In 1604, he published the second part, on a subject nearly connected with the first. Seventy-seven years after the conquest of Granada, the Moors of that kingdom, unable any longer to bear the oppressions to which they were subjected by the rigorous government of Philip the Second, took refuge in the bold range of the Alpuxarras, on the coast of the Mediterranean, and there, electing a king, broke out into open rebellion. They maintained themselves bravely in their mountain fastnesses nearly four years, and were not finally defeated till three armies had been sent against them; the last of which was commanded by no less a general than Don John of Austria. Hita served through the whole of this war; and the second part of his romance contains its history. Much of what he relates is true; and, indeed, of much he had been an eye-witness, as we can see in his accounts of the atrocities committed in the villages of Felix and Huescar, as well as in all the details of the siege of Galera and the death and funeral honors of Luis de Quijada. But other portions, like the imprisonment of Albexari, with his love for Almanzora, and the jealousies and conspiracy of Benalguacil, must be chiefly or wholly drawn from his own imagination. The most interesting part is the story of Tuzani, which he relates with great minuteness, and which he declares he received from Tuzani himself and other persons concerned in it;—a wild tale of Oriental passion, which, as we have seen, Calderon made the subject of one of his most powerful and characteristic dramas.
If the rest of the second division of Hita’s romance had been like this story, it might have been worthy of the first. But it is not. The ballads with which it is diversified, and which are probably all his own, are much inferior in merit to the older ballads he had inserted before; and his narrative is given in a much less rich and glowing style. Perhaps Hita felt the want of the old Moorish traditions that had before inspired him, or perhaps he found himself awkwardly constrained when dealing with facts too recent and notorious to be manageable for the purposes of fiction. But whatever may have been the cause of its inferiority, the fact is plain. His second part, regarded as genuine history, is not to be compared with the account of the same events by Diego de Mendoza; while, regarded as a romance, he had already far surpassed it himself.[124]
The path, however, which Hita by these two works had opened for historical fiction amidst the old traditions and picturesque manners of the Moors, tempting as it may now seem, did not, in his time, seem so to others. His own romance, it is true, was often reprinted and much read. But, from the nature of his subject, he showed the Moorish character on its favorable side, and even went so far as to express his horror at the cruelties inflicted by his countrymen on their hated enemies, and his sense of the injustice done to the vanquished by the bad faith that kept neither the promises of Ferdinand and Isabella nor those of Don John.[125] Such sympathy with the infidel enemy that had so long held Spain in fee was not according to the spirit of the times. Only five years after Hita had published his account of the rebellion of the Alpuxarras, the remainder of the Moors against whom he had there fought were violently expelled from Spain by Philip the Third, amidst the rejoicings of the whole Spanish people; few even of the most humane spirits looking upon the sufferings they thus inflicted as any thing but the just retributions of an offended Heaven.
Of course, while this was the state of feeling throughout the nation, it was not to be expected that works of fiction representing the Moors in romantic and attractive colors, and filled with adventures drawn from their traditions, should find favor in Spain. A century later, indeed, a third part of the Wars of Granada—whether written by Hita or somebody else we are not told—was licensed for the press, though never published;[126] and, in France, Madame de Scudéri soon began, in “The Almahide,” a series of fictions on this foundation, that has been continued down, through the “Gonsalve de Cordoue” of Florian, to “The Abencerrage” of Chateaubriand, without giving any token that it is likely soon to cease.[127] But in Spain it struck no root, and had no success.
Perhaps other circumstances, besides a national feeling of unwillingness that romantic fiction should occupy the debatable ground between the Moors and the Christians, contributed to check its progress in Spain. Perhaps the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, destroying, by its ridicule, the only form of romance much known or regarded at the time, was not without an effect on the other forms, by exciting a prejudice against all grave prose works of invention, and still more by furnishing a substitute much more amusing than they could aspire to be. But whether this were so or not, attacks on all of them followed in the same spirit. “The Cryselia of Lidaceli,” which appeared in 1609,—and which, as well as a dull prose satire on the fantastic Academies then in fashion, bears the name of Captain Flegetonte,—assails freely whatever of prose fiction had till then enjoyed regard in Spain, whether the pastoral, the historical, or the chivalrous.[128] Its attack, however, was so ineffectual, as to show only the tendency of opinion to discourage romance-writing in Spain;—a tendency yet more apparent a little later, not only in some of the best ascetic writers of the seventeenth century, but in such works as “The Moral History of the God Momus,” by Noydens, published in 1666, which, as its author tells us distinctly in the Prologue, was intended to drive out of society all novels and books of adventure whose subject was love.[129]
Still, serious romance was written in Spain during the whole of the seventeenth century, and written in several varieties of form and tone, though with no real success. Thus, Gonzalo de Céspedes, a native of Madrid, and author of several other works, published the first part of his “Gerardo” in 1615, and the second in 1617. He calls it a Tragic Poem, and divides it into discourses instead of chapters. But it is, in fact, a prose romance, consisting of a series of slightly connected adventures in the life of its hero, Gerardo, and episodes of the adventures of different persons more or less associated with him; in all which, amidst much that is sentimental and romantic, there is more that is tragic than is common in such Spanish stories. It was several times reprinted, and was succeeded, in 1626, by his “Various Fortunes of the Soldier Píndaro,” a similar work, but less interesting, and perhaps, on that account, never finished according to the original purpose of its author. Both, however, show a power of invention which is hardly to be found in works of the same class produced so early, either in France or England, and both make pretensions to style, though rather in their lighter than in their more serious portions.[130]
Again in 1617,—the same year, it will be recollected, in which the “Persiles and Sigismunda” of Cervantes appeared,—Francisco Loubayssin de Lamarca, a Biscayan by birth, published his “Tragicomic History of Don Enrique de Castro”; in which known facts and fanciful adventures are mingled in the wildest confusion. The scene is carried back, by means of the story of the hero’s uncle, who has become a hermit in his old age, to the Italian wars of Charles the Eighth of France, and forward, in the person of the hero himself, to the conquest of Chili by the Spaniards; covering meanwhile any intermediate space that seems convenient to its author’s purposes. As an historical novel, it is an entire failure.[131]
A similar remark may be made on another work published in 1625, which takes in part the guise of imaginary travels, and is called “The History of Two Faithful Friends”; a story founded on the supposed adventures of a Frenchman and a Spaniard in Persia, and consisting chiefly of incredible accounts of their intrigues with Persian ladies of rank. Much of it is given in the shape of a correspondence, and it ends with the promise of a continuation, which never appeared.[132]
Many, indeed, of the works of fiction begun in Spain, during the seventeenth century, remained, like the Two Faithful Friends, unfinished, from want of encouragement and popularity; while others that were written were never published at all.[133] One of these last, called “The Fortunate Knight,” by Juan Valladares de Valdelomar, of Córdova, was quite prepared for the press in 1617, and is still extant in the original manuscript, with the proper licenses for printing and the autograph approbation of Lope de Vega. It is an historical novel, divided into forty-five “Adventures”; and the hero, like many others of his class, is a soldier in Italy, and a captive in Africa; serving first under Don John of Austria, and afterwards under Sebastian of Portugal. How much of it is true is uncertain. Regular dates are given for many of its events, some of which can be verified; but it is full of poetry and poetical fancies, and several of the stories, like that of the loves of the knight himself and the fair Mayorinda, must have been taken from the author’s imagination. Still, in the Prologue, all books of fiction are treated with contempt, as if the whole class were so little favored, that it was discreditable to avow the intention of publishing another, even at the moment of doing it. In the style of its prose, the Fortunate Knight is as good as other similar works of the same period; but the poems with which it is crowded, to the number of about a hundred and fifty, are of less merit.[134]
The discouragement just alluded to, whether proceeding from the ridicule thrown on long works of fiction by Cervantes, or from the watchfulness of the ecclesiastical authorities, or from both causes combined, was probably one of the reasons that led persons writing serious romances to seek new directions and unwonted forms in their composition; sometimes going as far as possible from the truth of fact, and sometimes coming down almost to plain history. Two instances of such deviations from the beaten paths—probably the only examples in their time of the class to which each belonged—should be noticed, for their singularity, if not for their literary merit.