A History of Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

Lope de Vega is the greatest of Spanish dramatists; Calderón is amongst those who most nearly approach him. Lope incarnates the genius of a nation; Calderón expresses the genius of an age. He is a Spaniard to the marrow, but a Spaniard of the seventeenth century—a courtier with a turn for culteranismo, averse from the picaresque contrasts which lend variety to Lope's scene and to Tirso's. His interpretation of existence is so idealised that his stage becomes in some sort the apotheosis of his century. His characters are not so much men and women, as allegorical types of men and women as Calderón conceived them. It is not real life that he reveals, for he regarded realism as ignoble and unclean: he offers in its place a brilliant pageant of abstract emotions. He is not a universal dramatist: he ranks with the greatest writers for the Spanish stage, inasmuch as he is the greatest poet using the dramatic form. And, leaving aside his anachronisms and jumblings of mythology, he is a scrupulous artist, careful of his literary form and of his construction. The finished execution of his best passages is so irresistible that FitzGerald declared Isabel's characteristic speech in the Alcalde de Zalamea to be "worthy of the Greek Antigone":—"Oh, never, never might the light of day arise and show me to myself in my shame! O fleeting morning star, mightest thou never yield to the dawn that even now presses on thine azure skirts! And thou, great Orb of all, do thou stay down in the cold ocean foam; let Night for once advance her trembling empire into thine! For once assert thy voluntary power to hear and pity human misery and prayer, nor hasten up to proclaim the vilest deed that Heaven, in revenge on man, has written on his guilty annals. Alas! even as I speak, thou liftest thy bright, inexorable face above the hills." Contrast with this impassioned lament (a little toned down in FitzGerald's version) the aphoristic wisdom of Pedro Crespo's counsel to his son in the same play:—"Thou com'st of honourable if of humble stock; bear both in mind, so as neither to be daunted from trying to rise, nor puffed up so as to be sure to fall. How many have done away the memory of a defect by carrying themselves modestly, while others, again, have gotten a blemish only by being too proud of being born without one. There is a just humility that will maintain thine own dignity, and yet make thee insensible to many a rub that galls the proud spirit. Be courteous in thy manner, and liberal of thy purse; for 'tis the hand to the bonnet, and in the pocket, that makes friends in this world, of which to gain one good, all the gold the sun breeds in India, or the universal sea sucks down, were a cheap purchase. Speak no evil of women; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves our respect; for of women do we not all come? Quarrel with no one but with good cause.... I trust in God to live to see thee home again with honour and advancement on thy back."

Had Calderón always maintained this level, he would be classed with the first masters of all ages and all countries. His blood, his faith, his environment were limitations which prevented his becoming a world-poet; his majesty, his devout lyrism, his decorative fantasy suffice to place him in the foremost file of national poets. But he was not so national that foreign adaptors left him untouched: thus D'Ouville annexed the Dama Duende under the title of L'Esprit follet, which reappears as Killigrew's Parson's Wedding; thus Dryden's Evening's Love is Calderón done from Corneille's French; thus Wycherley's Gentleman Dancing Master derives from El Maestro de danzar. Yet, though Calderón's plots may be conveyed, his substance cannot be denationalised, being, as he is, the sublimest Catholic poet, as Catholicism and poetry were understood by the Spaniards of the seventeenth century: a local genius of intensely local savour, exercising his dramatic in local forms.

Archbishop Trench has suggested that in the three great theatres of the world the best period covers little more than a century, and he proves his thesis by a reference to dates. Æschylus was born B.C. 525, and Euripides died B.C. 406: Marlowe was born in 1564, and Shirley died in 1666: Lope was born in 1562, and Calderón died in 1681. With Calderón the heroic age of the Spanish theatre reached a splendid close. He chanced to outlive his Toledan contemporary, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla (1607-? 1661), from whose Traición busca el Castigo Le Sage has arranged his Traître puni, and Vanbrugh his False Friend. A courtly poet, and a Commander of the Order of Santiago, Rojas Zorrilla collaborated with fashionable writers like Vélez de Guevara, Mira de Amescua, and Calderón, of whom he is accounted a disciple, though his one great tragedy has real individual power. His two volumes of plays (1640, 1645) reveal him as a most ingenious dramatist, who carries the "point of honour" further than Calderón in his best known play, Del Rey abajo ninguno, a characteristically Spanish piece. García de Castañar, apparently a peasant living near Toledo, subscribes so generously to the funds for the expedition to Algeciras that King Alfonso XI. resolves to visit him in disguise. García gets wind of this, and receives his guests honourably, mistaking Mendo for Alfonso. Mendo conceives a passion for Blanca, García's wife, and is discovered by the husband at Blanca's door. As the King is inviolate for a subject, García resolves to slay Blanca, who escapes to court. García is summoned by the King, finds his mistake, settles matters by slaying Mendo in the palace, and explains to his sovereign (and his audience) that none under the King can affront him with impunity. Rojas Zorrilla's style occasionally inclines to culteranismo; but this is an obvious concession to popular taste, his true manner being direct and energetic. His clever construction and witty dialogue are best studied in Lo que son Mujeres (What Women are) and in Entre Bobos anda el Juego (The Boobies' Sport).

A very notable talent is that of Agustín Moreto y Cavaña (1618-69), whose popularity as a writer of cloak-and-sword plays is only less than Lope's. In 1639 Moreto graduated as a licentiate in arts at Alcalá de Henares. Thence he made his way to Madrid, where he found a protector in Calderón. He published a volume of plays in 1654, and is believed to have taken orders three years later. Moreto is not a great inventor, but so far as concerns stagecraft he is above all contemporaries. In El Desdén con el Desdén (Scorn for Scorn) he borrows Lope's Milagros del Desprecio (Scorn works Wonders), and it is fair to say that the rifacimento excels the original at every point. Diana, daughter of the Conde de Barcelona, mocks at marriage: her father surrounds her with the neighbouring gallants, among whom is the Conde de Urgel. Urgel's affected coolness piques the lady into a resolve to captivate him, and she so far succeeds as to lead him to avow his love for her: he escapes rejection by feigning that his declaration was a jest, and the dramatic solution is brought about by Diana's surrender. The plot is ordered with consummate skill, the dialogue is of the gayest humour, the characters more life-like than any but Alarcón's; and as evidence of the playwright's tact, it is enough to say that when Molière, in his Princesse d'Élide, strove to repeat Moreto's exploit he met with ignominious disaster. In the delicacy of touch with which Moreto handles a humorous situation he is almost unrivalled; and in the broader spirit of farce, his graciosos—comic characters, generally body-servants to the heroes—are admirable for natural force and for gusts of spontaneous wit. In El lindo Don Diego he has fixed the type of the fop convinced that he is irresistible, and the presentation of fatuity which leads Don Diego into marriage with a serving-wench (whom he mistakes for a countess) is among the few masterpieces of high comedy. Moreto's historical plays are of less universal interest; in this kind, El Rico Hombre de Alcalá is a powerful and sympathetic picture of Pedro the Cruel—the strong man doing justice on the noble, Tello García—from the standpoint of the Spanish populace, which has ever respected el Rey justiciero. In his later years Moreto betook him to the comedia devota; his San Francisco de Sena is extravagantly and almost ludicrously devout, as in the scenes where Francisco wagers his eyes, loses, is struck blind, and repents on recovering his sight. The devout play was not Moreto's calling: in his first and best manner, as a master of the lighter, gayer comedy, he holds his own against all Spain.

Among the followers of Calderón are Antonio Cuello (d. 1652), who is reported to have collaborated with Felipe IV. in El Conde de Essex; Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón (fl. 1664), whose Perfecta Casada is a good piece of work; Juan Matos Fragoso (? 1614-92), who borrowed and plagiarised with successful audacity; but these, with many others, are mere imitators, and the Spanish theatre declines lower and lower, till in the hands of Carlos II.'s favourite, Francisco Antonio Bances Candamo (1662-1704), it reaches its nadir. The last good playwright of the classic age is Antonio de Solís y Rivadeneira (1610-86), who, by the accident of his long life, lends a ray of renown to the deplorable reign of Carlos II. His dramas are excellent in construction and phrasing, and his Amor al uso was popular in France through Thomas Corneille's adaptation.

But his title to fame rests, not on verse, but on prose. His Historia de la Conquista de Méjico (1684) is a most distinguished performance, even if we compare it with Mariana's. Seeing that Solís lived through the worst periods of Gongorism, his style is a marvel of purity, though a difficult critic might well condemn its cloying suavity. Still, his work has never been displaced since its first appearance, for it deals with a very picturesque period, is eloquent and clear, and is almost excessively patriotic in tone and spirit. Gibbon, in his sixty-second chapter, mentions "an Aragonese history which I have read with pleasure"—the Expedición de los catalanes y aragoneses contra turcos y griegos by Francisco de Moncada, Conde de Osuna (1586-1635). "He never quotes his authorities," adds Gibbon; and, in fact, Moncada mostly translates from Ramón Muntaner's Catalan Crónica, though he translates in excellent fashion. Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584-1648) writes with force and ease in his uncritical Corona Gótica, and in his more interesting literary review, the República literaria; his freedom from Gongorism is explained by the fact that he passed most of his life out of Spain. The Portuguese, Francisco Manuel de Melo (1611-66), is ill represented by his Historia de los Movimientos, Separación y Guerra de Cataluña (1645), where he is given over to both Gongorism and conceptismo: in his native tongue—as in his Apologos Dialogaes—he writes with simplicity, strength, and wit. Melo's life was unlucky: when he was not being shipwrecked, he was in jail on suspicion of being a murderer; and being out of jail, he was exiled to Brazil. His reward is posthumous: both Portuguese and Spaniards hold him for a classic, and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo even compares him to Quevedo.

Another man of Portuguese birth has won immortality outside of literature; yet there is ground for thinking that Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599-1660) had the sense for language as for paint. His Memoria de las Pinturas (1658) exists in an unique copy published at Rome under the name of his pupil, Juan de Alfaro, though its substance is unscrupulously embodied in Francisco de los Santos' Descripción Breve of the Escorial. Formally, it is a catalogue; substantially, it expresses the artist's judgment on his great predecessors. Thus, of Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast he writes:—"There are admirable heads, and almost all of them seem portraits. Not that of the Virgin: she has more reserve, more divinity: though very beautiful, she corresponds fittingly to the age of Christ, who is beside her—a point which most artists overlook, for they paint Christ as a man, and His Mother as a girl." The great realist speaks once more in describing Veronese's Purification:—"The Virgin kneels ... holding on a white cloth the Child—naked, beautiful, and tender—with a restlessness so suited to his age that He seems more a piece of living flesh than something painted." And, in the same spirit, he writes of Tintoretto's Washing of the Feet:—"It is hard to believe that one is looking at a painting. Such is the truth of colour, such the exactness of perspective, that one might think to go in and walk on the pavement, tessellated with stones of divers colours, which, diminishing in size, make the room seem larger, and lead you to believe that there is atmosphere between each figure. The table, seats (and a dog which is worked in) are truth, not paint.... Once for all, any picture placed beside it looks like something expressed in terms of colour, and this seems all the truer." Strangely enough, this writing of Velázquez is ignored by most, perhaps by all, of his biographers; yet it deserves a passing reference as a model of energetic expression in a time when most professional men of letters were Gongorists or conceptistas.

A certain directness of style is found in Gerónimo de Alcalá Yañez y Ribera's Alonso, Mozo de muchos Amos (1625), in Alonso de Castillo Solórzano's Garduña de Seville (the Seville Weasel, 1634), in the Siglo Pitagórico (1644) of the Segovian Jew, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, and in the half-true, half-invented Vida y Hechos de Estebanillo González (1646)—all picaresque tales, clever, amusing, and improper, on the approved pattern. But the pest of preciosity spread to fiction, is conspicuous in the Español Gerardo of Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, and steadily degenerates till it becomes arrant nonsense in the Varios Efectos de Amor (1641) of Alonso de Alcalá y Herrera—five stories, in each of which one of the vowels is omitted. Alcalá, however, had neither talent nor influence. The Aragonese Jesuit, Baltasar Gracián (1601-58), had both, and his vogue is proved by numerous editions, by translations, by such references as that in the Entretiens of Bouhours, who proclaims him "le sublime." Addison thrice mentions him with respect in the Spectator, and it is suggested that Rycaut's rendering of the Criticón may have given Defoe the idea of Man Friday. In the present century Schopenhauer vowed that the Criticón was "one of the best books in the world," and Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, taking his cue from Schopenhauer, has extolled Gracián with some vehemence.

Gracián seems to have been indifferent to popularity, and his works, published somewhat against his will by his friend, Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa, were mostly issued under the name of Lorenzo Gracián. His first work was El Héroe (1630), an ideal rendering of the Happy Warrior, as El Discreto (1647) is the ideal of the Politic Courtier; more important than either is the Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio (1642), a conceptista Art of Rhetoric, of singular learning, subtlety, and catholic taste. The three parts of the Criticón, which appeared between 1650 and 1653, correspond to "the spring of childhood," "the summer of youth," and "the autumn of manhood." In this allegory of life the shipwrecked Critilo meets the wild man Andrenio, who finally learns Spanish and reveals his soul to Critilo, whom he accompanies to Spain, where he communes with both allegorical figures and real personages on all manner of philosophic questions. The general tone of the Criticón goes far towards explaining Schopenhauer's admiration; for the Spaniard is no less a woman-hater, is no less bitter, sarcastic, denunciatory, and pessimistic than the German. Gracián, to use his own phrase, "flaunts his unhappiness as a trophy" in phrases whose laboured ingenuity begins by impressing, and ends by fatiguing, the reader.

It is difficult to believe that Gracián's attitude towards life is more than a pose; but the pose is dignified, and he puts the pessimistic case with vigour and skill. His Oráculo Manual ó Arte de Prudencia (1653), a reduction of his gospel to the form of maxims, has found admirers (and even an excellent translator in the person of Mr. Joseph Jacobs). The reflection is always acute, and seems at whiles to anticipate the thought of La Rochefoucauld—doubtless because both drew from common sources; but though the doctrine and spirit be almost identical, Gracián nowhere approaches La Rochefoucauld's metallic brilliancy and concise perfection. He is not content to deliver his maxim, and have done with it: he adds—so to say—elaborate postscripts and epigrammatic amplifications, which debase the maxim to a platitude. Mr. John Morley's remark, that "some of his aphorisms give a neat turn to a commonplace," is scarcely too severe. Yet one cannot choose but think that Gracián was superior to his work. He had it in him to be as good a writer as he was a keen observer, and in many passages, when he casts his affectations from him, his expression is as lucid and as strong as may be; but he would posture, would be paradoxical to avoid being trite, would bewilder with his conceit and learning, would try to pack more meaning into words than words will carry. No man ever wrote with more care and scruple, with more ambition to excel according to the formulæ of a fashionable school, with more scorn for Gongorism and all its work. Still, though he avoided the offence of obscure language, he sinned most grievously by obscurity of thought, and he is now forgotten by all but students, who look upon him as a chief among the wrong-headed, misguided conceptistas.