The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

VI
OTHER LITERARY INFLUENCES SUMMARIZED

(a) Spanish Literature and English

The direct and avowed influence of Spain upon English literature has hardly been comparable to that of France or Italy; nevertheless, in its totality, it has been sufficient to demand some concise review. Meanwhile that review necessitates, if less inevitably than in the case of Italy and France, an outline survey of the history of Spanish literature down to the middle of the seventeenth century. After that date the Peninsula, apart from its own lack of progress, cannot be said to count in our literary development.

In the summary of such literary forces as existed in the Dark Ages, we have already spoken of the Moslem learning of Cordova, and of the agency of Moors, Arabs, and Jews in spreading science and philosophy. We must not forget also the influence of Arab lyrics accompanying Arab music, which not only operated in Spain, but also in Provence after the Counts of Barcelona had established their court in that region. The interpenetration of Christian and Moorish thought was, as a matter of course, continued for many generations during the Christian re-conquest, but from the eighth to the twelfth century both learning and literary art lay with the Moslem. When in the thirteenth century the dialect of Castile had become the most important, though by no means the only Spanish speech, it embodied but little contribution from the north. Such as it reveals is an imitation of the Carlovingian chansons de geste of France, in the shape of romantic poems of which the hero is Ruy Diaz de Bivar, commonly called the “Cid” (a corruption of the Arabic Seyd, “lord”). Side by side with these went the troubadour poetry common to the Provençal of Southern France and its closely related Catalonian of Eastern Spain. In the next and following centuries there were destined to spring from the Cid poems, combined with the Celtic tales of Arthur, brought through France from Wales, those romances of chivalry—libros de caballerias—of which something will be said in due course.

Meanwhile some noticeable elements in the character of the rising Spanish literature were being cultivated under Oriental influence. Chief among these were the love of aphorism and the love of story. The Spanish mind has at all times been peculiarly sententious, and the proverbial philosophy of Spain extraordinarily rich. The Spanish taste has also set strongly in the direction of fiction of no very probable kind, whether embodying more or less supernatural marvel, impossible sentiment, chivalric and pastoral, or crowd of incident. These predilections already showed themselves during the nascent period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Spanish taste worked with the Oriental in respect both of proverb and story. The people of the Arabian Nights naturally passed on their répertoire more readily to their Spanish neighbours than elsewhere. The Arabic version of the Fables (or Tales) of Pilpay was translated under the same title of Kalila and Dimna, and the Arabic version of the Seven Sages (or Book of Sindabad) into the Stratagems of Women. With these and other materials there went a native inventiveness, in which Spanish writers have seldom been deficient. When they proceed to issue stories in their own names, though still derived from eastern sources (as in the forty-nine tales of the Count Lucanor of Don Juan Manuel early in the fourteenth century), the sententious character common to Moors and Spaniards is in strong evidence. The same people which was gathering proverbial wisdom into such collections as Blooms of Philosophy and Mouthfuls of Gold, affected tales with a moral. Count Lucanor consists of stories, told by a minister to a prince according to the Oriental machinery, which are meant to do more than amuse. They have the credit of being the first collection of novels, if we may call them such, in modern Europe. Scattered fabliaux existed in France, and various tales were current in Italy, but there was as yet no Decameron. The extent to which portions of this early fiction filtered into England cannot very well be estimated, but in the neo-Latin countries, with their comparative nearness of language and traditions, their racial affinities and their common church, the tales enjoyed a large vogue, which brought them into the hands of the French composers of fabliaux, of Boccaccio’s Italian predecessors, of Boccaccio himself, and thence of Chaucer. The plot of one of Don Manuel’s stories is familiar to us through the Taming of the Shrew, and on the Continent some of them reappear in the dramas of Calderon, or the novels of Lesage. Nor was the circulation of the proverbs confined to Spain. In Caxton’s Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, translated from the French, there appear aphorisms which correspond to those in the Spanish Florilegia.

The next step in Spanish literature consists of the prose “Chivalric Romances,” or libros de caballerias, of which the existence is best known to the ordinary reader through the derision showered upon them by Cervantes in Don Quixote. The only exception which he makes is in the case of their parent, the original Amadis of Gaul (or Wales), as being the best book in this kind, and deserving of preservation as an example of a type. This Amadis, derived from Welsh sources, appeared early in the fourteenth century, but enjoyed its greatest popularity during the fifteenth. Elsewhere in western Europe the age of chivalry had already passed, but in Spain the spirit lingered. The Amadis romances, with their peculiar blend of Celtic knightly self-devotion and the semi-Oriental fondness for magical and other marvels, were entirely to the Spanish taste. About the original Amadis and some of its imitations, despite their extravagant conception of knightly honour and knightly prowess, and their lack of all reality of time, place, and circumstance, there is a certain tone or temper of nobility which redeems them from entire contempt. Beyond this the sequels to Amadis of Gaul, such as Palmerin, Palmerin of England, and Amadis of Greece, possess no literary virtues. They are simply more or less ingenious variations of one another, employing much the same figures and much the same situations. Their knights-errant are totally unreal, and move with much prolixity in an unreal world, of which the chief elements appear to be love and sorcery. Nevertheless, when reinforced by a new development, of which we are to speak next, their chivalric virtues gave them life under a new shape in France of the seventeenth century.

This new development was the pastoral romance. Our knights and their loves are now placed in the Arcady of shepherds and shepherdesses. It is the same world of chivalric impossibility of sentiment, heroism, and enchantment; but, during the vogue of the Amadises, Italy had developed the pastoral, and the increasing contact of Spain with Italy—since the acquisition of Naples—speedily brought before the Spanish writers the example of Sannazaro. From the Arcadia of the Italian on the one hand, and from the libros de caballerias on the other, the Portuguese-Spaniard Montemayor created his famous Diana. This work, like Sidney’s Arcadia, is partly in prose and partly in verse, and, in such English development as arose from the pastoral, the influence of the Spaniard must be reckoned with that of the Neapolitan. It appears in Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender, and incidentally it may be observed that, before writing his Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare would seem at least to have been told of the substance of Montemayor. Not only did this influence come directly from the Spanish work, and from its translation into English at the end of the sixteenth century; it came also by way of France in the latter part of the seventeenth. For in France, early in that century, had appeared the Astrée of D’Urfé, based upon the Spaniard, and this in turn was the parent of those tedious creations of sentimental affectation, the heroic romances of La Calprenède and Scudéry, which have already been mentioned in dealing with the effect of French literature upon our post-Restoration writers of drama and fiction.

It would, however, be an error to suppose that, during this period of romance and pastoral, literature made no approach towards real existence. When war has come to play a smaller part in the national interest, and when reading is becoming general, a country which loves stories and “situations” will begin to find material for them in the facts, or at least the possibilities, of real life. It was so with Spain. In the latter part of the fifteenth century appears the first instalment of non-romantic or non-chivalric literature in the shape of Calisto and Meliboea, better known as Celestina, a work of uncertain authorship. A prose “comedy,” though impracticable for the stage, and written in twenty-one so-called acts, it sets forth—ostensibly with a dissuasive moral purpose—a tale of intrigue and vice which might conceivably belong to the realities of contemporary Spain. “Realistic,” indeed, it cannot be called, since realism describes things strictly as they are. The work was translated in all western Europe, including England. The fact that in the early sixteenth century the productions of Spain found ready access to our own country will be considered later. Meanwhile it is most convenient to note the subsequent history of the Spanish novel of common life. That history was peculiar, but intelligible. Spain was growing weary of the monotonous pretences of the Amadises, and it was by the treatment of the most opposite type of humanity that the liveliest interest could be evoked. From the knight-errant to the rogue-errant was a grateful change. The country possessed a plenty of picaros or rogues, who lived by the exercise of their wits, and whose adventures might be embellished into stories at least as interesting as those of a Palmerin. The appearance of The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, his Fortunes and Adventures (1554)—a work of unknown authorship, though commonly attributed to Mendoza—marks the date at which such stories first take shape as a distinct branch of the novel, to be known as the “picaroon” or “picaresque.” From that time, for nearly a century, the “Novelas de Picaros” are a chief product of Spanish writing. In them the vagabond of low life is carried by his cunning and his luck through a multitude of such adventures as the Spanish mind considered humorous, even though they might not be particularly edifying. Unfortunately the hero and his history tend to become as stereotyped as those of the chivalric romance; and unhappily also many of the situations at which contemporary Spain could evidently laugh, are, to us, rather productive of pity or disgust. Chief among the progeny of Lazarillo are Guzman de Alfarache (1599), a sequel to Lazarillo itself by Luna (1620), and The Life of Buscon (otherwise entitled The Great Knave) by Quevedo (1626). All these were quickly translated into English. Upon England the effect of the picaresque novel first appears in the Jack Wilton of Nash, who was well acquainted with Spanish, and whose choice of a picaroon higher in the social scale than Lazarillo is merely a concession to contemporary English tastes and interests. In France the type passed through the hands of Scarron and reached those of Lesage, whose Diable Boiteux and Gil Blas were destined to eclipse the fame of the Spanish originals. From the example of France this species broke out in England with the Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack of Defoe, the Joseph Andrews of Fielding, the Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle of Smollett. In the nineteenth century it finds its congeners in the Three Musketeers of Dumas and in the works of several minor English novelists. Mr. Jingle does not essentially differ from the type.

It is commonly said that it was the ridicule of Miguel Cervantes which destroyed the vogue of the chivalric romances. In reality he is rather the embodiment of his epoch, dealing the coup de grâce to that which was already dying. His immortal Don Quixote appeared first in 1605, when Amadis and Palmerin had already been losing their hold for a generation. Cervantes himself began with a pastoral Galatea, but it is not to be wondered at that his characteristic satirical sense of reality diverted him from this vein to the writing of original novels. Some twelve of these “Novelas Exemplares,” or moral and instructive tales, were published in 1613, and, though of uneven quality, they are the nearest approach which Spain could show to a novel of actuality. Some of these were soon converted into plots for dramas by the later Elizabethan playwrights. La Gitanilla becomes the Spanish Gipsy of Middleton, and Fletcher’s The Fair Maid of the Inn is from the Illustrious Housemaid. But the abiding fame of Cervantes rests upon work of an entirely novel kind, and one which has remained unique, despite all efforts at imitation. Though full of contemporary Spain, Don Quixote is one of those immortal books which become the property of the world rather than of any particular country. Its happy conception and execution, its humour, its fine suggestion of the true gentleman, and its admirable style, combine to make Cervantes the one significant name in Spanish literature. Don Quixote, a poor gentleman of La Mancha, a true type of the Castilian with all his native dignity and ready acceptance of lofty views of honour and loyalty, has bemused himself—as so many others had done—with the reading of the libros de caballerias. Accepting the world of the chivalric romances as a real world, where wrongs and oppressions clamour for heroic knights to redress them, he saddles his gaunt mare, Rosinante, clothes himself in old armour, with a barber’s dish for helmet, and sallies forth to seek adventures. To him Cervantes attaches the necessary squire in the shape of Sancho Panza, a good-natured, ignorant peasant, endowed with a simple readiness to believe his betters, but also with a fund of vulgar shrewdness which forms an excellent contrast to the idealizing monomania of his master. The story consists of the adventures of this worthy pair. The inns which the knight takes for castles, and the windmills which he takes for giants, are now a commonplace, and had become proverbial in England within a few years of the appearance of the book. The word “Quixotic” itself tells the story of the vogue which the work secured. But thousands have been entertained by the book as a novel without realizing its deeper perfections. Don Quixote is something far greater than a satire upon the chivalric romances. It is a work of creative art, a perfect mirroring of two types of character, all the more true to nature for the apparent contradictions which each embraces. And Cervantes possesses the supreme gift of creation, in that, like Swift or Defoe, he makes his persons live. We are apt to feel, not that the Don is an imaginary character in a book, but that he once actually lived and entertained his noble delusions in La Mancha. The skill which not only saves him from contempt, but invests him with pathetic admiration, is in itself the skill of genius. It should be observed that Cervantes adapts his Spanish to the situations with the delicate tact of a master, and that more than usual is therefore inevitably lost in translation. The difficulty of imitating such a work is manifest. Among the best known must be reckoned the Hudibras of Samuel Butler (1663), but beyond adopting the notion of an errant knight and squire, in the persons of Sir Hudibras and Ralpho, he achieves little that is comparable to his original. Sir Hudibras is a cowardly and contemptible person of narrow mind, but, even as such, his treatment is inconsistent, and the verse which Butler employs in place of Cervantes’ prose is but facile doggerel. It would be better indeed to speak of Hudibras as a vulgar, if often amusing, travesty of Don Quixote than as an imitation.