The style they adopted was soon imitated. Montalvan, who, like his master, never failed to follow the indications of the popular taste, printed, in 1632, his “Para Todos,” or For Everybody, containing the imaginary amusements of a party of literary friends, who agreed to cater for each other during a week, and whose festivities are ended, as those of the “Cigarrales” began, with a wedding. Some of its inventions are very learnedly dull, and it is throughout less well arranged than the account of the entertainments near Toledo, and falls less naturally into a dramatic framework. But it shows its author’s talent. The individual stories are pleasantly told, especially the one called “At the End of the Year One Thousand”; and, as a whole, the “Para Todos” was popular, going through nine editions in less than thirty years, notwithstanding a very severe attack on it by Quevedo.[161] Its popularity, too, had the natural effect of producing imitations, among which, in 1640, appeared, “Para Algunos,”—For a Few,—by Matias de los Reyes;[162] and, somewhat later, “Para Sí,”—For one’s own Self,—by Juan Fernandez y Peralta.[163]
Meantime the succession of separate tales had been actively kept up. Montalvan published eight in 1624, written with more than the usual measure of grace in such Spanish compositions; one of them, “The Disastrous Friendship,” founded on the sufferings of an Algerine captivity, being one of the best in the language, and all of them so successful, that they were printed eleven times in about thirty years.[164] Céspedes y Meneses followed, in 1628, with a series entitled “Rare Histories”;[165]—Moya, at about the same time, published a single whimsical story on “The Fancies of a Fright”; in which he relates a succession of marvellous incidents, that, as he declares, flashed through his own imagination while falling down a precipice in the Sierra Morena;[166]—and Castro y Anaya published, in 1632, five tales called “The Auroras of Diana,” because they are told in the early dawn of each morning, during five successive days, to amuse Diana, a lady who, after a long illness, had fallen into a state of melancholy.[167]
The fair sex, too, entered into the general fashionable competition. Mariana de Carbajal, a native of Granada, and descended from the ancient ducal families of San Carlos and Rivas, published, in 1638, eight tales, pleasing both by their invention and by the simplicity of their style, which she called “Christmas at Madrid,” or “Evening Amusements.”[168] And in 1637 and 1647, María de Zayas, a lady of the court, printed two collections; the first called simply “Tales,” and the last “Saraos,” or Balls; each a series of ten stories within itself, and both connected together by the entertainments of a party of friends at Christmas, and the dances and fêtes at the wedding of two of their number, during the holidays that followed.[169]
Again, slight changes in such fictions were attempted. Mata, in two dull tales, called “The Solitudes of Aurelia,” published in 1637, endeavoured to give them a more religious character;[170] and in 1641, André del Castillo, in six stories misnamed “The Masquerade of Taste,” sought to give them even a lighter tone than the old one.[171] Both found successors. Lozano’s “Solitudes of Life,” which are four stories supposed to be told by a hermit on the wild peaks of the Monserrate, belong to the first class, and, notwithstanding a somewhat affected style, were much praised by Calderon, and went through at least six editions;[172]—while, in the opposite direction, between 1625 and 1640, we have a number of the freest secular tales, by Castillo Solorzano, among which the best are probably “The Alleviations of Cassandra,” and “The Country-House of Laura,” both imitations of Castro’s “Diana.”[173]
In the same way, the succession of short fictions was continued unbroken, until it ceased with the general decay of Spanish literature at the end of the century. Thus we have, in 1641, “The Various Effects of Love and Fortune,” by Alonso de Alcalá; five stories, such as may be imagined from the fact, that, in each of them, one of the five vowels is entirely omitted;[174]—in 1645, “The Warnings, or Experiences, of Jacinto,” by Villalpando, which may have been taken from his own life, since Jacinto was the first of his own names;[175]—in 1663, “The Festivals of Wit and Entertainments of Taste,” by Andres de Prado;[176]—and, in 1666, a series collected from different authors, by Isidro de Robles,[177] and published under the title of “Wonders of Love.” All these, as their names indicate, belong to one school; and although there is an occasional variety in their individual tones, some of them being humorous and others sentimental, and although some of them have their scenes in Spain and others in Italy or Algiers, still, as the purpose of all was only the lightest amusement, they may all be grouped together and characterized in the mass, as of little value, and as falling off in merit the nearer they approach the period when such fictions ceased in the elder Spanish literature.
One more variety in the characteristics of this style of writing in Spain is, however, so distinct from the rest, that it should be separately mentioned,—that which has sometimes been called the Allegorical and Satirical Tale, and which generally took the form of a Vision. It was, probably, suggested by the bold and original “Visions” of Quevedo; and the instance of it most worthy of notice is “The Limping Devil” of Luis Velez de Guevara, which appeared in 1641. It is a short story, founded on the idea that a student releases from his confinement, in a magician’s vial, the Limping Devil, who, in return for this service, carries his liberator through the air, and, unroofing, as it were, the houses of Madrid, during the stillness of the night, shows him the secrets that are passing within. It is divided into ten “Leaps,” as they afterwards spring from place to place in different parts of Spain, in order to pounce on their prey, and it is satirical throughout. Parts of it are very happy; among which may be selected those relating to fashionable life, to the life of rogues, and to that of men of letters, in the large cities of Castile and Andalusia, though these, like the rest, are often disfigured with the bad taste then so common. On the whole, however, it is an amusing fiction,—partly allegorical and partly sketched from living manners,—and is to be placed among the more spirited prose satires in modern literature, both in its original form and in the form given to it by Le Sage, whose rifacimento has carried it, under the name of “Le Diable Boiteux,” wherever letters are known.[178]
Earlier than the appearance of the Limping Devil, however, Polo had written his “Hospital of Incurables,” a direct, but poor, imitation of Quevedo; and in 1647, under an assumed name, he published his “University of Love, or School for Selfishness,” a satire against mercenary matches, thrown into the shape of a vision of the University of Love, where the fair sex are brought up in the arts of profitable intrigue, and receive degrees according to their progress.[179] It is, in general, an ill-managed allegory, filled with bad puns and worse verse; but there is one passage so characteristic of Spanish wit in this form of fiction, that it may be cited as an illustration of the entire class to which it belongs.
“‘That young creature whom you see there,’ said the God of Love, as he led me on, ‘is the chief captain of my war, the one that has brought most soldiers to my feet and enlisted most men under my banners. The elderly person that is leading her along by the hand is her aunt.’ ‘Her aunt, did you say?’ I replied; ‘her aunt? Then there is an end of all my love for her. That word aunt is a counter poison that has disinfected me entirely, and quite healed the wound your well-planted arrow was beginning to make in my heart. For, however much a man may be in love, there can be no doubt an aunt will always be enough to purge him clean of it. Inquisitive, suspicious, envious,—one or the other she cannot fail to be,—and if the niece have the luck to escape, the lover never has; for if she is envious, she wants him for herself; and if she is only suspicious, she still spoils all comfort, so disconcerting every little project, and so disturbing every little nice plan, as to render pleasure itself unsavory,’ ‘Why, what a desperately bad opinion you have of aunts!’ said Love. ‘To be sure I have,’ said I. ‘If the state of innocence in which Adam and Eve were created had nothing else to recommend it, the simple fact that there could have been no aunts in Paradise would have been enough for me. Why, every morning, as soon as I get up, I cross myself and say, “By the sign of the Holy Rood, from all aunts deliver us this day, Good Lord!” And every time I repeat the Paternoster, after “Lead us not into temptation,” I always add,—“nor into the way of aunts either.”’”
The example of Quevedo was, again, followed by Marcos Garcia, who in 1657 published his “Phlegm of Pedro Hernandez,” an imaginary, but popular, personage, whose arms, according to an old Spanish proverb, fell out of their sockets from the mere listlessness of their owner. It is a vision, in which women-servants who spend their lives in active cheating, students pressing vigorously forward to become quacks and pettifoggers, spendthrift soldiers, and similar uneasy, unprincipled persons of other conditions, are contrasted with those who, trusting to a quiet disposition, float noiselessly down the current of life, and succeed without an effort and without knowing how they do it. The general allegory is meagre; but some of the individual sketches are well imagined.[180]
The person, however, who, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, succeeded best in this style of composition, as well as in tales of other kinds, was Francisco Santos, a native of Madrid, who died not far from the year 1700. Between 1663 and 1697, he gave to the world sixteen volumes of different kinds of works for popular amusement;—generally short stories, but some of them encumbered with allegorical personages and tedious moral discussions.[181] The oldest of the series, “Dia y Noche en Madrid,” or, as it may be translated, Life in Madrid, though a mere fiction founded on manners, is divided into what the author terms Eighteen Discourses. It opens, as such Spanish tales are too apt to open, somewhat pompously; the first scene describing with too much elaborateness a procession of three hundred emancipated captives, who enter Madrid praising God and rejoicing at their release from the horrors of Algerine servitude. One of these captives, the hero of the story, falls immediately into the hands of a shrewd and not over-honest servant, named Juanillo, who, having begun the world as a beggar, and risen by cunning so far as to be employed in the capacity of an inferior servant by a fraternity of monks, now undertakes to make the stranger acquainted with the condition of Madrid, serving him as a guide wherever he goes, and interpreting to him whatever is most characteristic of the manners and follies of the capital. Some of the tales and sketches thus introduced are full of life and truth, as, for instance, those relating to the prisons, gaming-houses, and hospitals, and especially one in which a coquette, meeting a poor man at a bull-fight, so dupes him by her blandishments, that she sends him back penniless, at midnight, to his despairing wife and children, who, anxious and without food, have been waiting from the early morning to have him return with their dinner. This little volume, several parts of which have been freely used by Le Sage, ends with an account of the captive’s adventures in Italy, in Spain, and in Algiers, given by himself in a truly national tone, and with fluency and spirit.[182]