The Later Renaissance

by David Hannay

The great name of Spanish historical literature is that of Juan de Mariana,[52] the Jesuit, whose name once rang all over Europe for his defence of regicide in the treatise De Rege, written for the benefit of his pupil, Philip III. But this and his other treatises were written in Latin, and never translated by himself. His place in Spanish literature is due to his history. Mariana was of the most humble birth, for he was a foundling. He was born at Talavera in 1536, and educated by the Jesuits, in whose college in Sicily he taught for many years; but his later life was spent in the house of his order at Toledo. His troubles with his superiors form a not very honourable passage in the history of the Jesuits. The first purpose of his great work was to make Europe acquainted with the past of Spain, and he wrote in Latin, the universal language of scholarship. Twenty of the thirty books were published in that language in 1572. But, unlike Bacon, Mariana did not believe that the learned language would outlive the modern tongues. He was induced to make a Castilian version of his own Latin, and when doing it he took the freedom which even the most strict critic will allow to belong to the translator of his own work. He enlarged, corrected, and amended, till the Castilian history, which appeared in 1601, was almost a new work. Four editions, further enlarged and amended, appeared before the author’s death in 1623.

In answering a minute critic, Mariana, with an audacity not perhaps to be excused, declared that if he had stopped to verify every small fact, Spain would have waited for ever for a history. This bold avowal of his indifference to the tithings of mint and anise illustrates sufficiently the spirit in which he wrote. He was not a historical scholar in the same sense as Zurita—a minute student of original records—but a man of great learning and high patriotic spirit, who applied himself to the making of a work of literature worthy of the past of his country. The defects of the history are patent, and one of them is a mere matter of change of fashion. He took Livy for a model, and therefore put long speeches into the mouths of his personages. This, however, was a mere literary convention not intended to deceive anybody, and not likely to mislead the most uncritical reader. It was only a now disused way of giving what the modern historian would give in comment and illustration. The same following of Livy led him into including in his history, and presenting as history, a great deal of what he knew to be legend, simply because it was picturesque and familiar. Against these defects, which from the literary point of view are no defects at all, are to be put a fine style quite uncontaminated by the usual defects of Spanish prose, a great power of narrative, and then this, that Mariana gave the history of his country throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages in a lofty patriotic spirit, which may not interpret and explain ancient institutions, but does convey to us a sense that we see an energetic people of fine qualities struggling on to high destinies.

The decadence.

The fall from Mariana to any of his contemporaries or successors is great. The Cisma de Inglaterra—‘The English Schism’—by Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527-1611), enjoys the reputation of being a well-written account of the great movement by which the English Church vindicated its independence of the see of Rome, told from the point of view of a Spanish Jesuit. Prudencio de Sandoval, a distinguished churchman and one of the historiographers of the Crown, continued the general history of Morales, and then added to Mariana a life of Charles V., which is of about the same length as the Jesuit’s whole history. Sandoval shows what the reign of the great emperor looked like to a learned Spaniard of the later sixteenth century, but it has no great force and no merit of style.[53]

Other names might be added—Bartolomé de Argensola’s History of the Moluccas (1609), the work of a pure man of letters who wrote to please his patron, and the History of the Goths of the diplomatist Saavedra-Fajardo, published at Munster in 1649—but they could swell a list to little purpose. All these writers had the good fortune to write before the invasion of Góngorism, except Saavedra-Fajardo, who escaped it by residence abroad. |Solis.| Antonio de Solis (1610-1686) had the honour of resisting the plague. If the second-rate men of a literature could be dealt with at any length in our limits, Solis would be an interesting figure to dwell on. He was an accomplished man, who did very creditable work both as poet and dramatist, but in the schools of other and more original writers. There are few more melancholy lives among the biographies of men of letters. In spite of reputation and success, he was always poor. Although he held the post of Cronista Mayor of the Indies in the latter part of his life, he died in utter poverty, leaving “his soul to be the heir of his body”—that is, giving orders that his few belongings should be sold to pay for masses. In the general bankruptcy of Spain his salary was probably not paid. A sense of duty rather than an inclination to the task may be supposed to have led him to undertake the writing of a book which has always remained very dear to the Spaniards. This is The Conquest of Mexico, published by the help of a friend in 1684.[54] The excellence of the style was recognised from the first, and has preserved the reputation of the book. Yet it wants the rude life of the contemporary narratives, and the understanding of, or at least strenuous effort to understand, the native side, which is to be found in Mr Prescott. Flowing and eloquent as Solis is, he is also somewhat nerveless. Perhaps our knowledge of the fact that he stood on the very verge of the time when the voice of literature in Spain was to be silenced altogether makes the reader predisposed to find something in him of the signs of exhaustion. He closes the time when the Spaniards wrote for themselves, and also wrote well.

Miscellaneous writers.

Before closing this survey of the great period of Castilian literature by a notice, which must necessarily be brief, of one intensely national body of writers, some words must be said about the large class of authors of miscellaneous books belonging to the first half of the seventeenth century. The press was active in those years. Unfortunately it was an age of oddity and extravagance. |Gracian and the prevalence of Góngorism.| Its dominating figure is that Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) to whom the admiration of Sir M. Grant Duff among ourselves, and the whim, if not the cynicism, of Schopenhauer among the Germans, have given a limited revival of popularity in our own time. He was an Aragonese Jesuit, who published his books under the name of his brother Lorenzo. Gracian is not uninteresting as a finished example of all that bad taste and pretentiousness can do to make a man of some, though by no means considerable, faculty quite worthless. It was his chosen function to be the critic, prophet, and populariser of Góngorism. He wrote a treatise to expound the whole secret of the detestable art of saying everything in the least natural and perspicuous manner possible.[55] This Agudeza y Arte de Ingenios—‘Wit and the Wits’ Art’—was not written till he had published a book on The Hero to show that he had every right to speak with authority. Gracian was otherwise a copious writer. His Criticon, translated into English under the name of The Spanish Critic, by Paul Rycaut in 1681, about thirty years after it appeared, is an allegory of life, shown by the adventures of a shipwrecked Spaniard and a “natural man,” whom he finds on the island of St Helena. It may have helped Swift by showing him how not to write Gulliver’s Travels. The work which has been revived of late by the freak of Schopenhauer is the Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia—‘Hand (or Pocket) Oracle and Art of Prudence.’ It is a collection of maxims. Mr Morley went to the extreme limit of good nature when he said that Gracian sometimes gives a neat turn to a commonplace. As a rule, his maxims are examples of all that maxims ought not to be—long, obscure by dint of straining after epigrammatic force, and in substance of platitude all compact. We soon find that we are dealing with a “haberdasher of small wares,” who is endeavouring to impose himself upon us as wise by dint of a short obscure manner and a made-up face of gravity.

Gracian is worth singling out, not for his merits, but because he so thoroughly typified a something in the Spaniard which, oddly mixed with his real humour and sound sense, gives him a leaning to the theatrical in the worst sense of the word. When Shakespeare drew Don Adriano de Armado, the fantastical Spaniard, he was not laughing at random at the foreigner. And this side of the people was never more conspicuous than in the middle seventeenth century. It came out everywhere, from serious treatises on politics down to the fencing-book of the egregious Don Luis de Narvaez de Pacheco. It was not that Spain wanted for able men. Diego de Saavedra-Fajardo, the author of the history of the Goths, and of a curious book of emblems called Empresas Politicas, or ‘The Idea of a Political Christian Prince’; Vera y Figueroa, the author of The Ambassador; Suarez de Figueroa, who wrote the miscellaneous critical dialogues called El Pasagero—‘The Traveller,’—were none of them insignificant men, but there was a perpetual straining after sententious gravity in them, an effort to look wiser than life, an attempt to get better bread than could be made out of wheat. They helped to give Europe the old idea of the rigid sententious Spaniard which is so strangely unlike the real man. But it was the time of the frozen court etiquette of the Hapsburg dynasty, and of grave peremptory manners in public, covering an extraordinary relaxation of morals, and an unabashed taste for mere horseplay in private. These writers gave the literary expression of the artificial Spain of the seventeenth century. It adds to the piquancy of the contrast that at a time when Spain was marching resolutely, and with her eyes open, to ruin, by accumulating fault upon fault, the political writers named here, and others, abounded in good sense. To take a single example. Among the emblems of Saavedra-Fajardo is one representing a globe supported between the sterns of two warships, with the motto “His Polis.” In the Essay the Spanish diplomatist sets out the whole doctrine, so familiar in our own days as that of “sea-power,” with great force. Yet this was written, a melancholy example of useless wisdom, when his country was destroying its last chance of maintaining a navy, by bleeding itself nearly to death in the wars of Germany for the purpose of vindicating the claims of the house of Hapsburg.

Here may be mentioned, a little out of his date, but hardly out of his place, for it is difficult to say where he ought to be classed, the Viage Entretenido, or ‘Amusing Voyage,’ of Agustin de Roxas or Rojas. He was a very busy miscellaneous writer, who led a strange roaming life as a soldier, strolling actor, and in some sense pícaro. The Viage Entretenido is the only part of his work which survives. It is a rather incoherent autobiography, swollen out by specimens of the loas he wrote for his fellow-actors. The historical value of the book is considerable, for Roxas gives a very full account of the theatrical life of his time, and is the standard authority for the early history of the Spanish stage. The literary merits of the book are not small, for, consciously or unconsciously he takes, and keeps, the tone of the true artistic Bohemian, the wandering enfant sans souci to whom the hardships of his life, long tramping journeys, hunger, poverty, rags, and spasms of furious hard work are endurable because they give him intervals of reckless idleness, and save him from what he especially hates, which is orderly industry. The Viage Entretenido was the model of Scarron’s Voyage Comique. It appeared perhaps in 1603, but certainly very early in the seventeenth century.[56]