With the never-to-be-omitted exception of Cervantes, Quevedo is the most original prose writer Spain has produced; but at the same time he is so quaint, referring to local peculiarities, and using words unknown, except colloquially, that he is often unintelligible, especially in his burlesque poetry, to a foreigner. His countrymen esteem him highly. One of the most pleasing stanzas of Lope de Vega's Laurel de Apolo is dedicated to his praise. He speaks of him as "Possessing an acute but gentle spirit; agreeable in his wit, and profound in his serious poetry." He adopted something of the culto style and conceits blemish his verses. Quintana says of him, "Quevedo was every thing in excess; no one in the same manner displays in the serious, a gravity so rigid, and morals so austere; no one in the jocose, shows a humour, so gay, so free, and so abandoned to the spirit of the thing. His imagination was vivid and brilliant but superficial and negligent; and the poetic genius that animates him, sparkles but does not glow, surprises but does not move deeply, bounds with impetuosity and force, but neither flies nor supports itself at the same elevation. I am well aware that Quevedo often diverts with what he writes, and raves because it is his pleasure. I know that puns have their proper place in such compositions, and that no one has used them more happily than he. But every thing has its bounds; and heaped together with a prodigality like his, instead of pleasing they only create weariness.
"His verse, however, is for the most part full and sonorous, his rhyme rich and easy. His poetry, strong and nervous, proceeds impetuously to its end; and if his movements betray too much of the effort, affectation and bad taste of the writer, their course is yet frequently seen to have a wildness, an audacity, and a singularity hat is surprising.[121]"
To give some idea of Quevedo's style to the English reader we may liken him to Butler; but it is Butler rather in his fragments than in Hudibras, for a more elevated poetic tone is displayed in those. Quevedo could be sublime, though only by snatches. Serious he could be, to the depths of grave and profound disquisition, as his ethical and religious treatises testify.
One singular circumstance appertains to Quevedo's literary career—that he published none of his poetry himself, except that portion which he gave to the world under the feigned name of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre. These are the choice of all. Being more elevated, more sweet, more pure in their diction and taste, several critics would deprive Quevedo of the merit of being their author. But who Torre was, if he were not Quevedo, nobody can tell: while, these poems appearing under his editorship, and the very name—Francisco being his own, and the surname, "of the Tower," appropriate to his position, as the verses were written while he was living secluded in his patrimonial villa of Torre Juan Abaci, seems to fix them unquestionably on him. Of the rest, a friend of Quevedo assures us that not a twentieth part of what he wrote has escaped destruction. His dramas and historical works have perished; by which he has lost the right to being considered the universal writer his contemporaries name him. This friend, and afterwards his nephew and heir, published his poems, distributed under the head of six muses, pedantically headed with mottos from Seneca. There is Clio the historic, consisting chiefly of sonnets on great events addressed to great people; Polyhimnia the sententious; Melpomene, composed chiefly of epitaphs; Erato the erotic, or as it is styled, "singing of the achievements of love and beauty:" the greater part of which is dedicated to Lisi. Terpsichore the light, gay and satirical, a large portion of which are written in the jargon of the gypsies, and are unintelligible on this side of the Pyrenees; and Thalia, longest of all, which sings, "de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis."
It is as a prose writer, however, that Quevedo has acquired fame out of his own country. And this not from his serious works; nor from his "picaresco," in which he relates the life of the great Tacaño, or captain of thieves, the type of a Spanish rogue. This tale, by its familiarity with vice, squalid penury, and vulgar roguery, becomes tiresome; nor is it to be compared in richness of humour to Mendoza's history of Lazarillo de los Tormes. The letters of the "Cavallero de Tenaza," or knight of the pincer, are very whimsical. They are in ridicule of avarice, a sin, which Quevedo declares in another work to be the most unnatural of all. They are addressed to a lady; and are lessons to teach how little can be given, and how much preserved, by a man on all occasions. This sort of dry humour turning on one idea amuses at first, but at last becomes wearisome.
It is on his Visions however, his most original work, that his European reputation rests. Nothing can be more novel, singular and striking. They consist of various visions of the other world; where he sees the end of earthly vanities and the punishments that await crime. They are full of knowledge of human nature, vivacity, wit and daring imagination; they remind the reader of Lucian; and if they are less airy and fanciful, they are bolder and more sarcastic. They have the fault, it is true, of dwelling too exclusively on subjects of mean and vulgar interest—alguazils, attornies, ruffians, and all sorts of rogues of both sexes; among which, tailors figure preeminently. Now that tailors provide their own cloth, we have lost that intense notion of "cabbaging," which was so deeply impressed on the minds of our ancestors, when they only fashioned cloth sent to them. Tailors are with Quevedo the very ne plus ultra of a thief. As lord Byron styles a pirate "a sea-solicitor," so Quevedo calls a robber "a tailor of the highways." Several of these visions were written while their author was comparatively young: (one, dedicated to the duke of Osuna, is dated 1610, when he was thirty years of age), and possess the glow and spirit of early life. Nothing can be more startling and vivid than the commencement of the "Vision of Calvary." The blast of the last trump is described, and then he goes on to say: "The sound enforced obedience from marble, and hearing from the dead. All the earth began to move, giving permission to the bones to seek one another. After a short interval, I beheld those who had been soldiers arise in wrath from their graves, believing themselves summoned to battle: the avaricious looked up with anxiety and alarm fearing an attack, while men of pleasure fancied that the horns sounded to invite them to the chase. Then I saw how many fled with disgust or terror from their old bodies, of which some wanted an arm, some an eye; and I laughed at the odd figures they cut, while I admired the contrivance of Providence, that all being confounded together, no mistake was made. In one churchyard only, there was some confusion and exchanging in the appropriation of heads; and I saw an attorney who denied that his own soul belonged to him. But I was most frightened at seeing two or three merchants who put on their souls so awry, that all their five senses got into their fingers."
The commencement of the "Alguazil possessed" is equally spirited. A spectator calling him a man bedevilled, the bad spirit, within, cries out that "He is not a man but an alguazil; and you must know that it is against their will that devils possess alguazils; so that you ought rather to call me a devil be-alguazilled than an alguazil bedevilled." He is almost as inveterate against duennas, a race of people peculiar to Spain, and he disposes of them ludicrously enough in the infernal regons. "I went a little further," he says, "and came to an immense and troubled swamp, where there was so much noise that my head was bewildered: I asked what it was, and was told that it proceeded from women who had turned duennas on earth. And thus I discovered that those who are duennas in this life, are frogs in the next, and like frogs, are for ever croaking amidst the wet and mud; and very properly do they act the parts of infernal frogs, since duennas are neither fish nor flesh. I laughed to see them turned into such ugly things, with faces as care-worn and wrinkled as those of duennas here on earth."
Such is the sort of wit that Quevedo indulges in; terse, pointed, bitter, and driven home with an unsparing hand. Extravagant in its imaginations, yet so proportioned to the truth of nature as to excite admiration as well as surprise, and to be the model of a variety of imitations, none of which come up to him in penetration, vivacity and subtle felicity of expression.
"Murieron luego mis padres,
Dios en el cielo los tenga,
porque no vuelvan acà,
y a engendrar mas hijos vuelvan."