Some years after Rengifo came Pinciano, and ten years later the Spanish attempt to rival Vida and Vauquelin in the Ejemplar Poético of Juan de La Cueva. Pinciano. The two are opposed on the point which was rapidly becoming the burning question of Spanish literary criticism, but which was never thoroughly faced in Spain. The great national drama—in main part, if not in every respect, Romantic to the core—was making progress every day; but so was the theory that you were to follow the ancients. Alfonso Lopez, otherwise “El Pinciano,” did the latter diligently in his Filosofía Antigua Poética,[[440]] which, besides the authorities indicated in the title, owed much to the Italian school.

Pinciano[[441]] is set extraordinarily high by the Historian of Spanish criticism, who thinks him “the only humanist of the sixteenth century who presents a complete literary system,” contrasts him (I own that this gives me pause) with the “intolerable pedantries” of Castelvetro, and calls him plumply “an excellent critic.” The quotations advanced, though, according to Señor Menéndez' admirable custom with authors difficult of access, they are plentifully given, will perhaps hardly justify this praise. Pinciano thinks that “the soul of poetry is the fable”; that metre is not necessary, though it “perfects imitation”; that imitation itself must have verisimilitude; that poetry is superior to metaphysic; that it ranges over all the arts and sciences; that it gives things in a new form, makes them new to the world; that a perfectly organised fable is like a perfectly organised animal; that it is absurd for a hero to be born, grow up, become bearded, marry, &c., all in one piece. He prefers the probable-impossible to the improbable-possible, disapproves of classical metres, and so forth—all of which we have, I think, heard before. Señor Menéndez attributes to him altísimo entendimiento crítico for rejecting the common (and certainly absurd enough) division of comedy and tragedy by the happy or unhappy ending, and vesting the comic element in Ridicule. And he winds up by constituting Pinciano, with Cascales and Gonzales de Salas, “the luminous triad of our preceptists of the good age.”

Recurrence to, and study of, the book itself as given by Señor Peña will not, I think, remove the doubts about this high estimate of the Filosofía which even Señor Menéndez' own quotations may have started. It is a book of much learning, ingenuity, and labour, the somewhat non-natural form of which (the recounting in letters to a certain Don Gabriel by El Pinciano[[442]] of conversations between himself and two friends, Hugo and Fadrique) may, like much else in it, be due to Italian influence. That of such writers as Fracastoro is obvious in the philosophical aloofness of the first Epistle-dialogue, De la Felicidad Humana, in which the nature of virtue, the character of the Pagan divinities, and many other solemn things are discussed, with some curious ones, such as whether nobleza can be predicated of Lais either for her beauty or her eminence in an oficio deshonesto. It is Don Gabriel’s answer which deflects the subject with some sharpness into una Arte Poética en romance, and this, beginning in the next letter, occupies the rest of the book. The divisions are pretty usual: first, the general qualities of, and objections to, Poetry; then its nature, its different kinds, the Fable, Poetic diction, metre, tragedy, and comedy; dithyrambic, epic, minor poetry; and lastly, “Actors.” Pinciano calls these divisions modestly enough Fragmentos, but no just exception can be taken to them on the ground of scrappiness. The book is methodical enough; its aperçus (as, for instance, on furor poeticus and poetic diction) are often acute, and its expression not seldom has the quaint raciness of Spanish.[[443]] But it still “sticks in generals”; it still holds those generals to have been settled once for all of old; and it still gives no sign of any catholic examination of actual poetry.

On the other hand, La Cueva,[[444]] though meticulous enough, and citing with high reverence[[445]] not merely Aristotle and Horace, but Scaliger himself, Vida, Minturno, Viperano, and others, is, on the drama at least, and especially on comedy, an utter contemner of the ancient doctrine. La Cueva. My friend Mr Hannay’s pithy statement[[446]] of this Spanish point of view has already commended itself to good judges,[[447]] and it seems to sum up the whole matter. “The theatre was to imitate nature and to please. Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic.” There had been something of this in Castelvetro; there was more in the Spaniards, and it was fatal to them as critics.

Carvallo.

Of the authors of this group with whom I am myself acquainted, none seems to me to stand higher than Gonzales de Salas on the Aristotelian-Senecan side; while few exhibit rehashings of the common stuff to be found in all the Italian books more strikingly than Carvallo in his Cisne de Apolo.[[448]]

Gonzales de Salas,[[449]] on the contrary, strikes me as having shown distinct and original critical power. Gonzales de Salas. A foreigner is not likely to be greatly disturbed, even if he be a better Spanish scholar than I am, by the “palpable” darkness,[[450]] the “accumulation of obscurity and troublesomeness” in style, with which Señor Menéndez reproaches Salas. It is an odd thing, but might be paralleled elsewhere, that the foreigner, who does not know what the man ought to have said in order to convey his meaning properly, can, in nearly all languages, arrive at that meaning more easily than the native, who is “put off” by eccentricity and barbarisms. Words, for instance, like lucifugas and parasangas, which Don Marcelino holds up to special reproach, are to an Englishman, with his Virgil and his Xenophon in his head, perhaps easier reading than some of the bluest-blooded words of pure Spanish. The critic is further enraged by Salas’s devotion to Seneca, whose Troades he actually translated, with observations and exercitations thereon. But (as students of English at least should know) there is much Romantic virtue in your Seneca along with his Classical vice. The curious thing about Gonzales is that—fervent Aristotelian as he is in theory, and devotee of the ancient theatre down to the Tragic Boot—he has singular “pluckings of apples by the banks of Ulai,” strange glimpses of the truths which his countrymen were the best situated of all men in Europe (with hardly the exception of Englishmen) for seeing, but which as a rule they would not see. Both Pinciano and Cascales had eulogised Nature or Naturaleza; but as the foundress or foundation of Laws which Cascales at any rate would have as those of the Medes and Persians. Gonzales, Aristotelian as he is, on the other hand, says in so many words,[[451]] “You are not bound to follow the ancients,” “Time and taste may improve and alter art.” Señor Menéndez thinks this liberty a Spanish trait; but we find it in some Italians, though not many, and we certainly do not find it in all or many Spaniards, who are much rather inclined to divide their attentions, or, as the impudent old Greek definition has it, “to keep the wife for convenience and decency, the mistress for pleasure.” Gonzales, I think, saw a higher law.

These authors, however, and others who succeeded them, though worthy wights and good workers in labouring the lea of Spanish criticism, in no case possess the interest which attaches in all literatures to those who are at once eminent in creation and careful in criticism. The place of Corneille in French, of Jonson and Dryden in English, is taken, earlier than any of these, by one of the great and three of the greatest writers of Spain—Tirso de Molina, Lope, Cervantes, and Calderon.

The contribution of the “creator of Don Juan” to criticism is not large, and it comes in an odd place, but it is of importance. In the curious medley called Cigarrales [say "tales of a country-house">[ de Toledo,[[452]] Tirso has included a play of his own, El Vergonzoso en Palacio, and has given us a discussion of it by the company at p. 184 of the book. The Cigarrales of Tirso de Molina. A “presumptuous person” attacks the poet for “licentiously deserting” the limits and laws of comedy. He has stated the strict Unities, and is contrasting the action of the play with them, when he is interrupted by a certain Don Alejo, who carries the war into the enemy’s quarters bravely. Comedy must be ended in twenty-four hours, must it? It is quite decent and probable, is it not, that a gallant shall fall in love with a lady, court her, treat her, win her, and marry her all in a day? Where are all the delightful accidents of love—the hopes and the despairs—to go? A real lover must be proved by days and months and years of constancy. Why may not comedy present to the eye what history presents to the understanding—much time in little? The ingenuity of the playwright consists [I abbreviate here a good deal] in making things probable as they are related. The very difference of nature from art is that the one, from its creation, cannot vary—a pear-tree always producing pears, an ilex its own acorns, influenced only by soil, climate, &c. But drama varies its own laws, and grafts tragedy on comedy. And he then boldly sets Lope, to whom he gives the title of reformador de la comedia nueva, as an example of modern art against Æschylus and Euripides and Seneca and Terence, explaining the dramatist’s declaration, v. infra, that he had deserted the ancients to please the Popular taste, as due only to his natural modesty. This is real plain speaking: and the speech is worthy of the author of the Burlador de Sevilla and the striking Condenado por Desconfiado.

Tirso’s apology for his great craftsfellow was not more superfluous than his defence of him was bold and well framed. Lope’s Arte Nuevo, &c. Not merely in the verse Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias,[[453]] but elsewhere, does Lope make the somewhat undignified and pusillanimous, but, as we have said, widely entertained, excuse referred to. Señor Menéndez himself can only plead (a little obviously, perhaps) that “there were two men in Lope,” the great popular Spanish poet, and the educated versesmith, full of academic tradition. Very much the same mixture is seen in Dryden, from whom, as we shall see, inconsistencies quite as great as Lope’s, and much more numerous, can be quoted. But the contrast, I think, brings out the characteristic weakness of the Spanish critical spirit. Its historian admits frankly that there is a good deal in Lope that is “infantine.” I should add that he seems to me never to have taken any side of criticism with seriousness, whereas Dryden successively took many. Both had to confess that they had been sometimes traitors to their own best ideals of poetry, to please the multitude; but Dryden, at least, never committed the blasphemy of condemning his own best things as Lope did, and thanking God that he himself knew the precious “precepts,” according to which he did not write them. The simple fact seems to be that a man of Lope’s extraordinary facility and fecundity could not be critical. In the time that Dryden took to write Alexander’s Feast the Spanish poet would have done you an Epic, half-a-dozen plays, and minor poems enough to fill a volume. Señor Menéndez himself avows that he cannot pretend to be acquainted with all the critical remarks interspersed in Lope’s enormous and never yet collected work: and who shall venture to rival his extensive knowledge? But we shall probably not be rash in thinking that any real doctrine, except on details of craft, would be hard to extract from them. The man was a genius, but not a critical genius: and it certainly was within the resources of a very humble critical faculty to note, as it is his chief critical glory to have noted, in theory, as he expressed it in practice, the fact that “Points of honour move all people mightily” on the [Spanish] stage.[[454]]