A History of Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

Bid Beltenebros to come!'"

Overpraised and overblamed, Quevedo attempted too much. He had it in him to be a poet, or a theologian, or a stoic philosopher, or a critic, or a satirist, or a statesman: he insisted on being all of these together, and he has paid the penalty. Though he never fails ignominiously, he rarely achieves a genuine success, and the bulk of his writing is now neglected because of its local and ephemeral interest. Yet he deserves honour as the most widely-gifted Spaniard of his time, as a strong and honest man in a corrupt age, and as a brilliant writer whose hatred of the commonplace beguiled him into adopting a dull innovation. It is not likely that his numerous inedited lyrics will do more than increase our knowledge of Góngora's and Montalbán's failings; but the two plays promised by Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo—Cómo ha de ser el Privado and Pero Vázquez de Escamilla—cannot but reveal a new aspect of a many-sided genius.

Quevedo was not, however, known as a dramatist to the same extent as the Valencian, Guillén de Castro y Bellvis (1569-1631), an erratic soldier who has achieved renown in and out of Spain. Castro is sometimes credited with the Prodigio de los Montes, whence Calderón derived his Mágico Prodigioso, but the Prodigio is almost certainly by Lope. Castro's fame rests on his Mocedades del Cid (The Cid's First Exploits), a dramatic adaptation of national tradition in Lope's manner. Ximena, daughter of Lozano, loves Rodrigo before the action begins, and, on Lozano's death by Rodrigo's hand, her passion and her duty are in conflict. Rodrigo's victories against the Moors help to expiate his crime: on a false rumour of his death, Ximena avows her love for him, and patriotism combines with inclination to yield a dramatic ending. Corneille, treating Castro's play with the freedom of a man of genius, founded the French school of tragedy; but not all his changes are improvements. By limiting the time of action he needlessly emphasises the difficulty of the situation. Castro's device is sounder when he prolongs the space which shall diminish Ximena's filial grief and increase her admiration of the Cid. The strife between love and honour exists already in the Spanish, and Corneille's merit lies in his suppression of Castro's superfluous third act, in his magnificent rhetoric, beside which the Spaniard's simplicity seems weak. But though Castro wrote no masterpiece, he begot one based upon his original conception, and some of Corneille's most admired tirades are but amplified translations.

Less remarkable as a playwright than as a novelist, the lawyer, Luis Vélez de Guevara (1570-1643); is reputed to have written no fewer than four hundred pieces for the stage. Of these, eighty survive, mostly on historic themes, which—as in El Valor no tiene Edad—are treated with tiresome extravagance; but the most difficult critics have found praise for Más pesa el Rey que la Sangre (King First, Blood Second). The story is that, in the thirteenth century, Guzmán the Good held Tarifa for King Sancho; the rebel Infante, Don Juan, called upon him to surrender under pain of his son's death; for answer, Guzmán threw his dagger over the battlement, and saw the boy murdered before his eyes. Rarely has the old Castilian tradition of loyalty to the King been presented with more picturesque force, and few scenes in any dramatic literature surpass that last one on the raising of the siege, when Guzmán points to his child's corpse. Vélez de Guevara collaborated with Rojas Zorrilla and Mira de Amescua in The Devil's Suit against the Priest of Madrilejos, a play in which a lunatic girl saves her life by pleading demoniacal possession. The idea is characteristic of Guevara's uncanny invention; but the Inquisition frowned upon stage representatives of exorcism, and, though the author's orthodoxy was not questioned, the play was withdrawn. He is best remembered for his satire El Diablo Cojuelo (1641), which describes observations taken during a flight through the air by a student who releases the Lame Devil from a flask, and is repaid by glimpses of life in courts and slums and stews. Le Sage, in his Diable Boiteux, has greatly improved upon the first conception; but the original is of excellent humour, and the style is as idiomatic as the best Castilian can be. Felipe IV. is said to have smiled only three times in his life—twice at quips by Guevara, who was his chamberlain.

Of all Lope's imitators the most undisguised is the son of the King's bookseller, Doctor Juan Pérez de Montalbán (1602-38), who became a priest of the Congregation of St. Peter in 1625. His father was plain Juan Pérez (as who should say John Smith), and the son was cruelly bantered for his airs and graces:—"Put Doctor in front and Montalbán behind, and plebeian Pérez shines an aristocrat." It was rumoured that his Orfeo (1624), written to compete with Jáuregui, was really Lope's work, given by the patriarch to start his favourite in life. The story is probably false, for the verse lacks Lope's ease and grace; but the Orfeo won Montalbán a name, and—there is no such luck for modern minor poets—in 1625 a Peruvian merchant expressed his admiration by settling a pension on the young priest. Montalbán lived in closest intimacy with Lope, who taught his young admirer stagecraft, and helped him with introductions to managers. Unluckily he sought to rival his master in fecundity as well as in method, and the effort broke him. He is often credited with writing the Tribunal of Just Vengeance, a work which describes Quevedo as "Master of Error, Doctor of Impudence, Licentiate of Buffoonery, Bachelor of Filth, Professor of Vice, and Archdevil of Mankind." Quevedo, on his side, had a grievance, inasmuch as Pérez, the bookseller, had pirated the Buscón. He prophesied that Montalbán would die a lunatic, and, in fact, his words came true.

Pellicer credits Montalbán with literary theories of his own, but they are mere repetitions of Lope's precepts in the Arte Nuevo. Like his master, Montalbán has a keen eye for a situation, for the dramatic value of a popular story, as he shows in his Amantes de Teruel, those eternal types of constancy; but he writes too hurriedly, with more ambition than power, is infected with culteranismo, and, though he apes Lope with superficial success in his secular plays, fails utterly when he attempts the sacred drama. His own age thought most highly of No hay Vida como la Honra, one of the first pieces to have a "run" on the Spanish stage; but the Amantes is his best work, and its vigorous dialogue may still be read with emotion.

These lovers of Teruel were also staged by a man of genius whose pseudonym has completely overshadowed his family name of Gabriel Téllez. The career of Tirso de Molina (1571-1648) is often dismissed in six lines packed with errors; but the publication of Sr. Cotarelo y Mori's study has made such summary treatment impossible in the future. Writers whose imagination does service for research have invented the fables that Tirso led a scandalous, stormy life, and that the repentant sinner took orders in middle age. These legends are baseless, and are conceived on the theory that Tirso's outspoken plays imply a deep knowledge of human nature's weak side and of the shadiest picaresque corners. It appears to be forgotten that Tirso spent years in the confessional: no bad position for the study of frailty. It seems certain that he was born at Madrid, and that he studied at Alcalá is clear from Matías de los Reyes' dedication of El Agravio agraviado. The date of his profession is not known; but he is named as a Mercedarian monk and as "a comic poet" by the actor-manager, Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy, in his Letanía moral, written before 1610, though not printed till 1613. His holograph of Santa Juana is dated in 1613 from Toledo, where he also wrote his Cigarrales. Passages in La Gallega Mari Hernández imply a residence in Galicia. That he lived in Seville, and visited the island of Santo Domingo, is certain, though the dates are not known. In 1619 he was Superior of the Mercedarian convent at Trujillo, an appointment which implies that he was a monk of long standing. In 1620 Lope dedicated to him Lo Fingido verdadero, and in the same year Tirso returned the compliment by dedicating his Villana de Vallecas to Lope. Though he competed in 1622 at the Madrid feasts in honour of St. Isidore, he failed to receive even honourable mention. Ten years later he became official chronicler of his order, and showed his opinion of his predecessor, Alonso Remón—with whom he has been confounded, even by Cervantes—by rewriting Remón's history. In 1634 he was made Definidor General for Castile, and his name reappears as licenser of books, or in legal documents. He died on March 21, 1648, being then Prior at Soria, renowned as a preacher of most tranquil, virtuous life, the very opposite of what ignorant fancy has feigned of him. He is known to have written plays so recently as 1638, for the holograph of his Quinas de Portugal bears that date; but the preface to the Deleitar Aprovechado shows that his popularity was on the wane in 1635. His last years were given to writing a Genealogía del Conde de Sástago and the chronicle of the Mercedarian Order.

Tirso's earliest printed volume is his Cigarrales de Toledo (1621 or 1624), so called from a local Toledan word for a summer country-house set down in an orchard. The book is a collection of tales and verse, supposed to be recited during five days of festivity which have followed a wedding. Tirso, indeed, announces stories and verse which shall last twenty days; yet he breaks off at the fifth, announcing a Second Part, which never appeared. Critics profess to find in Tirso's tales some traces of Cervantes, who is praised in the text as the "Spanish Boccaccio": the influence of the Italian Boccaccio is far more obvious throughout, and—save for a tinge of Gongorism—Los Tres Maridos burlados might well pass as a splendid adaptation from the Decamerone. Still, even in the Cigarrales the born playwright asserts himself in Cómo han de ser los Amigos, in El Celoso prudente, and in one of Tirso's most brilliant pieces, El Vergonzoso en Palacio. A second collection entitled Deleitar Aprovechado (Business with Profit), issued in 1635, contains three pious tales of no great merit, and several autos, one of which—El Colmenero divino—is Tirso's best attempt at religious drama.

Essentially a dramatist, he is to be but partially studied in his theatre, of which the first part appeared in 1627, the third in 1634, the second and fourth in 1635, and the fifth in 1637. A famous play is the Condenado por Desconfiado (The Doubter Damned), of which some would deprive Tirso; yet the treatment is specially characteristic of him. Paulo, who has left the world for a hermitage, prays for light as to his future salvation, dreams that his sins exceed his merits, and is urged by the devil to go to Naples to seek out Enrico, whose ending will be like his own. Paulo obeys, discovers Enrico to be a rook and bully, and in despair takes to a bandit's life. Meanwhile Enrico shows a hint of virtue by refusing to slay an old man whose appearance reminds the bully of his own father, and kills the master who taunted him with flinching from a bargain. He escapes to where Paulo and his gang are hidden. Garbed as a hermit, Paulo vainly exhorts Enrico to confess, though the criminal finally repents, and is seen by Pedrisco—Paulo's servant—passing to heaven. Duped by the devil, Paulo refuses to believe Pedrisco's story, and dies damned through his own distrust and pride. The substance of this play, which is contrived with abounding skill and theological knowledge, is the old conflict between free-will and predestination. Some would ascribe the play to Lope, because the pastoral scenes are in his manner, but the notion that Lope would publish under Tirso's name is untenable. Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo will not be suspected of a prejudice against Lope; and he avers, in so many words, that the only playwright in Spain with enough theology to write the Condenado was Tirso, who, had he written nothing else, would rank among the greatest Spanish dramatists.

The piece which has won Tirso immortality is his Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra (The Seville Mocker and the Stone Guest), first printed at Barcelona in 1630 as the seventh of Twelve New Plays by Lope de Vega Carpio, and other Authors; and the omission of the Burlador from all authorised editions has led critics of authority to question Tirso's authorship.[27] The discovery in 1878 of a new version caused Manuel de la Revilla to declare that the play was by Calderón, on the ground that Calderón's name is on the title-page, and that Calderón never trespassed on other men's property. This is an overstatement: to mention but a few instances, Calderón's Á Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza is re-arranged from Tirso's Celoso prudente; his Secreto á Voces from Tirso's Amar por Arte mayor, while the second act of Calderón's Cabellos de Absalón is lifted, almost word for word, from the third act of Tirso's Venganza de Tamar. On the whole, then, Tirso may be taken as the creator of Don Juan. No analysis is needed of a play with which Mozart, the most Athenian of musicians, has familiarised mankind; nor is translation possible in the present corrupt state of the text. Whether or not there existed an historic Don Juan at Plasencia or at Seville is doubtful, for folklorists have found the story as far away from Spain as Iceland is; but it is Tirso's glory to have so treated it that the world has accepted it as a purely Spanish conception. The Festin de Pierre (1659) by Dorimond, the Fils Criminel (1660) of De Villiers, the Dom Juan (1665) of Molière, the Nouveau Festin de Pierre (1670) of Rosimond, and the arrangement of Thomas Corneille, are but pale reflections of the Spanish type which passes onward from Shadwell's Libertine (1676) till it reaches the hands of Byron and Zorrilla and Barbey d'Aurévilly and Flaubert (whose posthumous sketch comes closer back to the original). Of these later artists not one has succeeded in matching the patrician dignity, the infernal, iniquitous valour of the original. To have created a universal type, to have imposed a character upon the world, to have outlived all rivalry, to have achieved in words what Mozart alone has expressed in music, is to rank among the great creators of all time.