The suggested parallel does little credit to Puymaigre’s undoubted critical instinct. It is, moreover, damaging to the Archpriest who, in this particular passage, is simply translating from the First Act of Pamphilus de Amore (sc. iii.):—
Quantus adesset ei nunc locus inde loqui!
Sed dubito. Tanti michi nunc venere dolores!
Nec mea vox mecum, nec mea verba manent.
Nec michi sunt vires, trepidantque manusque pedesque.
Comparisons are odious, but, if they must be made, let us compare like to like. No breath of Dante’s hushed rapture plays round the libidinous Archpriest. The Spaniard never stirs in his reader a flicker of mystic ardour; he is of the world, of the flesh, and sometimes of the devil; his realism is irrepressible, his view of human nature is cynical, and his interpretation is pregnant with a constant irony. But he enjoys life, such as it is, while he can. He gives us to understand that people and things are what they are because [51] they cannot be otherwise, and he makes the most of both by describing in a spirit of bacchantic pessimism the ludicrous spectacle of the world. Learning is most excellent, but the Archpriest finds as much wisdom in a proverbio chico as in the patter of the schools; a cantar de gesta has its place in the scheme of literature, for it lends itself to parody; soldiers slash their way to glory, but, though they fascinate the ordinary timorous literary man, the Archpriest sees through them, and humorously exhibits them as sharpers more punctual on pay-day than in the hour of battle. His whole book, and especially his catalogue—De las propriedades que las dueñas chicas han—bespeak an incurable susceptibility to feminine charm; but he leaves you under no delusion as to the seductiveness of the women on the hillsides:—
Las orejas mayores que de añal burrico,
el su pescueço negro, ancho, velloso, chico,
las narises muy gordas, luengas, de çarapico,
beueria en pocos djas cavdal de buhon rico.