No words need be wasted in controverting the guesses of those who wish to account for the greatness of a great piece of literature by some hidden quality not literary. They have ranged from the fantastic supposition that Cervantes was ridiculing Charles V. down to the amazing notion that he was attacking the Church. Nor need much respect be shown to the truth that Don Quixote was meant to make fun of the books of chivalry. This would be self-evident even if Cervantes had not said so. It may be that this was all he meant, and then he builded better than he knew. The work of burlesque, though often necessary, and, when decently done, amusing, is essentially of the lower order. In this case it was not necessary, for the Libros de Caballerías were already dying out before the sordid rivalry of the Novelas de Pícaros. It was the less necessary, because it was no reform. The Spain of the Libros de Caballerías was the Spain of Santa Teresa and Luis de Leon, of the great scholars of the stamp of Francisco Sanchez El Brocense, of Diego de Mendoza, of Cortés and Pizarro and Mondragon—the Spain which Brantôme saw, “brave, bravache et vallereuse et de belles paroles proférées à l’improviste.” It was a better country than that in which the Count Duke of Olivares had to complain that he could find “no men.” The follies of the Libros de Caballerías were a small matter. It was not a small matter that a nation should replace Amadis of Gaul by Paul of Segovia, should pass from the lofty romantic spirit of Garcia Ordoñes to the carcajada—the coarse, braying, animal, and loveless guffaw of Quevedo.
In so far as Cervantes forwarded that change he did evil and not good. He did help to laugh Spain’s chivalry away. But in truth it was dying, and the change would have come without him. He is great in literature, because while consciously doing a very small, unnecessary, and partially harmful thing, he created a masterpiece of that rare and fine faculty which while thinking in jest still feels in earnest (the definition of what is, it may be, undefinable is taken from Miss Anne Evans), and which we call humour. Elsewhere in Spanish literature we find a type fixed and unvarying, or even a mere puppet, met through a succession of events, and moved about by them. In Don Quixote we have two characters acting on one another, and producing the story from within. And these two characters are types of immortal truth—the one a gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of good faculty, for whom a slight madness has made the whole world fantastic; the other an average human being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere coward, and ignorant, yet not unkindly, nor incapable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what his limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his greed. The continual collisions of these two with the real world make the story of Don Quixote. Cervantes had a fine inventive power, the adventures are numerous and varied, yet the charm lies not in the incidents, but in the reality and the sympathetic quality of the persons. We have no grinning world of masks made according to a formula. The country gentlemen, priests, barbers, shepherds, innkeepers, tavern wenches, lady’s-maids, domestic curates, nobles, and officials are living human beings, true to the Spain of the day no doubt, but also true to the humanity which endures for ever, and therefore intelligible to all times. In the midst is honest greedy Sancho with his peering eyes, so shrewd, and withal so capable of folly, the critic, and also the dupe of the half-crazed dreamer, by whom he rides, and will ride, as long as humanity endures, in this book, and under every varying outward form in the real earth. As for Don Quixote, is he not the elder brother of Sir Roger de Coverley, of Matthew Bramble, of Parson Adams, of Bradwardine, of Colonel Newcome, and Mr Chucks, the brave, gentle, not over-clever, men we love all the more because we laugh at them very tenderly?[46]
CHAPTER VI.
SPAIN—HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND THE MYSTICS.
SPANISH HISTORIANS—HISTORIES OF PARTICULAR EVENTS—EARLY HISTORIANS OF THE INDIES—GENERAL HISTORIANS OF THE INDIES—GÓMARA, OVIEDO, LAS CASAS, HERRERA, THE INCA GARCILASO—MENDOZA, MONCADA, AND MELO—GENERAL HISTORIES—OCAMPO, ZURITA, MORALES—MARIANA—THE DECADENCE—SOLIS—MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS—GRACIAN AND THE PREVALENCE OF GÓNGORISM—THE MYSTICS—SPANISH MYSTICISM—THE INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION ON SPANISH RELIGIOUS LITERATURE—MALON DE CHAIDE—JUAN DE ÁVILA—LUIS DE GRANADA—LUIS DE LEON—SANTA TERESA—JUAN DE LA CRUZ—DECADENCE OF THE MYSTIC WRITERS.
Spanish historians.
It was natural that a very active time of great literary vigour should be rich in historians. Spanish literature is, indeed, fertile in historical narratives of contemporary events written by eyewitnesses, and not less in authoritative narratives, the work of almost contemporary authors. A people so proud of the present could not be indifferent to the past. The Spaniard least of all; for he is, in his own phrase, linajudo—proud of his lineage—not less concerned to show that he had ancestors than to convince the world of his greatness. Thus the sixteenth century, and the early years of the seventeenth, saw the production of a very important Spanish historical literature. It followed the fortunes of the country with curious exactness. Every great campaign, every great achievement in America during the reign of Charles V., has been well and amply described. The reign of Philip II. is equally well recorded by contemporaries, and was the period of the great general histories of Morales, Zurita, and Mariana. But as the seventeenth century drew on, there was less and less which the Spaniard cared to record, till after the revolt of Catalonia and the separation of Portugal in 1640 we come to a period of entire silence. The exhaustion of the national genius was felt here as elsewhere. When the voice of Spanish history was last heard, it was in the conquest of Mexico by Antonio de Solis—the work of an accomplished man of letters who looked back over the disasters of his own time to the more glorious achievement of the past.
Historians of particular events.
Much of the historical writing of the great epoch—the histories of religious orders, of which there are many, and of towns, of which there not a few, and genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable—does not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But it would be a very pedantic interpretation of the word which would exclude the Comentario de la Guerra de Alemaña[47] of Luis de Ávila y Zuñiga. It is an account of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an eyewitness who served the emperor, and attended him in his retirement at Yuste. The merit of this, and many other books of the same order, lies less in any beauty of style they possess than in the interest which attaches to the evidence of capable men who saw great events. Luis de Ávila is also valuable because he gives expression to that pride and ambition of the emperor’s Spanish followers, who really dreamt that they were helping towards the establishment of a universal empire. Another writer of the same stamp, who lived when the fortune of Spain had reached its height and was beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier of the school of the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of distinction, was ambassador in England some years before the Armada, and in France during that great passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and “in religion,” having lived the full life of a fighting pious Spaniard who could use both sword and pen. He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low Countries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the Theory and Practice of War. The commentaries were published in 1592. The treatise had appeared in 1577. The great subject of the Low Country wars of a somewhat later period—1588-1599—was also treated by another Spaniard of the same stamp as Don Bernardino. This was Don Carlos Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist (he came on an embassy to England in the reign of James I.), and man of letters. Besides his Guerras de los Paises Bajos he made a translation of Tacitus.