The first is by Cosmé de Texada, and is called “The Marvellous Lion.” It was originally published in 1636, and consists of the history of “the great Lion Auricrino,” his wonderful adventures, and, at last, his marriage with Crisaura, his lady-love. It is divided into fifty-four Apologues, which might rather have been called chapters; and if, instead of the names of animals given to its personages, it had such poetical names as usually occur in romantic fiction, it would—except where it involves satirical sketches of the follies of the times—be a mere love-romance, neither more unnatural nor more extravagant than many of its fellows.
Such as it is, however, it did not entirely satisfy its author. The early portions had been written in his youth, while he was a student in theology at Salamanca; and when, somewhat later, he resumed his task, and brought it to a regular conclusion, he was already far advanced in the composition of another romance still more grave and spiritualized and still farther removed from the realities of life. This more carefully matured fiction is called “Understanding and Truth, the Philosophical Lovers”; and all its personages are allegorical, filling up, with their dreams and trials, a shadowy picture of human life, from the creation to the general judgment. How long Texada was employed about this cold and unsatisfactory allegory, we are not told; but it was not published till 1673, nearly forty years after it was begun, and then it was given to the public by his brother as a posthumous work, with the inappropriate title of “The Second Part of the Marvellous Lion.” Neither romance had a living interest capable of insuring it a permanent success, but both are written in a purer style than was common in such works at the same period, and the first of them occasionally attacks the faults of the contemporary literature with spirit and good-humor.[135]
Quite different from both of them, “The New Kings of Toledo,” by Christóval Lozano, introduces only real personages, and contains little but the facts of known history and old tradition, slightly embellished by the spirit of romance. Its author was attached to the metropolitan cathedral of Toledo, and, with Calderon, served in the chapel set apart for the burial of the New Kings, as the monarchs of Castile were called from the time of Henry of Trastamara, who there established for himself a cemetery, separate from that in which the race ending with the dishonored Don Pedro had been entombed.
The pious chaplain, who was thus called to pray daily for the souls of the line of sovereigns that had constituted the house of Trastamara, determined to illustrate their memories by a romantic history; and, beginning with the old national traditions of the origin of Toledo, the cave of Hercules, the marriage of Charlemagne with a Moorish princess whom he converted, and the refusal of a Christian princess to marry a Moor whom she could not convert, he gives us an account of the building of the chapel, and the adventures of the kings who sleep under its altars, down as late as the death of Henry the Third, in 1406. From internal evidence, it was written at the end of the reign of Philip the Fourth, when Spanish prose had lost much both of its purity and of its dignity; but Lozano, though not free from the affectations of his age, wrote so much more simply than his contemporaries generally did, and his story, though little indebted to his own invention, was yet found so attractive, that, in about half a century, eleven editions of it were published, and it obtained for itself a place in Spanish literature which it has never entirely lost.[136]
After all, however, the serious and historical fictions produced in Spain, that merit the name of full-length romances, were, from the first, few in number, and, with the exception of Hita’s “Civil Wars of Granada,” deserved little favor. Subsequent to the reign of Philip the Fourth, they almost disappeared for above a century; and even at the end of that period, they occurred rarely, and obtained little regard.[137]
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Tales. — Villegas, Timoneda, Cervantes, Hidalgo, Figueroa, Barbadillo, Eslava, Agreda, Liñan y Verdugo, Lope de Vega, Salazar, Lugo, Camerino, Tellez, Montalvan, Reyes, Peralta, Céspedes, Moya, Anaya, Mariana de Carbajal, María de Zayas, Mata, Castillo, Lozano, Solorzano, Alonso de Alcalá, Villalpando, Prado, Robles, Guevara, Polo, Garcia, Santos. — Great Number of Tales. — General Remarks on all the Forms of Spanish Fiction.
Short stories or tales were more successful in Spain, during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth, than any other form of prose fiction, and were produced in greater numbers. They seem, indeed, to have sprung afresh, and with great vigor, from the prevailing national tastes and manners, not at all connected with the tales of Oriental origin, that had been introduced above two hundred years earlier by Don Juan Manuel, and little affected by the brilliant Italian school, of which Boccaccio was the head; but showing rather, in the hues they borrowed from the longer contemporary pastoral, satirical, and historical romances, how truly they belonged to the spirit of their own times, and to the state of society in which they appeared. We turn to them, therefore, with more than common interest.
The oldest Spanish tales of the sixteenth century, that deserve to be noticed, are two that are found in a small volume of the works of Antonio de Villegas, somewhat conceitedly called “El Inventario,” and prepared for the press about 1550, though not published till 1565.[138] The first of them is entitled “Absence and Solitude,” a pastoral consisting of about equal portions of prose and poetry, and is as affected and in as bad taste as the ampler fictions of the class to which it belongs. The other—“The Story of Narvaez”—is much better. It is the Spanish version of a romantic adventure that really occurred on the frontiers of Granada, in the days when knighthood was in its glory among Moors as well as among Christians. Its principal incidents are as follows.