More fortunate than his master and great contemporary, Cervantes, Quevedo survives in canvas and in marble, so that we are able to realize the external features of the man. His portrait by Velasquez, representing him with a huge pair of spectacles on his nose and the cross of Santiago on his left bosom, is that by which he is best known. There is also a bust of him in the Public Library at Madrid. The first of his biographers, the Neapolitan Tarsia, has drawn this picture of him, evidently from recollection, in words: Quevedo was of middling stature; his hair black and somewhat frizzled (encrespado), his eyes very brilliant, but so short of sight that he constantly wore spectacles; the nose and other features well proportioned; and of a medium frame well made above, although lame and crippled in both feet, which were twisted inwards; somewhat bulky without being misshapen; very fair of countenance, and in the main with all those marks co-existent in his person which physiognomists commend as indicating a good temperament and a virtuous disposition. His biography by Tarsia, published in 1663, is a dull and tedious piece of work. By far the best account of Quevedo is that which I have made the basis of this sketch, the biography attached to the only complete collection of Quevedo’s works, by Don Aureliano Fernandez Guerra y Orbe, which forms three volumes in Rivadeneyra’s Biblioteca de los Autores Españoles. The Essai sur la Vie et les Œuvres de Quevedo, by Ernest Merimée (Paris, 1886), is a careful and painstaking work, of which the materials have been taken from Guerra y Orbe.
To judge the character of the man is easier for posterity than to estimate the worth of his products in literature. The greater part of his writings, those which brought him most fame in his lifetime, men have ceased to read even in Spain itself. Of the eleven octavo volumes which constituted the first complete edition of Quevedo’s works (1791-94) it may be said that it would be no loss to the world had three-fourths shared the doom which their author, on his death-bed, requested might overtake them all. The orthodox would thus have been saved much scandal, the expurgators a great deal of trouble, the critics and the commentators an endless amount of curious inquiry. The theology and the politics (these in Quevedo are much confused) have already perished. The satires have been visited by the destiny which invariably attends the works of wit which are dedicated to passing uses, when literature stoops to the service of politics.
But while the graver works of Quevedo, those which won him the applause of the learned and the favour of the great, have perished or are sunk into oblivion, there have survived enough of those lighter pieces born of his humour or his fancy, which he could scarcely be got to own in his lifetime, to keep his name alive and to secure for him a permanent place in literature. His lyrics are among the best in the language, and still keep their place in every collection of classic Castilian poetry. Those written in his early days, which include odes, sonnets, ballads, quintillas, and redondillas, mostly cast in a light and graceful mould, are distinguished for elegance of language, delicacy of fancy, and simple, tender expression. His burlesque poems (which include some pieces of a breadth such as excludes them from polite society), written in the picaresque dialect, of which, like Cervantes, he was a past master—the Jácaras, in which the people, the gitanos, the jaques, and the buzos, speak the language of Germania—the langue verte of Spain—are said still to be heard in the country, sung to the strumming of guitars. His regular verse is chiefly satire in the manner of Juvenal, against the corruption of morals and the evils of misgovernment. Of his prose writings the best are those which are purely sportive and fanciful, without serious intention, as the Visita de los Chistes, where he makes pleasant fun of the personages which figure in the old proverbs and popular sayings, as Mateo Pico, who is enshrined in the phrase, No dijerá mas Mateo Pico; Agrages, the boaster from Amadis of Gaul, who is for ever quoted as saying, Agora lo verédes (see Don Quixote, passim); Pero Grullo, the prophet who prophesied only of what he knew had come to pass; Calainos, of the ballad Cabalgaba Calainos; Don Diego de Noche; Marta, who is for ever expressing her satisfaction that though she died she died with a bellyful; and Villadiego, whose breeches have immortalized his name; with Juan Ramos, and the rest. The fun which Quevedo makes out of this flimsy material is only to be understood by those who know the proverbs of Spain, and the great part they play in the national talk and literature.
Less innocent, perhaps, are some of Quevedo’s other burlesque pieces, which neither gods, men, nor county councillors may allow. In these the poet sins, however, more from carelessness of humour than grossness of imagination. It is not his ideas that are nasty so much as his words which are coarse. He uses words at random, and is reckless of the effect produced, letting his fancy run away with his pen, to the detriment of his art. He is wanting in the exquisite simplicity and delicacy of the master of whose work he was a chief admirer, whose style he followed, and in whose path he attempted to walk—his friend, Miguel de Cervantes. So passionate was his love for Don Quixote that we are told he would throw down the book in an ecstasy and declare that he would gladly burn all his works to be able to write something like Don Quixote. Between the two wits it is pleasant to record that there was nothing like jealousy. Cervantes, in the references he makes to Quevedo, seems to speak with more than his wonted kindliness of the younger man, as though from personal intimacy. In the Voyage to Parnassus Quevedo is rallied upon his lameness with a freedom which only a friend might take. In summing up the roll of the good poets who are to be Apollo’s allies in the winning of Parnassus, the name of Quevedo is last on the list. But Cervantes interrupts the god-messenger to remind him of Quevedo’s infirmity:—
Scarce can Francisco de Quevedo be
In time, I said. Nay, quoth he, on this cruise
I do not go, unless he go with me;
He is Apollo’s son, son of the Muse
Calliope; we cannot, it is clear,
Go hence without him; I do not choose;
He is the scourge of all the poets drear,
And from Parnassus, at the point of wit,
Will chase the miscreants we expect and fear!
My lord, I said, his pace is most unfit,
He’ll be a century upon the route!
Quoth Mercury: It matters not a whit;
For be the poet gentleman to boot,
Upon a dappled cloud, and through the air,
He shall be borne, his courtly taste to suit![1]
In the delightful prose appendix to the same poem, the Adjunta al Parnaso, Don Pancracio de Roncesvalles brings to Cervantes’ house a letter from the god Apollo, dated the 22nd of July, 1614. In this there is another reference to Quevedo: If Don Francisco de Quevedo hath not left for Sicily, where they await him, seize him by the hand and tell him he must not fail to visit me in a neighbourly way; for his late sudden departure gave me no time to talk with him.
Quevedo’s worldly circumstances, as the owner of a landed estate, and his rank in the public service under the powerful Duke of Osuna, kept him, happily, free from that necessity of writing for bread which oppressed the fine genius but could not stifle the kind heart of the author of Don Quixote. But they did not preserve him from the envy of his other less fortunate brothers of the pen. With Lope de Vega, with whom he could have no rivalry, whom he survived ten years, his relations seem to have been tolerably friendly—that is to say, they exchanged compliments and commendatory sonnets. With Góngora there was too much similarity of humour to be much love. They had various tilts at each other, in which there was too much venom spilt for either to emerge with honour. When Góngora abandoned his early simplicity of style and took to that affected and extravagant way of writing which came to be called after him, Gongorismo, which corresponded to the disease called Euphuism in England and Marinism in Italy—Quevedo took up his lance against the intruder and in defence of the language, writing a pamphlet, La Culta Latiniparla, in which, under the guise of a catechism for the instruction of ladies of culture in the new way of speech, he quizzes his rival and the new invention very happily. A French critic and student of Spanish letters, M. Germond de Lavigne, in his account of Quevedo, has shown himself so far lost to the sense of humour as to call this piece un discours critique litteraire; which is as though we should class Swift’s Argument against the Abolition of Christianity among works of devotion. Quevedo’s wit had little effect in checking the depraved fashion of writing; and it is sad to tell that he himself, in his later years, was infected with the barbarous taste, and Gongorized like the rest. Góngora bitterly resented the attack upon his style, and there passed between the two much dyslogistic verse in the shape of epigram and sonnet. Góngora relieves his feelings by a poem in which he charges his critic with being no great scholar, and with wandering slow with heavy pace—one who sleeps in Spanish and dreams in Greek—insinuating that he is unsound in his religion. In another sonnet Góngora sneers at his critic’s learning, his limping gait, and his blindness, laughs at his red cross of Santiago, and his adventures, calling him borracho (drunkard), pedante gofo (stupid pedant), muy crítico y muy lego, &c. Quevedo retorted with equal spirit and good taste, reflecting on his rival’s origin, and hinting that he was no better Catholic than he should be:—
He de untarte mis versos con tocino
Porque no me los roas, Gongorilla.
(I have to anoint my verses with bacon fat
That you may not gnaw them, Gongorilla.)
The point of which jest, heightened by the contemptuous diminutive, lies in the hint that Góngora, then a priest in orders, was no old Christian, but either Jew or Morisco. Another enemy of Quevedo was Perez de Montalvan, a writer of plays the favourite disciple, parasite, and bully of Lope de Vega—whom our satirist was fond of assailing in verse and prose for his dogmatism, his arrogance and his inscrutable ignorance. Montalvan took his revenge in a volume entitled El Tribunal de la Justa Venganza, written under an assumed name, in which Quevedo’s satirical works are tried and condemned for their offences against religion and morality.