Especially Cervantes.
Yet there can be no doubt that the greatest debt owed by the eighteenth century, at least, to Spanish goes to the credit of one great man in the main, and of a compartment of literature to which that great man, though transcending it, belonged, in the second—in other words, to Cervantes and the Spanish novel. The “picaresque” variety of this novel had early affected both France and England: and it had virtue enough in it to affect successive generations, directly or indirectly, from that of Scarron and Head, through that of Le Sage, down to that of Smollett. Abundance of things may be said against the picaresque style: but of one credit nobody can possibly deprive it—that it was the first kind in Europe to combine the ordinary life of the fabliau (and in part the novela) with the length, the variety, the quasi-epic conformation and powers of the Romance. And while all the best of this quality appeared in Don Quixote itself, that mighty book left out almost all the bad and weak concomitants, and added merit and powers of which the Lazarillos de Tormes and the Marcos de Obregon had not a vestige. As we have seen, Cervantes was something of a Neo-classic himself in critical principles, and something (though not so much as has been thought) of an enemy of Romance in purpose. But his performance was fatal to his teaching in more ways than one or two: while he certainly gave Fielding the idea of the modern novel even as a matter of theory and schedule.
Of German.
If we say less here of Germany it is not because there is less to say, but because, in the first place, much of it has been and much more will be said, elsewhere; and because, in the second, we should have to give an abstract of the German literary history of the century. It was not till very late—till almost the eve of the nineteenth—that German literature had much effect abroad, or indeed that there was much German literature to have any effect. But quite early the Germans began to study their own older writers; and early and late they, as we have seen, simply flung themselves on the literature of other countries. It is indeed open to any one to contend that from the first (some century and a half ago) to the present day they overdosed themselves with this as with other studies,—that, taking to it before Germany had really acquired a continuous and important literary idiosyncrasy of its own, they have always lacked the pou sto, and have wasted their labour in consequence. But this is another and for us an irrelevant question. That they form no exception to the rule illustrated in this chapter, and that they not only took the medicine in huge doses themselves, but prepared it and handed it on to others, as if they wished to be the literary apothecaries of Europe, this is undeniable.[[340]]
[326]. The Germans, I believe, have definitely ticketed these explorers as “The Antiquarians.”
[327]. For this see in the last vol. under Dryden, Addison, Johnson, L. Racine, Voltaire, La Harpe, &c.: in the present the Zürichers and Chateaubriand.
[328]. I may once more refer to Mr Nichol Smith’s valuable edition of the Prefaces to most of these. Mrs Montagu’s famous Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1769, and often reprinted) may expect a separate mention. It is well intentioned but rather feeble, much of it being pure tu quoque to Voltaire, and sometimes extremely unjust on Corneille, and even Æschylus. It is not quite ignorant; but once more non tali auxilio!