Quevedo sought success, as a man of letters, in a great number of departments,—from theology and metaphysics down to stories of vulgar life and Gypsy ballads. But many of his manuscripts were taken from him when his papers were twice seized by the government, and many others seem to have been accidentally lost in the course of a life full of change and adventure. In consequence of this, his friend Antonio de Tarsia tells us that the greater part of his works could not be published; and we know that many are still to be found in his own handwriting, both in the National Library of Madrid and in other collections, public and private.[468] Those already printed fill eleven considerable volumes, eight of prose and three of poetry; leaving us probably little to regret concerning the fate of the rest, unless, perhaps, it be the loss of his dramas, of which two are said to have been represented with applause at Madrid, during his lifetime.[469]
Of his poetry, so far as we know, he himself published nothing with his name, except such as occurs in his poor translations from Epictetus and Phocylides; but in the tasteful and curious collection of his friend Pedro de Espinosa, called “Flowers of Illustrious Poets,” printed when Quevedo was only twenty-five years old, a few of his minor poems are to be found. This was, probably, his first appearance as an author; and it is worthy of notice, that, taken together, these few poems announce much of his future poetical character, and that two or three of them, like the one beginning,
A wight of might
Is Don Money, the knight,[470]
are among his happy efforts. But though he himself published scarcely any of them, the amount of his verses found after his death is represented to have been very great; much greater, we are assured, than could be discovered among his papers a few years later,[471]—probably because, just before he died, “he denounced,” as we are told, “all his works to the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, in order that the parts less becoming a modest reserve might be reduced, as they were, to just measure by serious and prudent reflection.”[472]
Such of his poetry as was easily found was, however, published;—the first part by his friend Gonzalez de Salas, in 1648, and the rest, in a most careless and crude manner, by his nephew, Pedro Alderete, in 1670, under the conceited title of “The Spanish Parnassus, divided into its Two Summits, with the Nine Castilian Muses.” The collection itself is very miscellaneous, and it is not always easy to determine why the particular pieces of which it is composed were assigned rather to the protection of one Muse than of another. In general, they are short. Sonnets and ballads are far more numerous than any thing else; though canciones, odes, elegies, epistles, satires of all kinds, idyls, quintillas, and redondillas are in great abundance. There are, besides, four entremeses of little value, and the fragment of a poem on the subject of Orlando Furioso, intended to be in the manner of Berni, but running too much into caricature.
The longest of the nine divisions is that which passes under the name and authority of Thalia, the goddess who presided over rustic wit, as well as over comedy. Indeed, the more prominent characteristics of the whole collection are a broad, grotesque humor, and a satire sometimes marked with imitations of the ancients, especially of Juvenal and Persius, but oftener overrun with puns, and crowded with conceits and allusions, not easily understood at the time they first appeared, and now quite unintelligible.[473] His burlesque sonnets, in imitation of the Italian poems of that class, are the best in the language, and have a bitterness rarely found in company with so much wit. Some of his lighter ballads, too, are to be placed in the very first rank, and fifteen that he wrote in the wild dialect of the Gypsies have been ever since the delight of the lower classes of his countrymen, and are still, or were lately, to be heard, among their other popular poetry, sung to the guitars of the peasants and the soldiery throughout Spain.[474] In regular satire he has generally followed the path trodden by Juvenal; and, in the instances of his complaint “Against the existing Manners of the Castilians,” and “The Dangers of Marriage,” has proved himself a bold and successful disciple.[475] Some of his amatory poems, and some of those on religious subjects, especially when they are in a melancholy tone, are full of beauty and tenderness;[476] and once or twice, when most didactic, he is no less powerful than grave and lofty.[477]
His chief fault—besides the indecency of some of his poetry, and the obscurity and extravagance that pervade yet more of it—is the use of words and phrases that are low and essentially unpoetical. This, as far as we can now judge, was the result partly of haste and carelessness, and partly of a false theory. He sought for strength, and he became affected and rude. But we should not judge him too severely. He wrote a great deal, and with extraordinary facility, but refused to print; professing his intention to correct and prepare his poems for the press when he should have more leisure and a less anxious mind. That time, however, never came. We should, therefore, rather wonder that we find in his works so many passages of the purest and most brilliant wit and poetry, than complain that they are scattered through so very large a mass of what is idle, unsatisfactory, and sometimes unintelligible.
Once, and once only, Quevedo published a small volume of poetry, which has been supposed to be his own, though not originally appearing as such. The occasion was worthy of his genius, and his success was equal to the occasion. For some time, Spanish literature had been overrun with a species of affectation resembling the euphuism that prevailed in England a little earlier. It passed under the name of cultismo, or the polite style; and when we come to speak of its more distinguished votaries, we shall have occasion fully to explain its characteristic extravagances. At present, it is enough to say, that, in Quevedo’s time, this fashionable fanaticism was at the height of its folly; and that, perceiving its absurdity, he launched against it the shafts of his unsparing ridicule, in several shorter pieces of poetry, as well as in a trifle called “A Compass for the Polite to steer by,” and in a prose satire called “A Catechism of Phrases to teach Ladies how to talk Latinized Spanish.”[478]
But finding the disease deeply fixed in the national taste, and models of a purer style of poetry wanting to resist it, he printed, in 1631,—the same year in which, for the same purpose, he published a collection of the poetry of Luis de Leon,—a small volume which he announced as “Poems by the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre,”—a person of whom he professed, in his Preface, to know nothing, except that he had accidentally found his manuscripts in the hands of a bookseller, with the Approbation of Alonso de Ercilla attached to them; and that he supposed him to be the ancient Spanish poet referred to by Boscan nearly a hundred years before. But this little volume is a work of no small consequence. It contains sonnets, odes, canciones, elegies, and eclogues; many of them written with antique grace and simplicity, and all in a style of thought easy and natural, and in a versification of great exactness and harmony. It is, in short, one of the best volumes of miscellaneous poems in the Spanish language.[479]