Another military history written by a nobleman connected with the service of his country, both in its armies and its diplomacy, is to be found in an account of eleven campaigns in Flanders by Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, published in 1625. A translation which he made of the “Annals” of Tacitus has been regarded as the best in the language; but, in his own work, he shows no tendency to imitate the ancients. On the contrary, it is, as it were, fresh from the fields of the author’s glory, and full of the honorable feelings of a soldier, sketching the adventures of the army when in camp, when in immediate action, and when in winter-quarters; and adding to his main narrative occasional glimpses of the negotiations then going on in the Low Countries respecting Spanish affairs, and of the intrigues of the courtiers at Madrid round the death-bed of Philip the Second. The style of Coloma is unequal; but much of what he describes he had seen, and the rest had passed within the compass of what he deemed sure information; so that he speaks, not only with authority, but with the natural vivacity which comes from being so near the events he records, that their color is imparted to his language.[217]
To the same class with the last belongs the spirited history of a portion of the Catalan rebellion in the time of Philip the Fourth. It was written by Melo, a Portuguese gentleman, who remained attached to the service of Spain till 1640-41, when he joined the standard of the Braganzas, and fought for the independence of his own country. His life, which extended from 1611 to 1667, was full of adventure. He was in the dreadful tempest of 1627, when the whole navy, as it were, of Portugal suffered shipwreck; and it fell to his lot to bury above two thousand bodies of those who had perished in the waves, from which he himself had hardly escaped. He was in the wars of Flanders and of Catalonia. Twelve years he was in prison in his own country, under an accusation of murder that was at last proved to be without foundation; and six years he was an exile in Brazil. But under all circumstances, and through all his trials, he sought consolation in letters. His published works, in prose and verse, in Spanish and in Portuguese, some of which have been already noticed, exceed a hundred volumes, and the unpublished would materially increase even this vast amount. What is more remarkable, he is, in both languages, admitted to the honors of a classic writer.
His “History of the War of Catalonia,” which embraces only the short period during which he served in it, was written while he was in prison, and was first published in 1645. Owing to political causes, he did not give his name to it; and when one of his friends in a letter expressed surprise at this circumstance, he answered, with a characteristic turn of phrase, “The book loses nothing for want of my name, and I shall lose nothing for want of the book.” It was, however, successful. The accounts of the first outbreak in Barcelona, on the feast of Corpus Christi, when the city was thronged with the bold peasantry of the interior; the subsequent strife of the exasperated factions; the debates in the Junta of Catalonia, and those in the king’s council, under the leading of the Count Duke Olivares; and the closing scene of the whole,—the ineffectual storming of the grand fortress of Mon Juich by the royal forces, and the disastrous retreat that followed,—are all given with a freshness and power that could come only from one who had shared in the feelings he describes, and had witnessed the very movements he sets with such a lifelike spirit before us. His style, too, is suited to his varying subjects; sometimes animated and forcible, sometimes quaint and idiomatic, and sometimes in its dark hints and abrupt turns reminding us of Tacitus. But the work is short,—not longer than that of Mendoza, which was its model,—and it covers only the space of about six months at the end of 1640 and the beginning of 1641.
Whether Melo intended to carry his narrative farther is uncertain. From his striking conclusion, where he says, “The events that followed—greater in themselves than those I have related—are perhaps reserved for a greater historian,” we might infer that he was desirous to describe only what he had witnessed. But, on the other side, in his Preface we have the following characteristic address to his readers, alluding to the concealment of his name as the author of the work he offers them. “If in any thing I have served you, I ask only that you would not endeavour to know more of me than it pleases my humor to tell you. I present to you my faithful opinion of things, just as it has been my lot to form it;—I do not present myself to you; for a knowledge of my person is not necessary to enable you to judge either kindly or harshly of what I have written. If I do not please you, read me no further;—if I do, I make no claims on your gratitude. I speak without fear and without vanity. The theatre before us is vast; the tragedy long. We shall meet again. You will know me by my voice; I shall know you by your judgment.” But, whatever may have been Melo’s original intentions, he survived the publication of this interesting work above twenty years, and yet added nothing to its pages.[218]
From this period, prose composition, which had been long infected with the bad taste of the age, suffered a still further and more marked decline. Saavedra Faxardo, indeed, who lived forty years out of Spain, employed in diplomatic missions, was educated in a better school, and formed himself on more worthy models, than he could have found among his contemporaries at home; but his “History of the Goths in Spain” is an imperfect work, published in 1646, at Munster, when he was there as a member of the congress that made the peace of Westphalia, and was left unfinished at his death, which occurred at Madrid two years later.[219] The only historian of eminence that remains to be noticed in this period is, therefore, Solís.
Of him we have already spoken as a lyrical poet and a dramatist, who in 1667 had retired from the world, and dedicated himself to the separate service of religion. He was, however, the official historiographer of the Indies, and thought himself bound to do something in fulfilment of the duties of an office to which, perhaps, a nominal income was attached. He chose for his subject “The Conquest of Mexico,” and, beginning with the condition of Spain when it was undertaken, and the appointment of Cortés to command the invading force, he brings his history down to the fall of the city and the capture of Guatimozin. The period it embraces is, indeed, short,—less than three years; but they are years so crowded with brilliant adventures and atrocious crimes, that hardly any portion of the history of the world is of equal interest. The subject, too, from this circumstance, is more easily managed; and Solís, who looked upon it with the eye of an artist, as well as of an historian, has succeeded in giving his work, to an extraordinary degree, the air of an historical epic;—so exactly are all its parts and episodes modelled into an harmonious whole, whose catastrophe is the fall of the great Mexican empire.
The style of Solís is somewhat peculiar. That he had the Roman historians, and especially Livy, before him, as he wrote, is apparent both in the general air of his work and in the structure of its individual sentences. Yet there are few writers of Spanish prose who are more absolutely Castilian in their idiom than he is. His language, if not simple, is rich and beautiful; suited to the romantic subject he had chosen for his history, and deeply imbued with its poetical spirit. In boldness of manner he falls below Mendoza, and in dignity is not equal to Mariana; but for copious and sustained eloquence, he may be placed by the side of either of them. That his work is as interesting as either of theirs is proved by the unimpaired popularity it has enjoyed from its first appearance down to our own times.
The Conquest of Mexico was written in the old age of its author, and is darkened by the feelings that shut him out from the interests and cares of the world. He refused to see the fierce and marvellous contest which he recorded, except from the steps of the altar where he had been consecrated. The Spaniards, therefore, are in his eyes only Christians; the Mexicans, only heathen. The battle he witnesses and describes is wholly between the powers of light and the legions of darkness; and the unhappy Indians,—whom the Spaniards had no more right to invade, in order to root out religious abominations, of which they had never heard till after their landing, than Henry the Eighth or Elizabeth had to invade Spain, in order to root out the abominations of the Spanish Inquisition,—the unhappy Indians receive none of the historian’s sympathy in the extremity of suffering they underwent during their vain, but heroic, struggle for all that could make existence valuable in their eyes.
The work of Solís, beautifully written and flattering to the national vanity, was at once successful. But success was then a word whose meaning was different from that which it bears now, or had borne in Spain in the time of Lope de Vega. The publication, which took place in 1684, by the assistance of a friend who defrayed the charges, found its author poor and left him so. On this point there are passages in his correspondence which it is painful to read;—one, for instance, where he says, “I have many creditors who would stop me in the street, if they saw I had new shoes on”; and another, where he asks a friend for a warm garment to protect him from the winter’s cold. Still he was gratified at the applause with which his work was received, though, at the end of a year, only two hundred copies had been sold. Two years afterwards he died, at the age of seventy-six, “leaving,” in the technical phrase and the technical habit of the time, “his soul to be the only heir of his body,” or, in other words, giving the remnants of his poverty to purchase expiatory masses.[220] Diego de Tovar, the same ecclesiastic who had been confessor to Quevedo and Nicolas Antonio, stood by the bedside of the dying man, and consoled the last moments of Solís, as he had consoled theirs.[221]
Solís was the last of the good writers in the elder school of Spanish history;—a school which, even during its best days, numbered but few names, and which, now that the whole literature of the country was decaying, shared the general fate. Nor could it be otherwise. The spirit of political tyranny in the government, and of religious tyranny in the Inquisition,—now closer than ever united,—were more hostile to bold and faithful inquiry in the department of history than in almost any other; so that the generous national independence and honesty announced in the old chronicles were stopped midway in their career, before half of their power had been put forth.