Written in the most debonair, idiomatic Castilian, Lazarillo de Tormes condenses into nine chapters the cynicism, the wit, and the resource of an observer of genius. After three hundred years, it survives all its rivals, and may be read with as much edification and amusement as on the day of its first appearance. It set a fashion, a fashion that spread to all countries, and finds a nineteenth-century manifestation in the pages of Pickwick; but few of its successors match it in satirical humour, and none approach it in pregnant concision, where no word is superfluous, and where every word tells with consummate effect. Whoever wrote the book, he fixed for ever the type of the comic prose epic as rendered by the needy, and he did it in such wise as to defy all competition. Yet ill-advised competitors were found: one, who has the grace to hide his name, at Antwerp, continuing Lázaro's adventures by exhibiting the gay scamp as a tunny, and a certain Juan de Luna, who, so late as 1620, converted Lázaro to a sea-monster on show.
Mysticism finds two distinguished exponents, of whom the earlier is the Apostle of Andalucía, the Venerable Juan de Ávila (1502-69), a priest, who, educated at the University of Alcalá, is famous for his sanctity, his evangelic missions in Granada, Córdoba, and Seville. The merest accident prevented his sailing for the New World in the suite of the Bishop of Tlaxcala, and his inopportune fervour led to his imprisonment by the Inquisition. Most of his religious treatises, beautiful as they are, are too technical for our purpose here; but his Cartas Espirituales are redolent of religious unction combined with the wisest practical spirit, the most sagacious counsel, and the rarest loving-kindness. Long practice in exhorting crowds of unlettered sinners had purged Juan de Ávila's style of the Asiatic exuberance in favour with Guevara and other contemporaries; and, though he considered letters a vanity, his own practice shows him to be a master in the accommodation of the lowliest, most familiar language to the loftiest subject.
In the opposite camp is Juan de Valdés (d. 1541), attached in some capacity to the court of Carlos Quinto, and suspect of heterodox tendencies in the eyes of all good Spaniards. Francisco de Encinas reports that Valdés found it convenient to leave Spain on account of his opinions; but, as his twin-brother, Alfonso, continued in the service of Carlos Quinto, and as Juan himself lived unmolested at Rome and Naples from 1531 to his death, this story cannot be accepted. None the less is it certain that Valdés, possibly through his friendship with Erasmus, was drawn into the current of the Reformation. His earliest work, written, perhaps, in collaboration with his brother, is the anonymous Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón (1528), an ingenious fable in Lucian's manner, abounding in political and religious malice, charged with ridicule of abuses in Church and State. Apart from its polemical value, it is indisputably the finest prose performance of the reign. Boscán's version of the Cortegiano most nearly vies with it; but Valdés excels Boscán in the artful construction of his periods, in the picturesqueness and moderation of his epithets, in the variety of his cadence, and in the refined selection of his means. It is possible that Cervantes, at his best, may match Valdés; but Cervantes is one of the most unequal writers in the world, while Valdés is one of the most scrupulous and vigilant. Hence, sectarian prejudice apart, Valdés must be accounted, if not absolutely the first, at least among the very first masters of Castilian prose.
A curious fact in connection with one of Valdés' most popular works, the Ciento y diez Consideraciones divinas, is that it has never been printed in its original Castilian.[7] Even so the book was translated into English by Nicholas Farrer (1638), and found favour in the eyes of George Herbert, who commends Signior Iohn Valdesso as "a true servant of God," "obscured in his own country," and brought by God "to flourish in this land of light and region of the Gospel, among His chosen." It may be expedient to give an illustration of Valdés from the version to which Herbert stood sponsor:—"Here I will add this. That, as liberality is so annexed to magnanimity that he cannot be magnanimous that is not liberal, so hope and charity are so annexed unto faith that it is impossible that he should have faith who hath not hope and charity; it being also impossible that one should be just without being holy and pious. But of these Christian virtues they are not capable who have not experience in Christian matters, which they only have who, by the gift of God and by the benefit of Christ, have faith, hope, and charity, and so are pious, holy, and just in Christ." The Arian flavour of this work explains its non-appearance in Castilian, and we must suppose that Herbert esteemed it for its austere doctrinal asceticism rather than its crude anti-trinitarianism. A Quaker before his time, Valdés owes no small part of his recent vogue to Wiffen, who first heard of the Consideraciones through a friend as an "old work by a Spaniard, which represented essentially the principles of George Fox." Whatever its defects, it is the one logical presentation of the dogmas of German mysticism, at the same time that it is a powerful, searching psychological study of the springs of motives and the innermost recesses of the human heart.
In another and a less contested field, we owe to Valdés the admirable Diálogo de la Lengua, written at Naples in 1535-36. The personages are four: two Italians, named Marcio and Coriolano; and two Spaniards, Valdés himself, and a Spanish soldier, called indifferently Pacheco and Torres. For all purposes this dialogue is as important a monument of literary criticism as was the conversation in Don Quixote's library between the Priest and the Barber. In almost every case posterity has ratified the personal verdict of Valdés, who approves himself the earliest, as well as one of the most impartial and most penetrating among Spanish critics. Moreover, he conducts his dialogue with extraordinary dramatic skill in the true vein of highest comedy. The courtly grace of the two Italians, the military swagger of Pacheco, the unwearied sagacity, the patrician wit and disdainful coolness of Valdés himself, are given with incomparable lightness of touch and felicity of accent. For the first time in Castilian literature we have to do with a man of letters, urbane from study, and accomplished from commerce with a various world. Valdés overtops all the literary figures of Carlos Quinto's reign in natural gift and acquired accomplishment; nor in later times do we easily find his match.
Footnotes:
[6] Garcilaso's forty-eight Latin stanzas, written after the Danubian imprisonment, are sufficiently unknown to justify a brief quotation here. They occur in Antonius Thylesius' Opera (Naples, 1762), pp. 128-129: Garcilassi di Vega Toletani ad Antonium Thylesium:—
"Uxore, natis, fratribus et solo
Exul relictis, frigida per loca