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas, Señor de la Torre de Juan Abad (1580-1645), was a very typical Spaniard of those who came from “the mountain,” and lived an agitated life in the Spain of the seventeenth century. He served under the once famous Duke of Osuna, viceroy of Sicily and Naples, was implicated in the mysterious conspiracy against Venice, and finally suffered from the hostility of the Count Duke of Olivares. In literature he is still the shadow of a great name as poet, scholar, and satirist. Among his countrymen his memory is still popular as the hero of innumerable stories of much the same kind as those told in Scotland of Buchanan, and in France of Rabelais. For his sake Pablo de Segovia may be mentioned, and also because it is the Novela de Pícaros as the Spaniards wrote it, stripped of the last rag of whatever could disguise its essential hard brutality. If you can gloat over starvation—if the hangman expatiating joyfully over halters and lashes seems a pleasant spectacle to you—if blows, falls, disease, hunger, dirt, and every form of suffering, told with a loud callous laugh, and utterly unrelieved, seem to you worth reading about, then Pablo de Segovia is much at your service. But Quevedo did other than this. Some of his satiric verse has life, and if not gaiety, still a species of bitter jocularity; and moreover, he gave a new employment to the gusto picaresco in his Visions. These once world-renowned satires are composed of such matter as the vices of lawyers, doctors, police-officers, unfaithful wives, complacent husbands, &c. To those who wish to master the Castilian language in all its resources they are invaluable, and it is in itself so fine that we can endure much to gain access to its treasures. But it is possible to gain a quite accurate understanding of Quevedo by reading the translation and amplification of his Visions by our own Sir Roger L’Estrange. Then, just in order to see where this spirit and this method lead, it is not a waste of time to go on to Ned Ward. There was something very congenial to the Restoration in the Spanish gusto picaresco, and that is its sufficient condemnation. Yet it did supply Le Sage with what he might not have been able to elaborate for himself, and thereby it contributed to the gaiety and the wisdom of nations.
Cervantes.