Periods of European literature
EDITED BY
PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY
VI.
THE LATEK KENAISSANCE
PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE,
Edited by Professor SAINTSBURY.
"The criticism ivhich alone can much, help us for the future
is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual
and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint
action and working to a common result."
Matthew Arnold.
In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes.
I.
The
II.
The
III.
The
IV.
The
V.
The
VI.
The
VII.
The
inn.
The
IX.
The
X.
The
XI.
The
XII.
The
DARK AGES
FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE
AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY .
FOURTEENTH CENTURY .
TRANSITION PERIOD .
EARLIER RENAISSANCE .
LATER RENAISSANCE .
FIRST HALF of 17th CENTURY .
AUGUSTAN AGES ....
MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY .
ROMANTIC REVOLT
ROMANTIC TRIUMPH .
LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY
Professor W. P. Ker.
The Editor.
F. J. Snell.
G. Gregory Smith.
The Editor.
David Hannay.
Professor H. J. C. Grierson.
Oliver Elton.
J. Hepburn Millar.
Professor C. E. Vaughan.
T. S. Omond.
The Editor.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York.
THE
LATER RENAISSANCE
BY
DAVID JHANNAY
NEW YORK
CHAELES SCRIBNER'S SONS
153-157 FIFTH AVENUE
1898
All Rights reserved
PAJ
P K E F A C E.
The general rules by which this series is governed
have been fully stated by the Editor in the first pub-
lished volume, The Flourishing of Romance and the
Rise of Allegory. It will therefore not be necessary
for me to do more than endeavour to justify the
particular application of them in this book. Mr
Saintsbury has fully recognised the magnitude of
the task which has to be overcome by the writer
who should undertake to display " intimate and equal
knowledge of all the branches of European Literature
at any given time." Nobody could be more conscious
of his insufficiency to attain to any such standard of
knowledge than I have had occasion to become in the
course of executing the part of the plan intrusted
to me. Though I hope my work has not been
shirked, I still cannot venture to boast of "intimate
and equal knowledge " of all the great bulk of litera-
5*nfi^o
VI PREFACE.
ture produced during the later sixteenth century.
Happily so much as this is not required. Some
ignorance of or at least some want of familiarity
with the less important, is permitted where the
writer is " thoroughly acquainted with the literature
which happened to be of greatest prominence in the
special period." I must leave others to decide how far
my handling of the Spanish, English, and French
portions of the subject can be held to excuse my less
intimate familiarity with the Italian and Portuguese.
The all but unbroken silence of Germany during this
period made it unnecessary to take account of it.
Modern Dutch and modern Scandinavian literature
had hardly begun ; such Scottish poets as Scott and
Montgomerie are older than their age. These and
other things, on the principles of the series, fall into
the previous or the next volume.
Although the reasons for the course taken with the
literature of Spain are given in the text, they may be
repeated here by way of preliminary excuse. It has
been decided to treat the Spaniards as an example of
the overlapping necessary to the satisfactory carrying
out of a series in periods. I have begun with them
earlier than with others, have ended with them
later, and have as far as space permitted treated them
as a whole. For this there is what appears to
me to be a sound critical reason. Although Spain
undoubtedly belongs to Europe, yet there is in her
something which is not quite European. The
PREFACE. Vll
Spaniards, though they have always been, and are,
vigorous and interesting, have a certain similarity to
some oriental races. This is not the place for an
essay on the Spanish national character. The com-
parison is only mentioned as a justification for
pointing out that, like some oriental races, the
Spaniards have had one great period of energy.
At no time have they been weak, and to-day they
can still show a power of resistance and a tenacity
of will which promise that if ever the intellect of the
nation revives, they will again play a great part in the
world. But it is none the less a matter of fact that,
except during their one flowering time, they have not
been what can be called great. From the fifteenth
century till well into the seventeenth, those defects
in the national character, which have kept the
Spaniards stationary and rather anarchical, were in
abeyance. The qualities of the race were seen at
work on a vast stage, doing wonderful things in war,
colonisation, art, and letters. Yet the very reason
that the Spaniard was then exercising his faculties to
the full extent to which they would go, gives a com-
plete unity to his Golden Age. It cannot be divided
in any other than a purely arbitrary way. England
and France were destined to grow and develop after
the Later Eenaissance. Tasso and Bruno were the
last voices of a great Italian time. But Spain sus-
pended the anarchy of her middle ages at the end
of the fifteenth century, gathered force, burst upon
viii PREFACE.
the world with the violence of a Turkish invasion, flour-
ished for a space, and then sank exhausted at the end
of a hundred and fifty years.
It may be thought that too little attention has been
paid to the Portuguese. I will not venture to assert
that the criticism is ill founded. Still I shall plead by
way of excuse that what the lesser Peninsular nation
did in literature was hardly sufficiently original to
deserve fuller notice in a general survey of a very
fertile period. Sa de Miranda and his contemporaries,
even Camoens and his follower Corte-Eeal, were after
all little more than adapters of Italian forms. They
were doing in kindred language what was also being
done by the Spanish " learned poets." In Camoens
there was no doubt a decided superiority of accom-
plishment, but the others seem to me to have been
inferior to Garcilaso, Luis de Leon, or Hernan de
Herrera. And this " learned poetry " is in itself the
least valuable part of the literature of the Peninsula.
In what is original and important, the share of the
Portuguese is dubious or null. They have a doubtful
right to the Zibros de Caballerias. They have a very
insignificant share in the stage, and no part in the
Novelas de Picaros. Barros and the other historians
were men of the same class as the Spaniards Oviedo
or Gornara. For these reasons, I have thought it
consistent with the scheme of the book to treat them
as very subordinate.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
The unity of Spanish literature Limits of treatment A prevailing
characteristic The division into native and imitative The
inheritance from the fifteenth century Spanish verse The
Cancioneros The romances The Romanceros The quality
of this poetry Spain and Italy The Di&logo de la Lengua
Prose of the early sixteenth century The influence of the
Inquisition .......
CHAPTER, II.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS.
The starting-point of the classic school The natural influence of
Italy Prevalence of the classic school Its aristocratic spirit
What was imitated from the Italians Its technique and
matter Artificiality of the work of the school Boscan Gar-
cilaso Their immediate followers The schools of Salamanca
and Seville Gongora and Gongorism The epics The Arau-
cana The Lusiads ...... 30
X CONTENTS.
CHAPTER III.
THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OP THE SPANISH DRAMA.
The national character of the Spanish drama The first beginnings
of the religions plays The starting-point of the secular play
Bartolome de Torres Naharro Lope de Rueda Lope de
Vega's life His influence on the drama The conditions of
the work Contemporaries and followers of Lope Calderon
Calderon's school ...... 60
CHAPTER IV.
FORMS OP THE SPANISH DRAMA.
The prevailing quality of the Spanish drama Typical examples
La Dama Melindrosa El Tejedor de Segovia El Condenado
por Desconfiado The plays on "honour" A Secreto Agravio
Seer eta Venganza The Auto Sacramental the loa The Ver-
dadero Bios Pan Los Dos Habladores . . .91
CHAPTER V.
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE.
Pastorals and short stories The original work of the Spaniard
The Libros de Caballerias The Amadis of Gaul Followers of
Amadis of Gaul Influence and character of these tales The
real cause of their decline The character of the Novelas de
Picaros The Celestina Lazarillo de Tormes Guzman de
Alfarache The followers of Mateo Aleman Quevedo Cer-
vantes His life His work The minor things Don Quixote 124
CONTENTS. XI
CHAPTEK VI.
SPAIN HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND
THE MYSTICS.
Spanish historians Histories of particular events Early his-
torians of the Indies General historians of the Indies Gom-
ara, Oviedo, Las Casas, Herrera, the Inca Garcilaso Mendoza,
Moncada, and Melo General histories Ocampo, Zurita,
Morales Mariana The decadence Solis Miscellaneous
writers Gracian and the prevalence of Gongorism The
mystics Spanish mysticism The influence of the Inquisition
on Spanish religious literature Malon de Chaide Juan de
Avila Luis de Granada Luis de Leon Santa Teresa Juan
de la Cruz Decadence of the mystic writers . . . 157
CHAPTER VII.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY.
The starting-point Italian influence The opposition to rhyme
Excuses for this Its little effect Poetry of first half of Eliza-
beth's reign Spenser Order of his work His metre Char-
acter of his poetry Sir P. Sidney The Apologie for Poetrie
His sonnets and lyrics Watson The Sonneteers Other
lyric poetry The collections and song-books The historical
poems Fitz-Geoffrey and Markham Warner Daniel Dray-
ton The satiric poets Lodge Hall Marston Donne . 185
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS.
The first plays Kesistance to classic influence Advantages of
this And the limitations The dramatic quality Classic,
Spanish, and French drama Unity in the English Plays
Ralph Roister Bolster Gammer Gurton's Needle Gorboduc
Xll CONTENTS.
Formation of the theatre Lyly Greene Peele Kyd Mar-
lowe Character of these writers Shakespeare Guesses about
his life Order of his work Estimates of Shakespeare Divi-
sions of his work -The Poems The Dramas The reality of
Shakespeare's characters ...... 223
CHAPTER IX.
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS.
Elizabethan prose Two schools of writers Roger Ascham His
books and style Webbe and Puttenham The sentence Eu-
phuism The Arcadia Sidney's style Short stories Nash's
Unfortunate Traveller Nash and the pamphleteers Martin
Marprelate Origin of the Marprelate Tracts The DiotrepJies
Course of the controversy Its place in literary history
Hooker The Ecclesiastical Polity .... 259
CHAPTER X.
FRANCE. POETRY OP THE LATER RENAISSANCE.
The Plr.iade Rons ard The lesser stars The Defenseet Illustration
de la Langue Francaise The work of Ronsard His place in
poetry Joachim du Bellay Remi Belleau Ba'if Du Bartas
D'Aubigne The dramatic work of the Pleiade Jodelle
Grevin and La Taille Montchrestien The comedy La Re-
connue Causes of failure of early dramatic literature . . 290
CHAPTER XL
FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS OF THE LATER SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
Abundance of later sixteenth-century prose A distinction Sully
Bodin The great memoir-writers Carloix La Noue
D'Aubigne Monluc Brantome The Satyrc Menipee Its
CONTENTS. xili
origin Its authors Its form and spirit Montaigne His
Essays The seeptiei: m of Montaigne His style Charron
and Du Vair . . . . . . . 326
CHAPTER XII.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
The later Eenaissance in Italy Torquato Tasso His work The
Gerusalemme Liberata Giordano Bruno Literary character
of his work Giambattista Guarini . . , .352
CHAPTER XIII.
CONCLUSION ........ 367
INDEX .
379
THE LATEE RENAISSANCE.
CHAPTER I.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
THE UNITY OF SPANISH LITERATURE LIMITS OF TREATMENT A PREVAIL-
ING CHARACTERISTIC THE DIVISION INTO NATIVE AND IMITATIVE
THE INHERITANCE FROM THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY SPANISH VERSE
THE " CANCIONEROS " THE ROMANCES THE " ROMANCEROS "
THE QUALITY OF THIS POETRY SPAIN AND ITALY THE " DIALOGO
DE LA LENGUA " PROSE OF THE EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY THE
INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION.
The Literature of Spain, of which the Portuguese is
the little sister, or even at times the echo, stands
m apart. In this fact lies the excuse for the
The unity of ...
Spanish ultra- division adopted in this volume. There is
at first sight something arbitrary in begin-
ning a survey of Literature of the later Eenaissance
with a book written at the close of the fifteenth cen-
tury. To carry the story on till the close of the
A
2 i-.riM; , i:A> uasBk&rufti later renaissance.
seventeenth may well appear to be a violation of
proportion. The Renaissance even in Italy was not in
its later stages in 1500, and it is far behind us when
we get to the years in which Boileau, Moliere, and
Racine were writing in France, while Dryden was
the undisputed prince of English poets and prose-
writers. Yet there is good critical reason for making
a wide distinction between the one period of literary
greatness of the Peninsula and those stages in the his-
tory of the Literatures of England, France, or Italy,
which belong to the time of the later Renaissance.
It is this that we cannot, without separating things
which are identical, divide the literature of Spain
and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. The years between the appearance of the
Shepherd's Calendar and the death of Shakespeare
form a period possessing a character of its own in the
history of our poetry, our prose, and our drama. It is
still more emphatically true that French literature,
between the rise of the Pleiade and the death of
Mathurin Regnier, is marked off sharply, both from
what had gone before and what was to follow. But
we cannot draw a line anywhere across the Spanish
drama, poetry, or prose story of the great time and
say, Here an old influence ended, here a new one
began. We have to deal with the slow growth, very
brief culmination, and sudden extinction of a brilliant
literature, which came late and went early, and which
for the short time that it lasted is one and indivisible.
It grew up partly from native roots, partly under an
influence imparted by Italy ; attained its full stature
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 3
in the early years of the seventeenth century; then
"withered, fell into puerile ravings, and died," with
the close of the Austrian dynasty.
As, then, the Golden Age of Spain is one, we are
justified in taking it as a whole, even though we
Limits of appear to violate the harmony of the ar-
treatmcnt rangement of the series to which this
volume belongs. And this division of the matter
imposes an obvious limitation on the treatment to be
adopted. Spanish literature is, in one sense, exceed-
ingly rich. During the century and a half, or so, of
its vigour, it produced a vast number of books, and
the catalogue of its authors is very long. Don Nicolas
Antonio, the industrious compiler of the Biblioteca
Hispana, has calculated the number of mystic and
ascetic works (of which some are among the best of
Spanish books) at over three thousand. The fecundity
of its theatre is a commonplace; the fluency of its
poets is boundless; the bulk of its prose stories is
considerable ; its historians are many, and not a few
are good. It is needless to add that much was
written on law, theology, and the arts which has
value. In dealing with all this mass of printed
matter in the space at our disposal, it is clearly
necessary to remember the injunction, "il faut savoir
se borner."
We must, to begin with, leave aside all that is not
primarily literature, except when it can be shown to
have influenced that which is. Again, even in deal-
ing with our proper subject, we must submit to
limits. It is manifestly necessary to omit scores
s
4 EUROPEAN LITERATURE TATER RENAISSANCE.
nay, hundreds of minor names. But that is not all.
In making a survey of a fertile literature in a brief
space, we are always obliged to go by kinds and
classes rather than by individual writers. But in
Spanish literature this is more especially true.
In the course of an introduction to a translation
of Shakespeare's plays by Seilor Clarke, Don Juan
Valera (himself the author of stories both Spanish
and good) has made a complaint, which is of the
nature of an unconscious confession. He has lamented
that the characters of Spanish drama are so little
known. An artist, so he says, has only to paint a
a prevailing young man in a picturesque dress on a rope-
characteristic. i a dd er> with a beautiful young woman on
a balcony above him, and all the world recognises
Eomeo and Juliet. If he takes his anecdote from
Lope and Calderon, nobody will be able to guess what
it is all about. With less than his usual good sense,
Seilor Valera accounts for the obscurity into which
the world has been content to allow the characters
and scenes of the Spanish drama to fall, by the
political decadence of his country at the end of the
seventeenth century. Yet the passing away of Spain's
greatness has not prevented Don Quixote and Sancho
from being familiar to the whole world. If anecdote
pictures are to be the test, Cervantes has no reason to
fear the rivalry of the English dramatic poet. There
is less of Spanish pride than of its ugly shadow,
Spanish vanity, in Don Juan Valera's explanation.
The Drama of Spain, brilliant as it was within its
limits, is not universally known, because it does not
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
give what we find in Cervantes, and in boundless
profusion in Shakespeare, eharacters true to un-
changing human nature, and therefore both true and
interesting to all time. It is mainly a drama of
situation, and of certain stock passions working-
through personages who are rarely more than puppets.
We may say the same of the prose stories, whether
Libros de Caballerias, or Novelas de Picaros Books
of Chivalry, or Tales of Eogues. They all have the
same matter and the same stock figures. They differ
only in the degree of dexterity with which the author
has used his material. In the poetry of Spain we see
two influences at work first, the Italian Kenaissance,
which ruled the learned poetry of the school of
Garcilaso ; and then the native " romance " or ballad
poetry, which held its ground beside the more varied
and splendid metres imitated from abroad. Each of
these, within its own bounds, is very uniform, and
the works of each school vary only according to the
writer's greater or less mastery of what he uses in
common with all others. Such a literature is mani-
festly best treated by classes and types. Cervantes,
indeed, stands apart. His greatness is not a towering
superiority but a difference of kind. It is as in-
dividual as the greatness of Velasquez in painting.
These two influences, the foreign and the native,
divided Spanish literature of the Golden Age between
Thedivisio tnem in vei 7 different proportions. To
into native and the first is owing the whole body of its
learned poetry, and part of its prose. To
the second belong all the " deliveries of the Spaniard's
6 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
self," as they may be called in a phrase adapted from
Bacon, the prose tale, the ballad, the drama, and
the ascetic works of the so-called mystics. These are
the genuine things of Spanish literature, and in them
the Spaniard expressed his own nature. It was very
shrewdly noted by Aarsens van Sommelsdyck, a Hol-
lander who visited Spain in the later seventeenth cen-
tury, that however solemn the Spaniard may be in
public, he is easy and jocular enough in private. He
is very susceptible to what is lofty and noble, capable
of ecstatic piety, of a decidedly grandiose loyalty and
patriotism, endowed with a profound sense of his own
dignity, which nerves him to bear adversity well, but
which also causes him to be contumaciously impene-
trable to facts when they tell him he must yield or
amend his ways. With all that, and perhaps as a
reaction from all that, he can enjoy crude forms of
burlesque, can laugh over hard realistic pictures of
the sordid side of life, and delights in rather cynical
judgments of human nature. The lofty and the low
have their representations in his literature, in forms
easily traced back to the middle ages. About the
third quarter of the sixteenth century it might have
appeared to a superficial observer that the native
element was overpowered by the foreign. But the
triumph of the " learned " literature was in show, not
in reality.
S The book already alluded to as marking the starting-
point of the Golden Age is the once famous Celestina,
a long story in dialogue, of uncertain authorship and
age. It was written at some time between the con-
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 7
quest of Granada and the end of the fifteenth century.
Precision is in this case of no importance, since the
true descendants of the Cclestina were the Picaresque
stories. Its first successor was the Lazarillo de
Tormes, which, though no doubt written earlier, ap-
peared in or about 1547. Then at an interval of fifty
years came the Beacon of Life Atalaya de la Vida
better known as Guzman de Alfarache, of Mateo
Aleman, and from him sprang the great Rogue
family. But while the Picaresque novel was gather-
ing strength, all the more slowly because it was not
an imitation, the classic school of poetry had blossomed,
and was already showing signs of decadence. The
drama, another purely native growth, had risen by
degrees alongside the prose tale, and reached its full
development at about the same time. Both are in-
trinsically of far greater value than the learned verse.
Yet since their maturity came later, they may be
postponed while the story of the school of Garcilaso
is told.
Before entering upon that, it is necessary to say
something of the conditions which the " new poetry "
m , . and the influence of the Renaissance found
The inheritance
from tiw fif- before them when they began to influence
tury ' Spain. The fifteenth century had not been
barren of literature. King John II. (1407-1454) had
collected round him a school of Court poets whose
chief was Juan de Mena. Although the last repre-
sentatives of this school resisted the innovations of
Boscan and Garcilaso as unpatriotic, it was itself
entirely foreign in origin being, in truth, little more
8 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
than an echo of Provencal and early Italian poetry.
Juan de Mena, the Prince of Poets of his time, wrote
long allegorical poems in imitation of Dante, and was
perhaps not uninfluenced by the French rhAtoriquewrs.
Indeed the earlier leaders of the school made no secret
of their debt. The Marquis of Santillana, a contem-
porary of King John, candidly says, in a letter to the
Constable of Portugal, that he sought the origin of
poetry in the Gai Saber of Provence. The trouba-
dours, when driven from Prance, had found refuse in
the dominions of Aragon, and had there given rise to
a school of imitators. The connection of Aragon with
Italy was close. Dante found translators, and Pe-
trarch imitators, among the Catalan poets of Valencia,
and from thence their influence spread to Castile.
' Juan del Encina, who in 1496 prefixed a brief Ars
Poetica to one of those collections of lyric verse called
Cancioneros, and who was himself a poet of the Court
school, confessed that he and his brother verse- writers
had conveyed largely from the earlier Italians. More-
over, he made this the main ground of their claim to
be considered poets. It was not till the next century,
and until the last representatives of this school found
themselves opposed by the Italian influence, that they
began to claim to be essentially Spanish.
What there was of really Spanish in their verse
must be allowed to have been mainly the impoverish-
ment of the original models. The Spaniard
has always been recalcitrant to the shackles
imposed by complicated and artful forms of verse, and
there is a natural tendency in him to drift at all times
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN.
to his native trochaic assonants of eight syllables. His
language, admirable when properly handled for prose,
wants the variety of melody required for poetry. Im-
patience of the difficulties of metre is another name
for the want of a due sense of the beauty of form.
Indeed it is not by its form that Spanish literature
has been distinguished. Given, then, a people who
had very little faculty for delicate verse, and a lan-
guage which wanted both the wealth of the Italian
accent and the flexibility of the French, and it is easy
to see what was likely to be the end of the Provencal
and Petrarchian influence in the Court school. Its
poetry, never more than an echo, sank into mechanical
verse-making mostly in eight- syllabled couplets, re-
lieved by a broken line of four. The inborn preference
of the Spaniard for loose metres gradually gained the
upper hand. No doubt fine verses may be picked out
from the bulk of the writings of the troubadour school
of Castile. The rhythmus de contemptu mundi, known
as the coplccs de Manrique, which has been made known
to English readers by Mr Longfellow, is even noble
in its rigid gravity. But the merit lies not in the
melody of the verse, which soon becomes monotonous.
It is in this, that the coplas give us perhaps the finest
expression of one side of the Spaniard. They are
full of what he himself calls in his own untrans-
latable word el dcsengafio that is to say, the
melancholy recognition of the hollowness of man's
life, and "the frailty of all things here" not in
puling self-pity, but in manly and pious resignation
to fate and necessity.
10 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
This old or troubadour school did not give up the
Held to the new Italian influence without a struggle.
The can- Its models continued to be imitated nearly
cioneros. a jj through the sixteenth century. It was
praised and regretted by Lope de Vega and Cervantes.
Boscan and Garcilaso found an opponent and a critic
in Cristobal de Castillejo, a very fluent verse- writer, a
most worthy man, and a loyal servant of the house of
Austria, who died in exile at Vienna in 1556. El
buen de Castillejo the good Castillejo, as he is
commonly called, with condescending kindness was
an excellent example of the stamp of critic, more or
less common in all times, who judges of poetry ex-
clusively by his own stop - watch. He condemned
Boscan and Garcilaso, not for writing bad poetry, but
for not writing according to what he considered the
orthodox model. The new school not unnaturally
retorted by wholesale condemnation of the old.
When Hernan, or Fernan, de Herrera published his
edition of Garcilaso in 1572, he was rebuked for
quoting Juan del Encina in the commentary. A
pamphleteer, believed to have been no less a person
than the Admiral of Castile, whose likeness may be
seen in the National Portrait Gallery among the
ambassadors who signed the peace at the beginning
of the reign of James I., laughed at Herrera for quot-
ing as an authority one who had become a name for a
bad poet. This was pedantry as bad as Castillejo's,
and represented an opinion never generally accepted
by the Spaniards. They continued to read the collec-
tions of ancient verse called Cancioneros, even when
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 11
the new school was at the height of its vigour. The
Cancioneros Generates of Hernan del Castillo, the great
storehouse of the poetry of the fifteenth century, was
reprinted, with some changes, no less than nine times
between 1511 and 1573. The extreme rarity of copies
of these numerous editions proves that they must have
been well thumbed to pieces by admiring readers. Yet
they constitute no inconsiderable body of literature.
The modern reprint issued (unfortunately only to its
own members) by the Sociedad de Bibliofilos Espanoles
is in two weighty volumes.
In this Cancionero there are two elements, destined
to very different fates. Hernan del Castillo included
eighteen romances in his collection, and
The romances. _ . . .
they reappeared in subsequent editions.
The importance of this word in Spanish literature
seems to call for some definition of its scope. The
word "romance" bore originally in Spanish exactly
the same meaning as in other tongues descended from
the Latin. It was the vernacular, and to write en
romance was to write Castilian, Galician, or Catalan.
<f Xi romance ni romano " neither Romance nor
Eoman is a phrase bearing more or less the meaning
of our " neither rhyme nor reason." But little by little,
by use and wont, it came about the end of the sixteenth
century to be applied exclusively to the form of verse
dearest and most native to the Spaniard, the already
mentioned trochaic eight-syllable assonant metre. As
the ancient ballads are mainly, though not exclusively,
written in this form, they are called romances. Yet
to write romances does not necessarily mean to write
J
12 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
ballads, but only to write in that metre, whether in the
dialogue of a play or in long narrative poems, or for
any other purpose.
The assonant metre, as is well known, is not peculiar
to Spain. It may well have been imported into Cas-
tile from France by those churchmen to whom the
country owes so much of its architecture, what learn-
ing it had, and its civilisation when it began to revive
from the merely martial barbarism produced by the
Moorish conquest But if the Spaniard did indeed
take the assonant metre from his French teachers, he
soon subjected it to that process which all forms of
verse are apt to undergo in his hands. He released
it from shackles, and gave it a freedom amounting to
licence-. The romance is a loose - flowing rhythm, in
which the rhyme is made by the last accented vowel.
Sometimes the same vowel is used line after line until
it is exhausted. More commonly the assonant comes
in alternate lines. As a rule there is no division into
stanzas, but the verse runs on till the speech is ended,
or the tale is told. To this there are, however, ex-
ceptions, and the romance is divided into 'ordondittas-
that is, roundels or staves of four lines, assonanced
either alternately, or the first with the fourth and the
second with the third, or into ; quintillasl of five lines,
with an assonant in three. The recalcitrance of the
Spaniard to all limitations in verse-making has caused
him to give a very wide range indeed to the assonant.
The vowel u is allowed to rhyme with o, and i with e,
though they have a very different sound and force.
The Spaniard, again, allows a diphthong to be assonant
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 13
to a vowel, although he pronounces both the vowels in
his diphthongs. It will be seen that such verse as this
can be written with extreme facility. Indeed it is a
byword in Spain that nothing is easier than to write
romances badly. The difficulty, in fact, is to avoid
writing them in prose ; and it is no small one, when the
ear of a people finds a rhyme in so faint a similarity
of sound, and in a language in which the accent is at
once so pronounced and as little varied. It is not, I
trust, superfluous to add that in Castilian, which we
call Spanish, there is a marked accent in the last
syllable of words ending in a consonant, on the penult
of words ending in a vowel, while a limited number
of words are esclrujulo that is, accented on the ante-
penult. The addition of a syllable to form the plural,
or of the adverbial termination mente, does not alter
the place of the accent. These rules, though nowise
severe, are not rigidly followed. Not infrequently the
assonant rhyme falls into the full or consonant rhyme,
while the Hesse or stave formed on one vowel, and its
equivalents, is broken by a line corresponding to
nothing. Even the rule requiring the use of eight
syllables is applied with restrictions, an accented
syllable at the end counts as two, while two un-
accented syllables rank only as one. It must be
acknowledged that this metre is unsatisfactory to an
ear attuned to the melody of English poetry. In our
language it renders hardly a tinkle. When we have
become accustomed to it in Castilian and until we
do it tantalises with a sense of something wanting its
highest virtue seems to be that it keeps the voice of
14 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
the speaker in a chanted recitative. It is more akin
to numbered prose than to verse.
However incomplete the romance may seem to us,
to the Spaniard it is dear. When romances were not
being well written in Spain, it was because nothing
was being written well. The metre not only held its
ground against the court poetry of the fifteenth
century, but prevailed against the new Italian influ-
ence. Here as in other fields the Spaniard was very
tenacious of the things of Spain. To find a parallel to
what happened in Spain we must do more than sup-
pose that the Pleiade in France, or Spenser and his
successors in England, had failed to overcome the
already existing literary schools. It was as if the
ballad metres had won a place even on the stage. No
Spanish Sir Philip Sidney need have apologised for
feeling his heart stirred by those ballads of the Cid, or
of the Infantes de Lara, which answer to our Chevy
Chase. They were strenuously collected, and con-
stantly imitated, all through the sixteenth and well
into the seventeenth century. So far were they from
falling into neglect, that they were first able to shake
the slowly withering poetry of the troubadour school,
and then to fill a long series of collections, known, in
, the beeinnin^ as Cancioneros, or Libros, or
ceros Sylvas de Romances, but finally as Roman-
ceros. Much bibliographical learning and controversy
has collected about these early editions. Even if I
could profess to be competent to speak on such matters,
they would have no proper place here. From the
point of view of the literary historian, the interesting
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 15
fact is that at a time when classic, or at least new
influences, born of the Renaissance, were carrying all
before them in France and England, and in Italy had
long ago definitively conquered, the Spaniards did not
wholly part with their inheritance from the Middle
Ages.
The few ballads, and fragments of ballads, printed
by Hernan del Castillo in 1511, proved so popular
that an editor was tempted to form a special collec-
tion. The place and date of this first ballad-book
proper are both significant. 1 It appeared at Antwerp
in or about 1546 that is to say, three years or so
after the first edition of the poems of Boscan and
Garcilaso. The editor was one Martin Nucio. Ant-
werp, be it observed, was always a great publishing
place for Spanish books, a fact which may be accounted
for, not only by the political connection between Spain
and the Low Countries, the number of Spaniards em-
ploye^! there in various capacities, as soldiers, officials,
or traders, and the then extensive use of their lan^uao-e
but also by the superiority of the Flemish printers.
That same carelessness of form which is found in the
Spaniard's literature followed him in lesser arts, where
neatness of handling was more necessary than spirit
and creative faculty. He was, at any rate in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rarely a good
engraver, and hardly ever a good printer. The
1 The fullest collection of Spanish ballads is that of Duran in the
Billioteca de Ribadeneyra ; but the best are in the Rosa de Romances
of Wolf and Depping, ed. 1844-1846. with notes by Don A. Alcala"
Galiano.
16 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Caneionero de Romances, brought out, it may be,
primarily for the pleasure of the Spaniards scattered
over Flanders and Germany, was soon reprinted in
Spain, by one Esteban de Najera, at Sarragossa. These
contemporary collections are not quite identical, but
essentially the same. This Caneionero, or Sylva, de
Romances met with a reception which proved how
strong a hold his indigenous verse had on the
Spaniard. Three editions, with corrections and addi-
tions, appeared by 1555. The latest of these was not
reprinted until well into the next century. In the
meantime other editors had followed Nucio and
Najera. A Romancer o in nine parts appeared at
places so far distant from one another as Valencia
Burgos, Toledo, Alcala, and Madrid, between 1593
and 1597. This again grew into the great Romancer o
General of 1604-1614, wherein there are a thousand
ballads.
In so far as this great mass of verse is really an in-
heritance from the Middle Ages, it does not belong to
The quality of the subject of this book. All that it is
this poetry. necessary to do here is to note the fact
that it did survive, and did continue to exerfc an in-
fluence. But nothing is more doubtful than the
antiquity of the vast majority of the romances. The
best judges have given up the attempt to class them
by age, and indeed that must needs be a hopeless task
where poems have been preserved by oral tradition
alone, and have therefore been subject to modification
by every succeeding generation. The presence of very
ancient words is no proof of antiquity, since they may
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 17
be put in by an imitator, Neither is the mention of
comparatively recent events, or of such things as
clocks or articles of commerce only known in later
times, of itself proof that the framework of the ballad
was not ancient when it took its final shape. The
Romances were collected very much in the style of
the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and we all know
with what facility remains of popular poetry are found
when there is a demand for them, when no critical
tests are applied, and when the searchers are endowed
with a faculty for verse-writing. The Moorish ballads
have been called old, and yet nothing is more certain
than that they were the fruits of a literary fashion
of the later sixteenth century. The Moor, like the
Eed Man, became a picturesque figure only when he
ceased to be dangerous. Another class of the ballads,
those called of chivalry, are full of references showing
that the writers were acquainted with Ariosto, and can-
not have been written before the middle of the century
at the earliest. Where the romance is identical in sub-
ject with, and very similar in language to, a passage
in the great chronicle of Alfonso the Wise, or other
unquestionably mediaeval work preserved in writing
of known antiquity, it may be accepted as ancient.
Where that test cannot be applied, it is safer not
to think that the ballad is older than the sixteenth
century. In some cases the inspiration can be shown
to have been French. The subject of the Molinero de
Arcos, a popular ballad existing in several versions,
was taken from a well-known French farce, Le Meunier
(VArlcux.
B
18 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
It is very necessary, when judging this great body
of verse, to stand on our guard against certain be-
setting fallacies. There is always a marked tendency
in collectors to excuse what is grotesque on the ground
that it is ancient, and to pardon what is bad on the
ground that it is popular. The Spanish ballads have
suffered from the too great zeal with which modern
editors have reprinted what was accepted by the in-
discriminate taste of first collectors. Many of the
ballads belong to the class of romances de ciegos i.e.,
" blindmen's ballads " which were doggerel at all
times. Others are not above the level of the poets'
corner of not over -exacting newspapers. Even in
the best, the intention and the first inspiration are
commonly far better than the expression. The
Spaniard's slovenliness of form is found here as else-
where. Lockhart, in the preface to his adaptations,
has rebuked the Spaniards for "neglecting old and
simpler poets," who wrote the romances, in favour
of authors " who were at the best ingenious imitators
of classical or Italian models." He has himself, how-
ever, subjected those he selected for translation into
English to a treatment which conveys a severe and a
just critical judgment. A comparison between his
ballads and the orginals will show that he occasion-
ally, though very rarely, weakened a forcible phrase.
Now and again there are signs that his knowledge of
Spanish was not deep. He writes, " So spake the
brave Montanez," as if that had been the name of the
Lord of Butrago, whereas montane* (mountaineer) was
a common old Spanish equivalent for noble, a custom
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 19
due to the belief that the old Castilian aristocracy
drew its "blue blood," shown by its grey or blue
eyes, from the Visigoths, who held the mountains of
Asturias against the Moors. The Lord of Butrago was
a historical personage, and the head of the house of
Mendoza. But if a few faults of this kind can be
found, there are to be set off against them a hundred
passages in which he has suppressed a redundancy or
replaced the purely prosaic original by poetry. A
very good test case is to be found in the last verse of
the Wandering Knight's song which stands thus in
Lockhart :
u I ride from land to land,
I sail from sea to sea ;
Some day more kind I fate may find,
Some night kiss thee."
What can be more pretty or more fit ? but it is not
in the Cancioncro de Romances, where the words
stand :
" Andando de Sierra en Sierra
Por orillas de la mar,
Por provar si en mi ventnra
Ay lngar donde avadar ;
Pero por vos, mi seiiora,
Todo se ha de comportar."
"Wandering from hills to hills by the shore of the
sea, to try whether my fortune will give me a ford ;
but for you, my lady, all things are to be endured," is
the bald literal meaning, which, though it is at least
as old as 1555, and is simple enough, is also, un-
fortunately, bathos. And this is very far from being
20 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
a solitary example. The result is, that Lockhart's
ballads give an unduly high estimate of the originals
to those who only know the English rifacimento. A
reader who refuses to be enslaved by authority will
find that he is constantly compelled to make allowances
for the faults which Lockhart was in the fortunate
position of being able to correct for redundancies,
for lines of mere prose, for vulgarities, for flat, spirit-
less endings. He will often feel that he is reading
mere repetitions in a popular form, written by pain-
fully uninspired authors, whose too frequent use of
stock literary phrases shows that they were far from
the simplicity attributed to the ballad-maker. It is
true that poetic feeling, and some poetic matter in
the shape of traditional stories, is to be found in the
romances, but, as it were, in solution. iSTor is it to be
denied that it is to the honour of a people when it
clings to a national form of verse, and to its own
traditions. Yet neither good poetic intention nor the
most respectable patriotism will make inferior execu-
tion anything but inferior even in national ballads. It
is unquestionably unjust to find fault with a body of
professedly unlearned writers because they show the
defects of men who have not a severe literary training.
But the claim made for the Spanish romances is that
they express the natural feelings of a poetic people
with simplicity : it is quite fair to answer that the
great mass of them belong to a time of high literary
cultivation ; that they show signs of being the work
of its inferior writers ; that, even at their best, their
loose metrical form far looser as it is than our own
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 21
ballad stanza permitted them to be written by per-
sons who could not have mastered even doggerel
rhyme ; and that they are too often wanting in the
direct, simple, passionate expression by which the
rudest genuine poet can force his way to the realm of
poetry.
It was a real, but in all probability an inevitable,
misfortune that the best poetic faculty in Spain during
spam ami the sixteenth century neglected the native
itaiy. metre, and turned for inspiration "to the
sweet and stately measures of the Italian poesie." An
Italian influence, as has been already pointed out, was
no new thing in Spain, and as the sixteenth century
drew on it was sure to be felt again. Italy, indeed,
was full of Spaniards. They were numerous at the
papal Court, and the wars for Naples brought them in
greatly increased numbers. Uncil the close of the
fifteenth century those who settled in the southern
kingdom were mainly drawn from Aragon. A great
change came with the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic.
He claimed Naples by right of his inherited crown of
Aragon, but he fought for it with the forces, and the
arms, of Castile. Isabel was tenacious of her rights as
queen of the greater kingdom, but she was scrupulous
in fulfilling her wifely duty to comfort her husband.
She supported him with her own subjects. After her
death he was regent, except for the short period during
which he was displaced by his worthless son-in-law,
Philip the Handsome. Thus the Castilians came more
directly in contact with Italy and Italian civilisation
than they had ever done before. They abounded as
22 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
soldiers, as diplomatists, lay and ecclesiastical, and as
administrators. Some among them were sure to feel
the artistic and literary influences of that many-sided
time. The way was prepared in Spain by the alliance
between the crowns of Castile and Aragon, which
could not give the country administrative unity, but
did give an internal peace. It was a time of expan-
sion and vigour. Isabel had favoured learning. Her
favourite scholar, Antonio de Lebrija better known
by the Latinised form of his name as Nebrissensis
drew up a Castilian grammar and dictionary. The
language came rapidly to maturity, and was in fact
full grown at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
This speedy maturity, though perhaps not for the
good of the language in the end, was natural. Cas-
tilian, in spite of a large admixture of Arabic words,
is so thoroughly Latin that little was needed to fit it
for literary purposes when once the study of classical
models was seriously begun much as the art of print-
ing came quickly to perfection because the early typo-
graphers had beautifully executed manuscripts before
them as models.
The early sixteenth century in Spain was not barren
in prose-writers, mostly didactic, and also for the most
part imitators of the Italians. Francisco de Villalobos,
of whom little is known except that he was doctor to
Ferdinand the Catholic and the Emperor Charles V.,
and Fernan Perez de Oliva of Cordova (1492-1530),
are the best remembered of the class. But the Prob-
lems of the first, and the treatise on the Dignity of
Man of the second, are mainly notable as examples
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 23
of the growing wish to write Castiliau for serious
purposes. 1
But a more interesting proof of the care the Span-
iards were giving to their language is to be found in
tu Spanish the Diaiogo de la Lengua 2 Talk about our
tongue. Language, as it may be freely but not in-
accurately translated. This little book appears to have
been written about, and perhaps a little after, 1530,
but was not printed till Mayans included it in his
The Diaiogo Origenes de la Lengua Castillana in the last
de la Lengua. cen t U ry. There is strong internal evidence
to show that it was the work of one Juan de Valdes,
a Spaniard belonging to the colony settled in Naples,
a Castilian by birth, and a member of the doubt-
fully orthodox society collected round Vittoria Co-
lonna. Juan de Valdes himself is included in the
short list of Spanish Protestants, and his heterodoxy
accounts for the length of time during which his
work remained in manuscript. He smelt of the fagot,
as the French phrase has it. All who possess even
a slight acquaintance with the literary habits of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are aware that
we must not draw from the fact that work remained
in manuscript the deduction that it was little known.
The Diaiogo de la Lengua was never quite forgotten.
It is in itself somewhat disappointing, being altogether
narrower in scope and less ambitious in aim than
1 For Villalobos see Bibliotcca de Ribadeneyra, B. xxxvi. There is
a modern edition of Perez de Oliva. Madrid, 1787.
a Origencs de la Lengua Castillana. Mayans y Siscar. Madrid,
ed. of 1873.
24 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Joachim du Bellay's Defense et Illustration de la
Langue francaise, published in 1549. Much of it
is devoted to nice points in the use of words, while
the scholarly, perhaps also the patriotic, leanings of
Valdes led him to assume the untenable position that
the few Greek colonies on the Mediterranean coast of
Spain had spread the use of their language all over
the country before it was displaced by the Latin.
But though the Dialogo is not, like the Defense, a great
literary manifesto, and though its learning is at times
fantastic, it has some intrinsic interest, and no small
value as a piece of evidence. That exceedingly
difficult literary form the dialogue is very fairly
mastered. The four speakers two Spaniards and
two Italians who take part in the conversation have
a distinct dramatic reality, and the tone of talk,
familiar, occasionally even witty in form, but serious
in substance, is well maintained. The scheme is that
three of a party of four gentlemen who are spending a
day at a villa on the Bay of Naples join in a friendly
conspiracy to draw the fourth, whose name, by the
way, is Valdes, into expounding to them, before they
take horse to return to the city, how a cultivated man
ought to speak and write Castilian. ' The doctrine of
Valdes differs significantly from the lesson enforced
by Joachim du Bellay. He does not call upon his
countrymen to go forth to the conquest of the
haughty Greeks and Eomans. On the contrary, it
is his contention that although the vocabulary re-
quires refining, and the grammar needs to be better
fixed, the language is already as fit for every purpose
THE LATER RENAISSANCE EN SPAIN. 25
of literature as the Italian, or even as the classic
tongues. With the pride of a genuine Spaniard he
seeks his examples in the refrancs, the proverbs and
proverbial phrases. He makes free use of the collec-
tion formed in the fifteenth century by the Marquess
of Santillana, who gathered the traditional sayings
'' from the old women sitting round the hearth."
Valdes may be held to have given evidence in support
of his own belief in the maturity of the language.
The Castilian of the Didlogo has very little in it that
is antiquated, and where it differs from the modern
tongue it is in being more terse and manly. His
literary doctrine, which is rather indicated than ex-
pounded, would have commended itself to our Queen
Anne men. To be simple and direct, to avoid affecta-
tion, to prefer at all times the natural and straight-
forward way of saying what you have to say that
is the advice of Juan de Valdes. Withal, he has no
squeamish dislike of the common, when, as in the case
of his beloved proverbs, it is also pure Spanish. The
principles of Valdes might have been fatal to a stately
and embroidered eloquence (of which Castilian has in
any case no great store), but they would preserve a
literature from the affected folly of Gongorism on the
one hand, and from the grey uniformity of general
terms, which was the danger incident to the classic
literature of the eighteenth century.
Valdes, who cited Garcilaso with praise, would not
have agreed in many things with Cristobal de Castil-
lejo, but he would have applauded his saying that
Castilian is friendly to a " cierta clara brevedad " to
2G EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
a certain lucid brevity. We shall be better able to
Theproscofthe J ud S e later whether the recognition of this
early sixteenth truth does not lead directly to agreement
with Mr Borrow, when he says that Spanish
Literature is not wholly worthy of the language.
Lucid brevity is certainly not the quality to be noted
in Spanish prose- writers of what we may call the time
of preparation the earlier sixteenth century. The
quality may indeed be found in an eminent degree in
the writings of Spaniards who were not men of letters
in the despatches of Cortes, or in the numerous
extant narratives of soldiers or priests who were eye-
witnesses of the wars of Italy, of the sack of Eome, or
of the conquest of America. It would be easy to
make an excellent collection of stories of adventure
from their letters, which would show the masculine
force and the savoury quality of Castilian. But these
were men of the sword, or churchmen as adventurous
as they not men of letters who knew by what devious
paths the Muses should be approached. The prose-
writers of this epoch as a class need not detain us in
what must be a brief outline portrait of Spanish litera-
ture. There is, however, one exception in Antonio de
Guevara, the Bishop of Mondonedo (//. 1545), who is
best known to us as the author of the once famous
Golden Epistles, if only for the sake of the influence
he may have had on Lyly. 1 Guevara^ wan& indeed,
the quaint graceful fancy, and also the oddity of the
1 The early editions and translations of Guevara are very numer-
ous. The passages spoken of in the text will be found in Biblioteca
de Jtibadcneyra, Obras de Filosofos.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 27
English writer; but it is possible that his senten-
tious antithetical style had some share in producing
euphuism. Guevara is also worth notice as an early,
though not the earliest, example of the pretentious-
ness and the tendency to wordy platitude which
have been so fatal in Spanish literature. He had
knowledge both of books and the world, and some
command of sarcasm. These qualities were, how-
ever, swamped in the "flowing and watery vein" of
his prose style. Xo writer ever carried the seesaw
antithetical manner to a more provoking extent. To
make one phrase balance another appears to have
been his chief aim, and in order to achieve this end
he repeated and amplified. In his own time, when
whatever was at once sound as moralising, learned,
and professedly too good for the vulgar was received
with respect, Guevara had a wide popularity both in
Spain and abroad. To-day he is almost unreadable,
and for a reason which it is easy to make clear. It
is known that La Fontaine took the subject of the
Paysan clu Danube from the Golden Epistles indirectly
if not directly. Spaniards may be found to boast
that there is nothing in the fable which is not in
their countrymen. This is partly true, but it is stated
in the wrong way. The accurate version is that there
is nothing in Guevara's prose which is not in La
Fontaine's verse, but that it is said in several hundred
times as many words, and that the meaning (not in
itself considerable) is smothered in tiresome digressions
and amplifications.
A few words, and they need be very few, on the in-
28 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
fluence of the Inquisition seem not out of place in a
The influx of history of any part of Spanish life in the
the inquisition, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They
are even to be justified by the fact that its oppressive
influence has been called on to account for the wither-
ing of the national will and intelligence, which dried
up the very sources of literature. The prevalence of
the destructive affectation called Gongorism has
been excused by Mr Ticknor on the ground that
men were driven back on mere playing with words
because the Inquisition made thinking dangerous.
But we are met at once by the problem of the Sufi
pipkin. It is hard to tell which is potter and
which is pot. Did the Spanish intellect wither be-
cause the Inquisition wrapped it in over-tight swad-
dling-clothes ? or did the Spaniard first create and
then submit to this repressive institution because he
had little tendency to speculation ? To judge by
what went before and by what has come after the
Inquisition, the second reading of the riddle is at least
as plausible as the first. However that may be, it is
difficult to see how the Inquisition is to be made
responsible for the carelessness of form and the
loquacious commonplace, which are the main defects
of Spanish prose and verse, while it may fairly claim
to have helped to preserve Spanish literature from
one grave fault so visible in parts of our own. The
Holy Office, which allowed Lope de Vega to write
La Esclava de su Galan, would not have punished him
for writing an As You Like It. Since it suffered
Cervantes to create Don Quiuote, it would not have
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. 29
burnt the author of a Novelet de Picaros, who had
made his hero as real as Gil Bias. The Inquisition
was no more responsible for the hasty writing of Lope
than for his undue complacence towards the vices of
his patron the Duke of Sessa. A literature which could
produce La Viola es Sueno, El Condenado por Desconfiado,
and the Mdgico Prodigioso, had all the freedom neces-
sary to say the profoundest things on man's passions and
nature in the noblest style. It was his own too great
readiness to say " This will do," and not the Inqui-
sition, which prevented Tirso de Molina from making
La Venganza de Tamar as perfect in form all through
as it is in one scene. The Church had no quarrel
with perfection of form. It had, indeed, a quarrel
with mere grossness of expression, and would certainly
have frowned on many so-called comic scenes of our
own Elizabethan plays. This was a commendable fas-
tidiousness of taste not peculiar to the Spanish Church.
The Spaniard may not be always moral, but he has
seldom been foul-mouthed. In this, as in other re-
spects, the Church spoke for the nation ; but it was
the effective administrative instrument which could
coerce an offending minority into decency and that
we may surely count to it for righteousness.
30
CHAPTER II.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS.
THE STARTING-POINT OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL THE NATURAL IN-
FLUENCE OF ITALY PREVALENCE OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL ITS
ARISTOCRATIC SPIRIT WHAT WAS IMITATED FROM THE ITALIANS
ITS TECHNIQUE AND MATTER ARTIFICIALITY OF THE WORK OF THE
SCHOOL BOSCAN GARCILASO THEIR IMMEDIATE FOLLOWERS
THE SCHOOLS OF SALAMANCA AND SEVILLE GONGORA AND GUN-
GORISM THE EPICS THE ' ARAUCANA ' THE ' LUSIADS. '
Mr Ticknor has made the very just remark, that
the manner of the introduction of the later Italian
influence into Spanish poetry enables us to
The starting- r r J
point of the see for once in a way exactly, when and
at whose instigation a literary revolution
was begun. The story is told by the best possible
authority, byMuan Boscan, who was one of the leaders
of the movement, in the long letter to the Duchess
of Soma, which is printed as a preface to the second
book of the collected works of himself and his friend
Garcilaso de la Vega, published at Barcelona in 1543. 1
En (to give him his native title) Juan Boscan
1 I have used the first edition <>f Boscan, P>arcclona, 154.'), Imt have
seen mention of a modern reprint by William J. Knapp, Madrid, 1875.
THE SPANISH LEA11NED POETS. 31
Almogaver was a Catalan of a noble family and of
good estate. The date of his birth is uncertain, but
it probably fell in the last years of the fifteenth
century. He died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he
had gone in discharge of his duty as ayo, or tutor, to
that formidable person the great Duke of Alva. The
story has been often told, but must needs be repeated
in every history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who
had already written verse in the old forms of the
previous century, was a cultivated gentleman who
had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good
knowledge of the language. This he afterwards
turned to account in a translation of Castiglione's
Courtier, which was considered by the Spaniards as
not inferior to the original, and had great popularity.
In 1526 he attended the Court at Granada, and there
met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian ambassador.
Navagiero urged him to write " in the Italian manner."
Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his
long ride back to Barcelona, and finally decided to
act on it, though not without doubts, and not until
he had been encouraged by a friend. This was the
far more famous Garcia Laso de la Vega, whose
names, according to a not uncommon custom, were
combined into Garcilaso. 1 He was born in 1503 of
a very ancient house of nobles of Toledo, and was
killed by being hurled from a ladder while leading a
storming-party at Frejus in 1536. Little is known
of their friendship, and indeed it would seem that
1 Tcsoro (hi Parnate h'x/Ktriul of Quintana, 41-51. BibUoteoa de
Ribadeneyra, vol. xxxii.
32 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
they cannot have seen much of one another, for
Boscan spent most of his life on his estate or at
Court, whereas Garcilaso, who was first a page and
then soldier to Charles V., lived, in common with all
who followed "the conquering banners" of the
emperor, on the march or on shipboard, from the
Danube to Tunis.
It would unquestionably be an error to conclude
from the exact manner of its beginning that there
The natural in- would have been no Spanish imitation of
jiuence of itaiy. Italian models if Boscan had not met
Navagiero at Granada in 1526. Garcilaso, Diego de
Mendoza, Gutierre de Cetina, and others, would no
doubt have begun to write pastorals, epistles, and can-
zones " in the Italian manner " in any case. Allowing
for the strength of the Italian influence of the day,
the close kinship of the two languages, the frequent
intercourse between the peoples, the ease with which
Castilian could be run into a Tuscan mould, this was
inevitable. Yet the story not only gives a curious
incident in literary history, but it is characteristic of
the classic poetry of Spain. Boscan we see took to
playing with the foreign metres as a mere exercise of
ingenuity, and as an amusement for his leisure. He
implies that Garcilaso acted on the same motives as
himself. With such a beginning there was an obvious
danger that the Spaniards would work as mere pupils
and produce only school exercises.
The ample following found by these two is itself a
proof that Navagiero's advice and Boscan's docility
were hardly necessary. It needed only an accident
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 33
to provoke the literary activity of the Italianate
Spaniards gathered round the emperor, in
ir FCVCtl&TtCC OJ
the classic the Court of Borne, at Naples, and at home,
where the " learned " men were all readers
of Italian and of Latin. Greek was never much read
in Spain, though a few of her scholars were good
Hellenists. The ambition of the poets of the school
of Boscan and Garcilaso is shown by their favourite
epithet of praise the word dodo. The literal sense is
"learned," but educated expresses its true meaning
more accurately. It did not necessarily imply much
more than this, that the poet was familiar with
Horace as well as with Sannazzaro and Ariosto, which,
at a time when Latin was the language of education
and diplomacy, and Italian was the language of
society, hardly amounted to learning, in the full
sense of the word. The seed fell on well- prepared
soil. A quick and copious harvest sprang up, which
for a time overshadowed all other forms of literary
growth. The second half of the sixteenth century
was the time of the learned poets of Spain. The
school lasted, indeed, into the seventeenth century,
but it had produced its best work before 1600.
The origin of this poetry would of itself lead us to
expect to find it composed of imitators who produced
it* aristocratic more or less ingenious school exercises.
spirit. its works are extant to show that the ex-
pectation would be well founded. Again, we should
expect to find that it was always much more of a
society fashion than a manifestation of the real
qualities of the Spaniard in literature, and here also
c
34 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
experience will be found to confirm expectation.
It was an aristocratic school, not perhaps quite so
indifferent to appearing in print as some others
have been, but still not uncommonly satisfied to
leave its work in manuscript. These poets could
afford to be indifferent to publication, since they did
not thereby injure their fame in the only world to
which they appealed. They were careless of the great
unlearned public, whose tastes favoured the romances
and the theatre. Manuscript copies sufficed for their
own limited society. Luis de Leon, for instance, was
the recognised chief of the Castilian learned poets in
his lifetime, yet his works were not printed till they
were brought out, forty years after his death, by
Quevedo, in the idle hope of converting his country-
men from Gongorism by the sight of better examples,
while Gongora was able to found a school of affecta-
tion by his influence, and yet his poems were not
published during his lifetime. The learned poets did
not expect to find readers among the vulgo, the com-
mon herd, of whose brutez, or bestial stupidity, they
habitually spoke in a very high and mighty fashion.
This attitude of superiority was not peculiar to the
learned poets of Spain. It was habitual with the
school of Eonsard, and indeed common to the whole
Eenaissance, which was emphatically scholarly and
aristocratic. But though the pretensions of Spain's
learned poets were not different from those of the
Italian, the Frenchman, or the Englishman, they were
less fully justified. These very self-conscious " children
of the Muses " were not so superior to the vulgar herd
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 35
of writers of romances and coplas in poetic inspiration
as to be entitled to look down upon them, on the
strength of a certain mechanical dexterity acquired
from foreigners by imitation.
The question what exactly it was that the innova-
tors of the sixteenth century took from their Italian
. rr . masters is easier to put than to answer.
I Wlmt was *
imitated from The mere imitation of Italian models was
in itself no novelty. Cristobal de Castil-
lejo denied the claim of the new school to originality
in the writing of hendecasyllabics. They had, he
said, already been written by Juan de Mena. So
they had, and by Ausias March and other poets of
the Catalan school also. The Marquess of Santillana
had written sonnets on the Petrarchian model ; the
ottava rima and tercets were not unknown to the
Court school of Castile or to the Catalans. The can-
zone had been written in Spain by imitators of the
earlier Italian poetry. What then remained for the
innovators to take ? If we look at the names only,
and the bare skeleton of the verse, little indeed ; but
when the manner of the execution is considered, a
great deal. The Italian hendecasyllable, which the
Spaniards allowed to be the original of their own
line of eleven syllables, and of the line of ten with
an accent on the final syllable, had become very
monotonous in their hands. The caesura fell with
unvarying regularity after the fourth syllable. The
innovators learnt to vary the pause, and thereby to
give a new melody to the verse. It remained to them
also to be more slavish in imitation than their pre-
36 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
decessors had been. This slavishness was shown by
its technique the establishment of the endecasilabo piano,
and matter. w ^ n f- ne unaccen ted vowel termination as
alone legitimate. Castilian abounds in vocablos agudos,
in masculine rhymes, and was not under the same
necessity as Italian to prefer the softer form. The
Spanish poets were, we may suppose, influenced by
the fact that the accented ending had become associ-
ated with comic verse among the Italians, and yet
by submitting to a limitation which was not justified
by the genius of their language, they began by im-
poverishing their poetic vocabulary, and they did it
in pure unintelligent imitation. The restriction was
not accepted without reluctance. Kengifo, who is
the Spanish Puttenham 1 the author, that is to say,
of the standard work on the mechanism of verse
written in Spain in the close of the sixteenth cen-
tury even puts in a plea for the mrso agitdo. He
had good authorities to support him, for Garcilaso
had dared to end a line with the word vesti. Boscan,
who, however, is not accepted by the Spaniards as
of unimpeachable authority, had been so left to him-
self as to end on nacid, while Diego de Mendoza
had done the evil thing " a thousand times." Accord-
ing to the stop-watch of the new school this was
wrong, and all three were duly pilloried for their
1 The Arte Po6tica Espanola, which goes under the name of Juan
Diaz Rengifo, a schoolmaster of Avila, is believed to have been
written by his brother Alfonso, a Jesuit. With the addition of a
dictionary of rhymes, it became the handbook of Spanish poetasters,
a numerous tribe. It appeared at Salamanca in 1592.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 37
offences in the Egemplar Portico i.e., Ars Poetica
of Juan da la Cueva. 1 ^^^^^
Yet j Juan cle la Cueba or Cueva (the b and v,
being very similar in Spanish pronunciation, were
constantly written for one another before the spel-
ling was fixed) was a man not unworthy of atten-
tion. His life is covered by the obscurity common
to the men of letters of the time, and on the whole
more dense in Spain than elsewhere. But we know
that he lived in Seville during the latter half of the
sixteenth century. His Egemplar PoStico, though not
considered as above reproach in form by Spanish
critics, undoubtedly contains the orthodox poetic
creed of the school, and is therefore of authority.
Nothing is more striking or, when the future of poetry
in the two countries is considered, more significant,
than the contrast between the three verse epistles
of Don Juan de la Cueva, and the Apologie for Poetrie
of Sir Philip Sidney. The PJgemplar is in tercets, and
the Apologie in fresh youthful prose ; but the work of
the Englishman is all on fire with the very soul of
poetic feeling, while the work of the Spaniard is a
cold didactic treatise of the most mechanical kind.
Sir Philip committed himself to the heresy that the
essential of poetry is in the matter, the passion, and
the intention, while the verse is an accident. Don
Juan is spotlessly correct on the one point on which
Sir Philip is heterodox. On the many on which our
countryman goes to the root of the matter, the Sevil-
1 The Egemplar Poetico is the first piece quoted in vol. viii. of
the Parnaso Espatiol of Seclauo, 1774.
38 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
lian is worse than wrong. He drops no single word
to show that he thinks them worthy of consideration.
A few general platitudes are to be found inculcating
the wisdom of consulting your genius, the excellence
of consistency and decency, the duty of despising the
profanum vulgus, the folly of applying the metres and
language proper to kings and great persons to the
doings of common people. Then having cleared the
way, he proceeds to the things really of necessity for
a poet, as that no cancion should contain more
than fifteen stanzas ; that a sestina is rhymed a b c,
cb a, and that its lines ought to end in nouns and
never in verbs ; that three adjectives are more than
enough for any substantive ; that an agudo at the end
of a hendecasyllable is the abomination of desolation ;
that the letter I is useful for sweetness ; that r comes
in with good effect " when violent Eurus opposes his
rush with horrid fury to powerful Boreas " ; and that
s suits with soft sleep and savoury repose (" al blando
sueno y al sabroso sosiego "), for he did not scorn
alliteration's artful aid.
It would be trivial to insist on the Egemyplar PoStico
if the author had been an insignificant man, or if
the bulk of Spanish classic poetry showed that he
spoke only for himself. But Juan do la Cueva lias an
honourable place in the history of Spanish dramatic
literature among the forerunners of Lope de Vega.
When he comes to write upon the comedy he rises
at once above the level of mechanism and common-
place. He ceases to be a mere schoolboy to the
Italians, and roundly vindicates the right of his
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 39
countrymen to reject the Senecan model, to be alive,
^Spanish, and original on the stage, in defiance of all
the rules and all the doctors. The theatre was to
imitate nature, and to please. Poetry was to imitate
the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute
critic. That is the sum and substance of Juan de la
Cueva's teaching, and therein lies the explanation of
the impassable gulf which separates the Spanish
drama a very genuine thing of its kind from
Spanish classic poetry a school exercise, redeemed.
Irom time to time by a note of patriotism or of
piety.
When poetry is approached in this spirit its matter
is likely to be as merely imitative as its form.
Spanish classic poetry did not escape
Artificiality of r . ,
the work of the this fate, and there is only too much
schooL truth in the taunt of " sterile abundance "
which has been thrown at it. We meet continually
with the exasperating, nameless, characterless shadow
of a lady whose " threads of gold " (which the rude vul-
gar call her hair) cruel hard tyrant Love has used to
enchain the lamenting poet, whose sorrows just fill the
correct number of stanzas. The pastoral raged. The
same Tirsis and the same Chloe repeat many hundreds
of times identical things in a landscape which has
flowers but no flower, trees but no tree, and is withal
most manifestly sham in arid, rocky Spain. Sj3anish
critics have complained that their classic poets so sel-
dom touched on the life of their time, but that is a
small matter. They have piety and patriotism apart
little human reality of any kind. Love according to
40 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
an Italian literary pattern, varied by platonism learnt
from the Florentines, is the staple subject. Don
Marcelino Menendez, the most learned of contempo-
rary Spanish critics, has said, when controverting
Ticknor's theory that the Inquisition was accountable
for the prevalence of Gongorism, that the real explan-
ation of that disaster lies elsewhere. Europe, he says,
was invaded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
by a sham middle age and a sham antiquity, which
could end in nothing but verbal follies. One does not
recognise the truth of this judgment in the case of
France and England, but it has force as applied to
Spain.
A general estimate of a school must always be diffi-
cult to justify except by a profusion of quotation, which
is impossible here. We can do no more than leave it
to be accepted or rejected by those who can control it
by a knowledge of the original, and proceed to give
such a sketch of the history of Spanish classic poetry
as our limits allow. 1 It falls naturally under two
heads the Lyric and the Epic and in both the pres-
ence of the Italian model is constant. The leading: S
form in lyric poetry is the cancion in hendecasyllables
with quebrados that is, broken lines of seven syllables.
1 This seems the most convenient place to note that fairly ample
specimens of Spanish literature will be found in the very useful collec-
tion known as the Bibliotecade Aribau, or de Ribadencyra seventy-
one somewhat ponderous volumes printed with middling skill on poor
paper. The texts are the best where few are really good, and the
introductions of value. It is well indexed. I prefer to make my
references to this rather than to earlier editions or better edit inns pub-
lished by societies, and therefore not easily accessible in this country.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 41
But the Epistola in tercets, imitated from the capitolo
of the Italians, is very common. The song proper is
wholly absent. There is no " Come unto these yellow
sands," no voice of Ariel in Spanish poetry. The
Spaniard does not sing ; he chants.
Of the two chiefs of the school, Boscan ranks mainly
by virtue of the example lie set. He was somewhat
harshly condemned by his follower, Her-
rera, for hanging jewels robbed from the
classics and Italians on his own robe of frieze. The
charge of plagiarism is not easily rebutted, for Boscan
certainly took his goods where he found them in Virgil
or Horace. As for the quality of his robe, it is un-
doubtedly of the nature; of frieze. What strikes the
reader most in Boscan is a certain worldly good sense,
more like our own Queen Anne men than the poetry
of a sixteenth-century school at its beginning. His
most quoted piece, an Epistola addressed to Diego de
Mendoza, is eminently rational prose disguised in
verse, .. avowing a most heterodox affection for his
wife (his whole tone to women is thoroughly modern),
and a quite unpoetic liking for a good supper by a
blazing fire of logs at the end of a day in the open
air. But we note also the maturity of the language,
in spite of a certain awkwardness due to the writer's
want of skill. This same premature and fatal maturity
is even more conspicuous in Gurcilaso, who was more
master of his pen. In the small body of
his verse, and the one fragment which
remains of his prose a letter to his friend's wife
praising her good taste for enjoying the Courtier of
42 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Castiglione there is hardly a word or phrase which
has become antiquated. This classic poetry was born
with an old head on young shoulders, and had no
youth. His finished form earned and kept for Gar-
cilaso the rank of Prince of Castilian poets. In the
latter part of the century he was twice edited once
at Salamanca in 1577 by the Humanist, Francisco
Sanchez, called, from the name of his native town,
Las Brozas, el Brocense, and best known as the
author of the Minerva; and then at Seville by Hernan
de Herrera. The edition of Herrera has a commentary
on a large scale, and is of considerable value for the
history of Spanish poetry; but it set an example which
was followed to an excess of tiresome pedantry by the
editors of Gongora and Camoens. It led to a famous
and not unamusing literary quarrel. The Castilian
critics, who were banded in support of their own man,
Sanchez, fell on Herrera with some justice for his
inappropriate display of scholastic pedantry, and most
unjustly for ignorance of Castilian. No Castilian
will ever readily allow that an Andalusian (which
Herrera was) speaks the language quite correctly. Of
the matter of Garcilaso's verse it may be said that it
is pastoral, or gentlemanlike, and melancholy. The
Spaniard finds, no doubt, a charm in the mere lan-
guage, which of itself is enough ; but even to him there
may be suspected to be some tedium in this obvious
determination to get a stool to be melancholy on. It
is not the melancholy of Jorge Manrique, who is sad-
dened by those eternal sorrows, death of kin and
friends and the burden of life, but the melancholy of
THE SPANISH LKABNED POETS. 43
a gentleman who is imitating a model to pass the
time in winter quarters. But the so-called Lira or
ode, in lines of seven syllables mixed with hendeca-
syllabics, addressed " To the flower of Gnidus " is
elegant. It is in stanzas of five lines, rhyming the
first with the third, the second, fourth, and fifth to-
gether, and enforces the well-known lesson, " Gather
ye rosebuds while ye may," for the instruction of a
young lady at Naples who had not favoured the suit
of one of the poet's friends.
Only a very full history of Spanish literature could
afford to dwell on Ferdinand de Acuna (Ferdinand,
Fernando, Fernan, and Hernan are all forms of the
same name, employed according to taste or local
usage), who was a Portuguese noble in the service
of Charles V., a soldier of distinction, a writer of
Castilian verse, and a copious translator from the
classics ; or G-utierre de Cetina; a soldier best known
by a graceful madrigal; 1 or many others whom it
would be a barren display to name; but Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza is too strong a man to be
passed in a crowd. He is chiefly famous as a man of
action as a soldier who governed Siena for Charles
V., and a diplomatist who represented the emperor
in a very military fashion at the Council of Trent.
In literature he ranks chiefly as the undoubted author
1 A very interesting study of this phase of Spanish poetry, and
some account of its writers, will be found in the introduction written
by M. Alfred Morel-Fatio- to his reprint of a Cancionero General of
1535, in his UEspagne au XVI 1 **. ct an AT//""'. Slede. Heilbronn
1878.
44 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
of a history of the revolt of the Moriscoes, and as the
possible, though doubtful, author of the Lazarillo de
Tormes. Diego de Mendoza (1503 - 1575) was a
younger son of the Count of Tendilla, head of one
of the many titled branches of his famous house
the Douglases of Spain. He was the direct descend-
ant of the Marquess of Santillana, and through him
of that Lord of Butrago who sacrificed his life for the
king at the battle of Aljubarrota. 1 His poetry was
^ . the relaxation of a great noble who broke
Their
immediate through the rules in a fashion well cal-
culated to horrify such critics as Juan de
la Cueva. But Don Diego had fire enough in him
to burn up a wilderness of correct poets of that
order. Sometimes it flamed out with little regard to
decency. But in happier moments as, for instance,
in the ode to Cardinal Espinosa he could strike that
note of a haughty, or even arrogant patriotism, which
is the finest in Spanish poetry. Even in his case
we have examples of the same premature maturity
noted in Boscan. One of his epistles addressed to
this very writer begins by the Horatian "Nil admirari"
an excellent maxim, perhaps, but chilling in the
first youth of a poetry. Mendoza wrote not only in
the Tuscan, but the native metres, couplets, and
J glosas. The glosa is a favourite exercise of verse-
making ingenuity with the Spaniard. It consists in
taking any stanza of whatever number of lines, and
building on it a poem of the same number of stanzas
1 Pamaso Uspanol of Sedafto, vol. vii. ; and Ribadeneyra, vol.
xxxii.; PoetCU Liricox de lot Siglot, xvi., xvii.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 45
as there are lines. Each must end in one of the lines
of the foundation stanza taken in their order. They
must be brought in without violence, and the whole
must be a variation on the theme of the stanza quoted.
Diego de Mendoza outlived Charles V., and spent his
last years in exile at Granada, incurred by a too
great promptitude in resenting impertinence within
the precincts of the Court.
It has been the custom to divide the poets of Spain
into the Castilian and the Andalusian, or those of
, , Salamanca and those of Seville. The divi-
T/ie two schools
of Salamanca sion is somewhat arbitrary, and corresponds
to very little distinction in tone, method,
or language among the writers, or at least so it seems
to a foreigner who compares Luis de Leon with Her-
nan de Herrera, though the first is counted as the
chief of the school of Salamanca, and the second as
the chief of the school of Seville. Both wrote the
same fine Castilian, both were good scholars, and
there was the same intense religious feeling, the same
high patriotism, in both. /Luis Ponce de Leon7 (1528-
1591), as if to show how artificial this distinction is,
was born at Granada, which is one of the sub-king-
doms of Andalusia. 1 He was an Augustine friar, and
occupied two important chairs in succession at Sala-
manca. Between 1572 and 1576 he was imprisoned
by the Inquisition. The charge made against him
was that he had translated the Song of Solomon, which,
1 Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, vol. xxxvii. , contains the work of Luis
de Leon, both prose and verse, together with a selection from the
papers of his trial before the Inquisition.
46 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
at a time when the Beformers were making an active
use of the Bible in the vernacular tongues against the
Church, was a serious offence. The leader of the
attack on him was the Dominican Melchior Cano ; of
whose De Locis Thcologicis Dr Johnson wrote, " Nee
admiror, nee multum laudo." It is a well-known story
of Luis de Leon that when the verdict of the Holy Office
was given in his favour, and he was allowed to resume
his lectures, he began where he had left off, and with
the words, "As we were saying yesterday, gentlemen."
His poetry may be divided into that part which is^
inspired by Horace, and that which is inspired by the
Bible. It is perhaps only natural that he should
appear to more advantage when he is paraphrasing
the description of a perfect wife from the Proverbs
of Solomon than when he is endeavouring to adapt
the lira of Garcilaso to some theme obviously taken
because it bore a certain resemblance to the subject
of one of the odes of Horace. These imitations of the
classic models were not confined to the graver and
more reflective parts of his originals. Luis de Leon,
though a churchman of undoubted piety, wrote amatory
poems. The coplas in the old Spanish metres called
A tina Desdenosa to a scornful lady are on exactly
the same subject as the already named Flor de Gnido
of Garcilaso. Whether he was following the classics
and learned poets of his own country, or paraphrasing
the Psalms, Luis de Leon was always a master of the
very purest Castilian ; while his reflective poems
the JVoche Serena, for instance, or the ode which imi-
tates the Beatus Ille of Horace are something more
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 47
than mere exercises of ingenuity. It was his repu-
"tation as a stylist which secured the publication of his
poems forty years after his death. Luis de Leon
himself seems to have considered them only as
amusements for his leisure. But in 1631 Quevedo
brought out the first edition, in order to counteract
the growing taste for Gongorism.
The poet who has the honour to rank as a stylist
among the Spaniards, next to, if not on an equality
with Garcilaso, is Hernan de Herrera of Seville (1534-
1597), a churchman of whose life almost nothing is
known with certainty. 1 As usual, he published little
during his life, and much of his manuscript was lost
by an accident after his death. The remainder was
published by his friend the painter Pacheco in 1619.
Spaniards, if asked to name the pieces of verse in their
language which display the greatest measure of force
and dignity, would certainly quote the famous odes on
the battles of Lepanto and Alcazar el-Quebir, together
with the sonnet in honour of Don John of Austria.
The vigour of these verses is unquestionable, and if it
cannot be claimed for them that they display any great
originality of form, they are animated by a fine spirit
of patriotism. Herrera, too, had a sense of the merits
of compression, which is not common with his country-
men. He worked at the language in an artistic spirit.
Once more, as in the case of the immediate followers
of Garcilaso, we must pass over the names of all but
the chiefs very lightly. 2 The Aragonese brothers
1 Biblioteca dc 2libadcnei/ra, vol. xxxii.
2 The reference is again to Ribadeneyra, vols, xxxii., xlii.
48 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Lupercio and Bartolome de Argensola, who may be
classed among the poets of Castile ; Francisco de
Figueroa, who spent nearly all his life in Italy ; Bioja,
the poet of flowers, and the author of a moral poem
on the Euins of Italica (a Koman colony near Seville),
inspired by Joachim du Bellay; Arguijo, and many
others, must be passed over in silence. It is proper to
note, however, that whatever anybody else was doing
at this time, Lope de Vega did in as great quantities
as men who did nothing else. But there will be
occasion to speak of Lope elsewhere. For the present
he must make room for the writer whom some have
claimed as the most genuine lyric poet of Spain, and
who bears the discredit of having flooded the literature
of his country with a ruinous affectation.
/ Don Luis de Argote y Gongora, who habitually used
the second of these names, which was his mother's,
c6ngoraand was a Corclovese, born in 1561. 1 He was
Gongorism. educated at Salamanca, followed the Court
for some years, and was attached to the Duke ' of
Lerma. He took orders, and received a benefice when
advanced in life, and died in his native city in 1627.
His evil fame, based on the invention of the particu-
lar form of bad literature called after him Gongor-
ism, is greater than his good, which yet has some
foundation. His romances on stories of captives
among Barbary pirates, and of wars on the frontiers,
are among the best of their kind. Among his earlier
poems on the Tuscan models there are some which
possess the lyric cry with a degree of intensity very
1 Biblioteca de liibadencyra, vol. xxxii.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 49
rare among the Spaniards. The third cancion, for
instance, contains a singularly passionate and admir-
ably worded variation, on the theme of Shakespeare's
forty-fourth sonnet, " If the dull substance of my flesh
were thought." But it was not for this, the work of
his earlier years, that the reputation of Gongora has
been spread over the world, but because he, to steal an
image from Carlyle, swings in chains on the side of
Parnassus, as the inventor of "El Culteranismo " or
" Gongorism." At some period in his life he began to
write in this style. Hostile critics say he did so be-
cause he could not attract sufficient attention by
writing with sanity. Admirers have asserted that
he had a literary ambition to improve the poetic
language of Spain, to make it, in fact, more culto
more cultivated. The question what exactly Gongor-
ism was, will be best answered by an example. Here,
for instance, is a passage from the Pyramus and
Thisbe, a short poem, published in 1636 by his ad-
mirer Cristobal de Salazar Mardones, with a wordy
commentary of incredible pomposity, and futility.
The English translation is put below the Spanish on
the Hamiltonian system, and the reader is begged to
observe that the inversions and transpositions are only
a little more violent in English than in Spanish :
Piramo fueron y Tisbe,
Pyramus they were and Tisbe,
Los que en verso hizo culto
Those who in verse made 1 polished
1 " Made " is the past tense of the verb. The order is " made to
leave," which is shown by the inflection in Spanish.
D
50 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
El Licenciado Nason
The Licentiate Naso
Bien romo 6 bien narigudo
Maybe snub, maybe beak
Dejar el dulce candor
To leave the siveet white
Lastimosamente obscuro
Lamentably dark
Al que, tumulo de seda,
Of that which, tomb of silk,
Fue de los dos casquilucios
Was of the tivo feather-heads
Moral que los hospedd
Mulberry which gave them shelter
Y fue condenando al punto
And was condemned at once
Si del Tigris no en raizes
If by the Tigris not in root
De los arnantes en frutos.
By the lovers in fruit.
Don Cristobal de Salazar Mardones explains in
prose, and with copious references to Ovid, Meta., lib.
iv., that what this means is that the mulberry -tree
was not torn up by the roots as a punishment by the
Tigris, but was coloured by the blood of the lovers.
The reader will see at once that this is puerile non-
sense, and that it is a mere trick. It is also a very
old trick. When Thiodolf of Hvin, whose verse rid-
dles adorn the Hdmskringla, wrote of a certain king
" Now hath befallen
In Frodi'a house
The word of fate
To fall on Fiolnir ;
That the windless wave
Of the wild bull's spears
That lord should <lo
To death by drowning,"
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 51
he was writing in "gongorina especie" that is, in
what was to be the manner of Gongora. The whole
secret lay, as Lope de Vega, indeed, pointed out, in
neve r calling an ything by its right name, and in
transposing words violently. Given a great deal of
bad taste, and a puerile mania for making people
stare, and the thing is easily accounted for. In such
conditions it may be thought clever to call mead
which men drink out of horns " the windless wave
of the wild bull's spear," or to describe a mulberry-
tree as a tumulus of silk, though the mistake was
incomparably more excusable in Thiodolf of Hvin
than in Gongora, and the Norseman seems on the
whole to have been the least silly of the two. The
comparison which has been made between Gongorism
and our own metaphysical school is too favourable to
the Spaniards, in whom there was absolutely nothing
but juggling with words.
This folly spread as rapidly as the imitation of
Italian models had done. It was in vain that Lope
argued against it for common-sense. He was himself
conquered. Queveclo, 1 who attacked it, was driven to
worse straits, for he endeavoured to resist it by means
of another affectation, the conccptista, or conceited
style, which is more like our " metaphysical " manner,
but never had the popularity of Gongorism. The
founder of this school of affectation was Alonso de
Ledesma of Segovia (1552-1623). The poems which
Quevedo published under the name of the Bachiller
1 Bibliotcca de Ribadencyra, vols, xxiii., xlviii., lxix. There is a
very pretty edition of Quevedo in eleven octavo volumes, by Sancha,
Madrid, 1791, which is occasionally met with.
52 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Francisco de la Torre were meant to reinforce Luis
de Leon, and were free from either kind of fault ; but
the learned poetry of Spain had not vitality enough to
throw off the disease. Gongorism became the literary
taste of the day, and was soon traceable everywhere.
The great mass of epics, or so-called epics, 1 which
form the non-lyric side of the learned poetry of Spain,
belong with rare exceptions, if not with
only one exception, to the domains of
bibliography and curiosity. I have to confess that
I do not speak with any personal knowledge of the
Carolea of Hieronimo Sempere, published in 1560, or
many others, and with only a slight acquaintance
with the Carlo Famoso of Don Luis de Zapata.
This second poem, published in 1565, is in 50 cantos,
and contains 40,000 verses. The subject is the history
of the Emperor Charles V., and it may stand here as a
specimen of the whole class to which it belongs. The
Carlo Famoso is essentially prose, disguised in such
ottava rima stanzas as any one who had once acquired
the trick could probably write as easily as prose pure
and simple. If Don Luis de Zapata, who had served
the emperor, had been content to tell us of what he saw
in prose, he would probably have left a readable, and
perhaps a valuable, book. But, unfortunately, lie felt
called upon to build the lofty rhyme, in imitation of
Ariosto, and this brought with it the necessity for
supernatural machinery, which the Don Luis de
1 Vols. xvii. and xix. of the Biblioteca de Ribadcneyra contain not
only all, but more than all, that i.s entitled to survive of this portion
of Spanish literature.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 53
Zapatas of all countries are very ill qualified to
handle. The ease with which verses of a kind are
written in Spanish, the influence of a fashionable
model, and the prestige attaching to the writing of
verse, led to the production of innumerable volumes
on historical subjects of what would fain have been
poetry if it could. Some of this mass of writing is not
without merit, the Elegies of Famous Men of the Indies
Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indicts of Juan de
Castellanos 1 is readable enough, and has some his-
torical value. Juan de Castellanos, whose dates of
birth and death are unknown, was an old soldier
turned priest, who in common with many others
could in a fashion write ottava rima stanza. He
seems to have thought that " Elegy " meant much the
same thing as " Eulogy," and his Elegias are, in fact,
a history of the conquest of America by the Spaniards,
carried down to 1588. It is only a fragment, but
even so, it fills a crown octavo volume of 563 pages in
double columns. Of course there are by the side of
work of this kind imitations of the Italian epic serious
or humorous, which have no pretensions to a histori-
cal character. Here it was only to be expected that
Lope de Vega would be among the most fluent and
the most conspicuous, for it may be repeated that he
tried his hand at whatever others were doing. The
epics in the Italian form being popular, he wrote
several ; and as he had an unparallelled command of
facile verse which always stopped short of becoming
bad, he is never anreadable, though, as he was also only
1 Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, vol. iv.
54 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
a very superior improvisatore, his poems never quite
compel reading. The subject of the Dragontea the last
cruise and death of Sir Francis Drake in 1594 is so
much more attractive to an Englishman than the
Angelicas and Jerusalem Conquistaclas, taken from
Ariosto and Tasso, that one is perhaps prejudiced in
its favour. And yet it seems to me to have a certain
vitality not present in the rest, and to be by no means
inferior to them in other respects. 1
The partiality of his countrymen and the too good-
natured acquiescence of foreigners have given the name
of epic to the Araucana of Alonso de
The Araucana.
Ercilla. The author was a very typical
Spaniard of his century. He was born in 1533, and
came to England as page to Philip of Spain at the
time of his marriage with Mary Tudor. It was from
England that he sailed to Chili for the purpose
of helping in the suppression of the revolt of the
Araucans, which became the subject of his poem.
While on service he was condemned to death for
drawing his sword on a brother officer. The sentence
was remitted, but Ercilla resented it so bitterly that
he entirely omitted the name of his general, the
Marquis of Cafiete, in his poem. He returned to
Spain in 15G5, and passed the remainder of his life,
until his end in 1595, partly in endeavouring to
secure a reward from the king for his services, and
partly in compiling his great Araucana. It appeared
1 Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra. Obras no drainalicas de Lope dt
Vega; also. Obras ttucltits. Madrid, 1776-1779.
2 Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, vol. xvii.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 55
in three parts in 1569, 1575, and 1590. The story
told by himself, that he wrote it on pieces of leather
and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies,
therefore, only to the first part. It is only by a
figure of speech that the Araucana can be described
as an epic. Ercilla said that he found courage to
print it because it was a true history of wars he had
seen for himself. The first part is almost wholly
occupied with the skirmishes of the Araucan war. In
the later parts he was tempted to provide a proper
epic machinery, but the change is only a proof of the
tyranny of a fashion. Ercilla was a good handicrafts-
man of ottava rima stanzas, he wrote very fine Cas-
tilian, and his poem has unquestionable vitality.
Yet it is, after all, hybrid. At its best it is a superior
version of the Varones Ilustres of Castellanos, at its
weakest an echo of the Italians. The literature of the
world would have been richer, not poorer, if Ercilla
had written memoirs on the model of his French con-
temporary Monluc.
The Italian influence which produced the learned
poetry of Spain had its effect on Portugal also. The
Portuguese remember Francisco de Sa de Miranda
(1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their
language for literary purposes, and the work was
continued by Antonio Ferreira and Pedro de Andrade
Caminha, his younger contemporaries and followers.
My own knowledge of these writers is small, but as
far as it goes it leads me to believe that Southey's
sound literary judgment had as usual led him right
when he said that, "They rendered essential service
56 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
to the language of their country, and upon that
their claims to remembrance must rest." l They are
interesting in fact as examples of a general literary
movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over
all Western Europe. Southey did not note, and
Portuguese writers have naturally not been forward
to confess, how near Portugal came to having no
modern literature in her own tongue. One of the
two founders of the Spanish Italianate school was a
Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner and Ausias
March to write Castilian. Had the political union of
Spain and Portugal been a little closer, it is very
possible that Portuguese would have shared the fate
of Catalan. It would not have ceased to be spoken,
but it would no longer have been the language of
government and literature. Even as it was, Castilian
had in Portugal something of the pre-eminence which
medieval Erench had had among neighbouring peoples.
Portuguese who wrote their own tongue also wrote
Castilian even Camoens is in the list of those who
used both languages. But the unity of the Peninsula
was destined never to be completed, and Portuguese
has escaped falling into the position of a dialect.
Before the close of the sixteenth century it was
illustrated by a poem which has at any rate " a world-
wide reputation."
It becomes the critic and historian of literature to
approach works of great fame, which he
cannot himself regard with a high degree
of admiration, in a spirit of diffidence, or even of
1 Article on Portuguese Literature in the QuarUrl/y for May 1809.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 57
humility. I have to confess my own inability to feel
the admiration other, and no doubt better, judges
have felt for the Lusiads} The pathetic circum-
stances of the life of the author, Luiz da Camoens
(1524 ? - 1580), are well known, and have perhaps
served to prejudice the reader in favour of the
poem. He was a Portuguese gentleman who served
in the East Indies, who was ruined by shipwreck,
and who ended his life in extreme misery in Lisbon.
The foundation of the Lusiads is supplied by the
famous voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of
Good Hope ; but Camoens has worked in a great deal
from Portuguese history, and the epic is written in
honour of the people, not of the navigator. The
matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I
speak under correction) feeble. The merit of epic
completeness and proportion which has been claimed
for the Lusiads is not great in a writer who had
Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama
supplied a coherent narrative, if not exactly a plot.
It cannot be denied and no one need wish to deny
that Camoens wrote his own language with great
purity, and with that softness bordering, and some-
times more than bordering, on the namby-pamby,
which the Portuguese love. He has a real tender-
ness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his
patriotism is undeniable. But in spite of these
merits, which at the best are fitter for the lyric
1 The general reader cannot do better than make his acquaintance
with the Lusiads in Mr Aubertin's translation, which gives the
Portuguese text opposite the English version.
58 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
than the scope of the epic, the Lusiads suffer from
the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both
in language and thought. The supernatural machinery
is an example of childish imitation. Camoens has
introduced the heathen mythology together with the
sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese-
poet had many precedents for the combination, but
he is not strong enough to make us endure its essen-
tial absurdity. The Lusiads has, in fact, the defect of
all the learned poetry of the Peninsula that it is
very much of a school exercise. He saw his heathen
gods and goddesses in Virgil, and transferred them
bodily to his own Christian poem, not because they
had any fit place there, but because they were or-
dered to be provided in the " receipt for making an
epic poem." 1
The reader who compares the Lusiads, not with the
Faerie Queen, which belongs to a very different man-
sion in the house of literature, but with the master-
pieces of the class to which it really belongs, the
purely literary epic, done by an accomplished writer
according to rule, is, it may be, liable to be rendered
impatient by the loud calls made on him for extreme
1 Whether because the subject is maritime, or in consequence of
our long trading and fighting alliance with Portugal, the Lusiads has
been translated into English with an almost curious persistence. Sir
Richard Fanshawe made a very quaint version in the middle of the
seventeenth century. The flowing, and extremely free, translation of
Mickle proved lucrative to its author as late as 1776. In our time
Mr Aubertin has translated it closely, and Sir Richard Burton has
given a version both of the Lusiads and of the minor poems which is
admirably Titled to introduce the English reader to the translator.
THE SPANISH LEARNED POETS. 59
admiration. He finds stanza following stanza of
smooth, but somewhat nerveless, ottava rima, full of
matter which might equally well be expressed in
prose, and would not then appear to differ essentially
from much of Hakluyt's voyages. Now and then he
will find incidents the vision of the Spirit of the
Cape, for example, and the episode of the island of
Love where the intention to be poetical is visible
enough, but which do not come of necessity, and have
no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is, and
that is what is most truly poetical and genuine in
Camoens. And of that again there are better and
more spontaneous examples in his sonnets. On the
whole, one has to come to the conclusion that he was
a real poet, though of no wide scope, who could ex-
press a certain tenderness and melancholy in forms he
had learnt from the Italians, but who owes his great
name mainly to the fact that he is the only man his
country can quote as worthy to rank with the great
poets of the world. Therefore he has a whole
nation to sing his praise, and nobody is concerned
to contradict. 1
1 Obras de Camoens. Lisbon, 1782-1783.
60
CHAPTEE III.
THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE
SPANISH DRAMA.
THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA THE FIRST BEGIN-
NINGS OF THE RELIGIOUS PLATS THE STARTING-POINT OF THE
SECULAR PLAY BARTOLOMF, DE TORRES NAHARRO LOPE DE RUEDA
LOPE DE VEGA'S LIFE HIS INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA THE CON-
DITIONS OF THE WORK CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE
CALDERON CALDERON's SCHOOL.
The dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own,
purely national. The classic stage had no influence
on it whatever ; the contemporary theatre
The national
character of the of Italy very little, and only for a brief
Spanish drama. ^^ ^ ^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^
Spain translators both of the Greek and Latin dram-
atic literature, while her scholars were no less ready
than others to impress on the world the duty of fol-
lowing the famous rules of Aristotle. But neither the
beauty of the classic models, nor the lessons of scholars,
nor even the authority of Aristotle though it was
certainly not less regarded in the last country which
clung to the scholastic philosophy than elsewhere
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 61
had any effect. It would be too much to say that they
were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic writers
were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them
with profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known
passage of Don Quixote, reproaches his countrymen for
their neglect of the three unities ; and Lope de Vega,
who more than any other man helped to fix the Span-
ish comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and
place, and its habitual contempt for the rules that the
comic and tragic should never be mingled in one piece,
or that great personages should never be brought on
except with a due regard to their dignity, avowed that
he saw what was right, and confessed its excellence.
He even boasted that he had written no less than six
orthodox plays. But Cervantes, in the little he wrote
for the stage, never made his practice even approach
his precept, while nobody has ever been able to find of
which of his plays Lope was speaking when he said
that he had observed the unities. It has even been
supposed that when he made the boast, he was laughing
at the gentlemen to whom he addressed his Arte Nuevo
de Haccr Comedias (New Art of Writing Comedies).
Not a little ingenuity has been wasted in attempts to
discover what both meant. The good sense of Don
Marcelino Menendez 1 has found by far the most ac-
ceptable explanation of the mystery, and it is this,
that Cervantes, Lope, and their contemporaries had a
quite sincere theoretical admiration for the precepts of
Aristotle, or what were taken to be such by the com-
mentators, but that in practice they obeyed their own
1 llistoria de las Ideas Esteticas en Espana.
62 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
impulses, and the popular will, though not without a
certain shamefaced consciousness that it was rather
wicked in them. Spanish dramatists, in fact, treated
the orthodox literary doctrine very much as the
ancient Cortes of Castile were wont to treat the un-
constitutional orders of kings, they voted that these
injunctions were to be obeyed and not executed " obe-
dicidas y no cumplidas," thereby reconciling independ-
ence with a respectful attitude towards authority.
Some were bold enough to say from the first that the
end of comedy was to imitate life, and that their imi-
tation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally
became as fully established in theory as it always had
been in practice. Nothing is more striking than the
contrast between the slavishness of Spanish learned
poetry and the vigorous independence of the native
stage.
There was little in the mediaeval literature of Spain
to give promise of its drama of the later sixteenth and
. . earlier seventeenth centuries. Spaniards
The first begin- r
ningso/thc had mysteries, and they dramatised the
lessons of the Church as other nations
did ; but they had less of this than most of their
neighbours, and very much less than the French. In
the earlier years of the sixteenth century there was a
perceptible French influence at work in Spain. 1 The
San Martinho of Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who wrote
1 Autos Sacramentalcs in Bibl'iotcca de Rlbadeneyra. The introduc-
tion by Don Eduardo Gonzalez Pedroso gives the early history of
these religious plays in Spain, but with scarcely sufficient recognition
of the fact that they were common to all western Europe.
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 63
both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is a moral
play like many in mediaeval French literature. It is
on the well-known story of Saint Martin and the
beggar, is written in flowing verse, and breaks off
abruptly with a note that the performers must end
with psalms, for he had been asked to write very late,
and had no time to finish. The Farsa del Sacramento
de Peralforja, which, from a reference to the spread of
the Lutheran heresy, seems to belong to the years
about 1520, betrays a French model by its very title.
Farce had not the meaning it acquired later. The
personages are Labour, Peralforja, his son, Teresa
Jugon, Peralforja's sweetheart, the Church, and Holy
Writ The subjects are the foolish leniency of Labour
to his son, and its deplorable effects (a favourite theme
with French writers of /arses and moralities), the
sorrows of the Church, who is consoled by Holy
Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his weakness, and
induce Peralforja to amend his ways. There is nothing
here particularly Spanish nothing which might not
be direct translation from the French. The religious
play was destined to have a history of its own in
Spain ; but its earlier stage is marked by little national
character. Even the Oveja Perdida (the Lost Sheep),
written, or at least revised and recast, by Juan de
Timoneda about 1570, which long remained a stock
piece with the strolling players, is a morality on the
universal mediaeval model. The Lost Sheep is of
course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite,
and rescued by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other
characters are Saint Peter, the Archangel Michael, and
64 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
the Guardian Angel. Except that it has an elaborate
introduction, divided between an Introit to Ribera, the
Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, be-
fore whom it was played, and an Introit to the people,
it does not differ from the San Martinho or the Farsa
Sacramental de Peralforja.
It has been customary to treat the Celestina as the
foundation, or at least an important part of the foun-
dations, of the Spanish secular drama. This curious
story in dialogue is indeed called a " tragi-comedy,"
and it most unquestionably proves that its author, or
authors, possessed the command of a prose style ad-
mirably adapted for the purposes of comedy. But the
Spanish is a poetic, not a prose drama. The qualities
which redeem the somewhat commonplace love-story
of Calisto and Meliboea, and the tiresome pedantry of
much of the Celestina, its realism, and its vivacious
representation of low life and character, are seldom
found on the Spanish stage. We shall do better
to look for the starting - point of the comedy of
Lope de Vega in the Eelogas of Juan del Enema,
who has been already mentioned as one of the
last lights of the troubadour school. 1 The model
here is obviously the little religious play of the
stamp of Vicente's San Martinho, modified by imitation
1 An accessible and still most useful account of the early Spanish
drama is to be found in the first volume of Ochoa's Tesoro del Tcatro
Espanol, which gives the introduction and catalogue of Don Leandro
de Moratin, Paris, 1836 ; but the standard authority is Schack's
Geschichte dcr Dramatischen Literatur und Kunst in Spanien, Berlin,
1845-46. Yet, here and always, the English reader cannot do better
than follow Mr Ticknor.
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 65
of the classic Eclogue. The personages, generally
shepherds, are few, the action of the
The starting- x
V oi,it of the simplest, and the verse somewhat infantile,
arp y ' though not without charm. Yet the mere
fact that we have in them examples of an attempt to
make characters and subjects, other than religious,
matter of dramatic representation, shows that they
were an innovation and a beginning. Juan del
Encina, who was attached in some capacity to the
Duke of Alva of his time, wrote these Eclogues to
be repeated for the amusement of his patrons by their
servants. It does not appear that they were played
in the market-place, or were very popular. During
the first half of the sixteenth century the Church
endeavoured to repress the secular play. The
struggle was useless, for the bent of the nation
was too strong to be resisted. It conquered the
Church, which, before the end of the century, found
itself unable to prevent the performance of very mun-
dane dramas within the walls of religious houses. Yet
for a time the Inquisition was able to repress the
growth of a non-religious drama at home. The
working of the national passion for the stage, and
for something other than pious farsas, is shown in the
Josefina 1 of Micael de CarvajaL This long-forgotten
work, by an author of whom nearly nothing is really
known, was performed apparently for, and by, ecclesi-
astics at Valencia about 1520. It is on the subject of
Joseph and his Brethren, is a religious play, but has
divisions, and a machinery obviously adapted from the
1 Published by the Sociedad de Biblidfilos Espanoles, 1870.
E
66 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Latin, if not the Greek model. There are four acts,
a herald who delivers a prologue to the first, second,
and third, a chorus of maidens at the end of each.
The dialogue has life, and there is a not unsuccessful
attempt at characterisation in the parts of the brothers
and of Potiphar's wife. At the close comes the
Jvillancico, a simple form of song hovering towards
being a hymn, which was obligatory at the close of the
religious play. The Josefina had no progeny, and is
to-day mainly interesting as an indication of the
struggle of the national genius to find its true path.
We cannot say even that of the few direct imitations
of the classic form produced by the Spaniards. Such
works as the Nise Zastimosa the Pitiable Agnes a
strictly Senecan play on the story of Ines de Castro,
first written in Portuguese by Perreira, and then adap-
ted into Castilian by Geronimo Bermudez, a learned
churchman, and printed in 1577, are simply literary
exercises. They show that the influences which in-
spired Jodelle, and Gamier in Prance, were not un-
felt in Spain ; but there, as in England, the national
genius would have none of them. In Bermudez him-
self the imitation of Seneca was forced. The Nise
Zastimosa has a continuation called the Nise Laure-
ada. The first, which ends with the murder of Agnes,
is correct; but in the second, which has for subject
the vengeance of the king, he throws aside the un-
congenial apparatus of messenger and chorus, and
plunges into horrors, to which the story certainly lent
itself, with the zest of his contemporary Cristobal de
Virues, or our own Kyd.
THE SPANISH DllAMA. 67
The true successors of Juan del Enema were to be
found during the reign of Charles V. in the Spanish
colony at Eome. The Spanish proverb has
Bartolome de J r r
Torres it that the Devil stands behind the cross
NaMrro. ^ ^ ^^ ^ ^ diablo _ and fche
Spaniards who lived under the shadow of the papal
Court enjoyed a licence which they would have missed
under the eye of the Inquisition. One of them, Bar-
tolome de Torres Naharro, who lived and wrote in
the early years of the century, is sometimes counted
the father of the Spanish stage. He was the author
of a number of comedies, published in Seville in 1520
under the title of Propaladia, which deal with the
favourite subjects of comedy, love intrigues, and the
tricks of lovers, rufianes i.e., bullies soldiers in and
out of service, and so forth, types which he had many
chances of observing at Eome when all Italy was
swarming with Spanish bisoJios, the wandering fight-
ing men who were mercenaries when any prince would
employ them, and vagabonds at other times. Naharro
had considerable vis comica, and a command of telling
fluent verse. His personages have life, and if his
plays have touches of obscenity, which is not common
in Spain, and brutality, which is less rare, his time
must be taken into account. But Naharro, though a
genuine Spaniard, lived too near the Italians not to be
influenced by Machiavelli and Ariosto. His plays
mark only a short step forward to the fully developed
comedy of Lope. The Propaladia was soon suppressed
by the Inquisition, not because it contained heresy,
but for a freedom of language in regard to ecclesi-
68 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
astical vices which would have passed unrebuked in
the previous century, hut had become of very bad
example after the Eeformation had developed into a
formidable attack on the Church. The form of his
comedy was not that finally adopted by the Spaniards.
It was in five acts, with the introito or prologue.
A truly popular national drama was hardly likely
to arise among courtiers and churchmen. It needed a
chief who looked to the common audience
Lope dc Rueda. ^ y^ >
as his patron, and who also had it in him
to begin the work on lines which literature could
afterwards develop, Spain found such a leader in
Lope de Kueda (floruit 1544?-1567?). Little is
known of his life, but that little is more than is
known with certainty of some contemporary men of
letters. He was a native of Seville, and originally a
goldbeater by trade. It may be that he acquired his
taste for the stage by taking part in the performance
of religious plays, which were always acted by towns-
men or churchmen. The separation of the actor from
the amateur, if that is the right word to apply to the
burghers and peasants of the Middle Ages who
appeared on the stage partly for amusement and
partly from piety, on the one hand, and from the mere
juggler, minstrel, or acrobat on the other, was going
on in France and England. The same process was at
work in Spain. By steps of which we can now learn
nothing, Lope de Rueda became in the fullest sense
a playwright and actor-manager. He strolled all over
Spain. Cervantes, who had seen him, has immortal-
ised his simple theatre the few boards which formed
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 69
the stage, the blanket which did duty as scenery, and
behind which sat the guitar- player who represented
the orchestra, the bags containing the sheepskin jackets
and false beards forming the wardrobe of the com-
pany. The purely literary importance of Lope de
Rueda's work is not great. That part of it which
survived is inconsiderable in bulk, and shows no
advance on Xaharro. He was not an ignorant man,
The Italian plays were certainly known to him,
and lie wrote pure Castilian. But his chief contri-
bution to the form of Spanish dramatic literature
was the paso or passage, a brief interlude, generally
between "fools" or "clowns" in the Shakespearian
sense, frequently introduced between the acts of a
regular comedy. The monologue of Lance over his
dog, or the scene between Speed and Lance with the
love-letter, in the third act of the Two G-entlemen of
Verona, would serve as pasos. But Lope de Rueda's
chief claim to honour is that he fairly conquered for
the Spanish stage its place in the sun. He hung on
no patron, but set his boards up in the market-place,
looking to his audience for his reward. When he
died, in or about 1567, the theatre was a recognised
part of Spanish life. _ If he had not much enriched
dramatic literature, he had provided those who could
with a place in which they were free to grow to the
extent of their intrinsic power. It is pleasant to
know that he had his reward. He seems to have
been a prosperous man, and Cervantes speaks with
respect of his character. The fact that he was buried
in the Cathedral of Cordova is a proof that he was not
70 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
considered a mere " rogue and vagabond," but had at
least as good a position as an English actor who was
the queen's or the admiral's " servant." As Lope de
Eueda was nobody's servant, we may fairly draw the
deduction that the Spanish stage had a more indepen-
dent position than our own.
The school of Lope de Eueda, as they may be called
with some exaggeration, must be allowed to pass under
The followers of his name. The most memorable of them
Lope de Rueda. wag j uan j e Timoneda, already named as
the author, or adapter, of the Oveja Perdida. He was
a bookseller of Valencia, who died at a great age, but
at some uncertain date, in the reign of Philip II.
Juan de Timoneda published all that were published
of the plays of Lope de Eueda, and in his capacity of
bookseller - publisher was no doubt helpful to litera-
ture. But as a man of letters he was mainly an
adapter, and his plays are echoes of Naharro and
Eueda, or were conveyed from Ariosto. The sap was
now rising, and the tree began to bear fruit in more
than one branch. Spain as it then was, and as it long
remained, was rather a confederation of states than a
state. There was no capital in the proper sense of
the word. Charles V. had never rested, and had spent
much of his life out of Spain. Philip II. did indeed
fix his Court at Madrid, or in the neighbourhood, but
it was not until the close of his life that the society
of a capital began to form about him. In the earlier
years of his reign the capitals of the ancient kingdoms
were still centres of social, intellectual, and artistic
activity, nor did they fall wholly to the level of pro-
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 71
vincial towns while any energy remained in Spain.
Thus as the taste for the stage and for dramatic litera-
ture grew, it was to be expected that its effects would
be seen in independent production in different parts
of the Peninsula. The writers who carried on the
work of Lope de Eueda, and who prepared the way
for Lope de Vega, were not " wits of the Court," or
m , . about the Court. They were to be found
The dramatists J
of seviiu and at Seville and Valencia. Juan de la
Cueva, the author of the Eg&m/plar Portico,
was a native of the capital of Andalusia. To him
belongs the honour of first drawing on the native
romances for subjects, as in his Cerco de Zamora
' Siege of Zamora ' a passage of the Cicl legend, and
of first indicating, if not exactly outlining, the genuine
Comedia de Capa y Espada in 7^ Tnfn.nm/i.rf (*-' TI-ip
Calumniator.' In Valencia Cristobal de yiruesj(1550-
?) wrote plays les s_j3ational in subject _but more
in manner. He did once join the well-meaning but
mistaken band which was endeavouring to bind the
Spanish stage in the chains of the Senecan tragedy ;
but, as a rule, he wrote wild romantic plays, abound-
ing in slaughter, under classic names. This was an
effort which could not well lead anywhere to good,
but at least it testifies to the vitality of the interest
felt in the stage; and Valencia has this claim to a
share in the development of the Spanish drama, that
for a short time it sheltered, encouraged, and may
have helped to determine, the course of the Phoenix
of wits, the Wonder of Nature, the fertile among all
the most fertile, the once renowned, the then un-
72 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
justly depreciated, but the ever -memorable Lope de
Vega.
If a writer is to be judged by his native force, his
originality, the abundance of his work, the effect he
produced on the literature of his country, and his
fame in his own time, then Lope, to give him the name
by which he was and is best known to his countrymen,
must stand at the head of all Spain's men of letters. 1
If it is a rule admitting of no exception that the
critic or historian of literature should have read all
his author, then I at least must confess my incapacity
to speak of this famous writer. Yet, encouraged by
a firm conviction that there never lived nor does live,
or at any future period will live, anybody who has
achieved or will achieve this feat, being, moreover,
persuaded, for reasons to be given, that it is not
necessary to b e achieved, I v enture to go on.
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio came of a family which
originally belonged to the " mountain," the hill country
Lope de Vegas of northern and north-western Spain, which
We- never submitted to the Moor. His father
was " hidalgo de ejucatoria," that is, noble by crea-
tion, but his mother was of an old family, and both
came from the valley of Carriedo in Asturias. He was
1 Biblioteca de Ribadencyra, vols, xxiv., xxxiv., xli., lii., give the best
modern texts of 120 of Lope de Vega's comedies, including, not very
properly, the Dorotea ; but the Spanish Academy has begun a por-
tentous edition, in quarto, of his whole work. The first volume con-
tains a life by Don C. A. de la Larrera, founded largely on the poet's
numerous extant letters. The Obras Sueltasi.e. , non-dramatic works
of Lope are to be found in a desirable form published at Madrid from
the excellent press of Francisco de Sancha in 21 vols., 177G-79.
THE SPANISH DKAMA. 73
born at Madrid on 25th November 1562. His life is
known with exceptional fulness, partly because many
passages of his works are avowedly biographical, partly
because a number of his letters, addressed to his patron
in later years, the Duke of Sessa, have been pre-
served, It would be better for Lope's reputation if he
had been more reticent, or his patron more careless.
As it is, w r e know not only that he passed a stormy
youth, but that in his later years he was an unchaste
priest. His father died when he was very young, and
he was left to the care of an uncle, the Inquisitor Don
Miguel de Carpio. The Jesuits had the honour of
educating him, among the many famous men trained
in their schools. It is recorded by his biographers^
and we can believe it, that he was very precocious.
At five he could read Latin, and had already begun to
write verses. After running away in a boyish esca-
pade, he was attached as page to Geronimo Manrique,
Bishop of Avila, who sent him to the University of
Alcala de Henares, the native town of Cervantes.
Prom the account given of his youth in the excel-
lently written dialogue story Dorotea, he appears to
have been a mercenary lover, even according to the
not very delicate standard of his time. His ad-
ventures were unsavoury, and not worth repeating.
It is enough that, both before he took orders and in
later life when he was tonsured and had taken the
full vows, he presented a combination, not unknown
at any time or in any race, but especially common
on both sides in the seventeenth century, of inten-
sity of faith with the most complete moral laxity.
74 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
He alternated between penance and relapses. After
leaving Alcala he was for a time attached to the
Duke of Alva, the grandson of the renowned gover-
nor of the Low Countries. For him he wrote the
pastoral Arcadia, which deals with the duke's amours.
He married, but marriage produced no effect on his
habits. He was exiled to Valencia for two years,
in consequence of obscure troubles arising, he says,
from "jealousy." Shortly after his return to Madrid
his wife died, but he continued to give cause for
"jealousy," and other troubles sent him off to join
the Armada. From that campaign of failure and
suffering he had the good fortune to return in safety,
and he bore it so well that he wrote at least a great
part of a long continuation of Ariosto, called The
Beauty of Angelica, during the voyage. After his re-
turn to Madrid in 1590 he was again married, and
again marriage made little difference. In 1609 he
became a priest. During his later years he was at-
tached, not apparently as a servant but as a patronised
friend, to Don Pedro Fernandez de Cordova, first
Marquess Priego, and then Duke of Sessa, a very
dissolute gentleman of literary tastes, belonging to
the famous house which had produced the Great
Captain, Gonsalvo de Cordova. He died at the age
of seventy-three in 1635.
A poet who could venture on so great an enterprise
as a continuation of Ariosto amid all the distractions
His i nfiuence of the Armada cannot have wanted for
on the drama, confidence in himself, nor was he likely to
have an idle pen. The productiveness of Lope was
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 75
indeed enormous. He may be said to have tried every
literary form of his time, from the epic on the Italian
model down_to the romance. In bulk, the life-work
of an industrious journalist might be about equal to
his surviving writings. And Lope was no mere jour-
nalist. His execution of everything he touched has a
certain interest. If space allowed, there would be
something to say of his religious poem on San
Isidro and his sonnets, serious and burlesque. But
space does not allow, and we must consider him here
chiefly in his great and dominant character of dram-
atist, remembering always that he was a man of many-
sided ability, and that the average cleverness of his
non-dramatic work goes far to justify the admiration
of his countrymen in his time, and the place they
have never ceased to give him as, with the one excep-
tion of Cervantes, the chief of their literature. The
number of his plays has remained a wonder and a
legend. Eighteen hundred comedias and four hundred
autos sacramentales is the figure given on fair authority
as his total life-work for the stage. He himself con-
fesses to two hundred and nineteen pieces as early as
1603, and in 1624 to one thousand and seventy. An
eyewitness has recorded that he once wrote five plays
in "fifteen days; and that on another occasion, hav-
ing undertaken to collaborate with two friends in a
comedy, he finished his share of the work before
breakfast, though it was one act out of three, and
wrote some other verse into the bargain. Nor are
these stories, incredible as they sound, altogether be-
yond belief.
76 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
They could be accepted without hesitation if the
writing of Lope de Vega were all imitative and bad.
But that is far from being the case. Over and above
the fact that he sometimes as in the Dorotea, for
example wrote an admirable style, he was the
creator of a literary form. Lope de Vega was the
real creator of the Spanish comcdia, a word which
must not be understood to mean only comedy, but
stage-play of every kind. Others prepared the way,
and some collaborated in the ending of the work,
but the merit is none the less his. Without Lope
there could have been no Calderon, who found the form
ready made to his hands. That a writer of so much
productiveness, and so little concentration, would have
many faults will be easily understood. Finish was
not to be expected from him, nor profundity. There
would inevitably be much that was hasty and careless,
much repetition, much taking of familiar situations,
much use of stock characters, and a great deal of
what the French call the it peu pris the "that is
good enough " instead of the absolutely best, which
is not to be attained except by thought and the labour
of the file. He must have been prepared to do what-
ever would please an uncritical audience, as indeed
Lope candidly avowed that he was. In short, he
might be expected to have all the weaknesses of the
class which Carlyle defined as "the shallow vehement,"
and they would be the more conspicuous because he
lived in a time of learning, but of no great criticism,
because he was a beginner, and not least because lie
belonged to a people who have always been indifferent
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 77
to finish of workmanship. But with all this, for
which a narrow criticism of the stamp of Boileau's
would have condemned him utterly, Lope h ad the
one thing necessary, which is creative faculty. The
quality of his plays will be best shown later on, when
we treat of the Spanish stage as a whole. For the
present it is enough to deal with the more mechanical
side of his workmanship. Before his time Spanish
play- writers had hesitated between the classic division
into five acts and a tentative division into four. One
early and forgotten writer, Avendano, took three.
Lope, not without the co-operation of others, but
mainly by his example, established this last as the
recognised number of jornadas acts for a Spanish
play. The choice was made for a definite reason. In
the Arte Nuevo de Haccr Comedias a verse epistle
written to a friend who had asked him to justify his
works before the critics who held by the classic rules
Lope laid it down that the first act should introduce
the characters and knit the intrigue ; the second lead
to the crisis, the scdne a /aire of French dramatic
critics ; and the third wind all up. JIc formulated
the great secret of the playwright's craft, which is
that the audience must always know what is going to
happen, but never exactly how it is going to be brought
about. They must never be left in a puzzling doubt
as to the meaning of what is going on, and yet must
always be kept in a pleasing uncertainty as to what is
about to happen next. This supposed a very real
unity of action, compatible with plot and underplot,
but not with two independent plots. For the unities
78 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
of time and place he cared as much, and as little, as
our own Elizabethans.
Not even Lope's fertility and activity could have
been equal to the production of two thousand two
hundred plays, of which all, or even a majority, were
executed in conformity with his own standard. Such
a piece of construction as the Dama Mclindrosa can-
not have been one of the five plays written in fifteen
days. There is a great deal in Lope's literary baggage
which is mere scribbling, meant to please an audience
for an afternoon. Though the Spaniards loved the
theatre much, they were not numerous enough in the
towns to supply many audiences, and they clamoured
for new things. To meet this demand, every Spanish
The conditions dramatist who wished to stand well with
of the work. thg managers was compelled to produce a
great deal of what may be called journalism for the
theatre, the mere rapid throwing together of accept-
able matter, which might be love - adventures or the
news of the day, historical stories or religious legend,
in stock forms. The stage was not only all the litera-
ture of the mass of the people, but all the newspapers,
and all the " music-hall " side of their amusements too.
In all cases the comedy was accompanied by inter-
ludes of the nature of music-hall "turns," loas } jpasos,
"or entremeses brief scenes of a comic kind, sons^s, and,
above all, dances. The patio or court that is, the pit
filled by the poorest, most numerous, and most
formidable part of the audience, who stood, and who
were addressed in compliment as the Senate or the
musketeers, and were known in actors' slang as the
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 79
chusma i.e., the galley-slaves would not endure
to be deprived of their dances. So the most truly
famous comedy would hardly have escaped the cu-
cumbers with which the "grave Senate" expressed
its disapproval, if it had been presented without
"crutches" in the form of the dance, the song, or
the farcical interlude. Thus it inevitably followed
that the playwright was often called upon to supply
what was in fact padding to fill up the intervals be-
tween the popular shows. And this Lope supplied,
besides writing the entremeses, mo i jig ana as , \ sayneTes} ajl
forms of brief farce. Such work could not well be
literary. His reputation, and indeed the reputation
of the Spanish drama, has suffered because matter of
this kind was not allowed to die with the day for
which it was written. During his later years, and the
better part of the life of his successor, Calderon, the
drama held its place at Court. Plays were frequently
first given before the Court (which at that time, and
at all festivals, meant substantially every lady and
gentleman in Madrid), before reaching the public
"theatre. This audience demanded a higher level of
work, and the best comedias were probably written for
it. Yet the drama made its way to the palace, and
was not originally directed to the king and courtiers.
It came as Lope de Yega had shaped it, and so re-
mained in all essentials. The metrical form was fixed
by him : the silvas or liras lyric verse in hendeca-
syllabic and seven - foot lines for the passionate
passages, the sonnet for soliloquies, the romance for
narrative and dialogue, the vedonclillas or roundelays
80 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
of assonant and consonant verse, are all enumerated
by him in the Arte Nucvo de Racer Comedias. And
what he did for the secular play he did for the re-
ligious. The Voyage of the Soul, given in his prose
y story, El Peregrino en Su Patria, is an Auto Sacra-
mental as complete as any of Calderon's. Whatever
the Spanish drama has to give us was either found
undeveloped by Lope de Vega, and perfected in shape
by him, or was his invention. Other men put their
mark on their versions of his models, or showed
qualities which he wanted, but nobody modified the
Spanish drama as he had built it in any essential.
He was, as far as any single man could be, the creator
of the dramatic literature of his country ; and even
though Tirso de Molina was greater in this or that
respect^ Alarcon had a finer skill in drawing a char-
acter, Calderon a deeper poetic genius, though he
might have cause to envy this man's art or that man's
scope, yd he must r em^ainj jie chief of one of th e very
few brilliant and thoroughly national dramatic litera-
tures of the world.
This predominance of the Luca fa presto of liter-
ature may have been a misfortune, though when the
conditions are remembered, and the innate indifference
of the Spaniard to artistic finish is allowed for, an
inevitable one. We must accept it and its conse-
v^quences. One of them is this, that after Lope de
Vega there could be no room for historical develop-
ment on the Spanish stage. Calderon was a different
man writing the same drama. There is no such differ-
ence between these two as between Shakespeare and
THE SPANISH DKAMA. 81
Ben Jonson ; and nowhere in Spanish dramatic liter-
ature is there anything answering to the contrast be-
tween the Elizabethan and the Kestoration stages. The.
division often made between the school of Lope and
the ^school of Calderon is very arbitrary. It --is
largely a matter of date. The earlier men are classed
with the first, and the later with the
Con temporaries - nurfni ----- -- M lll , -.- ,.
and followers second. To find a distinction between
them it is necessary to insist on mere
matters of detail, or on such purely personal differ-
ences of genius and character as must always be found
where there is life among a large body of men. The
rule of a literary as of a political despot may cramp
as well as support. It is possible that if they had not
been overshadowed by the Marvel of Nature his con-
temporaries might have developed with more freedom.
None of them may seem to have suffered more from
the consecration of hasty writing than /Gabriel Tellez
(1570 ?-1648), known in literature as the Maestro Tirso
de Molina. 'a churchman, who died as head of a re-
ligious house at Soria. Tirso de Molina may be said S
to live on the universal stage of the world as the first
creator of Don Juan. 1 One of his plays, The Vengeance
of Tamar, contains a scene of very high tragic power
that in which the outraged sister waits veiled out- I
side the tent prepared by Absalom for the slaughter
of his brother. She has a long double-edged dialogue
with the offender, full of warnings of doom intelligible \
to the audience, but misunderstood by him, and when
1 All the writers mentioned in this paragraph will be found under
their names in the Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra.
F
82 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
he has gone to his fate her soliloquy is a fine example
of the legitimate dramatic use of the chorus. There is
a certain quiet in this scene, a reserve, and an appeal
not to the mere passion for seeing something going on,
but to the emotions of pity and terror, which is rare
indeed on the amusing, but too often noisy and shallow,
Spanish stage. Calderon, using the freedom of a Span-
ish dramatist, conveyed the whole act into his Hairs
of Absalom. One is inclined to think that the play-
wright who first rough-hewed the universally true char-
acter of Don Juan might, if he had felt called upon to
finish as well as to imagine and sketch, have also given
us the finished type of the debauchee whom the pursuit
of his own pleasure has made a violator and brute, all
the more odious because there is on him an outward
show of gallantry and high-breeding. Tirso's Marta
la Piadosa 'The Pious Martha' has been most
absurdly compared to Tartuffe. It is the story of a
lively young lady who affects a passion for good works
and a vow of charity in order to escape a disagreeable
marriage, and is in other respects the usual comedia
de capa y espada. Yet there is a power of character-
isation in it, a liveliness and a genial humanity, which
need little to be the most accomplished comedy. But
it misses of what it might have reached, and we may
say that it failed because his audience, and the taste
of his time, called upon Tirso for nothing better than
hasty work. In Guillen de Castro (1569-1631), again,
the friend of Lope at Valencia, we find the same con-
trast between a vigorous original force of imagination,
with great powers of presentment, and a sudden drop
THE SPANISH DKAMA. 83
into what no doubt pleased the " musketeers/' but is
now only worth looking at because it did. His Youth
of the Cid, which up to a certain point supplied Cor-
neille with more than a model, falls to puerile miracle
and ends incoherently. I Juan Euiz de Alarcon reached
very high comedy. His Vcrclad Sospcchosa ' The
Doubted Truth' has had a great progeny on the
stage of the world. All the romancing liars they
who lie not for sordid ends but by imagination, and
from a love of shining, or getting out of the immediate
difficulty who follow one another on all theatres,
may claim descent from his hero. But Alarcon was
not popular, and he also could be hasty. The list of
names might easily be swollen in a country which
counted its known dramatic writers at certain periods
by sixties and seventies, but nothing would be gained
for the understanding of the school by the repetition. 1
Although he cannot be said to have developed or
even modified the form of dramatic literature in Spain,
Calderon was too considerable a man to be allowed to
pass with a school. 2
Pedro Calderon de la Barca Barreda Henao y
Piano, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Priest, Hon-
orary Chaplain of his Majesty, and our Lords the
1 Whoever wishes to gain an original knowledge of the dramatists
of this time may be referred to vols, xliii. and xlv. of the Biblioteca
de Ribadcneyra, with their introductions and catalogues by Don
Ramon Mesonero Romanos.
2 Not the best but the most accessible edition of Calderon's plays is
that of J. J. Keil, Leipzig, 1827. Don Eugenio Hartzenbusch has
edited him for the Biblioteca de Bibadeneyra, vols, vii., ix., xii., xiv.,
and lviii.
84 EUROPEAN LITEllATUltE LATER RENAISSANCE.
New Kings of the Cathedral of Toledo to give him
all his names and titles was a native of
Cakleron. * r i i
Madrid, " though trom another place he
took his name, an house of ancient fame." The
splendour of his pedigree was perhaps exaggerated
by the partiality of friends. It is a point on which
the Spaniard has all the reverence of the Scotsman.
Yet he was undoubtedly a noble, and " came from the
mountain," as indeed did all Spain's greatest men in
letters and art. His long life, which lasted from 1600
to 1681, unlike Lope's, was honourable, but is other-
wise little known. We are told that he served as a
soldier in his youth, but in a time of truce when not
much service was to be seen. From one of the few
certain passages in his life it appears that he was
not slow to draw his sword on sufficient provocation.
He had once to take sanctuary after chasing an actor
through the streets of Madrid sword in hand. The
man had stabbed Calderon's brother in the back, and
the excuse was held to be good. For the rest, the
poet's life was peaceful and prosperous. He was
educated by the Jesuits and at Salamanca, was
known as a writer when he was twenty, and after
the death of Lope de Vega, he became the acknow-
ledged chief of Spanish dramatists. Philip IV. greatly
favoured and employed him. Calderon was, in fact,
as much the king's poet as Velasquez was his painter.
By the favour of the king he also was admitted into
the Order of Santiago, which might bring with it a
commandery and a revenue. In the revolt of Cata-
lonia in 1640, when the king went to the army, Cal-
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 85
deron joined the other knights who rendered their
military service under the royal banner. At the age
of fifty-one he took orders. This was not always a
proof of a sincere vocation, for Swift's saying, that it
was easier to provide for ten men in the Church than
one out of it, was even truer of Spain than of England.
But Calderon's sincerity need not be doubted. He
appears to have given up writing directly for the
theatre after taking orders, but continued to produce
plays for the Court which were repeated in public.
During the latter half of his life he preferred to de-
vote himself to the autos sacrame?itales, which he had ^
an exclusive right to supply to the town of Madrid.
No dramatic author of the time seems to have been
so indifferent to the fate of his plays. A few were
printed by his brother, but he himself published none,
though he was continually vexed by piracies, and by
learning that rubbish had been presented in his name
to provincial audiences. In his old age he drew up
a list of his genuine plays at the request of the Duke
of Veragua, the representative of Columbus. From
the letter sent with the list we learn that there were
two noted pests of the Madrid theatre, one known
as Great, and the other as Little, Memory. The first
could remember a whole play (one supposes it must
have been taliter qualiter) after hearing it once, the
other after hearing it two or three times, and the two
gained a dishonourable livelihood by poaching for
piratical managers. As many dramas reached the
press by their exertions, the wretched state of the text
is easily accounted for. When Great or Little Memory
86 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
was at a loss he put in his own trash. Even in Cal-
deron's genial and peaceful old age this outrage moved
him to bitterness. Yet he never edited his plays.
His executor, Don Juan de Vera Tasis, who published
the first edition after his death, was unfortunately a
partisan of the detestable estilo culto, and is suspected
of having inserted some very bad examples of this
vicious affectation. Between the indifference of the
poet and the insufficiency of the editor the text has
suffered greatly. Calderon's high estimate, not per-
haps so much of his own autos as of the sanctity of
work written for a religious purpose, is shown by the
fact that he did publish some of them, lest they should
suffer the same misuse as his plays.
The reputation of Calderon has suffered from the
opposite evil to that which has injured Lope's. The
Phoenix of Geniuses has been punished in modern
times for the wild overpraise of his own, by some
neglect. German criticism has treated him as a mere
amuser. Calderon, on the other hand, has been the
victim of the incontinence in praise of the Schlegels,
who were determined to make another, and a better,
Shakespeare if they could not find one. Many read-
ers who had formed an idea of him at second hand
have probably suffered a severe shock on becoming
acquainted with his work. 1
1 For an example see the Spanish Drama by Mr G. H. Lewes,
1846, a shrewd piece of criticism by one who was a good judge of a
play. But Mr Lewes was too manifestly excited to revenge his own
once excessive confidence in Schlegel on Calderon. Don M. Menen-
dez's Calderon y su cscuela, a series of lectures delivered in 1881,
is a very sound piece of criticism.
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 87
No reader should expect to find a world poet in
Calderon, who was a Spaniard of the Spaniards. No
more intensely national poet, ever wrote,
Ills limitations.
and it is for that he must be read and
appreciated. Moreover, he is a Spaniard of the seven-
teenth century, when the monarchical sentiment was
at its height, and when all life was permeated by a
religion in which the creed had, in Mr Swinburne's
phrase, replaced the decalogue. His conception of
honour (we shall come back to the point of honour
as a motive for Spanish plays) is that of his time
thoroughly oriental. It was not the sentiment
which nerves a man against fear of consequences,
and enables him to resist the temptation to do what
is dishonourable, or, better still, makes him incapable
of feeling it, but the fixed determination not to allow
the world the least excuse for saying that somebody
has done something to you which renders you undig-
nified or ridiculous. As has been already said, he
added nothing to the formal part of Spanish dramatic
literature, not even to the auto. He was too much
affected by the Gongorism of his early manhood, for
even the most partial of editors cannot throw all, or
even the most, of the errors in that style found in
his plays on Don Juan de Vera Tasis.
Yet with his limitations Calderon was a considerable
poet, and a very skilful master of the machinery of the
Spanish comedy. When not misled into
Gongorism he wrote magnificently, and
there are lyric choral passages in the cmtos which Mr
Ticknor rightly praised as worthy of Ben Jonson's
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masques. Indeed not a little of his work is iden-
tical in purpose with the masque, though different
in form. As a Court poet he was called upon to
write for the entertainment of the king and the
courtiers, and to supply theatrical shows at royal
marriages, births of princes, and so forth. There was
no intrinsic novelty here, for Calderon did but give
the high-bred Spaniard of the Court a finer poetic
version of the dances, songs, and bright short pieces
under various names, which delighted the humbler
Spaniard in the patios. The intensely national senti-
ment which he expresses may strike us at times as
a little empty, but is high and shining, and lends
itself to a certain stately treatment which he could
give. The romantic sentiment was strong in Calderon,
and even in the most purely Spanish trappings that is
f ^""no T re^aote~frqiir-Tts : A~^ gBt"^dlo^gealt not inade-
quately with great passions could hardly help some-
times piercing through the merely national to the
universal, though it must be acknowledged that his
characters rarely utter the individual human saying,
and that he was far too fond of long casuistical ampli-
fications, which are almost always frigidly pedantic,
and not rarely bombastieal. The most quoted passage
~~ "in* all his work, the lines which close the second act
of La Vida es Sueno, gain by being taken apart from
their context:
" Que es la vida '? Un frenesi :
Que es la vida ? Una ilusion,
Una sombra, una ficcion
Y el mayor bien es pequeno
Que toda la vida es sueno
Y los sueuos sueno son."
THE SPANISH DRAMA. 89
" We are such, stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
It is a fine poetic reflection, well fitted to stand beside
the yet more beautiful lines of the Tempest, but it is
not wise to approach the play in the hope that all of
it will be found at the same level.
As in the case of Lope, though not to the same
extent, the critic who is severely limited in space
must be content to speak in general terms of much of
Calderon's work. It would be interesting to take El
Magico Procligioso (' The Wonder-working Magician '),
El Mayor Monstruo los Zelos ('Jealousy the greatest
Monster '), and La Puente de Mantible (' The Bridge of
Mantible '), and show what has been added in any of
them or a score of others which it were as easy to
name to the unchanging framework of the Spanish
play. In the Magico Procligioso, for instance, perhaps
the most generally known of Calderon's greater dramas,
which has been ineptly enough compared to Faust, we
have, in addition to the usual machinery of dama,
galan, and gracioso, a story of temptation by the devil.
Looked at closely, it is a tale told for edification, and
for the purpose of showing what a fool the devil
essentially is. He is argued off his legs by Cyprian
the hero at the first bout, beaten completely by stock
arguments to be found in text-books. His one resource
is to promise Cyprian the possession of Justina, and
he signally fails to keep his word. The false Justina
he has created to satisfy the hero turns to a skeleton
at once, and Cyprian becomes a Christian because he
discovers that the devil is unable to give him posses-
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sion of a woman, and is less powerful than God, which
he knew by the fiend's own confession at the beginning.
It is an edifying story to all who accept the premisses
and the parade of scholastic argument, and are prepared
to allow for the time, the nation, and the surroundings.
Calderon wound up and rounded off the historical
development of the Spanish drama so completely that
The school of little need be said of his school, which
caideron. indeed only means contemporaries who
wrote Lope's drama with Calderon's style. Yet
Moreto was a strong man, and to him also belongs
the honour of having put on the stage an enduring
type, the Lindo Don Diego, who was the ancestor
of our own Sir Fopling Flutter, of Lord Foppington,
and of many another theatrical dandy. Francisco
de Eoxas, too, has left a point-of-honour play, not
unworthy of his master, Del Bey Abajo, Ninguno
'From the King downwards, Nobody.' One feature
common to all the later writers for the old Spanish
stage may be noticed. It was their growing tendency
to re-use the situations and plots of their predecessors.
Moreto was a notable proficient in this, and Calderon
himself did as much. It seems as if a theatre which
dealt almost wholly with intrigue and situation had
exhausted all possible combinations and could only
repeat. When men began to go back in this fashion
the end was at hand. Calderon, less fortunate than
Velasquez, outlived the king who was their common
patron, and saw with his own eyes the decadence of
Spain. Beyond him there was only echo, and then
dotage prolonged into the eighteenth century.
91
CHAPTER IV.
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.
THE PREVAILING QUALITY OP THE SPANISH DRAMA TYPICAL EXAM-
PLES 'LA DAMA MELINDROSA' 'EL TEJEDOR DE SEGOVIA ' 'EL
CONDENADO POR DESCONFIADO ' THE PLAYS ON " HONOUR " 'A
SECRETO AGRAVIO SECRETA VENGANZA ' THE " AUTO SACRA-
MENTAL" THE "LOA ' THE ' VERDADERO DIOS PAN' ' LOS
DOS HABLADORES.'
There may well seem to be something over-bold, even
impudent, in the attempt to give an account of the
different kinds of Spanish drama in one brief chapter.
Its abundance alone would appear to render the effort
vain, and the common elaborate classification of the
plays into heroic, romantic, religious, of "cloak and
sword," and so forth, seems to imply the existence of
a number of types distinct from one another, and
calling for separate treatment. Yet though I cannot
hope to be exhaustive, it is, in my opinion, possible
m to be at least not wholly inadequate. The
The prevailing * x
quality of the task is materially facilitated by the great
Spanish aranuu uniformity of ^ Spanish drama . No
matter what the name may be, the action is much the
92 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
same, and the characters do not greatly vary. It has
been said that Calderon's personages are all like
bullets cast in a mould; and though this, as is the
case with most sweeping assertions, fails to take
notice of the exceptions, it has much truth, and may
J be applied to others. The Spanish drama is above
all a drama of action, conducted by fixed types. Juan
de la Cueva had said in a spirit of prophecy that the
artful fable was the glory of the Spanish stage, and
Lope appeared in good time to prove him right. The
types who move in the action are the Dama, the Golan,
the Barba, and the Gracioso the Lady, the Lover,
the Old Man, and the Clown. They have the stage
to themselves in the comedia de capa y espada. This
phrase, when translated into French or English, has
an air of romance about it which is somewhat mis-
leading. The cloak and sword were the distinctive
parts of the dress of the private gentleman. Cahcdlero
de capa y espada was the man about town of our own
Restoration plays, who is neither great noble, church-
man, nor lawyer. The comedia de capa y espada was
then the genteel comedy of Spain. But the Dama, the
Golan, the Barba, and the Gracioso figure in every kind
of play, even in those of religion. / By these is meant
the stage drama turning on some religious motive, and
not the auto sacramental, which was a mystery differ-
ing from those of the Middle Ages only in this, that it
was written by men of letters on whom, and on whose
art, the Renaissance had had its influence. In the
Romantic plays there is more passion, and the sword
is more often out of its scabbard, but we find the same
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 93
types, the same general action. Spain produced a
certain number of plays approaching our own comedy
of humours. These are the comedias de figuron. La
Verdad Sospechosa and the Lindo Don Diego are the
best known examples. But here again the " humour "
the figuron is placed in the midst of the stock
types and the customary action.
To show what these types and this action were in
general terms would be easy enough, but perhaps a
better, and certainly a more entertaining, method is to
take half-a-dozen typical plays, and to give such an
Typical analysis of them as may enable the reader
examples. to a pp rec iate for himself that skilful con-
struction of plot at which the Spaniards aimed, and to
judge how far it is true that however much the subject
differed, the dramatis personal did not greatly vary.
For this purpose it is not necessary to take what is
best but what is most characteristic. I have selected
as an example of the comedy of lively complicated
action the Dama Melindrosa, which may be translated
* My Lady's Vapours/ by Lope de Vega ; as a romantic
play, the Tejedor de Segovia ' The Weaver of Segovia '
by Juan Euiz de Alarcon; as a religious play, the
Condcnado por Desconfiado 'Damned for want of
Faith ' of Tirso de Molina ; for the play which has
" honour " for its motive, the A Secreto Agravio Secreta
Venganza ' A Secret Vengeance for a Hidden Wrong '
of Calderon. The Dama Melindrosa draws a little
towards the comedia de figuron, but it is none the less
a perfect specimen of the cloak-and-sword comedy,
and a good example of Lope. It is chosen also because
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it possesses a plot sufficiently entangled to show the
Spanish enredo {i.e., tangle), and yet not so complicated
as to be obscure in the telling. Specimens of the
romantic, and religious, play might have been easily
found in Calderon, but to show the general quality of
a literature, we must not confine ourselves to the
greater men. There remain the auto sacramental,
and the short interludes, which under various names
surrounded, and enlivened, the comedia. For the first
we must go to Calderon, and none seems more fit to
show what the Eenaissance had done with these sur-
vivals of the Middle Ages than the Verdadero Bios
Fan ' The True God Pan.' For an example of the
smaller pieces we can take the Dos Habladores ' The
Two Chatterers ' of Cervantes, who excelled in this,
and only in this, dramatic form. 1
Belisa, the Dama Melindrosa, the lady with the
vapours, of Lope's comedy, is the daughter of a rich
LaDamaMeiin- widow, Lisarda, and she has a brother,
drosa. jj n Juan. The brother spends his nights
serenading ladies, in company with his friend Eliso,
and lies in bed till midday. Belisa has hitherto re-
fused all the husbands proposed by her mother, giving
more or less fantastical reasons in each case, and is a
very airy whimsical young person. In the first scene of
the play Lisarda confides her troubles with her chil-
dren to her brother Tiberio, the barba beard, or old
1 Those who wish to make a closer acquaintance with the minor
forms of the Spanish play may be referred to the Entremeses, Loaas,
y Jdcaras, of Don Luis Quihones de Benavente ( ?-1652), edited
by Don C. Rosell in the Libros de Antano. Madrid, 1872.
FOEMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 95
man of the piece. Lisarda professes her desire to
get her children married and settled in life, in order
that she may retire to the country with one gentle-
woman and a slave, there to bewail her lost lord (who,
we learn, has been dead for about a year), like the
tender turtle on a thorn. Tiberio pooh-poohs his
sister's sentiments, and makes the unsympathetic re-
mark that widows generally seem to find solitude a
thorn, to judge by their perpetual fidgeting, but offers
to use his influence to persuade Belisa to marry. Then
follows a scene with the young lady. She knows she
is going to be sermonised, and puts on all her airs and
graces. A chair is brought for Tiberio and cushions
for the ladies, who squat on them in the old Spanish
fashion. Mme. d'Aulnoy, the author of the fairy
tales, who came to Spain as wife of the French
Ambassador, has explained how intolerable she found
this attitude. Belisa provokes her uncle, who has the
usual peppery temper of the barba, into expressing a
desire to box her ears, but will accept no husband.
To this party enter an alguacil, or officer of police,
with an escribano, a species of attorney and process-
server. We learn that Lisarda has a claim on her
son's friend Eliso, who owed her husband money, and
will not pay it. She has therefore sued out a writ,
and is sending the officers to seize a prenda, or pledge,
which she can keep or sell for the discharge of the
debt, if Eliso will not pay what he owes.
The scene now changes to the house of Eliso, who
is found discussing with his servant Fabio the
question whether it is better to pay the debt or
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compound by marrying Belisa, with her vapours.
His conversation is broken off by the hurried entry
of Felisardo, sword in hand. He has found a Na-
varrese cavalier persecuting Celia, who is on her
way home from church, with unwelcome attentions.
The usual duel has followed. The Navarrese is on
the pavement, and Felisardo is on his way to take
sanctuary, bringing Celia with him to leave her
under the protection of Eliso. Of course Eliso be-
haves like a gentleman, orders his front door to be
shut in case the police - officers are in pursuit, and
gives his friends refuge. He persuades the two to
disguise themselves in the holiday dresses of his
Morisco slaves, Pedro and Zara, who are absent on
his estate. Meanwhile Fabio reports that there are
police-officers below, and is sent down with orders
to delay them as long as he can. Eliso has a soliloquy
on the hazards of love, in the form of a half-burlesque
sonnet in which all the last words are esdrtijulo, ac-
cented on the antepenult. At last the alguacil is
admitted, deeply angered by the delay, and announces
that he has come to serve Lisarda's writ. Eliso is
relieved, and tells him to take what he likes and he
takes the two supposed slaves. The scene now returns
to Lisarda's house. She is much pleased by the intel-
ligence of the alguacil, and the attractive appearance
of the supposed Pedro and Zara. Belisa, too, is im-
pressed by the gallant bearing of Felisardo, who enters
into the game with spirit. Meanwhile Don Juan is at
last up. He finds Celia among the servants, and on
learning who she is supposed to be, observes that his
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 97
friend Eliso was wise not to let him see her. Of
course he makes hyperbolical love to her at once.
Celia is not pleased at the admiration of Lisarda's
female servants for Felisardo, and he is jealous of
Don Juan. And so the first act ends. Lope, it will
be seen, has carried out his dramatic scheme so far
with great success. He has introduced his persons,
and knitted his intrigue. Everything has happened
in a probable way, and there are infinite possibilities
of complications and cross purposes.
The second act opens with Belisa's confession of her
love for the supposed Pedro. It is made to the indis-
pensable confidante, who, as a matter of course, is her
servant Flora, the counterpart of the gr arioso, and the
soubrette of the French comedy. Belisa speaks largely
in infantile little lines of six syllables. She explains
and excuses her own melindres at considerable length,
and asks Flora how to escape from a love which she
feels is disgraceful, and half considers as a punishment
for her whims. Flora makes the ferocious suggestion
that she should insist on having Pedro branded on the
face, after the manner of runaway slaves. This was a
rebus formed of the letter s, pronounced " es," and a
nail clavo which together make the word esclavo, a
slave. The object of this precious device is to kill
Belisa's love by degrading its object. The melin-
drosa hesitates, but finally takes her servant's counsel,
and when her mother, who is as much in love with
Pedro as herself, declines, threatens hysterics. Lis-
arda in despair applies to Tiberio, who advises that
the rebus should be painted on the faces of the slaves,
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which will quiet Belisa, and do no harm. In the
meantime Eliso pays a visit to Lisarda. He has at
last made up his mind to become Belisa's suitor. The
mother warns him of her daughter's humours, but
promises her help, insisting, however, that he must
make her a present of the slaves, although he has now
satisfied the debt. Eliso, who knows he gives nothing,
consents with just sufficient appearance of reluctance
to provoke the lady's wishes still further. He also
drops hints that the slaves are not what they seem.
In a short conversation with Felisardo, Eliso tells him
that the Navarrese still lives, though in danger, that
the police are seeking for him and Celia, and that they
will be wise to stay where they are. They agree, and
allow the infamatory mark to be painted on their
faces. The play need no longer be told scene by scene,
and could not be so told except at inconvenient length.
Lisarda hankers after the man slave, and Don Juan
makes furious love to Celia. Belisa finds her love is
not cured by the supposed branding of Pedro, and is
perpetually either making advances to him, or flying
off in more or less affected hysterics. Celia for her
part is jealous of the mother and daughter. She and
her lover are twice surprised in talk, and have to use
their wits to escape discovery. There is no small
truth in the part Belisa plays. Lope accepted slavery
as a matter of course, and was writing to amuse, not to
enforce a moral, but he comes very near the best pas-
sages in that powerful book Uncle Tom's Cabin, the
scenes which follow the death of St Clair. Mrs
Beecher Stowe wrote to prove that slavery makes it
FORMS OF THE .SPANISH DRAMA. 99
possible for a weak self-indulgent nature to be hor-
ribly brutal in act. Belisa is not allowed to go beyond
whims. The second act ends by her insisting that
an iron collar shall be put on Pedro's neck, which
makes an effective " curtain," and no doubt left the
audience highly excited as to what was coming next.
The third act opens with a scene between Lisarda
and Eliso, who reproaches her with ill-treating the
slaves, and repeats his warning that they are not what
they appear to be. This only excites Lisarda in her
determination to marry Pedro. Then Eliso is angered
by Don Juan's servant Carrillo, the gracioso of the
piece, who tells him that the slave is making love to
Belisa. With a want of scruple too common with the
Spanish galan, he eggs on Don Juan to persevere in
his pursuit of Celia. Belisa also has begun to have
her suspicions as to the real character of the slaves,
but cannot believe that a free man and woman would
allow themselves to be branded. Now follows a set of
scenes hovering between farce and melodrama. In a
more than usually exalted state of the vapours, Belisa
pretends to faint, in order that Pedro may carry her
to her room. She has first given him a ring. Pedro
is not a little embarrassed, but finally takes her up
with disgusted resignation, and is about to carry her
to her room, when Celia comes in, and " makes him a
scene of jealousy." Supposing the melindrosa to be
insensible they address one another by their true
names, and say some uncomplimentary truths of
Belisa. At last Felisardo puts Belisa down on a
sofa, as Celia insists upon it, gives his lady-love the
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ring as a proof of his loyalty, and walks off to the
stable. Belisa is furious, puzzled, but still doubtful.
In a fit of rage she accuses Celia of stealing the ring,
and the dama is in some danger of learning that it is
perilous to play the part of slave. She is, of course,
rescued from the officious Carrillo, who is eager to
inflict the punishment ordered by his mistress,, by
Don Juan. The young gentleman is in high indig-
nation, and swears that lie will marry the slave. His
mother, who means to do the same with Pedro, is not
on that account the less angry with him. Being now
thoroughly tired of Don Juan's rebellion and Belisa's
whims, she begs the help of Tiberio to bring about her
marriage with the slave. The helpful Tiberio has a
resource. He has seen a gentleman named Felisardo
about the court who is wonderfully like Pedro. Let
the slave be dressed as a gentleman and introduced
as Lisarda's proposed husband. In the meantime Don
Juan has plotted with Eliso that Celia shall be helped
to resume her true place, when he will of course marry
her, and present his mother with the accomplished
fact. After a well -handled passage of mutual re-
proaches between mother and daughter, there comes
a stage device which the play-goer will recognise as
now worn threadbare, but which is always effective.
Lisarda decides that when Tiberio returns with Felis-
ardo, whom she still believes to be the slave Pedro,
she will put out the light by an affected accident, and
seize the opportunity to make a declaration of love.
What follows need hardly be told. The light is put
out. Everybody says the wrong thing to everybody,
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DHAMA. 101
and when the candles are lit again the play is over.
Eelisardo is married to Celia, who arrives at the right
moment. Belisa, her vapours being no longer heeded,
consents to marry Eliso. Carrillo is paired off with
Flora. Lisarda declares herself satisfied, and so the
play being played out, the puppets return to their
box.
Here, it will be allowed, is a play and it is one
of many which may well have amused a Spanish
audience for an afternoon. We may confess that this
was its main purpose. Yet it is also amusing to read.
Lope, indeed, wrote well. His verse in its various
forms, including blank verse, which has been com-
paratively little written by other Spaniards, is accom-
plished, when haste did not make him careless ; and
it has the qualities of the prose of our own Vanbrugh
straightforward simplicity and natural ease. The
actors must have found it pleasant to learn. His
characters, again, have a respectable measure of
general truth to human nature. They are not, in-
deed, the living persons we meet in Moliere and
Shakespeare. Even Belisa is only a dama with
melindres, and as Celia is, so his other damas are ;
nor does one galan, gracioso, or barba differ essentially
from another. Yet they are true, with the measure of
truth possible to conventional types, and their doings
are lively. The doings are always the essential thing.
Whatever literary merit Lope's play may have, it is
always strictly subordinate to the purely theatrical
purpose, to the necessity of pleasing an audience by
a lively action which must be full of surprises in the
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details, but always intelligible in the general lines.
Of this purely theatrical art he was a master. He
knew how to bring about a good situation, how to
lead up to an effective ending to his act, how to make
the wildly improbable look probable on the boards.
In so far he is very modern. The popular play of
to-day, the French comedy of quijproquo, is only Lope's
comedy of intrigue in modern trappings. It is never
better in these qualities than his are at their best. He
had discovered all the devices which the playwright
finds more effective, and much easier to produce, than
passion, or thought, or poetry. And he did at least
present them in poetic form. He was the most poetic
of playwrights, and the ancestor of all who write
merely for the stage, whose aim it is to amuse, and to
move by direct appeal to the eye, and the laughter, or
tears, which lie near the surface.
The enredo supplied the canvas on which, or the
background against which, the Spanish dramatist had
to place whatever romantic, religious, or other figure
or action he wished to present to his audience. In
EiTejedor the Tejedor de Segovia 'The Weaver of
de Segovia. Segovia ' of Alarcon we have romance
of the most approved type, the story of a gentleman
who is driven by oppression to become a Robin Hood,
a " gallant outlaw," and who finally earns pardon, and
restoration to his honours, by service against the Moor.
This is Don Fernando Ramirez, whose father has been
unjustly put to death by the king Don Alfonso, at the
instigation of the favourite, the Marques Suero Pelaez.
It is supposed that Fernando has also been killed, but
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 103
he is living disguised as a weaver at Segovia, with his
dama Teodora. A sister, Dona Ana Eamirez, is living
in retirement near the town with a servant, Florinda.
She is in love with the Count Don Julian, son of
Suero Pelaez, who neglects her, and is tired of her.
Don Julian has caught sight of Teodora, and has fallen
in love with her in the usual fire-and-flanies style. He
is determined to carry her off, and when the play
opens, is prowling about the weaver's house with his
servant Fineo. Don Julian is convinced that a mere
mechanic will not dare to resist the son of so powerful
a man as Suero Palaez. As a matter of fact the
weaver is absent, and Teodora is alone in the house
with the servant Chinchon, the gracioso of the piece,
and an accomplished specimen of the greed, cowardice,
brag, and low cunning proper to the type. A moder-
ately experienced reader of romance sees at once what
the course of the story must be. The count en-
deavours to gain admittance. Chinchon the coward
proves no protection. He is rather a traitor, and
Teodora is assailed by the count, when the weaver
returns. Fernando takes a high line with Don Julian,
and when the count endeavours to carry things with
a high hand, shows that, weaver as he appears to be,
he can use a sword like a gentleman. The count and
his servant are ignominiously driven into the streets.
Then the storm breaks on the weaver. He is im-
prisoned, and Teodora has to fly to hiding. In prison
the weaver finds Don Garceran de Miranda, and
various others, who form the raw material of a model
band of brigands. The courage and craft of Fernando
104 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
aiding, they all break out and take to " the sierra "
the hillside which is the Spanish equivalent of our
green wood. Through many adventures, each coming
one out of the other, all the personages playing their
part with that sense of the theatre which Lope had
conveyed to his countrymen, Don Fernando works
back to his own, and to revenge. It is a Eobin Hood
story, told by a Spaniard for the stage, and with
Spanish types.
There are individual scenes of the best Spanish
romance. One is that in which Suero Pelaez, the
barba, the personification of austere Castilian honour
and loyalty, reproaches his son with his disorderly
life. Suero Pelaez is the typical pere noble, the heavy
father of the stage, comparable for rigid loftiness of
sentiment to the Ruy Gomez of Hernani. Victor
Hugo would have done the scene magnificently, and
as Alarcon wrote it, it will stand comparison with the
best of the French romantic plays. In another scene
Teodora and Fernando are prisoners to the count, and
she saves her lover by pretending to betray him. She
asks to be allowed to kill him, and when supplied with
a sword for that atrocious purpose, cuts his bonds and
gives him the weapon a coup de thMtre repeated with
more or less disguise many thousands of times, but
unfailing in its effect. In a more thoroughly Spanish
scene, Fernando forces the count to do justice to his
sister, Dona Ana, by promising to marry her, and
having so salved the honour of his family, kills him
in fair fight. Dona Ana displays the philosophy rarely
wanting in the second dama at the end of a play.
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 105
While Don Julian was alive, honour required her to
insist on marriage ; but now that he is dead, and
she has been righted, she is quite prepared to marry
Don Garceran, who has gallantly played his part as
Patroclus, Achates, Horatio, Amyas Leigh's Lieuten-
ant Cary, or Jack Easy's friend Gascoigne in short,
hero's right-hand man. It is not King Lear, or even
Phfolre, but it is very amusing reading, made of such
stuff as romance is made of at all times.
With the play on a religious motive we come to what
is far more alien to ourselves. In Tirso de Molina's
ei c nd n do C n denado P or Desconfiado w T e have some-
porDescon- thing which, at any rate in such a form
as this, is unknown on the modern stage.
Paul the hermit is a man of thirty, who has fled
from the world ten years ago, and is living in the
practice of every austerity. Inappropriate as it may
seem, he has with him a servant, Pedrisco, the gracioso
of the piece, who differs in nothing from others of the
same function on the Spanish stage. In the first scene
Pedrisco is absent begging for the herbs on which the
hermit lives. The play opens with a soliloquy by
Paul, which is a rapid theatrical equivalent for Lord
Tennyson's monologue of St Simeon Stylites. The
hermit is troubled by no doubts on any point of faith,
but he is racked by anxiety to feel assured that his
austerities have earned him salvation, and we see that
he has yielded to spiritual pride. After giving ex-
pression to his doubts and fears, through which there
pierces an aggrieved sense that heaven owes him sal-
vation, Paul retires to his cave. We have a buffoon
106 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
interlude from Pedrisco, who complains of his diet
(the gracioso is ever a glutton), and tells us that he
smuggles in something more substantial than herbs for
his own consumption. Then he goes into his cave to
eat, and Paul returns in great agitation. He has
dreamt, and in his dream has been taken to the
judgment-seat of heaven. There he has seen his good
deeds weighed against his evil, and the good have
proved by far the lighter. He breaks into a wild
prayer for assurance, for a sign, which is by far the
finest passage of verse in the play. It is strictly
according to tradition that he should be heard by the
enemy of mankind. The devil tells us that he is em-
powered to tempt the holy man, that vulgar temp-
tations have failed, but that now Paul is wavering in
his faith in the divine mercy, and he will tempt him
in another way. A disappointment now awaits the
reader, who expects a scene of temptation, and gets a
device for helping on the action. Satan appears in
the shape of an angel, and tells Paul to go to Naples.
There at a certain place near the harbour he will meet
one Enrico, son of Anareto. He is to watch that man,
for as the fate of Enrico is, so will his own be, the
devil being a liar from the beginning. Paulo won-
ders, but obeys, and departs with Pedrisco for Naples.
There we precede him, and find ourselves with two
gentlemen at the door of Celia, who is a courtesan.
From the conversation of these two we learn of her
beauty, her rapacity, her great wit, and many accom-
plishments, as also that she is devoted to one Enrico,
a ruffler, gambler, and bully, who beats and robs her.
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 107
One of the two gentlemen has never seen her, and
after due warning from his friend, it is decided that
they shall go in on pretence of asking Celia, who is
a poetess, for some love verses to be sent to their
damas. They go in, bearing gifts, and then Enrico
bursts in with his follower Galvan. Enrico plays the
bully to perfection, drives off the two gentlemen, and
seizes their gifts to Celia, who wheedles and adores
him as the most valiant of men. All this scene is
full of vigour, and is written with astonishing gusto.
When placated by Celia, Enrico promises her a feast
on her own money, and sending for friends, they go
out to the sea-shore by the harbour. Here Paulo is
waiting, as he was directed by the fiend. There is a
scene, very intelligible, and not at all ridiculous to a
Spanish audience of the day, in which Paulo proves
his Christian humility by throwing himself on the
ground and telling Pedrisco to trample on him. Then
Enrico and his riotous party burst on the scene.
Enrico has just tossed a troublesome old beggar into
the sea out of pure wickedness, and is in jovial spirits.
He glories and drinks deep, bragging of his own sins,
and extorting the admiration of Celia and the sub-
ordinate scoundrels who form the party. This, again,
is an excellent scene, and not untrue to nature. Paul
recognises the man with whose fate his own is bound
up, and is horrified. He feels convinced that this
man can never be saved, and revolts at thinking that
after all his austerities he is to be lost. In an ex-
plosion of passion, not unhuman, and certainly very
southern, he decides that he too will lead a life of
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crime. and make the world fear one who, "although
just," has been condemned.
So ends the first act. In the second and third we
have the perpetual contrast between the two men.
Paulo has become a brigand, but is still in trouble
about his soul. He has a warning by an angel, who
appears in the shape of a shepherd-boy, and tells him
a parable of the lost sheep. Paulo understands, but
still his doubts haunt him. Meanwhile we learn,
with some surprise, that Enrico has one virtue amid
his thousand crimes a tender affection for his old
father. He refuses to kill an aged man, though he
has taken pay to kill him. The old man's resem-
blance to his father disarms Enrico. When reproached
by his employer he kills him. He has now to fly
Naples, and in order to escape pursuit has to take
to the water. Before plunging in he prays for God's
mercy, for though a sinner Enrico has never doubted.
Considerations of time and space troubled the Spanish
dramatist but little. Enrico swims from Naples to
the place where Paulo is camped with his band.
He falls into the hands of the ex-hermit. Paulo
now conceives a hope. If he can find that Enrico
is repentant there will be a chance for his salvation.
He causes his prisoner to be tied to a tree blindfold, in
order that he may be shot to death, and then resuming
his hermit's dress, exhorts him to prepare for death.
But Enrico will not go beyond a general acknowledg-
ment that the divine mercy can save him if God so
pleases. Of confession and repentance he will not
hear a word, but is in all respects a hardened sinner.
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 109
Paulo is again plunged into despair, and repeats his
determination to exceed the crimes of Enrico, " since
it is to be all one in the end." The words are trivial,
but they contain blasphemy in the real sense. The
close of the play finds Paulo still revolving his weary
doubt, and Enrico in a dungeon waiting for execution.
Here we have another very arbitrary and pointless
scene of temptation. The fiend shows Enrico a
means of escape, but he hears voices warning him
to stay, and he stays. The scene has no purpose, for
the devil makes no attack on the prisoner's faith, and
Enrico remains still an unbending sinner. At last he
yields to the prayers of his old father, confesses, and
makes an edifying end. In the last scene, while
Paulo soliloquises, the soul of Enrico is borne to
heaven by two angels. But Paulo will not believe
that so great a sinner can have been saved. He
does not, it is true, see the vision, and has only the
word of Pedrisco for Enrico's pious end. Then Paulo
is killed by soldiers who are hunting him down.
Flames are seen round his dead body, and his voice is
heard announcing that he is lost for ever, " por des-
confiado," as one who did not trust God's mercy.
The morality and doctrine of this play need not
concern us here, all the more because they are not
unfamiliar. There is some virtue in a name, for if
the Maestro Tirso de Molina had called his play
1 Justification by Faith,' as he well might, he would
have been in peril of ending at the stake. Head
of a house of Nuestra Sefiora de la Merced Calzada
at Soria, as he was, his play might pass for an illus-
110 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
tration of Luther's much -debated "pecca fortiter."
The purely literary interest of the piece is great.
The scenes filled with the crimes and violence of
Enrico are written with the greatest brio. Indeed
this venerable churchman Gabriel Tellez excelled in
drawing types, and more especially a type of woman,
of the simple, sensuous, and passionate order. He
appears to have had a strong sympathy with them,
and a belief, less monastic than sound, that there was
something better in their unfettered loyalty to nature
than in the coward virtue of those who fly the battle.
His Enrico is a better fellow from the first than the
hermit. There is a manfulness about him which is
more hopeful than the self-seeking, conventional piety
of Paulo. Whether Tirso de Molina meant so much
or not, his ^ost hermit is a vigorous rough sketch of
the stamp of man who is not essentially good, but only
very much afraid of hell-fire, and abjectly eager to
escape it by acting according to rule. The play, it will
be seen, does not differ essentially from the accepted
model of the Spanish drama. There is no develop-
ment of character. The action is imposed on the
personages, not produced by them. Enrico does not
repent in any real sense of the word. He only makes
a pious end, because his father, whom he loves, per-
suades him, and the act is sufficient. As Paulo is at
the beginning so he remains to the end.
With the play on the " point of honour " we return
to more familiar regions. There are hundreds of
modern comedies in which the leading personages are
the lover, the wife, and the husband. But the
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. Ill
Spaniards were limited in their treatment of the
theme. Neither the Church nor their own more than
half-oriental sentiment permitted of the presentation
of adultery as sympathetic, or even pardonable. When
they took this subject it was only for the purpose of
The play* on showing by a lively action how the husband
"honour." vindicated his "honour." This honour,
as has been already said, lay in the opinion the world
had of him. Don Gutierre Alfonso, in the Mklico de
su Honra, kills his wife, not because he believes her
guilty, but because she has been pursued by a lover
and he will not have it said that this has been, and
that he has not avenged himself. To do this effectually
he must kill both the innocent woman and the lover
who sought to seduce her. If you ask Why ? he
answers "Mi opinion" which means not what I
believe, but what the world may believe of me
leaves me no choice. If I do not, it will say, There is
a man whose wife was courted, and she lives. Where
one failed another may succeed. There must be no
doubt of my "honour." And so after a little com-
plaint over the tyranny of the world he kills her with
no more scruple than he would show in despatching a
worthless horse or hound. The father, or brother, who
is head of a house, is under the same obligation as the
husband. His honour is concerned in seeing that his
daughter or sister gives no occasion to the evil tongues
of the world. In Calderon's very typical comedia de
capa y espada, the Dama Duende the ' Fairy Lady '
the heroine is a young and beautiful widow living with
a brother, who keeps her in a separate set of rooms in
112 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
his house, and will not let her be seen. She accepts
this tyranny as a matter of course, and has no more
doubt of her brother's right to control, and if she is
found disobeying his orders, to punish her, than she
would have had of a husband's. How far all this gives
a true picture of the society of the time has been a
debated question. It certainly was the picture which
that society liked to see drawn of itself. We may
accept it as giving no more than an exaggerated
theatrical representation of truth. Spain is a country
of the Eoman law, which allows a husband to kill an
unfaithful wife and her lover. It had also been
affected by the long Moorish dominion, and the women
of all ranks were certainly less independent than in
England. In the higher classes they were, and in
provincial towns where ancient customs linger, still
are, much secluded.
None of the many plays in which Calderon set
forth this conception of honour is more interesting
than A Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza.
Agravio Secreta The action takes place in Portugal in the
reign of Don Sebastian, just before that
king sails on his disastrous expedition to Africa.
Don Lope de Almeida, a Portuguese gentleman of
great fortune, has made a contract of marriage with
Dona Leonora de Guzman, a Castilian lady. He has
never seen his future wife, who is travelling to Lisbon
under the escort of Don Lope's uncle, Don Ber-
nardino, when the play opens. In the first scene
Don Lope informs the king of his approaching mar-
riage, and asks leave not to accompany him on his
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DllAMA. 113
invasion of Morocco. Then after a brief conversation
with his servant Manrique, the inevitable gracioso, he
catches sight of an old friend, Don Juan de Silva, who
comes on the stage poorly dressed. Don Lope greets
him warmly, and with some difficulty learns his story.
In a long speech, disfigured, according to a fault too
common with Calderon, by repetitions, apostrophes,
and frigid ornament, Don Juan explains that at Goa
he has killed the son of the governor, and has been
compelled to fly, leaving his possessions, and is a
ruined man. The provocation was great, for Manuel
de Sousa had given him the lie. Don Juan describes
how he drew at once and killed the insulter on the
spot not, be it observed, in a duel, but by a thrust
delivered before Sousa could draw his sword. A
passage of this speech is very necessary for the under-
standing of the play. Don Juan breaks into an out-
cry against " the tyrannical error of men," the folly of
the world, which allows honour to be destroyed by a
breath. He labours the point, he repeats himself to
insist that his honour was destroyed when he was
called a liar, and that though he avenged himself in
the not very heroic fashion described, still it will
remain the fact that he has been called a liar. At
a later stage of the play this works. For the present
Don Lope gives his old friend refuge, and tells him
of his marriage. We are now introduced to Dona
Leonor, and learn that she has had a lover, in all honour
of course, Don Luis de Benavides. He, she thinks,
is dead on an expedition to Africa. She is marrying
because she is forced, but will carry his love to the
H
114 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
altar. Beyond that it shall not go, for it would touch
her honour. But Don Luis is not dead. He appears,
and makes himself known to her by pretending to be
a diamond-merchant, and sending her by the hand of
Don Bernardino a ring she has formerly given him.
There is a scene of reproach and explanation between
them, but Dona Leonor is loyal to honour so far. Her
husband now comes on the scene, and greets her with
a sonnet, to which she answers with another of double
meaning. It is addressed both to Don Luis and her
husband each may read it his own way, the first as a
farewell, the second as a promise of faithful obedience.
Don Luis decides to follow her to Portugal and die for
his love, if die he must. So the personages being in-
troduced, and the intrigue on foot, the first act ends.
Now Don Luis establishes himself near the house
of Don Lope, and is for ever prowling about the
neighbourhood. Don Lope sees him, and wonders
what he is doing. He suspects wrong at once, for
the wronged husband of these plays is not of a free
and noble nature. From the Spanish, and Italian,
point of view he who is not suspicious is credulous,
and a fool. Yet he will not believe at once, his wife
being what she is, and he what he is. He shows his
confidence by asking his wife's leave to join the king's
expedition to Africa. Leonor gives it, and he sees
no danger. But his friend Don Juan does. He
drops a hint that it is strange the lady should be
ready to part with her husband so soon. Again Don
Lope is set speculating and wondering. Meanwhile
Don Luis has been persecuting Leonor for a last
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 115
interview, and she agrees to see him in the house,
in the early morning, when she thinks she will not
be discovered by her husband. Don Luis comes
and is caught by Don Lope, but invents a story to
the effect that he has taken refuge in the house to
escape an enemy. Don Lope pretends to believe,
but does not, and warns Don Luis plainly enough,
though not in direct terms, that he will permit no
trifling with his honour. Now the action advances
very rapidly. Don Juan warns Don Lope by putting
the supposed case of a man who knows that an in-
sulting word has been used of a friend, who has not
heard it, and asking whether he ought to be told.
Don Lope advises silence, because the more an offence
to honour is repeated, the worse. But he knows what
is meant, and makes his mind up to take a secret
revenge for the secret wrong when once he is sure.
The king refuses to take him to Africa, on the ground
that he is more needed in his own house. "Is my
wrong already so public ? " is Don Lope's comment.
Now a very skilful use is made of Don Juan's story
to influence the mind of Don Lope. Don Juan hears
himself described by two cavaliers as the man to
whom the lie was given by Manuel de Sousa. He
draws, kills one, and drives the other off. Then, in
a paroxysm of grief, he once more complains to Don
Lope of the injustice which compels the insulted man
to bear the stigma of a public insult for ever. This
incident confirms Don Lope's intention to be secret
in his revenge, lest it should make his wrong known.
Fortune throws a chance in his way. Dona Leonor,
116 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
encouraged by what she believes has been her
escape from discovery, invites Don Luis to meet
her on the other side of the river in a garden. He
comes on the stage reading her letter, and meets
Don Lope. The husband does not know what is in
the letter, but he suspects. He invites Don Luis to
cross the river with him, pushes off without the
boatman, stabs his enemy in mid-stream, and upsets
the boat. Then he swims ashore to the garden
where his wife is waiting for Don Luis. To her he
tells a story of an accident, and gives her the name of
the Castilian gentleman who has perished. Leonor
faints, and thus confirms Lope's belief that she meant
to betray him. He pretends that her anxiety was for
himself ; but that night he fires his house, strangles his
wife in the confusion, and appears from among the
flames bearing her body in his arms, pretending that
she has been stifled by the smoke. The scene be-
tween husband and wife is not given. At the end he
tells the king what has happened as to the death
of Don Luis, and says that being no longer needed
in his own house he is ready to sail for Africa. Don
Sebastian approves of his hidden vengeance for the
secret wrong, and we are left to suppose that Don
Lope goes to perish at Alcazar el Quebir.
This is a powerful drama, and a good example of
Calderun's command of stage effect ^ It is written in
the finished poetic form with which he replaced the
free-flowing dialogue of Lope_de_Vega. The defect of
"tnTs lay in the temptation it afforded to redundancy
and undramatic ornament, but it has a sparkling
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 117
icy beauty of its own. There is no development,
even very little play, of character. The interest lies
in the consistent working of a fierce, sullen, suspicious
jealousy.
"""TEe AiUo Sacramental is very Spanish, very remote
from usT These mysteries were performed during the
T&eAuto month containing the feast of Corpus
sacramental, Chris ti in the streets, not in the theatres,
which were shut at this time, but they were acted by
professional actors. " Andar en los carros " to go in
the cars was the regular phrase used by the actors
for this form of their work. The cars were elaborate
structures, covered, but capable of being opened to
show scenes, and of letting down drawbridges which
served as the stage. They were taken to different
parts of the town, so that performances might be given
in the squares, or before the houses of distinguished
people.
The True God Pan may represent for us what the
Auto Sacramental had become in Calderon's hands
when his genius was at its fullest development. 1
Calderon was fond of taking classical myths for his
oMtos, and treating them as symbols of things to come
since fulfilled. He used the story of Psyche and
Cupid, and also the Andromeda. The application
of the myth of Pan to Christianity was not un-
common in the Renaissance. Pan in Spanish means
" bread," and the auto was especially meant to set
1 Vol. v. of Autos Sacramcntales de Don P. Calderon, published by
Don Juan Fernandez de Apontes, Madrid, 1757-1760 five years be-
fore the public performance of autos was forbidden by Charles III.
118 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
forth the mystery of the Sacrament. This play on
words is the key to the whole auto. If the reader
thinks the conceit puerile, and of more than dubious
taste, he must remember that he is asked to look
not at what would please us, but at what did please
the Spaniards, what was accepted by their still
mediaeval simplicity of piety, and was in keeping
^. ^ with their love for playing on words. First
* "' came th ajga or praisp- This was an intro-
ductory piece, sometimes delivered by a single speaker,
sometimes containing a little action. It was common
on the secular stage, but had no necessary connection
with the piece to follow, being only part of the sur-
roundings and dependencies of the comedia. Cal-
deron's loa was a regular introduction to the auto. In
The True God Pan there are five personages in the loa
History, Poetry, Fable, Music, and Truth. History,
the dama, begins by announcing that in this time of
general joy it becomes her to speak, since she by the
mouth of Paul and John has told how the 'Bread
(Pan) became flesh, and the Word had become flesh.
She calls in Music and the other personages. A for-
feit dance takes place that is to say, all sing as they
dance, and each who makes a fault is called upon to
pay a small forfeit. This was, and is, a form of amuse-
ment in Spain. The songs all refer to the mystery of
the Sacrament, and the faults are the successive de-
partures of Music, Poetry, and the others from
the Catholic truth. Fable promises to pay her forfeit
by telling one of her stories, and beginning with the
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 119
Spanish once upon a time " Erase que se era "
gives an allegorised version of the myth of Pan. Poetry
promises an auto on the same subject, to show that the
heathen had foreknowledge of our pure truths, but
being blind, without the light of Faith, applied them
to their own False Gods. The auto shall be on the
True God Pan. With a loyal address to Charles
the Consoler the unhappy Carlos II., then a small
boy, before whom the auto was performed the loa
ends.
The personages of the auto are Pan, Night, the
Moon, the World, Judaism, Synagogue, Heathenism,
ei verdadero Idolatry, Apostasy, Malice, Simplicity, the
Dios Pan. Fiend, Faith, a child, shepherds, shepherd-
esses, with musicians and attendants. Pan comes out
of a tent, and begins by a lyric appeal to Night.
Night comes, and Pan explains that his birth was at
Bethlehem, which in Hebrew means house of grain,
and from that point goes on to allegorise, in a fashion
which it is difficult to interpret, out of its own proper
language of piety and poetry, without offence. He asks
Night to lead him to the Moon, and then again alle-
gorises, explaining that she is Luna in heaven, Diana
on earth, and Proserpine in hell, therefore the type
of human nature, which dwells on earth, aspires to
heaven, and can sink to the infernal regions. Night
refuses, telling him that all the country is ravaged by
a monster of whom Paul, Chrysostom, and Saint Aug-
ustine speak. Here we have an example of those " im-
pertinences" which excited the ridicule of Madame
120 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
D'Aulnoy, who would, no doubt, have found Ben Jon-
son's masques " impertinent." Pan recognises the mon-
ster as " Sin," and announces that he will retire to the
desert while the Gentiles sing to their false gods. The
last words are taken up by a chorus, and we have now
a scene at the altar of the Moon. Judaism, Heathen-
ism, Synagogue, and the others appear, only to quarrel
and debate. The auto goes on, with constant interludes
of singing and dancing. The monster " Sin " is heard
of, ravaging the flocks. All prove hireling shepherds
except Pan, who appears to help Luna in her distress.
There is a scene of defiance between him and the
Fiend, quite in the style of the comedia when galan is
opposed to galan. The Fiend flies, leaving the trunk
of a tree with which he meant to strike down Pan.
The comic element is not wanting. Judaism takes up
the weapon which the Fiend has dropped, and threat-
ens Pan with it, but he only succeeds in knocking
down, and killing, Synagogue. Then he carries off the
body, saying in an aside that though all the world
knows Synagogue is dead, yet he will always consider
him as alive. Judaism rejects Pan, and Apostasy will
not be persuaded that Flesh can be Bread. Apostasy,
of course, stands for the heretics who will not accept
the doctrine of transubstantiation. But Heathenism
is persuaded, and Luna, typifying human nature, be-
lieves. Pan takes her as " spouse," and both ascend to
the celestial mansions.
The ciilrmirs interlude or farce was by nature a
slight thing. _ In the Dos Habladores ' The Two
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 121
Chatterers' of Cervantes we have the simple story
Los Dos of a gentleman who is plagued in the
iiabiadorcs. S fc ree t s \)j a ra gged gabbler of insufferable
fluency. He makes several attempts to shake him
off' without success, but at last sees how to make
use of him. Sarmiento, the pestered gentleman, has
a talkative wife. He takes the bore home, intro-
duces him as a poor relation, and sets him at her.
Eoldan the chatterer drives the woman frantic by
torrents of talk which leave her no chance to speak.
The merit of the piece on the stage lay no doubt in
the opportunity it presented for " patter " and comic
acting. Yet the entremescs not this one only, but the
whole class have great literary interest as store-
houses of vivid, richly coloured, familiar Castilian.
A drama which flowered for a century, and was so
productive as the Spanish, cannot be fully illustrated
by six examples. Yet these may serve to show the
reader what he may expect to find there. Much he
will not find, or will find only in passing indications.
Perfection of poetic form in the verse is too rare ; the
more than human beauty of the Elizabethan lyric,
the " mighty line," whether of Marlowe, Shakespeare,
or Corneille, the accomplishment of Moliere or Racine,
are wanting. The personages are constantly recurring
types, with here and there a humour. The Juan
Crespo of Calderon's Alcalde de Zcdamea stands almost
alone among the characters of the Spanish stage as a
being of the real world fixed for us by the poet. What
has been called the au delh of Moliere, and what is
122 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
found in the very greatest masters the something
which transcends the mere action before us, and is
immortally true of all human nature is not on the
Spanish stage. But there is much good verse, easy,
with a careless grace, and spirited in Lope, or
stately with a peculiar Spanish dignity in Calderon ;
there is a fine wind of romance blowing all through,
and there is ingenious, unresting, yet lucid action. If
it never reaches the highest level of our Elizabethan
drama, neither does it fall to the vacant horseplay
which is to be found side by side with the tragedy
of Marlowe or Middleton. And though this essen-
tially theatrical drama cannot be said to have held
the mirror up to nature, yet it does give a picture
of the time and the people, adapted and coloured for
the boards, but still preserving the likeness of the
original. This may be said to be its weakness.
Spanish dramatic literature is so much a thing of
Spain, and of the seventeenth century, that it must
needs appeal the less on that account to other peoples
and later times. None the less the spectacle 's pic-
turesque in itself, while the great theatrical dexterity
of the Spanish playwrights will always make their
work interesting to all who care for more than the
purely literary qualities of drama. The religion of the.
Spaniard is conspicuous in his play s. It has been
said that Calderon was the poet of the Inquisition,
and if this is not said as mere blame, it conveys a
truth. That solution of the riddle of the painful
earth which A. W. Schlegel professed to have found
FORMS OF THE SPANISH DRAMA. 123
in him, is no doubt only the teaching of the mediaeval
Church. We may on this account decline very
properly to receive him as a deeper thinker than
Shakespeare, but that teaching of the Church, to
which the Inquisition strove to confine all Spaniards,
had been the guide and consolation of all civilised
Europe. To have given it a lofty poetical expres-
sion for the second time, as Dante had for the first,
was no contemptible feat.
124
CHAPTER V.
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE.
PASTORALS AND SHORT STORIES THE ORIGINAL WORK OF THE SPANIARD
THE "LIBROS DE CABALLERIAS " THE ' AMADIS OP GAUL '
FOLLOWERS OF ' AMADIS OF GAUL ' INFLUENCE AND CHARACTER OF
THESE TALES THE REAL CAUSE OF THEIR DECLINE THE CHARACTER
OF THE "NOVELAS DE PICAROS " THE ' CELESTINA ' ' LAZARILLO
DE TORMtfS ' ' GUZMAN DE ALFARACHE ' THE FOLLOWERS OF MATEO
ALEMAN QUEVEDO CERVANTES HIS LIFE HIS WORK THE MINOR
THINGS ' DON QUIXOTE.'
The mere bulk of the Spanish stories was great,
but it is subject to many deductions before we can
Pastoral* <md disentangle the permanently important
short stories. part. Pastorals, for instance, were much
written in Spain, and one, the Diana 1 of Jorge de
Montemayor (1520 ?-15Gl ?), is excellent in its insipid
kind. But they were and could be only echoes of
Sannazzaro. In estimating the literature of any
nation we can afford to pass over what it has only
taken from a neighbour with a notice that the imita-
tion was made. The merit of creating the type, be
1 There is a pretty and not uncommon edition of the Diana pub-
lished at Madrid by Villalpando in 1795.
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 125
it great or little, belongs to the original. Even when
an imitator is himself widely read, as was the case
with Montemayor, he is but carrying on the work of
the first master. Short stories, again, were popular
enough in Spain ; but to a large extent they, too, were
imitations. The Patranuelo 'The Story- Teller '
of Juan de Timoneda, or the Cigarrales de Toledo
of Tirso de Molina, are full of the matter of the
Fabliaux and the Italian JVovelli. 1 What the Spaniard
did which was also a contribution to the literature
of Europe was done neither in the pastoral nor in
the short story, but in the long tale of heroic or of
vulgar adventure. His are the Libros de Caballerias
' Books of Knightly Deeds ' which are the pa-
rents of the true modern romance; and the Novelas
de Picaros, or, ' Tales of Eogues/ the counterpart, and
even perhaps a little the burlesque of the first, are the
ancestors of all the line which comes through Gil Bias.
Then his was Don Quixote, which belongs to no class,
but is at once universal and a thing standing by itself,
a burlesque of the Libros de Caballerias which grew
into a sadly humorous picture of human delusion, and
was also an expression of the genius of Miguel de
Cervantes.
The books of Chivalry, or of Knightly Deeds, which
is perhaps the more accurate translation of the Spanish
plural Caballerias, like the Eomances, cannot be said
1 The Patrafiuelo is reprinted by Ochoa in his Tesoro de Novelistas
Espanoles, Paris, 1847, vol. i. He also gives one story from Tirso de
Molina The Three Deceived Husbands. It is & fabliau. A Cigarral
was the name given to a country villa near Toledo.
126 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
to belong to the literature of the Kenaissance. They
were a survival of the Middle Ages, the direct suc-
cessors of the Romans d'Aventures, which had sprung
from the Chansons de Gestes.
The Arthurian stories of Lancelot and of Merlin
were known to the Spaniards, and had an enduring
popularity by the side of their own Tales of Chivalry.
There is even one book belonging in essential to the
school which certainly preceded the Amadis. This is
the Valencian Tirant lo Blanch, written in Catalan, of
which the first three books are the work of Juan Mar-
torell, and the fourth was added by Mosen Juan de
Galba, at the request of a lady, Isabel de Loriz. It
was printed in Valencia in 1490, was translated into
Spanish, though with suppressions, and had the rather
curious fortune to be published in a French version in
1737 by a gentleman whose own name was not un-
worthy of a Libro de Caballerias, A. C. P. Tubieres de
Grimoard de Pestels de Levi, Count of Caylus.
Here it is, perhaps, but fair to w r arn the reader of
the extreme difficulty of making more than a slight
acquaintance with these once widely read tales. Popu-
larity and neglect have alike been fatal to them. They
were thumbed to pieces while they were liked, and
thrown aside as worthless when the fashion had changed.
Single copies alone remain of some, as, for instance,
the curious ' Don Florindo, he of the Strange Adven-
ture,' of which Don Pascual de Gayangos gives a long
analysis. Even Don Pascual had never seen the
Spanish original of the once renowned Palmcrin of
England. Southey was compelled to make up his
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 127
Palmerin by correcting Anthony Munday's translation
from a French version. Surviving copies are scattered
in the public libraries, and it is probable that nobody
has seen them all. So we must speak with a certain
reserve concerning them, but yet with a tolerably
well-founded conviction that what one has not seen
does not differ in material respects from what has
come in one's way.
It is not the matter of these tales, but the spirit,
which attaches them to the Middle Ages. Knights
and damsels errant, dwarfs, dragons, giants, and en-
chanters were not neglected by the poets of the Italian
Kenaissance, but they were dealt with in gaiety, and
The Libros de more than half in mockery. But the Libros
Cabaiiems. ^ e Caballerias are very serious. Chivalry
was not to their authors an old dream, but a still
living standard of conduct, and they carried on the
tradition of the Middle Ages with absolute sincerity.
When the Libros de Caballerias are described as the
direct descendants of the Romans d 'Aventures, it
must be understood that this does not imply that
the actual story had its origin out of Spain. We
cannot say stories, because there is in reality only
one, which was constantly rewritten, with changes
which in the majority of cases hardly go beyond the
names. There is one parent story closely imitated by
The A.madis of tne others, and that is the Amadis of
Gaul - Gaul} The honour of the first invention
has been claimed by the French, on the general
1 Libros de Caballerias in the Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, with an
exhaustive introduction by Don Pascual de Gayangos, vol. xl.
128 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
ground that their influence in Spain and Portugal
was great, and that therefore they must not only
have carried the taste for tales of chivalrous adven-
ture beyond the Pyrenees, but have created all the
stories and personages. But the French Amadis has
been lost, and though that may be his only defect,
it suffices to leave us entitled to doubt whether he
ever existed, except in the patriotic French literary
imagination. What is certain is that Amadis was a
popular hero of romance with the Castilians and
Portuguese before the end of the fourteenth century.
It also appears to be put beyond doubt that a version
of the story was written by Vasco de Lobeira, a Por-
tuguese gentleman who died in 1403. Whether it
was the first, or was a version of a Castilian original,
or whether the Trench, who were then very numerous
both in Castile and Portugal, and had an undeniable
influence on the poetry of both countries, and more
especially of the second, did not at least inspire Vasco
de Lobeira, are questions which can be debated for
ever by national vanity, without settlement. The
Amadis of Gaul, which belongs to literature, and
not to the inane region of suppositions, disputes, and
lost manuscripts, is the work of Garcia Ordonez de
Montalvo, of Medina del Campo in Leon. It was
announced as an adaptation from the Portuguese.
As the manuscript of Vasco de Lobeira was lost in
the destruction of the Duke of Arveiro's library in the
great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, we cannot tell how
far Montalvo followed, or improved upon, or did not
improve upon, his original. Indeed, in the absence of
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 129
a Portuguese manuscript, it is impossible to be sure
that the Spanish author did not adopt the common
device of presenting his work as a translation, when
in fact it was wholly his own. It is certainly strange,
considering the immense popularity of the Amadis of
Gaul all over Europe, that the Portuguese did not
vindicate their right to him by publishing Vasco de
Lobeira, since the manuscript was known to exist, and
to be accessible, in the library of a great noble.
Be all that as it may, we are on firm ground when
we come to the proved facts concerning the actual
writing of the Spanish Amadis. It belongs to the
years between 1492 and 1504. The first known edi-
tion, that of Rome, is dated 1519 ; but it is unlikely,
though not impossible, that there had not been a Spanish
predecessor. There is a known edition of the first of
the rival Palmerin series, which is dated 1511. "What
is beyond doubt is that its popularity was immediate
and widespread. Spain produced twelve editions in
fifty years. It was translated in French and Italian
with immense acceptance. One of the best known
stories of lost labour and disappointment in litera-
ture is that Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato,
founded a considerable reputation on the fact that
he had undertaken to make the Amadis the founda-
tion of an epic, which reputation endured until the
appearance of the poem.
As if in direct imitation of the mediaeval custom,
Amadis was made the founder of a family. Montalvo
gave the world the deeds of his son Esplandian in
1526, and from another hand came in the same year
I
130 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER. RENAISSANCE.
his nephew, Florisando, and then a long line, reaching
to the twelfth book. The succession in France was
even longer, for it reached the twenty -fourth. Beside
the house of Ainadis, there arose and nourished the dis-
tinguished family known as the Palmerines. The first
two of this series, the Primaleon and the Palmerin de
Oliva, are said to have been the work of a lady of
" Augustobriga, a town in Portugal." But her name
and very existence are uncertain, while neither of the
places called Augustobriga in the time of the Eoman
dominion in the Peninsula is in Portugal. The most
famous of this line, the Palmerin of England, was for
long attributed to a Portuguese, Francisco de Moraes,
who after a rather distinguished public career was mur-
dered at Evora in 1572 ; but it was probably the work
of a Spaniard, Luis Hurtado of Toledo. It was the con-
fusing habit of the authors of these tales to call them
the fifth, or sixth, or other, " book " of Amadis, or of
Primaleon. Sometimes rival fifths or sixths appeared,
and translators did not follow the Spanish numeration.
Hence much trouble to the faithful historian. Yet
the family history can be followed with tolerable
accuracy. Don Pascual de Gayangos has been at the
pains to make a regular pedigree for both, showing the
main lines and collateral branches. It is a satisfac-
tion to be able to state with confidence that the lady
Flerida, daughter of Palmerin de Oliva, married Don
Duardos (Edward), son of Frederick, King of England,
and of a sister of Meleadus, King of Scotland, and that
Palmerin of England was their son. He again married
Polinarda, and was the father of Don Duardos de
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 131
Bretaila II., who was the father of Don Clarisel. The
Palmerin series, by the way, is much less rich than
the Amadis in those superb names which are not the
least of the pleasures of the Tales of Chivalry. It
rarely rises to the height of Cadragante, or Manete the
Measured, or Angriote de Estravaus, and never to the
level of the Queen Pintiquinestra, or the Giant Famon-
gomadan, whom Cervantes had in his mind when he
imagined Brandabarbaran de Boliche. The stories in-
dependent of these two series are numerous, though less
numerous than the reader who has not looked into the
matter may suppose. Their names and that is all
which survives of some will be found in their proper
places in the lists of Don Pascual de Gayangos.
It will be seen that much of this work is either
anonymous, or is attributed on vague evidence to
authors of whom the name only is known. The chief
exception is the Feliciano de Silva at whose style
Cervantes laughed. It happens that something is
known of Feliciano, and that it is to his honour.
He was page to the sixth Duke of Medina Sidonia,
and he saved the Duchess from being drowned in
the Guadalquivir at the risk of his own life; which,
it will be allowed, was an action not unworthy of
the author of Libros de Caballerias. He wrote the
Lisuarte de Grecia, the Amadis de Grecia, and several
others, including the Florisel de Niquea. Feliciano
was an industrious man of letters, who would have
been a useful collaborator with, and fairly successful
imitator of, Dumas, had time and chance suited.
He adulterated his tales of knightly deeds by im-
132 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
itations of the pastoral model, and his style certainly
laid him open to the ridicule of Cervantes. Yet it
is not more pompous and mechanical than our own
Lyly, and is better than the manner of some of the
Novelas de Picaros.
v None of the commonplaces in the history of litera-
ture are better established than these : that the Libros
de Cciballerias were tiresome and absurd :
Influence and
character of that they appeared in immense numbers,
these Tales. ^ flooded Qut aU betfcer and mQre wno l e _
some reading ; and that they were killed by Don
Quixote. Yet there are probably not three worse
founded commonplaces. That these books can be
tedious, and that the worst of them can be very
tedious, is true. But none are more long-winded than
the Golden Epistles, which had an equally great popu-
larity, or than some well - accepted reading of any
generation is apt to look to later times, when fashion
has changed. They were certainly neither more
tiresome nor more essentially absurd than the Novela
de Picaros. Their number was not very great. The
whole body is not nearly as numerous as the yearly
output of novels to-day in England ; and even when
their inordinate length is allowed for, their total bulk
is not greater, though they were written during a cen-
tury. As for their supposed predominance, it must
be remembered that the great time of the Libros de
Caballcrias was also the time of the " learned poetry "
of Spain, of the growth of the drama, of most of the
romances, and of some of the best work of the his-
torians and the mystic writers. That Don Quixote
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 133
destroyed them may seem to be a truth too firmly
established to be shaken, and yet the contrary pro-
position, that it was the waning popularity of the
Tales of Knightly Deeds which made Don Quixote pos-
sible, is on the whole more consistent with fact. They
had been less and less written for a generation before
Cervantes produced his famous First Part. The Novelet
de Picaros was taking their place. Eeaders were pre-
disposed to find them laughable, and therefore enjoyed
the burlesque. Cervantes' own half-humorous boast
has been taken too seriously. The ridicule of the
Libros de Caballerias is the least valuable part of Don
Quixote, and is not in itself better than much satire
which has yet failed to destroy things more deserving
of destruction than the family of Amaclis.
Neither the popularity nor the decline of the Libros
de Caballerias was in the least unintelligible. These
books supplied the Spaniards with stories of fight-
ing and adventure in a fighting adventurous time,
when the taste for reading, or at least hearing others
read, was spreading, and when the theatre the only
possible rival was still in its feeble beginnings. And
what they gave was not only suited to the time but
not inferior to what came after. The English reader
who wishes to put it to the test has an easy way open
to him. Let him take the adaptations which Southey
made of Amaclis of Gaul, or Palmerin of England, and
compare them, not with Sir Walter Scott, who showed
what a great genius could do with a motive not unlike
that of the Libros de Caballerias ; not with Gil Bias,
which shows what genius could do with the machinery
134 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
of the Novelet ele Picaros ; not with Don Quixote, which
is for all time, but with an English version of the
Guzman ele Alfarache, the book which first firmly
established the gusto picaresco at the very close of
the sixteenth century. He will find much repetition
(though Southey, who made one or two notable addi-
tions, has suppressed largely) in both, but in the Guz-
man it is endless sordid roguery, in which there is no
general human truth, and in place of it a mechanical
exaggeration of a temporary form of Spanish vaga-
bondage, while in the Amadis or Palmerin it is some-
thing not unlike the noble fancies of the Arthurian
legend.
The decline of the Libros ele Caballerias is easily
accounted for. They ended by wearying the world
with monotony, and the increasing extravagance of
incident and language, which was their one resource
for avoiding monotony. The Spaniard's tendency to
repeat stock types in the same kind of action was
visible here as elsewhere. The Amadis gave the
pattern, and it was followed. A hero who is the son
The real cause, of a king, and is also a model of knightly
of their decline. p r0 wess and virtues, with a brother in
arms who, while no less valiant, is decidedly less
virtuous, are the chief figures. Amadis, the Bel-
tenebros the lovely dark man is the pink of loyalty
to his peerless Oriana, who is the fairest and most
loving of women. Galaor is gay and volatile, light of
love, but loyal in friendship. Amadis is born out of
wedlock, and left to fortune by his mother, or for
some other reason brought up far away from the
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 135
throne which is lawfully his, and fights his way to his
crown without ever failing for an instant in his devo-
tion to Oriana. Galaor helps him, and loves what
ladies he meets on the road. Amadis breathes out
his mistress's name as he lays his lance in rest,
Galaor throws a defiant jest in front of him ; Amadis
has the gift of tears, but Galaor laughs in the jaws
of death, laughs in fact at everything except the
honour of a gentleman and on that he smiles. It
is a brotherhood between Sir Charles Grandison and
Mercutio. Combats, giants, fairy ladies, enchanters
good and bad, make up the matter of the story. If
it is essentially unwholesome, so is the Eound Table
legend ; and if it is necessarily absurd, so is the Faerie
Queen. But when it had been done once in Amadis,
and for a second time in Palmerin, it was done for
good. To take the machinery of the Libros de Cabal-
lerias, and put a new spirit into it, which, as Cervantes
saw, was possible, was not given to any Spaniard.
All they could do was to repeat, and then endeavour
to hide the repetition by multiplying everything on a
fixed scale. The giants grew bigger, the sword-cuts
more terrific, the combats more numerous, the mon-
sters more hideous, the exalted sentiments swelled
till they were less credible than the giants. The fine
Castilian of Garcia Ordonez was tortured into the
absurdities which bad writers think to be style.
The Libros de Caballerias, which had been a nat-
ural survival, and revival, of the Middle Ages in
the early sixteenth century, were unnatural at its
close. Don Quixote did but hasten their end. They
136 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
would have perished in any case before the Novelas de
Picaros, which in turn ran much the same course, and
were extinguished without the intervention of satire.
That the taste of the time was tending away from
the higher forms of romance is shown by the little
following found for the Civil Wars of Granada by
(Hues Perez de Hita, of whom little or nothing is
known. 1 This book, of which the first part was pub-
lished in 1598 and the second in 1604, is the original
source of all the stories of the Zegries and Abencer-
rages. It gave the Spaniards a model for the histori-
cal novel proper, but though it was popular at the
time so popular that it was taken for real history
"Perez de Hita founded no school. The Spanish char-
acter was becoming too impoverished for a large and
poetic romance. What imagination there was, was
becoming concentrated in the theatre before wither-
ing entirely.
The fate of the Novelas de Picaros is one of the most
curious in literature. But for them, and their popu-
larity outside of Spain, there could not well have been
any Gil Bias, and without him the history of
modern prose fiction must have been very different.
Yet apart from the example they set, and the
machinery they supplied, their worth is small. We
find in them the same monotony of type and incident
as in the comedia and the Libros de Caballerias, while
they have neither the fine theatrical qualities of the
first (which was, we may allow, inevitable) nor the
1 The QuervtU Chiles de Granada is in vol. iii. of the Biblioteoa di
Ribadencyra.
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 137
manly spirit of the second. Poetry, heroic sentiment,
or deep religious feeling we could not
Character of the r & o
Noveiasde expect from what only professed to deal
with the common and animal side of life.
But they do not give what might have compensated
for these things, average sensual human nature, act-
ing credibly and drawn with humour. Their fun and
they strained at jocularity is of the kind which de-
lights to pull the chair from below you when you are
about to sit down, and laughs consumedly at your
bruises. To make the jest complete you must be old,
ugly, sickly, and very poor. There is no laugh in the
Novelets cle Picaros, only at their best a loud hard
guffaw, and when they do not rise to that, a perpetual
forced giggle. Truth to life is as far from them as
from the Lihros cle Caballerias, but the two are on
opposite sides. In mere tediousness they equal the
heroic absurdity, for and this is not their least offen-
sive feature they are obtrusively didactic. The
larger half of the Guzman cle Alfarache is composed of
preachment of an incredibly platitudinous order.
Boredom for boredom, the endless combats of the
knight-errant are better. And withal we find the
same childish effort to attain originality by mere
exaggeration. The Lazarillo cle Tonne's forces the tone
of the Gelestina, Guzman cle Alfarache advances, more
particularly in bulk, beyond Lazarillo, Marcos de
Obregon improves on Guzman, and so it goes on to the
grinning and sardonic brutality of Quevedo's Pablo
de Segovia and the jerking capers of Don Gregorio
Ghiadana. This last is the work of an exiled Span-
138 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
ish Jew, Enriquez Gomez (/. 1638-1660). Imagine
Villon's Ballade des Pcndus without the verse, with-
out the pathos, spun out in prose, growing ever
more affected through endless repetitions of sordid
incident, and you have the Novela de Picaros. 1
Yet they started from what might well have been
the beginning of better. The Celestina had a certain
truth to life in its really valuable parts, and it did not
strive to amuse with mere callous practical joking. 2
This curious dialogue story was written perhaps before,
or it may be about, the time of the conquest of Gran-
ada 1492 and both the identity of its author and
its date of publication are obscure. It is divided into
twenty-one so-called acts, of which the first is very
long and the others are very short. Fernando Kojas
of Montalvan, by whom it was published, says that
the first act was the work of Eodrigo Cota of Toledo,
a Jew, the known author of some tolerable verses in
the style of the Court school ; and that he himself
finished it at the request of friends. This account has
been disputed by the criticism which delights in dis-
puting the attribution of everything to everybody. It
is neither supported by internal, nor contradicted by
\ external, evidence. The literary importance
V- The Celestina. ' J r
of the tale is not affected by it in the least.
There are two elements in the Celestina. It contains
1 See Novelistas anteriores a Cervantes and Novelistas postcriorcs a
Cervantes in the Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, vols. iii. and xviii.
2 For the history of the Celestina see Mr Fitz Maurice Kelly's in-
troduction to the reprint of Mabbe's excellent version in Mr Henley's,
Tudor Translations.
SPANISH PKOSE ROMANCE. 139
a love-story of the headlong southern order, sudden
and violent in action, inflated, and frequently insuffer-
ably pedantic in expression, withal somewhat common-
place. With this, and subservient to this, there is a
background, a subordinate, busy, scheming world of
procuresses, prostitutes, dishonest servants, male and
female, and bullies, which is amazingly vivid. Celes-
tina, whose name has replaced the pompous original
title of the story, Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibma,
is the ancestress of the two characters of similar trade
in Pamela and Clarissa. She had many forerunners in
mediaeval literature, in and out of Spain. But she has
never been surpassed in vividness of portraiture, while
her household of loose women and bullies, with their
intrigues and jealousies, their hangers-on, and their
arts of temptation, is drawn with no less truth than
gusto. The quality of their talk is admirable, and the
personages are not described from the outside, or pre-
sented to us as puppet types, but allowed to manifest
themselves, and to grow, with a convincing reality rare
indeed in Spanish literature.
Though the popularity of the Celestina, not only in
Spain but abroad, was great, it did not produce any
marked effect on Spanish literature until a generation
had passed. It was adapted on the stage, but there it
left few traces except on the racy dialogue of the prose
entremeses. The poetic form of the Spanish comedy
did not, and even perhaps could not, adapt itself to the
alert naturalistic tone of the Celestina, and the subjects
of the plays grew ever more romantic and more re-
mote from the vulgar world. But this answered too
140 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
well to a natural taste of the Spaniards to remain
The Lazariiio without a following. Its first real successor
de Tonnes, (apart from rifacimentos or mere echoes, of
which there were several) was the Vicla de Lazariiio
de Tonne's; sus Fortunas y Adversidades, 1 attrib-
uted on very dubious evidence to the famous Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza, and with not much greater
probability to Fray Juan de Ortega, of the Order of St
Jerome. The date of its composition is uncertain.
The first known edition is of 1553, but it may have
been read in manuscript before that. In the Lazariiio
we have the Novela de Picaros already complete, differ-
ing only from those which were to come after in the
greater simplicity of its style and in freshness. The
hero is a poor boy of Tormes, in the neighbourhood of
Salamanca, none too honest by nature, and made per-
fectly unscrupulous by a life of dependence on harsh,
or poverty-stricken, masters. The story tells how he
passes from one service to another, generally after
playing some more or less ferocious trick on his
employer. It is a scheme which affords a good open-
ing for satirical sketches of life, and the author, who-
ever he was, clearly adopted it for that among other
reasons. Lazarillo's master, the poor cavalier who
keeps up a show of living like a gentleman while in
fact he is starving at home too proud either to work
or beg, but not too proud to cherish schemes of en-
1 The early history of the book, with an account of the doubts
which prevail as to its authorship, will be found in the Vie de Lazar-
iiio de Tormis. A new translation by M. A. Morel Fatio. Paris,
1886.
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 141
trapping a wife with a dowry, and not spirited enough
to serve as a soldier was no doubt a familiar figure
in Spain, and he became a stock puppet of the Novelets
de gusto Picaresco. Another scene of real, though not
peculiarly Spanish, satire deals with a dishonest seller
of pardons and his sham miracles. The Eeformation
had imposed limits on the freedom of orthodox writers
to deal with the sins, or even absurdities, of churchmen,
and this passage was suppressed, as of bad example,
by the Inquisition. The majority of the figures are,
however, less satirical than grotesque. We find in the
Lazarillo, though not to the extent which afterwards
become common, the love of dwelling on starvation,
poverty, and physical infirmities as if they were things
amusing in themselves. But this is less the case than
in its successors, and being nearly the first, or even
the actual first, in the fully developed form, it has a
certain freshness. It has the merit of being short,
and leaves its hero dishonourably married, with a
promise of a continuation, which was never written
by the author.
Putting aside spurious " second parts " of the Laza-
rillo, the next event in the advance we cannot say the
development of the Novela de Picaros is the publica-
tion of the Guzman de Alfarache of Mateo Aleman,
a Sevillian of whose birth, life, and death nothing
certain is known. This book, appearing just as the
Libros de Caballerias were dying of exhaustion, set
Guzman de the example to a swarm of followers. Yet
Alfarache. ft was itself but an imitation of Lazarillo,
greatly enlarged, and over-burdened with what Le Sage,
142 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
who translated it, most justly called " superfluous moral
reflections." The second title of the book, La Atalaya
~de la VidcT ' The Beacon of Life' indicates Ne-
man's didactic intention, which even without it is
obtrusive. But a beacon of life, to be other than
a useless blaze, must be set to warn us off real
dangers in real life: it must flame with satire on
possible human errors. The satire of Aleman is akin
to Marston's, and Marston's many followers among
ourselves, it is a loud bullying shout at mere base-
nesses made incredible by being abstracted from
average human nature, and kneaded into dummies.
Celestina, besides being an impudent, greedy servant
of vice, is also a woman with humour and an amusing
tongue. Her household are the scum of the earth,
but they are human scum, with a capacity for enjoy-
ing themselves as men and women without dragging
their humour of vice in, when no cause sets it in
motion. They can laugh and cry, like and dislike,
as other human beings do. But the personages of
Mateo Aleman are grinning puppets, galvanised to
imitate the gestures of greed, cowardice, mendacity,
and cruelty, abstracted from humanity. Then, they are
set to play a wild fantasia in vacuo. What is true of
Mateo Aleman applies equally to his followers.
A brief outline must suffice for his successors. A
spurious second part of Guzman de Alfarache was
Foiimvers of published in 1603, written, as it would
Mateo Aleman. geenij ty Qne ]^ ar ti j a Valencian, who
assumed the noble name of Luxan. This, by the way,
is one proof among many that the Libros de Caballerias
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 143
were not the prevailing taste of readers when Cer-
vantes published his first part of Don Quixote in 1605,
or else it would have suggested itself to nobody to
trade on the popularity of Gfuzman. In 1605 Aleman
wrote a second part, in which he victimises the plagi-
arist in a fashion afterwards followed by Cervantes
when provoked in the same fashion. In the same - ^
year came out the Picara Justina of Andreas Perez,
a Dominican who wrote under the name of Francisco
Lopez de Ubeda, with a she rogue as heroine, with
exactly the same spirit and machinery, and an iden-
tical didactic purpose, but written in a tortured style.
Vicente Espinel (? 1551-? 1630), who was otherwise
notable for adding the fifth string to the guitar and as
a verse -writer, published El Escudero (i.e., Squire)
Marcos de Obregon in 1618. This squire is of the
class of the Biscayan whom Don Quixote overthrew,
an elderly man who waited on ladies the fore-
runner of the footman with the gold-headed stick,
familiar to ourselves till very recent times. He
has led the usual life. The Marcos de Obregon
had the honour of contributing a few incidents to
Le Sage. The soul of Pedro Garcia is not taken
from the introduction, but put in place of what
Espinel had written. In the Spanish story two
students find a tombstone on which are written the
words " Unio, unio," a pun on pearl and union. One
sees nothing in the riddle, and goes on. The other
digs and finds the skeletons of the lovers of Ante-
quera, who threw themselves together from a preci-
pice to escape capture by the Moors. Here we see
144 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
what Le Sage did with the framework supplied him
by the Spaniards. He took what was only Span-
ish, and made it universal. We can all laugh over
the bag of coin which was the soul of Pedro Garcia,
but who understands the story of the Spanish lovers
without a commentary ? After Marcos de Obregon there
follow mainly repetitions.
y An exception must, however, be made for the Gran
Tacafio 'The Great Sharper,' Paul of Segovia, by
Quevedo. 1 Don Francisco Gomez de Que-
Quevedo.
vedo y Villegas, Sefior de la Torre de Juan
Abad (1580-1645), was a very typical Spaniard of
those who came from "the mountain," and lived an
agitated life in the Spain of the seventeenth century.
He served under the once famous Duke of Osuna,
viceroy of Sicily and Naples, was implicated in the
mysterious conspiracy against Venice, and finally suf-
fered from the hostility of the Count Duke of Olivares.
In literature he is still the shadow of a great name as
poet, scholar, and satirist. Among his countrymen
his memory is still popular as the hero of innumer-
able stories of much the same kind as those told in
Scotland of Buchanan, and in France of Rabelais.
For his sake Pablo de Segovia may be mentioned,
and also because it is the Novela de Picaros as the
Spaniards wrote it, stripped of the last rag of what-
1 Quevedo's works are in the Bibliotcca de Ribadeneyra ; but the
desirable edition is that of Sancha, Madrid, 1791, in eleven pretty
volumes. A translation of ' The Sharper ' was published in London
in 1892, admirably illustrated by the Spanish draughtsman known m
Daniel Vierge.
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 145
ever could disguise its essential hard brutality. If
you can gloat over starvation if the hangman ex-
patiating joyfully over halters and lashes seems a
pleasant spectacle to you if blows, falls, disease,
hunger, dirt, and every form of suffering, told with
a loud callous laugh, and utterly unrelieved, seem to
you worth reading about, then Pablo de Segovia is
much at your service. But Quevedo did other than
this. Some of his satiric verse has life^ and if not
gaiety, "sHll a species of bitter jocularity; and more-
over, he gave a new employment to the gusto picaresco
in his VisioTis. These once world-renowned satires
are composed of such matter as the vices of lawyers,
doctors, police-officers, unfaithful wives, complacent
^TiusFahds, &c. To those who wish to master the
Castilian language in all its resources they are in-
valuable, and it is in itself so fine that we can endure
much to gain access to its treasures. But it is pos-
sible to gain a quite accurate understanding of Que-
vedo by reading the translation and amplification of
his Visions by our own Sir Eoger L'Estrange. Then,
just in order to see where this spirit and this method
lead, it is not a waste of time to go on to Ned Ward.
There was something very congenial to the Restora-
tion in the Spanish gusto picaresco, and that is its
sufficient condemnation. Yet it did supply Le Sage
with what he might not have been able to elaborate
for himself, and thereby it contributed to the gaiety
and the wisdom of nations. ^-
That the name of (Miguel de Cerv antes, (towers above
all others in Spanish literature is a commonplace.
K
146 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
/Montesquieu's jest, that Spain has produced hut
one good book, which was written to
prove the absurdity of all the others, is
only the flippant statement of the truth that the one
Spanish book which the world has taken to itself is
Don Quixote. What else the Spaniards have done in
literature may have its own beauty and interest. It
may even have affected the literature of other nations.
The Spanish drama did something to form the purely
theatrical skill of the playwright, and the Novela de
Picaros gave a framework for the prose story of com-
mon life. Yet the plays of Lope or of Calderon, the
tales of Aleman, Espinel, and others, are essentially
Spanish, and Spanish of one time. It is only in
touches here and there that we find in them, behind
their native vesture, any touch of what is human and
universal. Even when they dealt with what was
common to them with other peoples, the emotions of
piety and devotion, they gave them their own colour,
their own purely Spanish flavour. There is no Imita-
tion of Christ, no Pilgrim's Progress, in their religious
writing. But Don Quixote is so little purely Spanish
that its influence has been mainly felt abroad, that it
has been, and is, loved by many who have neither
heard nor wish to hear of the literature lying
round it.
The life of Cervantes has been made so familiar that
the details need only be briefly mentioned here. 1 It
1 The main authority for the life of Cervantes is still the Biograiphy
by Dun Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, published by the Spanish
Academy in 1819. The memory of Cervantes has undergone the
SPANISH THOSE ROMANCE. 147
is within the knowledge of all who take any interest
in him at all that he was by descent a
gentleman of an ancient house. His own
branch of it had become poor. He was born, prob-
ably on some day in October 1547, at Alcala de
Henares, a town lying to the east of Madrid, and the
seat of the university founded by Cardinal Jimenez.
It does not appear that Cervantes ever attended the
university, or received more than the trifling schooling
which fell to the lot of Shakespeare also. Mar, Iglesia,
y casct de rey the sea (i.e., adventure in America), the
Church, and the king's service were the three careers
open to a gentleman at a time when trade, medicine,
and even the law, were plebeian. Cervantes began
life in the household of a great Italian ecclesiastic,
Cardinal Acquaviva, in one of those positions of
domestic service about men of high position which
were then, in all countries, filled by gentlemen of
small or no fortune. From 1571 to 1575 he served as
a soldier under Don John of Austria, and received
that wound in the left hand at the battle of Lepanto
in which he took a noble pride. From 1575 to 1580
he was a prisoner in Algiers. After his release in
1580 till his death in 1616 for thirty-six long years
full of misfortune he led the struggling life of a
Spanish gentleman who had no fortune, no interest,
no command of the arts which ingratiate a dependent
misfortune of becoming the object of a cult to the persons calling
themselves Cervantistas, who have made it an excuse for infinite
scribbling. A few new facts of no importance have been discov-
ered, but Navarrete's Vida remains the real authority.
148 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
with a superior. At the very end he may have enjoyed
some measure of comparative ease, but few men of
letters have been poorer. Most men of his class were
no richer than himself, for Spain was a very poor
country, and mere poverty was deprived of its worst
sting when men ranked by birth and not by their
possessions. No want of means could cause a noble
to be other than the social superior of the merely rich
man, while the Church had been only too successful
in investing poverty with a certain sanctity. Yet
though there were alleviations, the lot of Cervantes
was a hard one, embittered by disappointments and
imprisonments, which seem to have been chiefly due
to the clumsy brutality of the Spanish judicial system.
All this he bore with that dignity in misfortune which
is one of the finest features in the character of the
Spaniard, and with a cheerful courage all his own.
Everything known of his life shows that he possessed
two of the finest qualities which can support a man in
a life of hardship pride and a sweet temper.
The written work of Cervantes is divided in a way
not unexampled in literature, but nowhere seen to the
same extent except in the case of Prevost,
J I is work.
a far smaller, but a real, genius. If he
had left nothing but Don Quixote, his place in litera-
ture would be what it is. If he had not written his
one masterpiece, he would have passed unnoticed ; and
there would have been no reason why he should have
been remembered, unless it were with Bermudez and
Virues, as one of the forerunners of Lope who made
vague, ill - directed experiments in the childhood of
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 149
Spanish dramatic literature. Even the Novelets Ejem-
plares, though they possess a greater measure of his
qualities than any part of his literary inheritance,
other than Don Quieote and his erifremeses, are mainly
interesting because they are his. Other Spaniards did
such things as well as he, or better, but none have
approached Don Quixote. The difference is not in
degree, it is in kind.
We may, then, pass rapidly over the minor things.
It is to- be noted that his natural inclination was
The minor n t towards letters, but to arms. When
things. a mere DO y he did, indeed, write some
verses on the death of Isabelle of Valois, the wife of
Philip II., but they were school exercises written at
the instigation of his master, Juan Lopez de Hoyos,
and published by him. Like Sir Walter Scott, he
believed in the greater nobility of the life of action,
and more particularly in the superiority of the " noble
profession of arms." If he could have had his choice
it would have been to serve the king, and more espe-
cially to serve him in the reconquest of Northern
Africa from the Mahometans. He was driven to
write by mere necessity, and the want of what he
would fain have had. During his captivity in Algiers
he made plays for the amusement of his fellow -prison-
ers. After his release, when he was again employed
as a soldier in the conquest of Portugal, in 1580 he
wrote his unfinished pastoral, the Galatea. He was
married in 1584, and established in Madrid. At this
period he wrote many plays, now lost, and two which
have survived. The Trato de Argel, or 'Life in
150 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Algiers,' has some biographical interest, and some
general value as a picture of the pirate stronghold,
but is valuable on these grounds only. The Numancia
belongs to the class of works describable in the good
sense as curious. It is a long dialogued poem divided
into scenes and acts, on the siege of Numantia by
Scipio, and is not without a certain grandiose force.
As a play it shows that the Spanish drama had not
found its way, and that Cervantes was not to be its
guide. It struggles between imitation of the mystery,
vague efforts to follow an ill-understood classic model,
and attempt to strike a new and native path which
the author could nowhere find. Then comes a long
interval, during which Lope was sweeping all rivals
from the stage, and Cervantes, in his own phrase,
was buried "in the silence of oblivion." He was
struggling for mere subsistence, working as a clerk
under the Commissary of the Indian fleet, collecting
rents for the Knights of St John, and finally, as it
would seem, supporting himself, his wife, a natural
daughter born to him in Portugal before his marriage,
and a sister, by the trade of cscribiente at Valladolid.
The escribiente, still a recognised workman in Spain,
writes letters for those who cannot write for them-
selves.
He never quite lost his connection with literature.
A few commendatory verses in the books of friends,
and other slight traces, remain to show that in the
intervals of the work by which he lived he endeavoured
to keep a place among the poets and dramatists of the
time. During these years lie wrote the first part of
SPANISH PKOSE ROMANCE. 151
Don Quixote. It appeared in 1605, but, according to
the usual practice, had been shown to friends in manu-
script. His last years were spent in Madrid. How
he lived must remain a mystery. The Bon Quixote,
was popular, but copyrights were then not lucrative,
even if they could be said to exist. He again tried the
stage, and was again unsuccessful. In 1613 he pub-
lished the Novelets Ejemplares, a collection of short
stories, partly on the picaresque, partly on an Italian,
model. During the following year he brought out the
Voyage to Parnassus, a verse review of the poets of his
time, a common form of literary exercise, and not a
good specimen of its kind. In 1614 he was provoked
by the false second part of Don Quixote. This was a
form of literary meanness from which Mateo Aleman
had already suffered, but Cervantes had particular
cause to be angry. The continuer of Guzman cle
Alfarache appears to have been only an impudent
plagiarist, but the writer who continued Don Quixote
was obviously animated by personal hostility. He de-
scended to a grovelling sneer at Cervantes' wounded
hand. It has been guessed that this is another chapter
in the miserable history of the quarrels of authors.
Avellaneda, as the author of the false second part
called himself, is supposed to have acted on the in-
stigation of Lope de Vega, who is known to have had
no friendly feelings for Cervantes. The trick, which
was as clumsy as it was spiteful, probably hastened
the appearance of the genuine second part. It un-
doubtedly had some influence on the form, for it in-
duced Cervantes to alter the course of the story, in
152 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
order to make the two as unlike as possible. Perhaps
it decided the author to kill the hero lest another
should murder him. The second part was printed in
1615. Cervantes died in the next year. Cheerful
and hopeful to the end, even when " his foot was in
stirrup" for the last journey, he had prepared his
Persiles y Sigismunda for the press before he died.
This was meant to be a model of what a tale of ad-
venture might be, and was written with more care in
the formal and mechanical parts than he gave to Don
Quixote; but, like almost all he is known to have
done with deliberate literary intentions, it is dull and
lifeless.
There is a difficulty in speaking of Don Quixote.
One has to come after Fielding and Scott, Heine,
Thackeray, and Sainte-Beuve, not to men-
Don Quixote. . . _ _ .
tion many others hardly less illustrious.
These are great names, and it may seem that after
they have spoken there is nothing left to say. The
first duty which this position imposes is not to
endeavour deliberately to be different, in the vain
hope of attaining originality. But the cloud of
witnesses who might be summoned to prove the
enduring interest of Don Quixote is itself a part of
the critical history of the book, and a tribute to its
solitary place in Spanish literature. The ascetic and
so-called mystic writers had their day of influence
among us in the seventeenth century. Crashaw alone
is enough to prove that here, and in a certain section
of English life and literature, Santa Teresa and Juan
SPANISH PEOSE ROMANCE. 153
de la Cruz were living forces. Quevedo had his day,
and the Novela de Picaros their following. During
the romantic movement, the dramatists were much
in men's mouths. But in each case the Spaniard
remained only for a time. Calderon once had his
place in Lord Tennyson's Palace of Art, but he fell
out, and that has been the fate of all things Spanish
in literature. They have given an indication, have
been used and forgotten, or they have been welcomed
as strange, mysterious, probably beautiful, and then
silently dropped as too exclusively Spanish, too entirely
belonging to a long past century. But Don Quixote
has been always with us since Shelton's translation
of the first part appeared in 1612. This of itself is
proof enough that there is something in Don Quixote
which is absent from other Spanish work, whether his
own or that of other men.
No words need be wasted in controverting the
guesses of those who wish to account for the great-
ness of a great piece of literature by some hidden
quality not literary. They have ranged from the
fantastic supposition that Cervantes was ridiculing
Charles V. down to the amazing notion that he was
attacking the Church. Nor need much respect be
shown to the truth that Don Quixote was meant to
make fun of the books of chivalry. This would be
self-evident even if Cervantes had not said so. It
may be that this was all he meant, and then he
builded better than he knew. The work of burlesque,
though often necessary, and, when decently done,
154 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
amusing, is essentially of the lower order. In this
case it was not necessary, for the Libros de Caballerias
were already dying out before the sordid rivalry of
the Novelets de Picaros. It was the less necessary,
because it was no reform. The Spain of the Libros
de Caballerias was the Spain of Santa Teresa and
Luis de Leon, of the great scholars of the stamp of
Francisco Sanchez El Brocense, of Diego de Mendoza,
of Cortes and Pizarro and Mondragon the Spain
which Brantome saw, " brave, bravache et vallereuse
et de belles paroles proferees a rimproviste." It was
a better country than that in which the Count Duke
of Olivares had to complain that he could find "no
men." The follies of the Libros de Caballerias were a
small matter. It was not a small matter that a nation
should replace Amadis of Gaul by Paul of Segovia,
should pass from the lofty romantic spirit of Garcia
Ordones to the carcajada the coarse, braying, animal,
and loveless guffaw of Quevedo.
In so far as Cervantes forwarded that change he
did evil and not good. He did help to laugh Spain's
chivalry away. But in truth it was dying, and the
change would have come without him. He is great in
literature, because while consciously doing a very small,
unnecessary, and partially harmful thing, lie created a
masterpiece of that rare and fine faculty which while
thinking in jest still feels in earnest (the definition of
what is, it may be, undefinable is taken from Miss
Anne Evans), and which we call humour. Elsewhere
in Spanish literature we find a type fixed and un-
SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. 155
varying, or even a mere puppet, met through a
succession of events, and moved about by them. In
Don Quixote we have two characters acting on one
another, and producing the story from within. And
these two characters are types of immortal truth
the one a gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of
good faculty, for whom a slight madness has made
the whole world fantastic ; the other an average
human being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere
coward, and ignorant, yet not unkindly, nor in-
capable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what his
limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his
greed. The continual collisions of these two with
the real world make the story of Don Quixote. Cer-
vantes had a fine inventive power, the adventures are
numerous and varied, yet the charm lies not in the
incidents, but in the reality and the sympathetic
quality of the persons. We have no grinning world
of masks made according to a formula. The cou ntry
gentlemen, priests, barbers, shepherds, innkeepers,
tavern wenches, lady's - maids, domestic curates,
nobles, and officials are living human beings, true to
the Spain of the day no doubt, but also true to the
humanity which endures for ever, and therefore in-
telligible to all times. In the midst is honest greedy
Sancho with his peering eyes, so shrewd, and withal
so capable of folly, the critic, and also the dupe of
the half-crazed dreamer, by whom he rides, and will
ride, as long as humanity endures, in this book, and
under every varying outward form in the real earth.
156 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
As for Don Quixote, is he not the elder brother of Sir
Eoger de Coverley, of Matthew Bramble, of Parson
Adams, of Bradwardine, of Colonel Newcome, and Mr
Chucks, the brave, gentle, not over- clever, men we
love all the more because we laugh at them very
tenderly ? 1
1 The fame and the excellence of Le Diable Boiteux of Le Sage
entitle the author of El Diablo Cojuelo to notice in this chapter.
Luis Velez de Guevara (1572 or 1574-1644) of Ecija was a fertile
dramatist. His Diablo Cojuelo, published in 1641, supplied the
starting-point, and the matter but not the form, of the two first
chapters of Le Diable Boiteux. There is nothing answering to the
famous " Apres cela on nous reconcilia ; nous nous embrassames ;
depuis ce tems la nous sommes ennemis mortels. " The matter of the
Diablo Cojuelo is akin to the Visions of Quevedo, and the style is
very idiomatic.
157
CHAPTEK VI.
SPAIN HISTORIANS, MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS, AND
THE MYSTICS.
SPANISH HISTORIANS HISTORIES OF PARTICULAR EVENTS EARLY HIS-
TORIANS OP THE INDIES GENERAL HISTORIANS OP THE INDIES
GOMARA, OVIEDO, LAS CASAS, HERRERA, THE INC A GARCILASO MEN-
DOZA, MONCADA, AND MELO GENERAL HISTORIES OCAMPO,
ZURITA, MORALES MARIANA THE DECADENCE SOLIS MIS-
CELLANEOUS WRITERS GRACIAN AND THE PREVALENCE OF GON-
GORISM THE MYSTICS SPANISH MYSTICISM THE INFLUENCE OF
THE INQUISITION ON SPANISH RELIGIOUS LITERATURE MALON DE
CHAIDE JUAN DE AVILA LUIS DE GRANADA LUIS DE LEON
SANTA TERESA JUAN DE LA CRUZ DECADENCE OF THE MYSTIC
WRITERS.
It was natural that a very active time of great literary
vigour should be rich in historians. Spanish litera-
ture is, indeed, fertile in historical narratives of con-
temporary events written by eyewitnesses, and not
less in authoritative narratives, the work of almost
contemporary authors. A people so proud of the
present could not be indifferent to the past. The
Spaniard least of all; for he is, in his own phrase,
linajudo proud of his lineage not less concerned to
show that he had ancestors than to convince the
world of his greatness. Thus the sixteenth century,
158 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
and the early years of the seventeenth, saw the pro-
SpaMdi duction of a very important Spanish his-
historians. torical literature. It followed the fortunes
of the country with curious exactness. Every great
campaign, every great achievement in America during
the reign of Charles V., has been well and amply
described. The reign of Philip II. is equally well re-
corded by contemporaries, and was the period of the
great general histories of Morales, Zurita, and Mariana.
But as the seventeenth century drew on, there was
less and less which the Spaniard cared to record, till
after the revolt of Catalonia and the separation of
Portugal in 1640 we come to a period of entire
silence. The exhaustion of the national genius was
felt here as elsewhere. When the voice of Spanish
history was last heard, it was in the conquest of
Mexico by Antonio de Solis the work of an accom-
plished man of letters who looked back over the
disasters of his own time to the more glorious achieve-
ment of the past.
Much of the historical writing of the great epoch
the histories of religious orders, of which there are
many, and of towns, of which there not a few, and
genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable
does not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But
it would be a very pedantic interpretation of the word
which would exclude the Comentario de la Guerra de
Alemana 1 of Luis de Avila y Zufiiga. It is an account
1 This and most of the other works mentioned here will be found
in the two volumes of Jlistoriadores de Succsos Particvtlares in the
Biblioteca de Ribadcncyra, vols. xxi. and xxviii.
SPAIN HISTORIANS. 159
of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an
eyewitness who served the emperor, and attended him
in his retirement at Yuste. The merit of this, and
many other books of the same order, lies less in any
beauty of style they possess than in the
particular interest which attaches to the evidence of
capable men who saw great events. Luis
de Avila is also valuable because he gives expression
to that pride and ambition of the emperor's Spanish
followers, who really dreamt that they were help-
ing towards the establishment of a universal empire.
Another writer of the same stamp, who lived when
the fortune of Spain had reached its height and was
beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a
most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier
of the school of the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of
distinction, was ambassador in England some years
before the Armada, and in France during that great
passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and
" in religion," having lived the full life of a fighting
pious Spaniard who could use both sword and pen.
He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low Coun-
tries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the
Theory and Practice of War. The commentaries were
published in 1592. The treatise had appeared in 1577.
The great subject of the Low Country wars of a some-
what later period 1588-1599 was also treated by
another Spaniard of the same stamp as Don Bernar-
dino. This was Don Carlos Coloma, Marquis of
Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist
(he came on an embassy to England in the reign of
160 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
James I.), and man of letters. Besides his Guerras de
los Paises Bajos he made a translation of Tacitus.
Contemporary with these and less famous authors
of commentaries is the long line of writers usually
classed together by the Spaniards as Early Historians
of the Indies. 1 The desire to record what they had
seen and suffered was strong in the conquistador es,
and a long list might be made of their names. Only
, the most famous can be mentioned here.
Early His-
torians of the No more amazing story of shipwreck and
Indies. , 1,11
misery among savages has ever been told
than in the Naufragios of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de
Vaca. He was wrecked in Florida, and remained
wandering among the native tribes for ten years,
1527-1537. A power of endurance, wellnigh more
than human, was required to bear up against all he
suffered ; but he lived to hold a governorship in the
Kio de la Plata, of which also he has left an account.
A much gayer and a more famous book is the account
of the conquest of Mexico written by Bernal Diaz del
Castillo, one of the companions of Cortes, who survived
nearly all his brothers in arms, and died at a great
age in Guatemala, on the estate he had won with his
sword. His True History was provoked by the earlier
narrative of Gomara, and was written to vindicate the
honour due to himself and his fellow -adventurers,
which he thought had been unduly sacrificed by the
official historian of Cortes. Bernal Diaz is a Spanish
Monluc, but both ruder and more mediaeval than the
1 The Hittoriadores Primitcvos de Indias fill two volumes xxii.
and xxvi. in the Biblioteca de Ribadcncyra.
SPAIN HISTORIANS. 161
inimitable Gascon. Francisco de Jerez, Augustin de
Zarate, and Pedro Cieza de Leon (the work of the
last-named has only been wholly published in our
own time) give the Peruvian half of that wonderful
generation of conquest.
Beside these, the actual eyewitnesses of events, are
to be put the general historians of the Indies. The
General His ^ TS ^ w ^ P u ^lished his work complete was
torianso/the Francisco Lopez de Gomara. He was born
in 1510, too late to share in the con-
quest, and was, in fact, a man of letters, who travelled,
indeed, but only in Italy. The accident that he was
secretary to Cortes when he had returned for the last
time to Spain probably directed Gomara's studies.
He was accused of knowing nothing of many parts
of his subject except what Cortes had told him, and
of having distorted truth in the interest of his patron.
But Gomara wrote well, and the immense contem-
porary interest in the subject gave his History of the
Indies and his Chronicle of New Spain, which is a
panegyric of Cortes, a great vogue. They first ap-
peared in 1552, 1553, and 1554. An older man, and
a much greater authority, was Gonzalo Fernandez de
Oviedo y Valdes (1478 - 1557), whose General and
Natural History of the Indies was partly published
in 1535, before Gomara's. But the author kept his
work in hand till his death, and appears to have made
corrections and additions to the last. 1 Oviedo was in
1 The standard edition of the Historia General y Natural de las Indias,
istas y tierrafirrne del Mar Oceano, is that in four volumes folio, edited
by Don Amador de los Rios for the Academy of History in 1851-1855.
L
1G2 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
the West Indies in official posts for forty years, begin-
ning in 1513, and was therefore a contemporary of,
though not a partaker in, the great conquests. He is a
garrulous writer of no great force of mind, much more
a chronicler than a historian. There are two general
historians of the Indies of very different value from
Oviedo. The first is the Bishop of Chiapa, the justly
G6mara,oviedo, famous Bartolome de las Casas(1474?-1566),
^tlTinT who applied the critics of his country-
Garciiaso. me n (most of whom afterwards showed that
they wanted only the opportunity in order to equal
the crimes) with weapons by his famous Very Brief
Account of the Ruin of the Indies. This, first printed
in 1542, was reprinted with other tracts written for
the honourable purpose of defending the unfortunate
Indians from oppression in 1552, and was made
known to all Europe in translations. The general
History of the Indies, which he wrote during his old
age, remained unprinted till it was included in the
Collection of inedited Documents for the History of Spain
published by the Spanish Government. 1 Las Casas
was a man of a stamp not unfamiliar to ourselves.
His hatred of cruelty was equally vehement and sin-
cere. In his perfectly genuine horror for the excesses
of his countrymen, which are not to be denied, he
sometimes exaggerated and was sometimes unjust.
He was perhaps inevitably emotional in his style,
yet the fact that he had principle and passion and a
cause to plead, gives his book a marked superiority
1 Coleccion de Documentos incditos para la Historia de Espafta, vols,
hdi.-lxvi.
SPAIN HISTORIANS. 163
over the mainly chronicle work of Gomara and
Oviedo. Antonio de Herrera (1549-1625) was a very
different man, an official historian he was histori-
ographer of the Indies who served the king as liter-
ary advocate, and was supplied with good information.
His General History of the Deeds of the Castilians in
the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea was pub-
lished in 1601-1615 at Madrid. While compiling this
great book, the most valuable part of his work, Herrera
was also engaged in drawing up a General History of
the World in the time of our Lord the King Philip II,
and other treatises, which are, in fact, statements on
behalf of the Government, and have in historical liter-
ature something like the place of the yearly summaries
in the old Annual Register. Herrera's style was busi-
nesslike, but he can never have been read for the
pleasure of reading him. With these writers may be
placed the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1540-1616), an
attractive and rather pathetic figure. His father was
one of the conquistador -es, and his mother belonged to
the sacred Inca race. The son was almost equally
proud of his pedigree on both sides. The Inca Garci-
laso, as he is always called, did some other literary
work, including a translation of the once famous
Dialogues on Love by Leon Hebreo, an echo of the
Florentine Platonists, written in Italian by the exiled
Spanish Jew, Juda Abarbanel, but he is best known
by the Commentaries on Peru. In this work, published
in two parts in 1609 and 1617, he contrived to re-
concile a genuine Christian zeal and an equally
genuine Castilian pride of descent with a tender
164 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
memory of his mother's people. Garcilaso, though
weak and garrulous, is touching, and his commentaries
have been the great storehouse of the more poetic
legends told of the Incas. 1
Though writers who recorded what they had seen,
and others who only recorded what had happened in
their time, or near it, cannot be wholly classed to-
gether, yet the authors named above have certain
qualities in common. Of those mentioned here, almost
all wrote in a straightforward manly fashion, with
little straining after effect, and a manifest desire to
tell the truth. There is little in them of that over-
weening arrogance which has become associated with
the character of the Spaniard. There is no want of
pride, which was, indeed, amply justified by the
stories they had to tell, but little of the vanity so
common in the time of Spain's decadence.
The account of the rebellion of the Moriscoes written
by Don Diego de Mendoza supplies a link between
the series of histories just named and the histories
which belong wholly to learning and literature. The
subject was contemporary to the author, and members
of his family took an active part in the events ; but
Don Diego had a literary ambition which is only too
visible. It was plainly his intention to make a careful
Mendoza, Man- C0 VJ of Latin models chiefly Sallust and
coda, and Meio. j n one passage he slavishly follows the ac-
count given by Tacitus of the discovery of the remains
of the legions of Varus, by the soldiers of Germanicus.
1 The commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso were early translated into
English, and have been reprinted by the Hakluyt Society.
SPAIN HISTOKIANS. 165
But there was an intrinsic force in Diego de Mendoza
which saved him from falling into a mere school
exercise, and though the mould of sentence is too
much taken from the Latin, the vocabulary is very-
pure Castilian. He protests in one place against the
use of the foreign word centinela for a sentinel, in
place of the old Spanish atalaya for the watch by day,
and escucha (listen) for the watch by night. Tlie Ex-
pedition of the Catalans and Aragonese against the
Turks and Greeks of Francisco de Moncada, Count of
Osona (1635), which Gibbon said he had read with
pleasure, has a great reputation among the Span-
iards. It is certainly a well - written account of
the expedition of the Free Companions who were
led by Eoger de Flor to serve under the Paleologi
against the Turks, and who, after making them-
selves intolerable to their employers, ended by ex-
pelling the Dukes of Athens of the house of Brienne
from their duchy, and then held it for the crown
of Aragon. Moncada was a viceroy and general
who served with high distinction, and a very ac-
complished man of literary tastes ; but his narra-
tive, which is very brief, is mainly a good Castilian
version of the Catalan Chronicle of Eamon Mun-
taner, and has, in a phrase dear to Mr Hallam, been
praised to the full extent of its merits. It appeared in
1623, twelve years before the death of the author, who
was then viceroy in Lombardy. A work on the same
scale as Moncada's, which has been praised much
beyond its merits, is the account of the revolt of the
Catalans against Philip IV. in 1640 by Francisco
166 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Manuel de Melo. It contains only the beginning of
the war, and though the author seems to promise a
continuation, he never went further. The book was
published in 1645. Melo had a curious literary history.
He was a Portuguese in the Spanish service, and a
kinsman of the unfortunate general who lost the
battle of Eocroi. He lived long, wrote much, and it
was his fortune to survive Gongorism. But his History
of the Troubles, Secession, and War of Catalonia was
written while he was under a bad literary influence.
Without being exactly " Gongorical," it is written in
a strained, pretentious, snappy style, which covers a
decided poverty of thought.
The great school of Spanish historians has an un-
broken descent from the chronicles of the Middle
General Ages. It had been the custom of the
Histories. ki n g S f Castile from the reign of Alfonso
XL (1350-1369), surnamed the Implacable, or " he of
the Eio Salado," from the scene of the battle in which
he overthrew the last considerable Moorish invasion
of Spain, to appoint a chronicler. With Florian de
Ocampo, who held this post under Charles V., the
chronicler became the " historiographer." He was not
necessarily a scholar and student of the past, yet he
might be if he so pleased, and the spirit of the time in-
vited him to adopt the new character. Ocampo himself
showed little faculty, though his intentions were good ;
but his successor, Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1581),
was a scholar in the fullest sense of the word. It
was his wish to write a real history of Spain, based
on chronicles and records. But he obtained his post
SPAIN HISTORIANS. 167
late in 1570, and his work is a fragment ending so
early as 1037. Morales was unquestionably influ-
ocampo, zurita, enced by the example of his friend Gero-
Momies. nimo de Zurita, the historiographer of the
crown of Aragon. The unanimous judgment of
scholars has recognised the right of Zurita to the
name of historian, and even to the honour of being
the first of modern historians. His father had been
physician to Ferdinand the Catholic, and he was him-
self one of the many secretaries of Philip II. Zurita,
who was born in 1512 and died in 1580, was appointed
historiographer of Aragon by the choice of the Cortes
in 1548. For a man with the ambition to be a his-
torian, the position was enviable. It gave him inde-
pendence, a right of access to all records ; he had a
fine story to tell, and as he had no predecessors, he
had no need to spend time in reading the works of
others. Zurita was worthy of his fortune. His
Annals of the Croivn of Aragon' down to the death of
Ferdinand the Catholic, in six folio volumes, published
between 1562 and 1580, has kept its place as a work
of scholarship and criticism.
The great name of Spanish historical literature is
that of Juan de Mariana}, 1 the Jesuit, whose name once
. rang all over Europe for his defence of
Manana. - . . , . ,
regicide in the treatise De Regc, written
for the benefit of his pupil, Philip III. But thisjtnd
his other treatises were written in Latin, and never
1 The works of Mariana are in the Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, vols,
xxx. and xxxi. ; but it is much more pleasant to read his history in
the edition of Ibarra, 1780, 2 vols, folio, beautifully printed.
168 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
translated by himself. His place in Spanish literature
is clue to his history. Mariana was of the most hum-
ble birth, for he was a foundling. He was born at
Talavera in 1536, and educated by the Jesuits, in
whose college in Sicily he taught for many years;
but his later life was spent in the house of his order
at Toledo. His troubles with his superiors form a
not very honourable passage in the history of the
Jesuits. The first purpose of his great work was to
make Europe acquainted with the past of Spain, and
he wrote in Latin, the universal language of scholar-
ship. Twenty of the thirty books were published in
that language in 1572. But, unlike Bacon, Mari-
ana did not believe that the learned language would
outlive the modern tongues. He was induced to
make a Castilian version of his own Latin, and
when doing it he took the freedom which even the
most strict critic will allow to belong to the trans-
lator of his own work. He enlarged, corrected, and
amended, till the Castilian history, which appeared in
1501, was almost a new work. Tour editions, further
enlarged and amended, appeared before the author's
death in 1623.
In answering a minute critic, Mariana, with an
audacity not perhaps to be excused, declared that
if he had stopped to verify every small fact, Spain
would have waited for ever for a history. This bold
avowal of his indifference to the tithings of mint and
anise illustrates sufficiently the spirit in which he
wrote. He was not a historical scholar in the same
sense as Zurita a minute student of original records
SPAIN HISTORIANS. 169
but a man of great learning and high patriotic
spirit, who applied himself to the making of a work
of literature worthy of the past of his country. The
defects of the history are patent, and one of them is a
mere matter of change of fashion. He took Livy for
a model, and therefore put long speeches into the
mouths of his personages. This, however, was a mere
literary convention not intended to deceive anybody,
and not likely to mislead the most uncritical reader.
It was only a now disused way of giving what
the modern historian would give in comment and
illustration. The same following of Livy led him into
including in his history, and presenting as history,
a great deal of what he knew to be legend, simply
because it was picturesque and familiar. Against
these defects, which from the literary point of view
are no defects at all, are to be put a fine style quite
uncontaminated by the usual defects of Spanish
prose, a great power of narrative, and then this, that
Mariana gave the history of his country throughout
antiquity and the Middle Ages in a lofty patriotic
spirit, which may not interpret and explain ancient
institutions, but does convey to us a sense that we
see an energetic people of fine qualities struggling
on to high destinies.
The fall from Mariana to any of his contemporaries
or successors is great. The Cisma de Inglaterra
' The English Schism ' by Pedro de Eiba-
Tlie decadence. - . . ~n+-t\ . , .
deneyra (1527-loll), enjoys the reputation
of being a well-written account of the great movement
by which the English Church vindicated its indepen-
170 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
dence of the see of Rome, told from the point of view
of a Spanish Jesuit. Prudencio de Sandoval, a distin-
guished churchman and one of the historiographers of
the Crown, continued the general history of Morales,
and then added to Mariana a life of Charles V., which
is of about the same length as the Jesuit's whole
history. Sandoval shows what the reign of the great
emperor looked like to a learned Spaniard of the later
sixteenth century, but it has no great force and no
merit of style. 1
Oth er names might be added Bartolome" de Argen-
sola's History of the Moluccas (1609), the work of a
pure man of letters who wrote to please his patron,
and the History of the Goths of the diplomatist Saavedra-
Fiijardo J published at Munster in 1649 but they could
swell a list to little purpose. All ^ these wr iters^ had
the good fortune to write before the invasion of Gon-
gorism, except Saavedra-Fajardo, who escaped it by
residence abroad. Antonio de Solis (1610-1686) had
the honour of resisting the plague. If the second-
rate men of a literature could be dealt with at any
length in our limits, Solis would be an in-
Solis. , "I 11 TT
terestmg figure to dwell on. He was an
accomplished man, who did very creditable work both
as poet and dramatist, but in the schools of other and
more original writers. There are few more melan-
choly lives among the biographies of men of letters.
1 There is not, I think, any modern edition of Sandoval, whose
life of Charles V. first appeared in 1604-1606, since the second edition
of Antwerp, 1681. It was translated and abridged in 1703 by Captain
John Stevens, an indefatigable hack to whom we are indebted for
many bad versions of Spanish originals.
SPAIN HISTORIANS. 171
In spite of reputation and success, he was always poor.
Although he held the post of Cronista Mayor of the
Indies in the latter part of his life, he died in utter
poverty, leaving " his soul to be the heir of his body "
that is, giving orders that his few belongings should
be sold to pay for masses. In the general bankruptcy
of Spain his salary was probably not paid. A sense
of duty rather than an inclination to the task may be
supposed to have led him to undertake the writing of
a book which has always remained very dear to the
Spaniards. This is The Conquest of Mexico, published
by the help of a friend in 1684. 1 The excellence of
the style was recognised from the first, and has pre-
served the reputation of the book. Yet it wants the
rude life of the contemporary narratives, and the
understanding of, or at least strenuous effort to under-
stand, the native side, which is to be found in Mr
Prescott. Flowing and eloquent as Solis is, he is also
somewhat nerveless. Perhaps our knowledge of the
fact that he stood on the very verge of the time when
the voice of literature in Spain was to be silenced alto-
gether makes the reader predisposed to find something
in him of the signs of exhaustion. He closes the time
when the Spaniards wrote for themselves, and also
wrote well.
Before closing this survey of the great period of
Castilian literature by a notice, which must necessarily
be brief, of one intensely national body of writers, some
1 A very finely printed edition of The Conquest of Mexico, unfor-
tunately disfigured by silly plates, was published at Madrid by Sancha
in 1783.
172 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
words must be said about the large class of authors of
Miscellaneous miscellaneous books belonging to the first
writers. h a if f th e seventeenth century. The press
was active in those years. Unfortunately it was an
age of oddity and extravagance. Its dominating figure
is that | Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) to whom the
admiration of Sir M. Grant Duff among ourselves, and
the whim, if not the cynicism, of Schopenhauer among
the Germans, have given a limited revival of popularity
in our own time. He was an Aragonese Jesuit, who
published his books under the name of his brother
Lorenzo. Gracian is n ot u ninteresti ng as a finished
example of all that bad taste and pretentiousness can
do to make a man of some, though by no means con-
siderable, faculty quite worthless. It was his chosen
function to be the critic, prophet, and populariser of
Gringorism. He wrote a treatise to expound the whole
secret of the detestable art of saying everything in the
Jeast natura l and perspicuous manner possible. 1 This
Aguilcm y Arte cle Ingenios ' Wit and the Wits' Art '
was not written till he had published a book on The
Hero to show that he had every right to speak with
authority. Gracian was otherwise a copious writer.
His Criticon, translated into English under the name
oKTlie Spanish Critic, by Paul Eycaut in 1681, about
thirty years after it appeared, is an a llegory of life,
shown by the adventures of a shipwrecked Spaniard
and a "natural man," whom he finds on the island of
1 Part of Gracian is in the JUMiotcca de ItiLadencyra, vol. Lw. A
translation of the Ordculo Manual has been included in The Golden
Treasury.
SPAIN MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS. 173
St Helena. It may have helped Swift by showing him
how not to write Gulliver's Travels. The
Gratian and
the prevalence work which has been revived of late by
the freak of Schopenhauer is the, Oraculo
Manual y Arte de Pruclencia 'Hand (or Pocket)
Oracle and Art of Prudence.' It is a collection of
maxims. Mr Morley went to the extreme limit of
good nature when he said that Gracian sometimes
gives a neat turn to a commonplace. As a rule, his
maxims are examples of all that maxims ought not to
be long, obscure by dint of straining after epigram-
matic force, and in substance of platitude all compact.
We soon find that we are dealing with a " haberdasher
of small wares," who is endeavouring to impose him-
self upon us as wise by dint of a short obscure manner
and a made-up face of gravity.
Gracian is worth singling out, not for his merits,
but because he so thoroughly typified a something in
the Spaniard which, oddly mixed with his real humour
and sound sense, gives him a leaning to the theatrical
in the worst sense of the word. When Shakespeare
drew Don Adriano de Armado, the fantastical Spaniard,
he was not laughing at random at the foreigner. And
this side of the people was never more conspicuous
than in the middle seventeenth century. It came out
everywhere, from serious treatises on politics down
to the fencing -book of the egregious Don Luis de
Narvaez de Pacheco. It was not that Spain wanted
for able men. Diego de Saavedra-Fajardo, the author
of the history of the Goths, and of a curious book of
emblems called Umpresas Politicas, or ' The Idea of a
174 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Political Christian Prince ' ; Vera y Figueroa, the
author of TJie Ambassador ; Suarez de Figueroa, who
wrote the miscellaneous critical dialogues called El
Pasagero ' The Traveller,' were none of them insig-
nificant men, but there was a perpetual straining after
sententious gravity in them, an effort to look wiser
than life, an attempt to get better bread than could
be made out of wheat. They helped to give Europe
the old idea of the rigid sententious Spaniard which is
so strangely unlike the real man. But it was the time
of the frozen court etiquette of the Hapsburg dynasty,
and of grave peremptory manners in public, covering an
extraordinary relaxation of morals, and an unabashed
taste for mere horseplay in private. These writers
gave the literary expression of the artificial Spain of
the seventeenth century. It adds to the piquancy of
the contrast that at a time when Spain was marching
resolutely, and with her eyes open, to ruin, by accumu-
lating fault upon fault, the political writers named
here, and others, abounded in good sense. To take
a single example. Among the emblems of Saavedra-
Fajardo is one representing a globe supported between
the sterns of two warships, with the motto "His
Polis." In the Essay the Spanish diplomatist sets out
the whole doctrine, so familiar in our own days as that
of "sea -power," with great force. Yet this was
written, a melancholy example of useless wisdom,
when his country was destroying its last chance of
maintaining a navy, by bleeding itself nearly to death
in the wars of Germany for the purpose of vindicating
the claims of the house of Hapsburg.
SPAIN MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS. 175
Here may be mentioned, a little out of his date,
but hardly out of his place, for it is difficult to say
where he ought to be classed, the Viage Entretenido,
or ' Amusing Voyage,' of Agustin de Eoxas or Rojas.
He was a very busy miscellaneous writer, who led a
strange roaming life as a soldier, strolling actor, and
in some sense picaro. The Viage Entretenido is the
only part of his work which survives. It is a rather
incoherent autobiography, swollen out by specimens
of the has he wrote for his fellow-actors. The his-
torical value of the book is considerable, for Eoxas
gives a very full account of the theatrical life of his
time, and is the standard authority for the early
history of the Spanish stage. The literary merits of
the book are not small, for, consciously or uncon-
consciously, he takes, and keeps, the tone of the true
artistic Bohemian, the wandering enfant sans souci to
whom the hardships of his life, long tramping journeys,
hunger, poverty, rags, and spasms of furious hard
work are endurable because they give him intervals
of reckless idleness, and save him from what he
especially hates, which is orderly industry. The
Viage Entretenido was the model of Scarron's Voyage
Comiaue. It appeared perhaps in 1603, but certainly
very early in the seventeenth century. 1
A survey of Spanish literature of the great epoch
cannot end more appropriately than with the writers
who by common consent are called the Mystics. The
term has become established in use, and there would
be pedantry in rejecting it. Yet it is far from being
1 El Viage Entretenido de Agustin de Eoxas. Madrid, 1793.
176 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
accurately applied. What is, properly speaking, called
Mysticis m is not congenial to the Spaniard,
and was inevitably odious to the Inquisi-
tion. A train of religious thought which led infal-
libly to trust in the " Inner Light," to the contempt
for dogma, to indifference to the hierarchy, and to the
preference for emotional piety over morality of con-
duct, could not but be suspect to a body which existed
for the purpose of maintaining the authority of the
Church. One Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos, did
indeed show himself a true mystic, and was the
father of the " Quietism " of the later seventeenth
century. But Molinos lived in Italy, did not ad-
dress his countrymen, and found his following mainly
in France. There were a few alumbrados, as the
Spaniards called them "Illuminati" in Spain, as
there were a few Protestants; but they were ex-
ceptions, and examples of mere personal eccentricity.
The Inquisition had the sincere support of the nation
in stamping out both. When it went too far and
condemned what the Spaniards did not dislike, as
when, for instance, the Guia de Pecadores ' The
Guide for Sinners ' of Luis de Granada was put in
the Index, the Inquisition was forced to reverse its
decision. But it had the approval of the country
in its efforts to suppress teaching which had a danger-
ous tendency to arrive at the doctrine that, when the
soul of the believer is united in ecstatic devotion with
God, the sins of the flesh are no sins at all. The
common-sense of the Spaniard, which was never more
conspicuous than in the greatest of his orthodox
SPAIN THE MYSTICS. 177
mystics, Santa Teresa, left him in no doubt as to the
Spanish rea l meaning of such teaching as that. The
mysticism. s tern handling it received from the Inquisi-
tion had his sincere approval. The mysticism of the
Spaniards consisted wholly in a certain Platonism or
Neo-Platonism, in the doctrine which can be suffici-
ently well learnt in Spenser's Hymne of Heavenly
Love. This might have lent itself to the extreme of
Quietism or Antinomianism, but it was restrained by
the sense of the necessity for active virtue, which was
strong in the Spaniard, and was the result of the
Church's teaching that there is no salvation without
works.
It is not, however, the doctrine of the mystics, but
their importance, and the literary quality of their
work, which concern us here. As regards their posi-
tion in the country, and their influence with all ranks
of Spaniards, there can be no question. It was shown
not only by the deference of the austere Philip II. to
Santa Teresa, but by the docility of his grandson,
Philip IV. a very different and a very pleasure-
loving man to Maria de Jesus de Agreda, a woman
far inferior in intellect and force of character to the
reformer of the Carmelites. 1 To their work we may
apply the expression, very Platonist and old, which
Diego de Estella uses of the soul in his Very Devout
Meditations on the Love of God. " Da vida," he says,
1 For this rather unexpected side to the character of Philip IV. ,
and strange feature of the Spanish life of the time, see Cartas de las
Venerable Madre Sor Maria de Agreda y del Senor Rey Don Felipe IV.
Don Francisco Silvela. Madrid, 1885.
M
178 EUEOPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
and " es la forma del cuerpo " " It gives life, and is
the form of the body."
" For soul is form, and doth the body make,"
as the same truth stands in Spenser's hymn. The
intense religious spirit of the Spaniards gives their
work life, and is the form of their body. All the
best of this side, if one ought not to say this basis, of
their character has gone into the "mystic" works.
The Spaniard has not been a great preacher. Part
of the explanation of this, on the face of it, rather
surprising fact, is no doubt to be found in saying
that if the Inquisition had listened to every denuncia-
tion of a preacher, nobody would have been found to
risk going into a pulpit. For, while denying that the
Holy Office was felt to be oppressive by the majority
of Spaniards, there can be no doubt that its yoke was
heavy on the neck of individuals even of the most
orthodox. The persecution of Luis de Granada, who
as a Dominican, and therefore as a member of the
order which controlled the Inquisition, might have
been supposed to be sure of the most favourable
treatment, is an example of the vigilance exercised
over all who even approached religious
The influence of . . T . -, T ' . ,
the inquisition questions. Luis de Leon incurred an lm-
on Spanish reii- p r i SO nment of five years on accusations
gwus literature. * J
brought by envious rivals at Salamanca,
and too favourably received by the jealousy of the
Dominicans, who were hostile to him as an Augus-
tinian. 1 Santa Teresa was sequestered by the Inqui-
1 For this example of the Inquisition at work see the papers of his
case in vols. x. and xi. of the Documentos indditos.
SPAIN THE MYSTICS. 179
sition at Seville. Her disciple. Juan de la Cruz, who
helped her in the reform of the Carmelites, was im-
prisoned for a year, and only released by the intrepid
exertions of the saint and the use of the royal autho-
rity. It was dangerous to speak without much thought
and care. So the Spaniards, who might have given
their country what the great Caroline divines gave to
English and Bossuet to French literature, preferred
to confine themselves to writing, where they could
weigh every word and subject their work to the re-
vision of superiors.
The bulk of the Spanish mystic, religious, and ascetic
writings is enormous. By far the greater part of
them have fallen dead to the Spaniards themselves.
They have never been made the subject of an exhaus-
tive study by any native scholar. 1
The great names among the Spanish mystics of
the golden time of their literature are those of Malon
Maion de de Chaide, Juan de Avila, Luis de Granada,
chaide. j^ u j s d e L eon? Santa Teresa, and San Juan
de la Cruz and of these Santa Teresa alone is a liv-
ing force. It is difficult to understand what sense the
word mystic bore to the first person who applied it
to Pedro Malon de Chaide (? 1530 ?). He was
of the Order of St Augustine, and was a master of a
fine-flowing, rather . unctuous style. The w T ork by
which he is known in Spanish literature is The Treatise
of the Conversion of the Glorious Mary Magdalen. It
1 My own obligation is mainly to M. Paul llousselot's Mystiques
Expagnols, Paris, 1867, which the Spaniards have found it easier to
call insufficient than to displace.
180 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
was written for a young lady who had resolved to take
the vows, but was not published till many years later.
Malon de Chaide was one of those who denounced the
evil influence of the books of chivalry ; but his own
style is very often at least to our modern taste more
lit for a romance than a book of devotion. He wrote
verse and well. It must be read with a constant
recollection that it was not written for us, but in a
time when the application of the language of The Song
of Solomon to devotion was justified by the all but
universal belief in the allegorical character of the
poem. In this practice, of which we have well-known
examples of our own, Malon de Chaide never went
to the extreme reached by Juan de la Cruz. The ven-
erable master Juan de Avila (1502-1569),
Juan de Avila.
known as the Apostle ol Andalucia, an older
man than Malon de Chaide, was also much less the
fashionable divine. The most famous of his many
works is The Spiritual Treatise on the verse Audi,filia
" Hearken, daughter, and consider," &c. It was at
first only a letter of advice written for a lady, Sancha
Carrillo, who had resolved to take the vows, but Avila
added to it largely, and in its final form it is a com-
plete guide for those who wish to lead the religious
life, whether in a monastery or in the century. It is
not, perhaps, a book to be recommended to those who
cannot read with the eyes of a Spanish Eoman
Catholic, or at least with as much critical faculty as
will enable them to understand, and to allow for, that
point of view. The style of Juan de Avila, though
verbose in the weaker passages, has an ardent
Luis de
Granada.
SPAIN THE MYSTICS. 181
eloquence at times, and has always a large share of
the religious quality of unction. _
[L uis de (fomnHfli n 504-158^ and (Luis de Leon
(1527-1601) were contemporaries, younger men than
Juan de Avila, and to some extent his
fnllowpT-g. The Guide for Sinners of the
first, and the Perfecta Casacla of the second, have
remained more or less popular hooks of devotion. At
least they are reprinted among the Spaniards. The
Guide for Sinners was translated and read all over
Europe. Granada's Booh of Prayer and Meditation
on " the principal mysteries of our faith " was hardly
less famous. He had both the qualities and the de-
fects of the style of his master. Luis de Leon was
probably the greatest of the mystics in intrinsic force
of intellect and in learning, besides being master of a
far more manly style than any of them. He wa s also
a man of independent intrepid character, and it may
be that the fear with which the Inquisition regarded
him was largely inspired by his strictures on the
ignorance of the clergy and their flocks. Inquiry
and knowledge were dreaded at a time when the
Protestants were using them as instruments against
the Church. The Perfecta Casada was written for a
lady, Doha Maria Varela Osorio. These writers, it
t . a r will be seen, worked much for women. It
Luis de Leon.
was the age of the directors as distinguished
from the old confessors. Pious people, and more especi-
ally women, who wished to lead a religious life, and
had been taught that it was necessary not only to do
but to believe what was right, were anxious for the
182 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
constant guidance of a teacher who must be . both
orthodox and learned. Santa Teresa insisted greatly
on this. The tre atise is a long comment on the passage
of Scripture which will suggest itself to everybody as
fit fur the purpose the last chapter of Proverbs, be-
ginning at the tenth verse. But the allegorical mean-
ing is more insisted on than the plain sense of the
wo r d s, and the Pcrfecta Casada is a treatise on doc-
trine. Luis de Leon wrote much else, including an
exposition of the Names of Christ and of The Booh
of Job.
The greatest name among the Spanish mystics, and
one of the greatest in all religious history, is that of
Teresa de Zepeda y Ahumada, who called herself " in
religion " Teresa de Jesus. She was born of a noble
family of Avila in Old Castile in 1515, and died in
1582. "We are not directly concerned here
with her religious life, her reform of the
Carmelites, or her doctrine, which indeed was not
original. The inspiring motive of Santa Teresa was
her desire to save the souls of the Lutheran heretics,
not by preaching to them, but by so reforming her
own order, the Carmelites, that they should return to
their original purity, and prove an effective instrument
for the Church. Her literary work may be divided
into two parts. One contains the different treatises
she wrote by the order of her superiors, who probably
began by wishing to test her orthodoxy, and who ended
by revering her as one inspired. Then there are her
many letters, written to all ranks of her contempor-
aries, from the king down to the nuns of her houses.
SPAIN THE MYSTICS. 183
In both Santa Teresa wrote the same Castilian the
language as it was spoken by the nobles, not learned,
indeed, but not wholly uneducated, who belonged to
" the kidney of Castile," and had not been affected by
the Italianate style of the Court. ^Hgr own great
character is stamped on every line. Nobody ever
showed less of the merely emotional saintly character,
rr 3Ieandering about, capricious, melodious, weak, at the
will of devout whim mainly ! * Her letters, which are
not only the most attractive part of her writing but
even the most valuable, show her not only as a great
saint but as a great lady, with a very acute mind, a
fine wit, and an abounding good sense.
Santa Teresa's disciple and colleague in the reform
of the Carmelites, 0uan de la Cruz/whose family name
jnan de la was Yepes (1542=1591)', not unjustly named
cruz. the Ecstatic Doctor, was emphatically a
saint of the " melodious " order. His emotional not
to say gushing style has been, and is, much admired
by the Spaniards. To us it seems that nobody stands
in greater need of being judged by the widest inter-
pretation of the text, " To the pure all things are pure."
There is an amatory warmth of language, an applica-
tion to religion of erotic images in Juan de la Cruz,
which, considered in itself, and apart from what justi-
fied it at the time, is nauseous. A quite sufficient
example will be found in the much-quoted verses in
his Ascent of Mount Garmel, which begin, " En una
noche escura." Yet Juan de'la Cruz wrote eloquently
in his emotional way, and his verse is beautiful.
These are but a very few names from among the
184 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Spanish mystic, moral, and ascetic writers, but it
a would only be a very full history of Spanish
Decadence of t J m J * . r
the Mystic religious literature which would deal with
Jeronimo Gracian (not to be confounded
with Baltasar), with Juan de Jesus Maria, or Eusebio
Nieremberg. As the seventeenth century drew on
there was continually less thought in Spanish religious
literature and more emotion, while that emotion had
an increasing tendency to abound in the amatory
images of Juan de la Cruz. 1
1 All the writers mentioned here will be found in the Tesoro dt
Escritores Misticos Espafioles of Ochoa. Paris, n.d.
185
CHAPTER VII.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY.
the starting-point italian influence the opposition to rhyme
excuses for this its little effect poetry of first half
of Elizabeth's reign spenser order of his work his metre
character of his poetry sir p. sidney the ' apologie for
poetrie' his sonnets and lyrics watson the sonneteers
other lyric poetry the collections and song-books the
historical poems fitz -geoffrey and markham warner
daniel drayton the satiric poets lodge hall marston
DONNE.
A long silence and two generations of effort preceded
the renaissance of English poetry, which may con-
veniently, though perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, be
said to date from the publication of the Shepherd's
Calendar in 1579. The choice of this year as the
The starting- actual starting-point is arbitrary, because
point. Spenser was already recognised by his
friends as the " new poet," and his work was known
among them in manuscript. It had therefore begun
to live, and to exercise an influence, before it was given
to the world. But the convention which treats the
ascertainable date of printing, and not the first moment
186 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
when the poet's mind began to create, as the starting-
point, is useful, and we may (always remembering that
it is a convention) put 1579 at the head of the history
of the great Elizabethan poetry.
With us, as with the Spaniard, the spark, which was
to grow into so great a flame, was brought from Italy.
Before Spenser there had been Surrey and Wyatt, who
had worked in the Italian metres in the reign of
Henry VIIL, and their example had been set up for
all to follow by the publication of TotteVs Miscellany
in 1557. There had also been the leaders of the New
Learning, and the classic models. But the resemblance
Italian between the history of poetry in the two
influence, countries goes no further. Italy could
affect only individual Englishmen. No such similarity
of language, beliefs, and character existed between the
two countries as would have enabled Italy to press
on us as it did on Spain, all along the line. There
was not the same proximity, nor had there been an
equally close previous relationship of pupil to master
stretching far back into the Middle Ages. The Italian
influence in England was rather an incitement to in-
dependent effort than a mere pattern to be copied, as
it was to the Spaniard. Nor were the Greek and
Latin models more, though in this case a deliberate
effort was made to bring English verse into subjec-
tion to ancient prosody. Much ridicule was shed
then, and has been poured since, on those who en-
deavoured to write English verse by quantity only.
The quaint pragmatic figure of Spenser's friend Gabriel
Harvey, who was the most conspicuous, though not
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 187
the first of the school, was of itself enough to confer
me opposition a certain absurdity on the effort. And the
to rhyme. verse produced in this struggle to do the
impossible was altogether worthy of Harvey's oddities.
Putting aside Stanyhurst's JEneid, published in 1582,
which is the most bulky example of misapplied labour,
it ought, one would think, to have been warning
enough to those who thought to force English into
an alien mould when they found a writer of the real
intelligence and natural good taste of Webbe, author
of TJie Discourse of English Poetrie, contentedly pro-
nouncing such a line as this:
"Hedgerows hott doo resound with grasshops mournfully
squeeking.
Webbe did worse, for he seems really to have be-
lieved that he improved Spenser, whom he admired
and recognised as the new poet, when he turned the
song in The Shepherd's Calendar beginning
" Ye dainty Nymphes that in this blessed brooke
doo bathe your brest,"
into this :
" O ye Nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke
For to bathe your pretty breasts at all times,
Leave the watrish bowers hyther and to me come
At my request now."
Yet the mistake of Webbe was one which Spenser
himself, and Sidney, had so far shared that they
Excuses/or played with the classic metres. Nor was
this - it altogether absurd, but, on the contrary,
natural, and even inevitable. When there were no
188 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
native models newer than Chaucer to follow, and
when the splendour of classic literature was just being
fully recognised, it was not wonderful that men who
were in search of a poetic form should have been
deluded into thinking that they could reproduce what
they admired, or should have agreed with Ascham that
"to follow rather the Goths in rhyming, than the
Greeks in true versifying, were even to eat acorns
with swine, when we may freely eat bread among
men."
Then this mania, pedantry, or whatever other evil
name may be given it, never attained to the dignity of
doing; harm. No Englishman who could
Its little effect.
write good rhyme was ever deterred from
doing so by the fear that he would become a Goth,
and eat acorns with swine. The real belief of the
Elizabethan poets was expressed in The Arte of English
Poesie, which tradition has assigned to George Putten-
ham. If we have not the feet of the Greeks and
Latins, which we " as yet never went about to frame
(the nature of our language and wordes not permitting
it), we have instead thereof twentie other curious
points in that skill more than they ever had, by
reason of our rime, and tunable concords, or sim-
phonie, which they never observed. Poesie therefore
may be an arte in our vulgar, and that very methodi-
call and commendable." The Arte of English Poesie
was published in 1589. Webbe's discourse had ap-
peared three years before. The conflict, such as it
was, was really over, though the superiority of " versi-
fying " to rhyming might continue to bo discussed as
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 189
an academic question. Thomas Campion, who, as if
to show the hollowness of his own cause, was a writer
of rhymed songs of great beauty, might talk " of the
childish titilation of riming " in his Art of English
Poetry in 1602, and be answered by Daniel in his
Defence of Byrne, but they were discussing " a question
of the schools." The attempt to turn English poetry
from its natural course belongs to the curiosities of
literary history.
Poetry so completely dominated the literature of
Elizabeth's reign that we can leave not only the
prose, which was entirely subordinate, but
half of Eiiza- the drama, poetic as it was, aside for the
beth's reign. ^^ There Wftg nQ great drama fem ^
poets had suppled and moulded the language. The
example set by Surrey and Wyatt had no such imme-
diate influence as had been exercised by Boscan and
Garcilaso in Spain. Part even of their own work
hardly rose above the level of the doggerel to which
English verse had fallen. Those who look for an
explanation of the flowering or the barrenness of
literature elsewhere than in the presence or absence
of genius in a people, may account for this by the
troubled times which followed the death of Henry
VIII. But the return of peace and security with
the accession of Elizabeth brought no change. The
first twenty years of her reign were as barren as the
disturbed years of Edward or Mary. Indeed they
were even poorer, for Sackville's Induction to The
Mirror of Magistrates and his Complaint of Bucking-
ham, which have been recognised as the best verse
190 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
written in England between Chaucer and Spenser,
though not published till Elizabeth was on the throne,
had been written before 1559 in the reign of Mary.
Between this year and the publication of The Shep-
herd's Calendar (1579) the voice of poetry was not
mute in England at least not the voice of those who
were endeavouring to write poetry. When Webbe
spoke, with more emphasis than respect, of the
" infinite fardles of printed pamphlets," mostly " either
meere poeticall or which tend in some respects (as
either in matter or forme) to poetry," by which " this
country is pestered, all shoppes stuffed, and every
study furnished," he was not wholly exaggerating.
Translators were very busy, and not a few published
original work. There were certainly many others
who wrote but did not publish. But these fore-
runners could in no case have deserved more than
the praise which Sir John Harington gave to one of
them, George Turberville :
" When times were yet but rude thy pen endeavoured
To polish barbarism with purer style."
Their inferiority to Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville
diminishes their claim even to so much as this.
They were enslaved to the old fourteen-syllabled
metre, which might or might not be printed in lines of
eight and six, but which, in whatever way it was
arranged, had a fatal tendency to fall into a rocking-
horse movement. We constantly meet with rhymes
like these :
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 191
" The hawtye verse that Maro wrote
made Rome to wonder muche,
And mervayle none for why the style
and weightynes was such,
That all men judged Parnassus Mownt
had clefte herselfe in twayne,
And brought forth one that seemed to drop
from out Minervaes brayne."
These verses, which are from Barnabe Googe's Epitaph
on Thomas Phayre, are not bad examples of a kind
of metre which seems to come naturally to English-
men, but their capacity for turning to doggerel is
patent. They, with here and there a note which shows
that if the writer had had the good fortune to be young
after, and not before, The Shepherd's Calendar, he
might have contributed to the great body of exquisite
Elizabethan songs, make the staple of the verse of the
first half of the reign. These men are entitled to their
own honour. They rough - harrowed the ground.
George Turberville, who was born about 1530 and died
about 1594; George Gascoigne, whose dates are 1535
or thereabouts to 1577 ; and Barnabe Googe, born in
1540, who died in 1594, tried many things ; and if they
did nothing else, they helped to extend the knowledge
of the average Englishman, and to give practice to the
language by their translations. The strongest of the
three was Gascoigne, who, in addition to his attempt to
write a verse satire The Steel Glass was the author
of some pretty occasional poetry, of a translation of
Ariosto's Gli Snppositi, st ories from Band ello, and a
tragedy of Euripides, and who may be said to have
begun the writing of critical essays in English by his
192 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
brief note of Instruction for the construction of English
verse, published as a preface to The Steel Glass. 1
The sincerity with which the best intellects in Eng-
land were studying poetry, and looking for a poet,
helps to explain the instant recognition of Spenser.
At this moment the times called for the man, and he
came. Edmund Spenser was born in London, probably
in 1552, of a Lancashire branch of a very ancient and
famous house. His family was poor, and he received
his education at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar.
He remained at Cambridge from 1569 to 1573, and it
is believed that he then spent some time in the north
of England with his family before coming to London
to seek his fortune. It could be obtained
Spenser. . .
m one way only by the favour of friends
who could secure him a place. That Spenser was re-
solved to make poetry the chief aim of his life is
certain ; but he could not live by it at a time when
no form of literature, with the exception of the drama,
brought certain payment, and even the drama gaVe but
starvation wages. He had to rely on the willingness
of powerful patrons to see him provided for because he
was a poet. Spenser was not without friends who
might have been useful. At Cambridge he had be-
come known to Gabriel Harvey, who, as the older man,
a good scholar, and perhaps also as a person of prag-
1 TotteUs Miscellany has been reprinted by Mr Arber, who has also
republished Gascoigne's Steel Glass, and the Ecloyucs, Epitaphs, and
Sonnets of Barnabe Googe in his English reprints. Turberville is in
vol. ii. of Chalmers's British Poets. Works of Thomas Sackville, Lord
Buckhurst, 1859.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 193
matical self-confidence and indomitable pertinacity,
exercised a certain limited influence over him.
Harvey introduced Spenser to Leicester and Leicester's
kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. His undoubted Puritan-
ism was, it may be, in part learnt from the equally
undoubted though very different Puritanism of the
queen's favourite. But Leicester did, and it may be
could do, little for his client. The Shepherd's Calendar
was published in 1579, a year or two after Spenser
came to London, but he had no share in " the rich fee
which poets won't divide." There is no need to look
far for the causes of his disappointment. Elizabeth had
little money, and much to do with it, while her Lord
Treasurer, Burghley, who had no love for Leicester, was
the man to meet any pensioned poet with the un-
gracious attitude of Sully to Casaubon : " You are no
use, sir, and you cost the king as much as two
captains." In 1580 Spenser accompanied Lord Grey
to Ireland, where estates of confiscated land were to
be won. From that time he was plunged into the
horrible strife between the anarchy of Celtic Ireland
and the repression of the queen's officers, who fought
for order with ferocious means. He obtained a grant
of land in County Cork, married in 1594, and reached
some measure of prosperity. A small but apparently
ill-paid pension was granted him. The rebellion of
1598 shattered his fortunes altogether. His house at
Kilcolman was burnt in the usual fashion of the brutal
Irish wars, and it was said that one of his children
perished with it. Spenser fled to England, and died
on the 16th January 1599 "for lack of bread,"
N
194 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
according to Ben Jonson, and undoubtedly in great
poverty.
It seems certain that he began writing very young,
for some translations from Petrarch and Joachim du
Bellay, which were afterwards reprinted unchanged, or
changed only by rhyme, in his acknowledged works,
appeared in The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings
of John Van Noodt in 1569. Ten years, however,
passed before he published The Shepherd's Calendar,
Order of an d then an equal period before he pre-
Mswork. pared to bring out the first three books
of The Faerie Queen, which was registered at Sta-
tioners' Hall on the last day of 1589, and appeared
in the following spring. Next year 1591 ap.-
peared the minor poems, under the name of The
Complaints (The Ruins of Time, The Tears of the
Muses, Virgil's Gnat, Mother Hubberds Tale, The Ruins
of Rome, Muiopotmos, and The Visions). The address
to the reader gives a promise of other poems, which
have been lost; and it may be noted that the same
thing had happened with The Shepherd's Calendar.
The Daphnaida followed. In 1596 the Amoretti,
the Epithalamium, Colin Clout's Come Home Again,
the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of The Faerie Queen,
the Hymns, and the Rrothalamium were published
within a short time of one another. Nothing more
was to appear in his life. Part of a seventh book
of The Faerie Queen, and a prose treatise giving a
very vivid, very true, and very terrible " View of the
Present State of Ireland," were printed after his
death. The treatise did not come out for thirty
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 195
years, when it was published by Sir J. Ware. The
Fragments were included in the new edition of The
Faerie Queen in 1611.
Few great poets were ever so little beholden to
predecessors as Spenser. He had before him Chaucer,
and near his own time Sackville, who had written
with original force in Chaucer's stanza. There were
also the Italians, whom he knew well, their few
English followers, and the French poets of the Pleiade.
In his Shepherd's Calendar Spenser imitated the
Italian copies of the classic Eclogues, and he trans-
lated from the French. Neither he nor any man
could live uninfluenced by his time. The notes of the
Eenaissance are abundantly audible in his work its
love of beauty, its desire for joy, and the melancholy
which was natural in men whose ideals were un-
attainable in a very harsh world, which was never
harder than amid the disruption of faith, the violent
clash of contending forces, and the unchaining of
violent passions, of the sixteenth century. But there
might have been all this, and no Spenser.
He is great by what was wholly his own,
both in form and spirit. The Shepherd's Calendar
may be called the work of his prentice hand, done
when he had not attained complete control of his
own vast powers. Yet it is not so far below the im-
peccable verse of his later years as it is above the
level of his immediate predecessors in Elizabeth's
reign. The part of imitation which there is in it
is the weakest. What he inherited from nobody was
the new melody he imparted to English poetry. It
196 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
is out of his own genius that he perfected the form
in which that melody found its full expression. The
Spenserian stanza does not appear in The JSJiepherd's
Calendar ; but it had been constructed, and was being
used in the earlier cantos of The Faerie Queen at least
immediately after the earlier work was finished. It
is surely no longer necessary to argue that this form
was not imitated from the Italians. The ottava rima
and the sonnet may have indeed must have helped
Spenser with indications, but they did no more. Had
he been an imitator he would have done as the
Spaniards did, he would have taken an already
finished form, and would have adhered to it slavishly.
But he did a very different thing. He constructed .a
stanza which is to English what the ottava rima is
to the Italian. It is just the difference between a
successor and a mere follower, that whereas the
second toils to reproduce the letter, the first gives a
new form to the spirit. The relation in which Spenser
stands to the Italians is that he carried on the torch
of great poetry, but he lit it of English wood, and
bore it to a measure of his own. His sonnet is hardly
less independent than his stanza, and all talk of obli-
gation to any model becomes idle indeed when we
think of the melody of the Hymns, the Epithalamium,
and the Prothalamium.
The matter which this form bodied forth to the
world is not to be expressed in our meagre prose.
The character It could be uttered only in his own perfect
of his poetry. verset The mere doctrine may be defined
with no overwhelming amount of difficulty, for there
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 197
is a strong and, not only unconcealed but, firmly
avowed didactic aim in Spenser. It was no purpose
of his to be " the idle singer of an empty day." He
held with his friend Sir Philip Sidney that the poet
" doth intend the winning of the mind from wicked-
ness to virtue." The poet in their creed was the seer,
and Spenser strove to fulfil his lofty function by
teaching the Platonism which endeavours to trace
back the love of virtue and the love of beauty to that
divine origin where they are one, and by singing a
Puritanism which is the poetic expression of the Eng-
lishman's innate conviction that the religion which is
not interpreted into conduct is an empty hypocrisy.
But all this didactic side of Spenser is the side which
was not necessarily poetic. In so far as the Hymns
merely teach a Platonist doctrine, they do not surpass
the final pages of Castiglione's Courtier. In so far as
The Faerie Queen is an allegory, it is no more consist-
ent, ingenious, or perfectly adapted to its purpose
than The Pilgrim's Progress. But over all that could
be adequately expressed in prose Spenser cast a spell
which carried it into the realm of fancy that golden
world of the poet which Sir Philip Sidney contrasted
with nature's " brazen " earth. A very trifling change
in the wording of one passage of The Apologie for
Poetrie is all that is needed to make it applicable to
The Faerie Queen : " Nature never set forth the earth in
so rich tapistry as ' this poet hath ' done, neither with
pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers;
nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved
earth more lovely." It is to this word that the
198 EUROPEAN LITERATURE 1ATER RENAISSANCE.
attempt to estimate Spenser finally leads. By the
magic of his melody, and the force of that imagination
which could transmute all from prose to poetry, he
made a lovely world of poetry out of the real earth.
When he used ugliness, as he could, it was for the
purpose of heightening beauty by contrast.
As the poet of The Faerie Queen, Spenser stands
apart in his time. He is connected with his con-
temporaries by the sonnet. This form, introduced
into English literature by Surrey and Wyatt, had
been little, and ill, cultivated in the duller generation
which followed them. But with the revival of the
poetic genius of England towards the middle of the
queen's reign, it naturally attracted men who were
in search of richer and more artful forms of verse.
Moreover, it lent itself to the expression of feeling,
and that was of itself enough to make it popular with
a lyrical generation. For this reason the sonnet work
of the Elizabethans has been made subject to a great
deal of comment which is not of the nature of literary
criticism. It has been treated as a form of confession
and veiled autobiography. Various considerations
the limits of space being not the least important
among them make it impossible to discuss the ques-
tion at length here. Moreover, where the external
evidence is naught, and the internal evidence is sub-
ject to various interpretations, which is always the
case, comment on the inner meaning of the sonnets
must always be more or less guesswork. To start
from arbitrary premisses, with the certainty of arriv-
ing at no definite conclusion, ought to be considered
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 199
a waste of time. Sidney may have decided to leave
it on record that he found out his love for Penelope
Devereux too late, and that he then hovered round
the thought of adultery. Shakespeare may have made
poetry out of his friendship and his love. If so, the
passions which left them so much masters of them-
selves as to be able to produce these artistic forms
of verse cannot have been very absorbing. Finished
sonnets do not come to men either in their sleep or
in anguish. What we know for certain of Spenser,
Sidney, Shakespeare, and others is, that they lived
active lives in the world, and that they were artists.
The nature of the artist is that he endeavours to give
form to the passion or action which he can conceive, in
the terms of his art, whether he be poet, painter, or
actor. It is because he has the constructive imagina-
tion and the power of expression that he gives truth
to his work. The genius which could give reality
to the sorrow of Constance, to the manhood of the
Bastard, to the jealousy of Othello, to more men,
women, and passions than could be named on this
page, was quite adequate to giving the same reality
to the scheme of the Sonnets. As much may be said
of the other Elizabethans, each in his place in the
scale. From the literary point of view, too, it is of no
importance how the debate be settled. Poetry is not
valuable because it tells us that this or the other dead
poet felt as a man the common hopes and disappoint-
ments of humanity, but because it fixes what all men
can feel in forms of immortal beauty.
The sonnet was much cultivated in the literary
200 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
society gathered around Sir Philip Sidney in and about
1580. His high birth, he was son of Sir Henry
Sidney, Lord President of Wales and Lord Deputy in
Ireland, and nephew of Elizabeth's sinister favourite,
the Earl of Leicester, the fact that he stood in the
relation of patron to many of the men of letters of
his time, his amiable personal character,
Sir P. Sidney. x .
and the heroic circumstances of his death
in a skirmish fought to prevent a Spanish convoy
from entering the besieged town of Zutphen in 1586,
have combined to make Sir Philip Sidney a very
shining figure. It is possible that he is more con-
spicuous than his intrinsic power would have made
him without the gifts of fortune. Yet there must"
have been a great personal fascination in the man who
could inspire the reverential love which was felt for
Sir Philip Sidney by Eulke Greville, while his Apologie
for Poetrie, his Arcadia, the sonnets collected under
the title of Astrophel and Stella, with his other
poems, remain to prove that wherever he had been
born he would have left his mark on the time.
The Arcadia may be left aside for the present, but
The Apologie for Poetrie, though written in prose, can-
The Apoiogie n t> without violently separating things akin
for Poetrie. ^o one ano ther, be taken apart from his
poetry. It is to some extent our English equivalent
for the Deffense et Illustration de la Langue frangaise
of Joachim du Bellay, the manifesto of a new school
of poets. The circumstances in which the two were
written differ widely. The Pleiade, with the French-
man's usual love of a large and minute ordonnance,
ELIZABETHAN POETEY. 201
drew up a scheme for the conquest and orderly divi-
sion of the poetic world. Sir Philip Sidney was pro-
voked into writing his little treatise by a very foolish
tract printed in 1579, and named The School of Abuse,
the work of one Stephen Gosson (1535-1624), an un-
successful playwright who took orders, and lived to a
great age as a clergyman of Puritanical leanings. The
School of Abuse, which was absurdly dedicated to Sir
Philip Sidney without his consent, and perhaps because
he was the nephew of the chief protector of the Puri-
tans, is in itself insignificant, except in so far as
it contains a statement of the narrow puritan view
that all modern poetry was wicked, and that the
theatre was the home of every corruption. It is
chiefly worth naming now because Sidney did it the
signal honour to give it an answer. The Apologie
for Poetrie is in no sense an Ars Poetica. Sidney does
not deal with the formal part of poetry. He replies
to those who belittle it by an emphatic assertion
that it is the noblest of all things. The view and
the spirit of the Elizabethan time are nowhere
more clearly shown than in the Apologie. That
Sidney fell into one gross heresy is true. He said
that poetry was independent of metre. But that
was not an error likely to mislead either himself
or others. Against it has to be set his concep-
tion of poetry as the noble expression of that which
in itself is fine, made for a lofty purpose. There may
not be much guidance in this ; but it is not as a guide
that the Apologie is to be considered, but as the chal-
lenge of the coming English poetry, lyrical, epic, and
202 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
dramatic a declaration that it was to be something
more than ingenious exercises in metres, that it was
to be the expression in beautiful form of passion and
thought, of fancy and imagination. If English poets
of that generation looked up to Sidney, it was not
only for the reasons given above, but because he spoke
early and worthily to the enemy at the gate. The
style of the Apologie is full of the animation and
sincerity of the writer. It has a colour and melody
unknown to the downright sober English of his pre-
decessor Ascham or his contemporary Puttenham, and
is free from the conceits of his own Arcadia.
Sidney was himself one of the first to sound the
high note of the great Elizabethan poetry.
No part of his work was printed in his life. The
Arcadia was prepared for publication immediately
after his death in 1586, but it did not appear till
1590, and then first in a pirated edition. A more
ins sonnets accurate version followed in 1593. The
and Lyrics. sonne ts and other lyric pieces, collected
under the title of Astrophel and Stella, were printed
in 1591, and the Apologic for Poetrie in 1595. His
metrical version of the Psalms remained in manuscript
till 1828, while some fragments of his verse have only
been recovered recently by Dr Grosart. 1 But the
date of printing was comparatively unimportant at a
time when a poet's work not only could be, but gen-
erally was, known in manuscript to the reading world
long before it was published. Sidney was renowned
] The Complete Poems of ir Philip Sidney, edited by the Rev. A.
B. Grosart, '2 vols., 1878, in "The Puller's Worthies Library."
ELIZABETHAN POETKY. 203
as a poet and prose- writer in his lifetime, and his case
is only one of many. Therefore we may fairly count
his influence as having been exercised from the day
when his sonnets were handed about among his
friends, which must have been as early as, if not
earlier than, 1580. Those to whom they came must
have learnt at once that the day when Gascoigne,
Turberville, Googe, or an industrious decent verse-
writer of the stamp of Churchyard, represented Eng-
lish poetry, was over. The sonnets are not all on the
same high level. The epithet of "jejune" which
Hazlitt applied to Sidney cannot be justly used of
any of them ; but the sonnet beginning, " Phoebus
was judge betweene Jove, Mars, and Love," or the
other which has for first line, " I on my horse and
love on me, doth try," or the third, " grammar-
rules, now your virtues show," are not equally safe
against the other epithet " frigid." They are at least
more marked by laboured and cold - blooded conceit
than by passion or fancy. Yet even these have an
accomplishment of form which was new, and in the
others the greater qualities are by no means rarely
shown. The first in the accepted order " Loving in
truth and faine in verse my love to show," with its
ringing last line, " ' Foole,' said my Muse to me,
1 looke in thy heart and write,' " and the last, " Leave
me, Love, which readiest but to dust," are abun-
dantly lofty and passionate ; and were, in the sense
in which the word was used, " insolent " that is, un-
precedented in the English poetry of that genera-
tion. To these it would be easy to add many others.
204 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
" With how slow steps, Moon " ; " Having this day
my horse, my hand, my lance," are but two of them ;
while the sonnet " Good brother Philip " is a gem of
gaiety overlaying passion. Sidney did not confine
himself to the so-called legitimate form of two qua-
trains and two tercets, but tried experiments. He
stretched the term sonnet as far as it will go when
he applied it to twelve Alexandrines and a heroic
couplet. Nor was it in the sonnet only that Sidney
set an example. The songs of Astrophel and Stella
usher in the great Elizabethan lyric, in which there
is nothing to surpass the " Doubt you to whom my
Muse these notes entendeth " in soaring melody. The
verse which abounds in the Arcadia and the metrical
version of the Psalms does not reach the level of the
Astrophel and Stella. Yet it appears inferior only
when judged by his own best work, and the best
that was to follow. We may doubt whether Sidney
has a claim to the place in the active life of Eliza-
beth's time assigned him by the affection of Fulke
Greville and by tradition, but there can be no ques-
tion that he stands beside Spenser as one of the
beginners of the unsurpassed poetic literature of her
reign.
It is mainly on historical grounds that mention
must be made of his contemporary Thomas Watson
(1557-1592). Watson was a busy writer of
Watson. V _ J _ _ *
verse and translator, whose claim to be
remembered now rests on this, that he was working
at the sonnet beside Sir Philip Sidney, and indepen-
dently of him. What he called a sonnet was a set
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 205
of three stanzas of six lines, each complete in itself. 1
There the independence of Watson ends. His sonnets
are avowedly imitations of Italian or Trench originals
when they are not translations. But his chief work,
the Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love, has
an undoubted value as a piece of evidence. It supplies
a link in the chain of literary history, and then it
gives what may be called a glimpse into the workshop
of a sonnet-cycle maker. Watson candidly confesses,
in a " Letter to the Friendly Eeader," that his pains in
suffering the pangs of love which his sonnets record
are " but supposed." His less ingenuous followers
leave us to guess as much concerning them. But in
addition to this there is an apparatus criticics which
in everything except bulk bears a very close re-
semblance to the pedantic commentaries added by
his admirers to the early editions of the Spaniard
Gongora. Each sonnet is introduced, explained,
annotated, and the passion it is to express described,
and we are shown the machinery at every stage. One
of these introductions contains what is, in fact, a by
no means bad criticism on the whole body of the
sonnets. " This Passion," No. xli., " is framed upon a
somewhat tedious, or too much affected, continuation
of that figure of Bhetorique whiche of the Greeks is
called iraXiWoyia or avahiirXcoa^, of the Latins
Eeduplicatio." Somewhat tedious, too much affected,
and full of repetitions are these sonnets ; but they
show the increased mechanical skill of our writers of
verse, and they are historically interesting. When
1 Poems of Thomas Watson, in Arber's English reprints.
20G EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
tempted to make autobiography out of the cycles of
other sonneteers, it is well to remember Watson's
confession, and also this, that to have a lady for the
saint of your literary devotions had been " common
form" as far back as the troubadours. His later
work, The Tears of Fancy, is in regular quatorzains.
The popularity of the Astrophel and Stella (there
were three editions in the first year in which it was
printed 1591), as well as the example it set,
The sonneteers.
help to account for the profuse production
of sonnet cycles in the next few years. The following
list, which does not profess to be exhaustive, of the
collections published before 1595, will show the wealth
of Elizabethan literature in this form: The Parthen-
ophil and Parthenophe of Barnabe Barnes (which owes
its survival to the accident which has preserved a
single copy at Chatsworth, reprinted by Dr Grosart),
the Licia of Giles Fletcher, and the Phillis of Thomas
Lodge, were published before the end of 1593. In
1594 appeared the Cailia of William Percy, Constable's
Diana, Daniel's Delia, and Drayton's Idea. To these
may be added the names of Willoughby's Avisa, which,
however, does not consist of sonnets, and the anony-
mous Zepheria. Spenser's Amoretti, or love sonnets,
belong in date of publication to 1595. Three other
collections the Fidessa of Griffin, Lynch's Diella
(thirty-eight sonnets, prefixed to the amorous poem
of Diego and Genevra), and the Chloris of W. Smith,
belong to 1596. The sonnet, too, was written by
others who did not construct cycles. Every reader of
The Faerie Queen knows the splendid " Me thought
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 207
I saw the grave where Laura lay," by Sir W. Raleigh,
and its less legitimately built successor, " The praise
of meaner wits," which was addressed less to Spenser's
masterpiece than to the vanity of Queen Elizabeth.
During many long fallow years of silence the poetic
genius of the English race had been accumulating,
and it wanted but a touch to set it free. Even
among the poets named here who are not otherwise
famous, there was some measure of original power.
Putting aside Spenser, who towers over all, the finest J )
lyric force was in Lodge, and the most uniform accom-
plishment in Daniel. It was left to Shakespeare to
give the greatest of English sonnets, but the form he
preferred the three rhymed quartrains and the
couplet had been polished and established as the
prevalent English type by Daniel. 1
Although the Elizabethan age was great in all forms
of pure literature, except the prose romance and the
satire, and was not wholly barren even of these, yet it
was more copious, more uniformly excellent in the
lyric, than in any other. Sir Walter Scott has spoken
of the wind of poetry which blew throughout that
wonderful generation. He was thinking of the drama ;
but this general inspiration which gives its grandeur
to the activity of the time is to be traced more widely,
and with less admixture of weakness in its songs, than
in any other of its manifold activities. But this very
extension of the lyric faculty, and the number of the
1 For Barnes, Percy, Constable, Lynch, Zcphcria, and Smith, see
Mr Arber's Enylish Garner ; for Daniel and Drayton, vols. iii. and iv.
of Chalmers's British Poets.
208 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
singers, makes it not merely difficult but impossible
other lyric to deal fully with the subject within the
poetry. limits of our space. Of the sonnet
writers we can speak with some approach to com-
pleteness, for there the field, though large, is not
boundless. But the freer forms of lyric spread over
all the life and literature of England. Ealeigh, who
was a soldier, politician, discoverer, colonist, historian,
political writer, and amateur chemist, was also a lyric
poet of more than note. So were the Jesuit missionary
Southwell and the courtier Earl of Oxford. Some of
the most beautiful lyrics in the language were written
by pamphleteers, prose story-writers, and dramatists.
The composer wrote his own songs, and some of them
are among the best, while many are only just below
that level. So much was the time penetrated by poetic
fire, that gems of verse are to be found in its song-
books for which no known author can be traced.
The general wealth of the time in lyric poetry can
be better appreciated by taking its miscellaneous col-
lections, whether of pure poetry or of verse written to
accompany music, than by a list of the names of writers
who may be held to deserve particular mention. Pitt-
ing aside TotteVs Miscellany as belonging to an earlier
time, though it was repeatedly reprinted under Eliza-
beth, and The Mirror of Magistrates, which stands
apart, there were numerous collections of minor pieces
made in the queen's reign. The Paradise of Dainty
tu collections Devises, 1576; A Gorgeous Gallery of Gal-
and song-books. i an f Inventions, 1578; A Handful of
Pleasant Delights, 1584; The Phoenix Nest, 1593;
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 209
England's Helicon, 1600 ; A Poetical Rhapsody, 1602 ;
England's Parnassus, 1600 ; and Belvedere, or the
Garden of the Muses, in the same year, are the names
of some of them. To these are to be added the list
of song-books collected or written by Byrd, Yonge,
Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and
others. 1 Some of the poems in these collections have
always been known, but they contain many which had
fallen entirely into obscurity. There can have been
very few readers to whom Mr Bullen's collection, made
from a class of books which in most ages are full of mere
insipidities, was not a revelation. The point is that it
represents not the exceptional work of the time, but
the average production, which we may almost call
commercial, or the poets' corner, and that being this,
it maintains such an extraordinarily high level of in-
spiration and melody. It is not a mere question of
that workmanlike dexterity which a great poet, as
Scott said half humorously, but not without truth, to
Moore, can teach a receptive generation. Spenser
himself could never have taught anybody to produce
such a piece of genuine lyric poetry as the "Fain
would I change that note," which Mr Bullen quotes
from Captain Hume's First Part of Airs. It, and
much else only less good, would not have been written
without Spenser and Sidney ; but it is one thing to be
influenced by great models, and another merely to
echo them.
1 Mr Arber in his English Garner, and Mr Bullen in his Lyrics from
the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age, 1887, have made selections from
these sources.
O
210 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
The love of verse led in England, as in Spain, to the
production of not a little in what is almost inevitably
The historical a bastard kind the historical poem. By
poems. attempting to do in poetry what could be
adequately done in prose, the authors of The History
of the Civil War or of The Barons' War, condemned
themselves to be often dull, or to endeavour to escape
dulness by mixing purely romantic episodes with what
professes to be record of matter of fact. The romance
is superfluous to those who read for the history, and
the history is tiresome to those who read for the
romance. Our own historical poems are commonly
the more subject to the danger of dulness, because the
authors, unlike the Spaniards, did not, as a rule, choose
the great events of their own time, or of the previous
generation, of which the memory was still fresh. They
went back to the past, which they could only know
through books. This would have done no harm if they
had used their authorities only to find " local colour "
for their romance. But they did not. They aimed at
even a minute historical accuracy, and thereby con-
demned themselves to produce works of learning in an
inappropriate shape. It is no doubt bad criticism to
condemn any form of literature for being itself and
not another. Yet we could spare even the Polyolhion
for an Elizabethan Mariana, which Drayton, whose
prose was excellent and whose learning was great,
misht well have been, and still have left himself free
to write his sonnets, his Nymphidia, and his Ballad of
Agincourt.
The curious literary bad fortune which has pursued
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 211
the achievements of Englishmen at sea is well illus-
Fitz-Gcoffrey trated by the vehement, but also frothy and
andMarkham. flamboyant, poem of Charles Fitz-Geoffrey,
called Sir Francis Drake, his Honourable Life's Com-
mendation and his Tragical Death's Lamentation. It is
in the seven-line stanza which Drayton, after first
trying it, renounced as too soft for the subject of his
Barons' War. Fitz- Geoffrey wraps up the substantial
figure of Sir Francis in clouds of hyperbole, and makes
a terrible abuse of the figure called " by the Latines
Beduplicatio." We see the great corsair only in
glimpses through the very smoky flames of Fitz-
Geoffrey's melodious rhetoric. The most honourable
Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinvill, by Gervase Mark-
ham, in an eight-lined stanza, very flowing and mytho-
logical, has much the same defect. The author, who
founded his poem on Ealeigh's pamphlet describing
the last fight of the Eevenge, endeavours to "out-
cracke the scarcrow thunderbolt."
Three names stand out among the writers of his-
torical poems William Warner, because he was at
once a forerunner to the others and a link between
the poetry of the earlier and the later Elizabethans ;
Daniel, for a certain mild, yet grave, wisdom ; Dray-
ton, for his manly force and intrinsic poetic power.
Warner, who was born about 1567, and who certainly
died in March 1609 (the year in which
Warner. x J
Shakespeare s Sonnets were published), was
attached in some uncertain relationship as client or
servant to the Careys, Lords Hunsdon. His historical
poem, Albiorts England, was in part written before
212 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
1586, when it was suppressed for some unknown
reason by an order of the Star Chamber. 1 If this
date is correct, the decidedly jejune account of the
defeat of the Armada, and the most unfriendly passage
on the execution of Queen Mary, must have been
added later. Warner had written a collection of
prose stories called Syrinx, as he says, " with accept-
ance." But his claim to be remembered rests on his
Albion's England, a long poem in the old seven-foot or
fourteen-syllable metre, on the history, and more par-
ticularly on the legends of the history, of England.
His well - established reputation as " a good, honest,
plain writer" is fully deserved. Warner, indeed,
carries plainness so far that in the most poetic pas-
sage of his book the episode of Curan and Argentill,
in which there is a genuine simple poetry he tells us
that the hero " wiped the drivel from his beard." Be-
ginning at the creation of the world, he comes down
to his own time, with constant digressions into ro-
mantic episodes of his own growing, and classical or
Biblical tales. He does not always escape the tendency
of his metre to drop into a jog-trot, yet in the main
he canters briskly along with a very fair proportion of
spirited lines. His farewell to Queen Mary is worth
quoting, both as an example of his verse and as a rather
engaging mixture of charity and implacability :
"Then to her wofull servants did she pass a kind a-dew,
And kissing oft her crucifix, unto the block she drew,
And fearless, as if glad to dye, did dye to papisme trew.
1 Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iv.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 213
Which and her other errors (who in all did ever erre)
Unto the judge of mercie and of justice we referre.
If ever such conspirator of it impenitent,
If ever soule pope-scooled so, that sea to Heaven sent,
If ever one ill lived did dye a papist Godwards bent,
Then happie she. But so or not, it happie is for us,
That of so dangerous a foe we are delivered thus."
His moderate length (a fairly girt reader can begin
and end him in a longish evening), his disregard for
mere historical fact, and a certain childish downright-
ness, make Warner easier reading than much better
poets. Although Warner adhered to the f ourteener in
the face of Spenser and Sidney, he was so far affected
by their example that he generally raised his verse
above the mere rocking-horse motion, which is its
special bane.
Samuel Daniel, the son of a music-master, was born
near Taunton in 1562, and was educated at Magdalen
Hall, Oxford. He began by translating
Daniel. ' , ^ . , , . n
the Jmprese ot Faulus Jovius, and his first
independent works were his sonnets to Delia, already
mentioned. It is possible that he went abroad as
servant to Elizabeth's ambassador in France, Lord
Stafford, and that he visited Italy before 1590.
Although Daniel wrote two tragedies Cleopatra and
Philotas they were on the classical model, which
our stage has never tolerated, and he therefore could
not live by literature, since it was then only the
theatre which paid. It was necessary for him to
seek support in the service of rich people. He found
it in the patronage of the Pembroke family, and was
afterwards tutor to the daughter of the famous sea-
214 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
faring Earl of Cumberland. In his later years he was
in the service of Queen Anne, the wife of James L, as
" inspector of the children of the Queen's revels," and
as groom or "gentleman extraordinary of her majesty's
private chamber/ 5 At the end he appears to have
achieved independence, for he died on a farm of his
own near Beckington in 1619.
In spite of the interruptions caused by his tutoring,
at which he repined not a little, Daniel was a volu-
minous writer. He was the author in prose of a
history of England down to the reign of Edward III.,
popular in its day, and of the excellent Defence of
Rime in answer to Campion's belated plea for " pure
versifying." But it is as a poet that Daniel ranks in
English literature, though with a limitation, somewhat
roughly worded by his stronger contemporary Dray-
ton, who said that " his manner better fitted prose."
This would be a very unfair judgment if it were
applied to all his work without qualification. The
Complaint of Rosamonde, his first considerable poem,
published in 1592, is neither in manner nor matter
better fitted for prose* It is a very pcetic retelling of
the legend of Henry II.'s mistress in the favourite
seven-line stanza. His moral epistles in verse escape
the vice of mere moralising by virtue of a loftiness of
sentiment which is fitly enough wedded to poetic form.
Yet there is none of the " lofty, insolent, and pas-
sionate" note of the Elizabethans in Daniel, and
Drayton's harsh sentence may be applied with little
or no restriction to the Civil Wars. Daniel's claim to
honour was as well stated by himself in some pre-
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 215
fatory verses to an edition of his poems in 1607 as by
any of the many good judges of literature who have
praised him :
" I know I shall be read among the rest
So long as men speak English, and so long
As verse and virtue shall be in request,
Or grace to honest industry belong."
Grace to honest industry seems but a humble plea
for the poet. We may paraphrase it with more
dignity and not less truth by saying that Daniel was a
most accomplished and conscientious artist in verse,
who had a genuine, but mild, poetic nature. The care
he took to revise his work is evidence of his con-
science as a workman, and the fact that his changes
were commonly for the better is proof of his judgment.
It is mainly the beauty of his English which will cause
him to be read for ever among the rest. If it never
has the splendour of the greatest Elizabethan poetry,
neither does it fall into " King Cambyses' vein," into
the roaring fury which gave an outlet to the exuberant
energy of that time. Southey gave Daniel as the
nearest English equivalent to Camoens, on the ground
that the main charm of both is the even purity of
their language. This of itself is hardly compensation
enough for the undoubted tediousness of his Civil Wars,
which tell the essentially dreary history of the Wars of
the Eoses down to the marriage of Edward IV. 1
It was perhaps partly his dislike of the Bohemian
habits of his brother men of letters which has left the
1 Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iii. Complete works, edited by Dr
Grosart. 5 vols., 1885-1896.
216 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
life of Michael Drayton so obscure. He was a Warwick-
shire man of respectable parentage, but so poor that
he owed his education to the kindness of patrons. The
date of his birth was 1563, and he died in 1631, well
into the reign of Charles I. If confidence can be
placed in the jottings of Drummond of Hawthornden,
there was at one time an armed neutrality between
Jonson and Drayton ; but Jonson wrote some highly
laudatory verses on the Polyolbion, and we need not
place too much reliance on casual remarks he threw
out in conversation when he had no knowledge that
his words were to be written down. It is known, too,
that Drayton was patronised by Prince Henry, who in
his short life was the friend of many men of pith and
substance, from Ealeigh to Phineas Pett the ship-
builder. Ill-founded legend asserts that he was of the
party in the carouse which is said to have been the
death of Shakespeare.
Drayton * was a stronger man than Daniel, and there
came forth more sweetness from him. No writer of
the time was more voluminous. The
Drayton. .
sonnets, to which he seems to have heen
somewhat indifferent, form a very small portion of his
work. Whenever he began to write (it is said that his
love of literature was shown when he was a boy), he
did not publish early. His first poem A Harmonie of
the Church appeared in 1591. It was suppressed by
the censorship, then directed by Archbishop Whitgift,
1 Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iv. A very thorough monograph
on Drayton by Mr 0. Elton has been published by the Spenser
Society, 1895.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 217
but republished under another title, The Heavenly
Harmonie of Spiritual Songs and Holy Hymns, in
1610. In 1593 he published nine eclogues with the
title of Idea, a name also given to the sonnets printed
in 1594. It is to be noted that the famous sonnet
beginning, " Since there's no help, come let us kiss and
part/' which is so superior to the others, and so like
Shakespeare's, was first included in the edition of
1619. Drayton, like Daniel, was much in the habit of
revising his work. He not uncommonly incorporated
his earlier poems in his later with great changes. In
1596 appeared the awkwardly named Mortimeriados, in
the seven-line stanza, recast and republished in ottava
rima in 1603 under the title of The Barons' Wars.
Between these two came the Heroical Epistles in 1597.
In 1604 Drayton made a most unfortunate attempt to
win the favour of James I. by flattery, and he also
published a satirical poem, The Owl, and his Moses in a
Map of his Miracles. To 1605 belongs a collection of
short poems, including the most famous of his minor
poems, except the universally known sonnet, the
magnificent Ballad of Agincourt. The years which
follow were employed in the composition of his vast
PolyoTbion, of which nineteen books appeared in 1613,
and which was completed in 1622. Between these
dates he brought out an edition of his poems in 1619.
In 1627 he went back on the battle of Agincourt,
and produced the poem of that name, together with
Nympihidia and The Miseries of Queen Margaret. At
the very close of his life, in 1630, he published the
gay and graceful Muses' Elysium. He wrote also for
218 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
the stage, to which he had no natural inclination, in
an occasional and subordinate way.
This list, which is not exhaustive, will show that
the forty years of Drayton's known activity were
remarkably well filled. And the quality of this great
bulk of work was not less remarkable than the
quantity. It may be allowed at once, and without
conceding too much to the eighteenth-century criti-
cism, which talked of his "creeping narrative," that
much of his poetry is dull to other readers than those
who find all dull except the last smart short story or
newspaper scandal. The reader who can master The
Battle of Agincourt (not the Ballad), The Miseries of
Queen Margaret, and The Barons' Wars without an
effort may hold himself armed against the more
laborious forms of study. Drayton indeed tempted
dulness when he chose for subject the Barons' War
of Edward II.'s reign, and did not also decide to make
the "she- wolf of France" his heroine and to throw
history to the winds. Yet even in these the strong
poetical faculty of the writer can never be forgotten.
The longest of all his poems the Polyolbion, or
" Chorographical Description of all the Tracts, Eivers,
Mountains, Forests, and other parts of Great Britain,"
which may be described as a poetical guide-book to
his native country is not dull, though it cannot be
praised as exciting. Drayton may have made an
error when he decided to write it in the long twelve-
syllable line, and not in his favourite eight-line stanza,
which, in the words of his preface to The Barons'
Wars, " both holds the time clean through to the base
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 219
of the column, which is the couplet at the foot or
bottom, and closeth not but with a full satisfaction to
the ear for so long detention." Yet he has mastered
his unwieldy verse, and after a time, when the
reader's ear has become attuned to the melody, his at
first rather strange mixture of topography, legend, and
vigorous romantic flashes rolls on in a majestic course.
It is a proof of the essential strength of Drayton that
his most delicate work the fairy poetry of the Nym-
phidia and the Nymphalls or Muses' Elysium belongs
to his later years. He grew sweet as he mellowed.
A time so rich as the Elizabethan in new forms of
literature could hardly fail to produce the satirist.
The satiric I n this case also there were Italian and,
poets. ft nee( j hardly De added, Classic models to
follow,, and they were followed. Satiric writing there
had always been, and that inevitably, since so soon as
men began to record observation at all they would see
that there was much vice and folly in the world, and
from this experience all satire springs. The satiric
spirit abounded in the prose pamphlet literature of
the time. Between this and the help afforded by the
Latin models, who supplied the ready-made mould,
the poetic satirists were led forward by the hand.
As a class, and in so far as they were satirists, they
were the least interesting body of writers of their
time. It is very necessary to limit this estimate to
their satires ; for the four who may be mentioned
here are all, for one reason or another, notable men,
or even more. Lodge, without ever attaining to
originality or power of the first order, was a success-
220 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
ful writer in many kinds. Marston has a deservedly
high place in our dramatic literature. Hall, though
that part of his life lies outside the scope of this
book, was a divine and controversialist of mark in
his later years. Donne, who however belongs in the
main to a later time, is one of the most enigmat-
ical and debated, alternately one of the most attrac-
tive and most repellent, figures in English literature.
If Hall's boast in the Prologue to his Satires
" I first adventure, follow me who list,
And be the second English Satirist,"
is to be taken seriously, he must be supposed to have
claimed the honour of leading. If so, he must also
be presumed not to have known The Steel Glass of
Gascoigne, an undeniable though rambling and ineffec-
tive satire, belonging to the first half of the queen's
reign. He certainly ignored the earlier claim of
Lodge, whose Fig for Momus appeared in 1595, two
years before the first six books of Hall's Virgidemi-
arum. But it may be that he wrote long before he
printed, and in any case the originality is not great
enough to be worth fighting over, since both were
followers of Latin originals ; while it appears more
than probable that Marston and Donne were turning
their thoughts in the same direction about the same
time. In fact, the Poetic Satire was so certain to
arise that many men may well have begun it together
in complete independence one of another.
The satire of Lodge is confessedly a mere
echo of Horace.
ELIZABETHAN POETRY. 221
This cannot be said of the Satires of Joseph Hall.
Hall, who in his very interesting brief autobiography
says that he was born on the 1st January,
1574 (which, if he went by the old official
calendar, means 1575), and was educated at the Puri-
tan College of Emmanuel, Cambridge, lived to attain
the bishopric of Exeter, to play a conspicuous part in
the early days of the Long Parliament, to be trans-
lated to Norwich in the eclipse of King Charles's
fortunes, and to be rabbled out of his palace by the
Puritans. He died at Heigham in 1656. His Satires,
therefore, appeared when he was at the utmost only
twenty-three. Although marked by a certain youth-
ful loftiness of moral pose and some impudence, they
show an undoubted maturity of form much more meri-
torious then than it would be now, when there is so
much more in English to copy. In " A Postscript to
the Eeader," printed with the first issue of the Virgi-
demiarum (a pedantic title taken from Virgidemia, a
gathering of rods), he states what undoubtedly was
the literary faith of the satirists of the time : " It is
not for every one to relish a true natural satire, being
of itself, besides the nature and inbred bitterness and
tartness of particulars, both hard of conceit and harsh
of style, and therefore cannot but be unpleasing both
to the unskilful and over -musical ear." In other
words, a rough form and a deliberate violation of
melody were proper to satire. Marston and Donne
acted on that rule. But Hall in his own verses is
not markedly hard of conceit or harsh of style. His
couplets flow easily enough, carrying with them
222 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
shrewd but not very important remarks on the con-
tradictions of sinners. We can well believe that
when Pope was shown them late in life he wished
he had seen them sooner, and that he thought the
first satire of the sixth book " optima satira." Hall's
attitude of superiority to a sinful world is rather
comic in a young gentleman who knew no more of
it than lay inside the walls of "pure Emmanuel."
His worst fault was a habit of sniffing at contem-
porary poets, whose poetic shoe-latchet he was not
worthy to undo. He falls upon the sonneteers and
their "Blowesses" (i.e., Blowsibellas) after a fashion
afterwards bettered by Swift with his incomparable
brutality. 1
Marston's first set of Satires were printed under the
assumed name of W. Kinsayder in 1598, together
with a poem called Pygmalion's Image. A
second instalment of the Satires followed
next year, and both bear the same title The Scourge
of Villainy. There was not much villainy to which
Marston had better call to apply the scourge than the
greasy lubricity of Pygmalion's Image. He preferred
to scold at his contemporaries in verse which is as
pleasant to read as charcoal would be to eat, and
to lecture an imaginary world made up of vices which
he took at second hand from Latin books, in a style
which raises the image of ancient Pistol unpacking his
heart with curses.
1 Satires by Joseph Hall. Chiswick Press, 1824.
223
CHAPTEE VIII.
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS.
THE FIRST PLATS RESISTANCE TO CLASSIC INFLUENCE ADVANTAGES OF
THIS AND THE LIMITATIONS THE DRAMATIC QUALITY CLASSIC,
SPANISH, AND FRENCH DRAMA UNITY IN THE ENGLISH PLAYS
'RALPH ROISTER DOISTER ' ' GAMMER GURTON'S NEEDLE '
'GORBODUC' FORMATION OF THE THEATRE LYLY GREENE PEELE
KYD MARLOWE CHARACTER OF THESE WRITERS SHAKESPEARE
GUESSES ABOUT HIS LIFE ORDER OF HIS WORK ESTIMATES OF
SHAKESPEARE DIVISIONS OF HIS WORK THE POEMS THE DRAMAS
THE REALITY OF SHAKESPEARE'S CHARACTERS.
Three plays stand at the threshold of the Elizabethan
drama Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton's Needle,
and Gorhoduc, or Ferrex and Porrex. None
The first plays. . _. .
of the three indicate the course which that
dramatic literature was destined to take. Gammer
Gurton's Needle is a spirited farce of low life, holding
if from anything, then from the mediaeval comedy
as it nourished in France. Ralph Roister Doister, as
became the work of a schoolmaster, is full of reminis-
cences of the Latin comedy. Gorhoduc is an open
imitation of the Senecan tragedy.
When the great and natural authority of the classic
224 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
models is allowed for when we remember how many
writers for the stage, not only here but
Resistance to .
the classic wherever the theatre nourished, were uni-
versity wits when the taste of the time
for moralising is taken into account, it is rather to be
wondered at that this pattern proved so unattractive
as it did. The predominance of the French drama of
the seventeenth century must not lead us into over-
estimating the rarity of the independence required, to
reject the classic model in the time of the Eenaissance.
Corneille and Eacine did indeed establish a " correct "
form of tragedy, largely constructed on classic lines.
But this was part of a general, and far from inexcus-
able, reaction towards order, measure, and restraint in
literature. During the Eenaissance the influence of
the classic drama was confined to producing a false
dawn of the French tragedy. Italy achieved no con-
siderable drama. The classics, both the great Greek
and the lesser Latin, were presented to Spain in
translations, and by scholarly critics, only to be
rejected. The Nise Lastimosa of Geronimo Bermudez,
with here and there a tentative effort in early plays,
is all that remains of the teaching of translators and
men of learning. Among ourselves Gorboduc had
little immediate following, and when Daniel in the
very early seventeenth century tried to succeed where
Sackville had failed, he wrote for the literary coterie
of the Countess of Pembroke and for nobody else.
Between the two there is Kyd's translation of Garnier's
Cornelia or so, and that is all.
For this we have undoubtedly reason to be thankful,
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 225
and so have the Spaniards. Both nations had the
Advantages of spirit to be themselves on their stage,
this. which is something ; and then we have
had a freer Shakespeare, a more spontaneous Lope,
than would have been possible if the three unities and
the complete separation of tragedy from comedy had
been accepted in the two countries. Yet we may be
thankful with more moderation than we commonly
show. It is not to be taken for granted that the
choice lay between freedom and a convention. It
was rather between one convention and another.
The Spanish stage is not unconventional. It has a
different convention from the French that is all.
Ours made its own rules, less precise than the Spanish
or the classical, but none the less real. "Tanto se
pierde por carta de mas, como por carta de menos," says
the Spanish proverb. The card too much is a loss
as much as the card too little ; and a convention which
says " You shall " is no less tyrannical than the con-
vention which says " You shall not." A drama which
Andthciimi- w iH allow no mixture of comedy with
tations. tragedy is unquestionably limited, and is
condemned to give no full picture of life. But a
drama which is forced to insert comic scenes is
equally under an obligation. The clown who figures
as porter in Macbeth is not necessarily more in place
than the murder of a king would have been in The
Taming of the Shrew. To say that you may fairly
keep your comedy unmixed by tragedy, but must
never allow your tragedy to be unrelieved by comic
scenes, is as arbitrary a rule as any other. Un-
P
226 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
doubtedly the reaction from the strained emotion
of tragedy to lighter feeling is natural and that is
the sufficient artistic justification for the jests of
Hamlet. But this just observation does not excuse
the insertion into a tragic action of independent
comic scenes which have no necessary connection
with the main personages and action.
The history of the Elizabethan drama is the history
of the formation of an English dramatic convention.
The questions are what it was, and what were its
merits. These questions are not settled by the answer
that Shakespeare was the greatest of dramatists. That
he would have been in any case. What is greatest in
him his universal sympathy with all nature and his
unerring truth to life was wholly personal. He
shared it with nobody. If the Elizabethan drama is
Shakespeare, and a ring of men whom we are content
to know wholly by " beauties," which beauties, again,
are lyric poetry and not drama, then it is quite super-
fluous to treat it as dramatic literature at all. The
Bible does not belong to a class, and neither does
Shakespeare in those qualities which raise him above
all others. "We must look at him as standing apart ;
and as for the others, if that for which they are worth
studying is their lyric poetry, or their mighty line, or
this or that touch of genuine pathos or fine interpreta-
tion of character in flashes, it is unnecessary to con-
sider them as writers of plays. If there was an Eliza-
bethan dramatic literature in any other sense than
this, that many poets wrote for the stage and put
noble poetry into a machinery not essentially dramatic,
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 227
it must be studied apart from what was purely Shake-
speare. And that is not difficult to do. On his pre-
decessors he could have no effect, and it is only
necessary to turn from him to any contemporary or
successor to see how little they shared with him in
all that was not mere language and fashion of the
time.
I trust it will not be thought superfluous to attempt
a definition of what we ought to look for in judging
dramatic literature. Dry den, whose example cannot
well be followed too closely in criticism, acknowledges
the need for a definition of a play early in his Essay
of Dramatic Poesy. Lisideius, one of the interlocutors
in the conversation, gives this, with the proviso that it
is rather a description than a definition : " A just and
tu dramatic lively image of human nature, representing
quality. ft s p ass i ons an d humours, and the changes
of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and
instruction of mankind." Now this is neither defini-
tion nor description of a play. There is not a word in
it which does not apply to Gil Bias. Dryden was
himself well aware of its insufficiency, for he makes
Crites raise " a logical objection against it " that it is
" only a genere et fi?ie, and so not altogether perfect."
Yet he leaves the matter standing there. That he,
who was himself a playwright, should have been con-
tent to do this when dealing with the drama is one
proof how much English literature had lost " the sense
of the theatre." If Lisideius had not been thinking of
literature, but of literature as adapted to the stage, he
Avould have said (but in Dryden's incomparably better
228 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
way) something like this : " A play is an action, put
before an audience by dialogue and representation,
forming a coherent whole, in which all the parts sub-
serve a general purpose, and are dramatically good
only in so far as they do." Lyric beauty, good moral
reflection, vigorous deliveries of human nature, are,
however good in themselves, as little able to make a
good play as the most beautiful ornament is to make
a fine building.
It is the unity of the action which constitutes the
good play, and it may be obtained by different methods.
A dramatist may obtain unity by means of the passion
or by the working out of a single situation. Of the
great Greek dramatists I cannot speak with expert
authority, but as far as they are visible in translations
as in a glass darkly, they appear to have achieved
unity in this way to the full. The chorus,
Spanish, which in inferior hands offers irresistible
and French temptations for wandering talk, always
drama. 5 . ,., , .
carries on the action, while what we see is
the outward and visible sign of some terrible force
working behind. This ever-present sense of the some-
thing reserved driving before it what we are allowed
to see, with an undeviating directness of aim, gives
by itself an awful unity of interest to the tragedy.
The Spanish dramatist gains his unity by artful con-
struction of his story, and by subordinating passion
and character to the mere action. The French stage
in its great days aimed at using the same resources as
the Greek, though with certain mechanical changes,
such as the dropping of the chorus, and the division of
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 229
its work among the personages, which in itself was no
great gain.
Our own drama adopted neither device. It neither
concentrated its attention on the one situation or
unit >i of the passion, nor did it subordinate all to the
English piay. ma rch of an action. There remained to it
to do this to secure unity by giving to the play the
unity of life itself by showing us human nature work-
ing in all its manifestations, of love and hate, heroism
and cowardice, laughter and tears. Every rule suffers
exceptions. There are many pure comedies in our
dramatic literature, while Ben Jonson showed at least
a strong leaning to accept the unnecessary unities of
time and place in order to attain more effectually the
indispensable unity of action. Yet the distinguishing
feature of our great dramatic literature on its construc-
tive side is that it threw tragedy and comedy together,
and that it relied for its unity on an inner binding
force of life. This is the greatest skill of all, but it is
for that very reason the most difficult of attainment.
It presupposes in the dramatist a sympathy with all
humanity from Lear to Parolles, and with that a power
of creation and construction incomparably greater than
is needed to build by the classic rules, or to put together
an artful story worked out by stock-figures on the
Spanish model. Its dangers are obvious. When the
dramatist had no natural tragic power he would be in
constant peril of falling into fustian. When he was
deficient in a sense of humour, he would be tempted
to fall back for his comedy on mere grossness. His
action, being free to wander in time and space, would
230 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
have a constant tendency to straggle, and the play
would become a mere succession of scenes following
one another "like geese on a common." The strict
following of the classic rules, which work for concen-
tration, helps to preserve the dramatist from these
errors, at the cost of limiting his freedom. To Shake-
speare they would have been a slavery, but it is not
certain that they would not have been a support to
Marlowe or Middleton, who stood much less in need
of freedom than of discipline and direction. So while
feeling duly thankful for that resistance to the
authority of the classics which helped to give us
Shakespeare, we may remember that it also helped to
give us many comic scenes which it is hardly possible
to read without feeling ashamed for the men who
wrote them, and many so-called plays which are only
shapeless combinations of scenes, bound together by
no other nexus than thread and paper.
Ralph Roister Doister, the earliest known English
comedy, was written apparently about 1530, and
Ralph Roister printed some fifteen or sixteen years later.
Doistcr. The date of the printing of a play is notori-
ously no test of its date of composition or acting, but
only of the time when the actors had no further motive
for keeping it in their own hands in manuscript that
is, when it ceased to be popular on the stage. Ralph
Roister Doistcr was the work of Nicholas Udall, head-
master of Eton and Westminster, and is full of remin-
iscences of Plautus. Ealph Koister Doister himself
is our old friend the miles gloriosvs adapted to the
conditions of London life in the time of Edward VI,
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 231
Matthew Merrygreek, described as a " needy humor-
ist/' is our no less familiar friend the parasite. Merry-
greek feeds on the vanity and credulity of Ealph
Koister Doister, who is made up of conceit, bluster,
and cowardice who thinks that every woman who
sees him falls in love with him, and is of course
baffled and beaten in the end. It is written in suffi-
ciently brisk lines of no great regularity; and there
are much duller plays. Ralph's courtship of Dame
Christian Custance, who will have none of him, is
lively. On the whole, the play leaves the impression
that Udall was more than a mere imitator of Plautus,
but it is only the school exercise of a clever man. 1
" The right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy,
entitled Gammer Gurtons Needle" is believed, on good
Gammer gut- evidence, to have been written by John
ton's Needle. g t iil (1543 ?-1608), a churchman, who died
Bishop of Bath and "Wells. It was played at his
college, Christ's, Cambridge, in 1566, but may have
been written three years earlier. However that may
be, it was certainly written in his youth. Nothing
could well be less academic or clerical. Though
divided into five acts, it is, in fact, a farce not unlike
much mediaeval French comedy. The plot is one of
a familiar class which will always hold the stage under
new forms, and the working out is of the simplest.
Gammer Gurton loses her needle, and then finds it,
just where she ought to have looked for it, after up-
setting the house by searching in unlikely places, and
disturbing the village by unjustly suspecting her
1 Dodsley's Old Plays. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.
232 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
neighbours of theft. It is unquestionably too long,
but it is very far from dull. There is a directness of
purpose in Still which is decidedly dramatic, and with
it a power of characterisation by no means contempt-
ible. All the personages, and notably the wandering
beggar, Deccon the Bedlam, have a marked truth to
humble human nature. They are coarse, but not wil-
fully and unnecessarily coarse. There are none of
those strings of mere nasty words and images which
serve as foil to the poetry of the true Elizabethan
comedy. Still is honestly naturalistic, neither toning
down the truth of the rough talk of rude people, nor
lavishing bad language from an apparent wish to
startle. If he had not entered the Church, which
made it indecent for him to work for the stage, he
might have given us a series of spirited naturalistic
comedies. As it is, Gammer Chirton's Needle stands
alone. The facts that it contains the capital drinking-
song, " Back and side go bare, go bare," and that it is
written in the prevailing seven-foot metre, are all that
connect it with the later comedy. 1
We have seen that the Latin comedy had much to
do with Ralph Roister Doister. The Latin tragedy is
directly responsible for a much more ambitious effort,
the play variously named Gorhoduc, or
Ferrex and Porrex, generally attributed to
Sir Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst,
though a claim is made for the part-authorship at
least of Thomas Norton. If it had been the in-
tention of the author to establish a prejudice against
1 Podsley's Old Plays. Edited l>y W, Carew Hazlitt. Vol. iii.
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 233
the regular tragedy in the minds of his audience,
he could hardly have done better than write this
painfully dull play. The very metre, which is the
heroic couplet, moves by jerky steps of the same
length, and is inexpressibly wooden. Nor is that by
any means all. Gorbocluc has all the faults and none
of the possible merits of its kind. The "regular"
tragedy on the classic model needs the concentration
of the interest on one strong situation. But Gorbocluc
is a long story of how the king of that name divides
his kingdom between his sons ; how they quarrel, and
one kills the other ; how the mother slays the slayer ;
how the people kill her and her husband, and are
then killed by the nobles. It is all told in speeches
of cruel length, and is necessarily full of repetitions.
A very curious feature of the play is the insertion
between the acts of dumb shows intended to enforce
the excellence of union, the evils of flattery or of
anarchy, which have a decided flavour of the morality.
The Induction to The Mirror of Magistrates and The
Complaint of Buckingham remain to show that Sir
T. Sackville was a poet; but Gorboduc is the very
ample proof that he was no dramatist. The play,
which one thinks must have bored her extremely,
was given before the queen by the gentlemen of the
Inner Temple in 1561. 2
The suspension not, indeed, of activity but of
growth in literature which marks the first years of
the queen's reign was as marked in drama as in pure
poetry. Udall, Still, and Sir T. Sackville had no
i Dodsley's Old Plays, 1825.
234 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
following to speak of, and it was not until a now
generation had grown up that the first signs of the
real Elizabethan drama became visible. The produc-
tion of pieces for the theatre did not cease, but they
belong to the past not to the coming time. The taste
for shows was strong, and it was served. But the
pieces of this interval are the descendants of the
morality, not the ancestors of Shakespeare's drama.
We can leave them aside, for they had no following.
There is no Auto Sacramental in English literature.
Formation of Before that could come it was first neces-
the theatre. sarv t have a theatre, in the sense of a
place of public amusement, managed by professional
actors, and not only an occasional stage on which
corporations and societies performed from time to
time. The formation of the theatre in the material
sense was the work of these earlier years ; but this,
which is, moreover, very obscure, does not belong
properly to the history of literature. It is enough to
note that a body of men working together did here
what Lope de Eueda did in Spain. A class of actors
was formed. Like him, they often wrote themselves.
In both countries the theatre was thoroughly popular,
which was not, it may be, altogether an advantage.
At least the fact that the same man might be manager
of a theatre and keeper of a bear-garden as Alleyn
was points to the existence of influences which did
not visibly work for the production of good literature
in the theatre. In England, as in Spain, much was
inevitably written to please what may be called the
bear-garden element of the audience. In Spain this
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 235
tended to separate itself into the pasos, mojigangas,
entremcses, dances, and so forth, which were given
between the three jornadas of the comedia. With ns
all was thrown into the five acts of the play, and this
difference in mechanical arrangement was not without
its influence on literary form. .
The flowering of the Elizabethan drama dates from
the middle years of the queen's reign. By this time
the theatre was formed, and the taste for it was strong.
It naturally attracted many writers, if only because
it was the most direct and effective way in which
they could make themselves heard, to say nothing of
the fact that it was by far the most certainly lucrative
of all forms of literature, and therefore had an intelli-
gible attraction for all who lived by their pens. Among
them it was inevitable that there should be not a few
who had no natural faculty for dramatic literature
Lodge, for instance, and Nash. Both lived much
about the theatre, and their relations with it, and the
writers for it, figure largely in the gossiping pamphlets
of the time. But they wrote for it only by necessity
or accident, and their dramatic work is altogether
subordinate. As much might be not unfairly said of
John Lyly ; but his plays are so curious, and held so
considerable a place in the estimation of his time, that
he cannot be put wholly aside.
Custom has ruled that the name of Lyly shall be
followed by the words " the author of JShiphues" Cus-
tom has in this case decided rightly. Lyly
was always the author of Ewphues. This
didactic tale falls to be discussed with the prose of the
236 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
time, but we may note that it is composed of a very
slight framework of story, from which blow out clouds
of words arranged in quaint and not inelegant patterns.
No drama can be made out of such materials, and,
properly speaking, the plays of Lyly are not dramatic. 1
Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was attached to
the Court, though, according to his own melancholy
summing-up of the results of his labours, he obtained
nothing as a reward. He was born in Kent about
1554, and was educated at Oxford. It may be that he
went on to Cambridge, according to what was then a
common custom. So little is known of the rest of his
life that biographers have been driven to make matter
by identifying him with a certain Mr Lilly, a bold,
witty atheist, who harassed Hall in his first living,
and whose sudden death from the plague is recorded by
the satirist and future Bishop of Norwich, with pious
satisfaction, among the various examples of divine in-
tervention on his own behalf. If he sat in several Par-
liaments, Lyly cannot have altogether wanted means
and friends. He may have lived into the reign of James
L, and died in 1606. His plays were part of his
service as a courtier. They were not written for the
vulgar theatre, but to be performed by the " children
of Paul's " or " of the Queen's Chapel " before the
queen at the New Year feasts. Here he would have
an audience which already admired his Euphucs,
published in 1580, and was well content to hear him
" parle Euphuism." To this we may partly attribute
the fact that, while his contemporaries were making
1 Dramatic Works of John Lyly. Edited by F. W. Fairholt, 1858.
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 237
blank verse the vehicle of the higher English drama,
he showed a marked preference for the use of prose,
and also for mythological and classical subjects.
The names of his undoubted plays are Alexander and
Campaspe ; Sapho and Phao ; Bndimion, or The Man
in the Moon ; Gallathea ; Mydas ; Mother Bomhie ; Tlie
Woman in the Moon ; and Love's Metamorphosis. They
were written between 1584 and the end of the century.
Lyly, as has been said, was no dramatist. His plays
do not advance in any coherent story. They rotate or
straggle. When, as in Mother Bombie, he did attempt
to construct a comedy of intrigue, the result is mere
confusion. The faults of his style have been made
familiar to all the world by Falstaff s immortal address
to Prince Hal : " For though the camomile, the more
it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the
more it is wasted the sooner it wears. . . . There
is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and
it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch :
this pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile,"
and so on. The antitheses work with the regularity
of pistons; there is a steady march past of similes,
drawn as often as not from a natural history worthy
of Sir John Mandeville, and arranged in twos or
threes. His humour is of the kind which makes a
reader imitate the example of Sancho when he saw his
master cutting capers in his shirt on the slope of the
Sierra Morena retire in order to escape the spectacle
of a good gentleman making an exhibition of himself.
Yet in his grave and poetic moments there is a prim
charm about Lyly, and a frosty moonlight glitter which
238 EUROPEAN LFTEBATURI LATER RENAISSANCE.
is attractive. His snatches of song are among the
best in an age of lyric poetry.
Lyric poet tempted or driven by necessity on to the
stage is the description which must be given of two of
his contemporaries, who in other respects
differed from him very widely Robert
Greene and George Peele. If we are bound to take
his own confessions, and the abuse poured on his
grave by that bad -blooded pedant Gabriel Harvey,
quite seriously, we are compelled to believe that
Greene ended a thoroughly despicable life by a very
sordid death. But a little wholesome scepticism may
well be applied both to Greene's deathbed repentance
and to the abuse of his implacable enemy. There was
in the Elizabethan time a taste for a rather maunder-
ing morality, and for a loud-mouthed scolding style of
abuse. The pamphleteers talked a great deal about
themselves, and conducted wit combats, which were
redolent of the bear-garden and backsword combats. La
Rochefoucauld's observation, that there are men who
would rather speak evil of themselves than not speak of
themselves at all, may also be kept in mind. A weak,
conceited, self-indulgent man, with a genuine vein of
lyric poetry and of tenderness, is perhaps as accurate
a summing up as can be given of Greene. He was
born in 1560 and died in 1592, worn out by a
Bohemian life led in a very exuberant time. There
seems to be no doubt that the end was very miserable.
Greene has enjoyed an unfortunate notoriety on the
strength of a passage in his last pamphlet, The Groat's
Worth of Wit, in which he abuses Shakespeare.
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 239
Everybody has heard of the " only Shake-scene in the
country," the player adorned with the feathers of
Greene himself and other real poets. Historically it
is of some value as proving that Shakespeare was
known and prosperous in 1592. It also helps to give
the measure of Greene, that while he was affecting for
the press all the agony of a deathbed repentance
partly no doubt sincere enough and was exhorting
his friends to flee destruction, he could break out, with
all the venom of wounded vanity, against the man
who had succeeded where he himself had failed. If
we had the good fortune to know nothing of the life
of Greene, he would rank as a respectable writer who
had a share in a time of preparation for a far greater
than himself or any of his associates. His prose stories
largely adapted from the Italian include one, Pan-
closto, which had the honour in its turn to be adapted
and made into poetic drama by Shakespeare in The
Winter's Tale. His undoubted work for the stage
which survives was all published after his death with
bad or little editing. The first printed, Orlando Furioso,
taken from a passage in Ariosto, is hopelessly cor-
rupt. The others are A Looking -Glass for London
and England; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; Scottish
Story of James TV.; the Comical History of Alphonsus,
King of Aragon; and the doubtful George-a-Green, the
Pinner of Wakefield} With Greene we come to some-
thing at once very different from Lyly, and quite new,
to the vehement exuberant Elizabethan drama, which
in strong hands reaches the loftiest heights of poetry
1 Dramatic Works of Robert Greene. Dyce, 1883.
240 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
and passion, but in others falls to the lowest depths
of rant, or runs to the very madness of fustian. It is
not the greater achievement that we must look for in
Greene. His heroics are " comical," in a sense not
designed by the printer of Alphonsits. Drawcansir
is hardly an exaggeration of that hero, and is incom-
parably more coherent. His comic scenes have too
commonly the air of mere hack work put in to supply
parts for the clowns of the theatre, while his plots are
mere successions of events frequently unconnected
with one another. But in the midst of all is the
undeniable vein of tenderness and lyric poetry. All
the scenes in his best play, Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay, in which Margaret the Fair Maid of Fressing-
field is introduced, are charmingly fresh and natural.
With more discipline, and no temptation to serve the
taste of the time for King Cambyses' vein, Greene
might have been the author of pleasant little plays
of a poetic sentimental order written in a charming
simple style.
His contemporary George Peele was slightly the older
man, and outlived Greene a very few years. He was
born about 1558, and was dead by 1598, in a
very sordid way. Of his life very little is
known except that he was the son of the " clerk " of
Christ's Hospital, that he was educated at Broadgates
Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, and that he was
a thorough Bohemian. His reputation in this respect
was so solidly founded that he was made the hero of
a book of "jests," which, in fact, are tales of roguery
mostly reprinted from older French originals. Peele
THE EAKLIEE DRAMATISTS. 241
worked regularly for a company of actors, and no
doubt did much which cannot now be traced. Com-
mentators, who have striven hard to prove the un-
provable in the history of the Elizabethan Drama, have
assigned him portions of the First and Second Parts
of Henry VI} His undoubted plays are The
Arraignment of Paris, The famous Chronicle of King
Edward I., The Battle of Alcazar, The Old Wives' Tale,
and David and Fair Bethsabe. To these may be added
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, which is written
in the old seven -foot metre, and differs from the
others greatly. But custom has assigned it to Peele,
who indeed uses the long line elsewhere. Peele was
a decidedly stronger man than Greene, but a writer
of the same stamp and limitations. What is best in
him is the lyric note and the tenderness. The first
is well shown in not a few passages of the Arraign-
ment of Paris, a somewhat overgrown masque, written
for the Court and to flatter Elizabeth ; and the second
in the David and Bethsabe. His chronicle play,
Bdtvard L, has a certain historical value as illustrat-
ing the growth of the class, and it is notorious for the
hideous libel it contains on the character of Eleanor
of Castile ; while The Battle of Alcazar is interesting
in another way, as an example of the boyish " blood
and thunder" popular at the time, of which Mar-
lowe's Tamburlainc is the masterpiece. It is the
equivalent to Greene's Alphonsus; but if not more
sane it is more substantial, and does really contain
1 Dramatic WorTcs of George Peele. Dyce, 1883.
Q
242 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
lines which are poetry and not rant, though the rant
is there in profusion.
Thomas Kyd need hardly be mentioned here except
for the purpose of leading on to the master of the
school, Marlowe. He is a very shadowy
figure, who may have been born in 1557,
and may have died in 1595. His voice is still audible
in The Spanish Tragedy, and perhaps in Jcronimo.
The first-named is a continuation of the second if
the second were not written to supply an introduction
to the first. They too are " blood and thunder," with
the occasional flash of real poetry, which is found
wellnigh everywhere in that wondrous time.
Greene, Peele, and Kyd, in spite of the independent
merit of parts of their work, are mainly interesting
because they were forerunners of Shakespeare, and
aided in the formation of the English drama. If it
had wanted Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, or David
and Bethsabe, it would no doubt have been the poorer,
but by things not great in themselves, and still less
indispensable. If it had wanted the author of Doctor
Faustus, it would have been the poorer by a very
great poet. Christopher Marlowe was born
Marlowe.
in 1564, in the same year as Shakespeare
and was the son of a shoemaker. Probably by the
help of patrons he was educated at the grammar-
school of the town, and went from it to Corpus
Christi College at Cambridge. The other events of
his life are mainly matter of guesswork till we come
to the fact that he was stabbed in a tavern brawl at
Deptford on the 1st June 1593. He was accused of
THE BARTJTBft DRAMATISTS. 243
exceeding even the large Bohemian licence of life of
his contemporaries, and of atheism. The evidence is
neither direct nor good, but it is certain that a warrant
for his arrest, and that of several of his friends, on the
charge of disseminating irreligious opinions, was issued
by the Privy Council about a fortnight before he was
killed. At a time when all the once accepted founda-
tions of religion were being called in question, sheer
denial was naturally not unknown. Given the vehe-
ment spirit of all his work, it is as probable that
Marlowe went this length as that he stopped short of
it. The truth is in this case of little importance, for
Marlowe's place is among the poets, not the contro-
versialists, of the sixteenth century.
As a poet Marlowe stands immediately below Spenser
and Shakespeare, but between them and every other
contemporary. He fails to rank with them because he
wanted their range, and also because there was some-
thing in him not only unbridled, but incapable of sub-
mitting to order and measure. For a moment, and
from time to time, he shoots up to the utmost height
of poetry, but only in a beam of light, which lasts for
a very brief space and then sinks out of view. In
these happy passages of inspiration lie showed what
could be done with English blank verse. It had been
written before him, since it was first used by Surrey
in his translation of the ^Eneid, but Marlowe was its
real creator as an instrument of English poetry. This
was his great achievement. His fragment of Hero and
Zeander, though a beautiful poem of the mythological
and rather lascivious order popular at the time, and
244 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
full of a most passionate love of beauty, nowhere at-
tains to the height of the constantly quoted " purple
patches " from the first part of Tamlurlaine, from Dr
Faustus, or from The Jew of Malta. In themselves
they are unsurpassable, yet his plays cannot by any
possible stretch of charity be called good. What we
remember of them is always the passage of poetry, ex-
pressing in the most magnificent language some ex-
treme passion of ambition, greed, fear, or grasping
arrogance, or some sheer revel of delight in the splen-
dour of jewels and the possibilities of wealth. There
are few scenes, in the proper sense of the word, and
there is much monotonous repetition. The second
part of Tamburlaine is the same thing over and
over. The first two acts of The Jew of Malta promise
well, and then the play falls off into incoherence and
absurdity. Marlowe, though an incomparably greater
man, seems to have been as blind as Greene or Peele
ever were to what is meant by consistency. His Bar-
abas, for instance, who is represented as a wicked able
man, is suddenly found putting his neck in the power
of a new-bought slave in a fashion hardly conceivable
in the case of a mere fool. Dr Faustus holds together
no better than Barabas. There is something more
astonishing still. A poet may be able to express
passion in splendid verse, and yet be able neither to
construct a story nor create a character, but we do not
expect to find him dropping into what, as mere lan-
guage, is childishly inept. Now that is what Marlowe
did. The difference is not that between Wordsworth
at his best and his worst. It is the difference between
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 245
Dryden and the bellman's verses between poetry and
rank fustian, or commonplace. His short life, and the
conditions in which it was passed, made it inevitable
that the bulk of Marlowe's work should be but little.
Tamourlaine, Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II,
and The, Massacre of P a ris sum up the list of the plays
which we can be sure were wholly his. The Tragedy of
Dido was written in collaboration with Nash. Beyond
this there is a supposition, supported by greater or
less probability, that he had a share in Lust's Dominion
and in Titus Andronicus and Henry VI. To the plays
are to be added the fragment of Hero and Leander, The
Passionate Shepherd, and the translations from Ovid
written in his earlier days. 1
If the question is asked what this body of poets
had done to advance the development of the Eng-
charactero/ nsn drama, the answer must be that they
these writers, fr^ ^one something to improve its lan-
guage. More can hardly be claimed for them. They
certainly give no example of how to construct a
dramatic story, nor did they create a consistent
interesting character, unless Greene's Fair Margaret
be allowed as an exception. That you did very well
as long as you took care that something happened,
whether it was what the personage would have done,
or what would follow from what went before, or not,
was apparently an accepted rule with all of them. It
was somewhat strange that it should have been so, for
all were educated men, and were deeply conscious
of their learning. Even if they did not take the
1 Works of Christopher Marlowe. Dyce, 1865.
246 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
classic model, which, as they were all far better
qualified to write a chorus than to construct a plot,
it would have been to their advantage to do, they
might have learnt, without going beyond Horace, to
avoid their grosser faults. It must not be forgotten
that none of their surviving plays were published
in favourable circumstances. All may have been,
and some certainly were, subject to manipulation
while in the hands of the actors. But even when
allowance is made for this, it is undeniable that the
writers of the school of Marlowe, to use a not very ac-
curate but convenient expression, were totally wanting
in any sense of proportion. To judge by much that
they were content to write, they cannot have known
the difference between good and bad. The incoherent
movement of their plays was perhaps partly due to
the want of scenery. When the audience would take
a curtain for Syracuse, they would also take it for
Ephesus or for twenty different places, indoors and
out, in one act. There was, therefore, no check on
the playwright, who could move with all the licence
of the story-teller. But then they did not give their
plays even the coherence of a story. As they were
all dependent on companies of actors, they may often
have put in what their employers told them was
needed to please a part of the audience. It is to
this necessity that we may attribute the comic scenes
of Br Faustus if we wish to find an excuse for Marlowe
and if, indeed, they were his, and not written in by
others at the orders of Henslowe the manager. But
this does not account for all. When it is allowed for,
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 247
enough remains to show that all these predecessors of
Shakespeare were unable to see the difference between
horseplay and humour, and were almost equally
blind to the immense distinction between the " grand
manner" and mere fustian. This last, indeed, had
an irresistible attraction for them, and not less for
Marlowe than for the others. If it had not he would
never have put the rant of Tamhurlaine into the mouth
which spoke the superb lines beginning "If all the pens
that ever poets held," nor would he have allowed Bara-
bas to sink from the gloomy magnificence of his begin-
ning into a mere grotesque puppet Jew with a big nose.
"All that is known with any degree of certainty
concerning Shakespeare is, that he was born at
Stratford - upon - Avon married and had
Sliakespeare.
children there went to London, where he
commenced actor, and wrote poems and plays re-
turned to Stratford, made his will, died, and was
buried." This summary, which Steevens put in a
note to the ninety-third sonnet, is as true as when
it was written in the last century. It is not quite
exhaustive, for we know that Shakespeare had the
respect and affection of his contemporaries from
Chettle to Ben Jonson, and also that he was a very
prosperous man. Yet Steevens included nearly all
that the most extreme industry has been able to
discover of Shakespeare's life. The date of his birth
was on or just before the 23rd April 1564, and he
died on that day in 1616. From the age of about
twenty till he was nearly forty he lived in London as
actor or manager. In his youth he wrote two poems
248 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
in the prevailing fashion, Venus and Adonis and The
Rape of Lucrece. The sonnets published in 1609 belong
to a later period, but it is impossible to fix their date.
His chief work was always done for the company to
which he belonged. For that he recast old plays or
wrote new ones. The poems alone were published by
himself. His sonnets appeared in a pirated edition
during his life, and his plays after his death, when his
fellow-actors had no longer an overpowering motive
to keep them for themselves. On this very slight
framework there has been built a vast superstructure
of guesswork of which very little need be said here.
It is not only the large element of sheer folly in
these guesses, the imbecile attempt to prove that the
Guesses about m &n of whom Ben Jonson spoke and
us ufe. wrote the well-known words was not the
author of his own plays, which may be put aside.
Nor is it even the hardly less imbecile effort to find
political journalism, or other things didactic, social,
and scientific, in his dramas. Don M. Menendez,
speaking of the very similar race of Cervantistas, has
said that this is the resource of people, often respect-
able for other reasons, who being unable to enjoy
literature as literature, but being also conscious that
they ought to enjoy it, have been driven to look for
something else in their author. These good people
have fixed on Shakespeare, as their like have settled
on Moliere in France and Cervantes in Spain. Some
great names may be quoted to give a certain au-
thority to the supposition that Shakespeare unlocked
his heart with the key of the sonnet. For their
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 249
sake we must not dismiss this guess as uncere-
moniously as we may well turn out the egregious
Bacon theory and its like. Yet it is perhaps not
essentially wiser. Even if we accept it, nothing is
proved except this, that Shakespeare experienced
some of the common fortunes of men of letters and
other men, and then this, that he carried the in-
delicacy of his time to its possible extreme. We
know that his " sugared sonnets " were handed about
among his friends so freely that they got into print.
So much is certain. If they did unlock his heart,
and if the sonnet beginning " My mistress' eyes are
nothing like the sun " did refer to a particular person
who must have been perfectly well known to many
of its readers, then this very great poet and dramatist
must have been singularly destitute of the beginnings
of a sense of shame, even according to the standard
of the sixteenth century. It is impossible to prove
that those who take this view are wrong and if the
word evidence has any meaning, equally impossible to
prove that they are right. But be their belief right or
wrong, the value of the sonnets is not affected. They
are valuable, not because they reveal the passing
fortunes of one man, however great, but because they
express what is permanent in mankind in language of
everlasting excellence.
The work by which Shakespeare was first known
order of in his time were the poems Venus and
us work. Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which
appeared respectively in 1593 and 1594. Though the
dates of composition and order of succession of his
250 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
plays are obscure, it is certain that he was working
for the stage before the first of these years. But
as yet he was rather redoing the work of others
than producing for himself. The sonnets were widely
known by 1598, and were in all probability inspired,
as so many other collections of the same class, though
of very different degrees of merit, were, by the
example of Astrophel and Stella. The chronology of
the plays is, it may be repeated, difficult to settle,
but on the whole they may be asserted to have
followed the order in which it would appear natural
to assign them on internal evidence. First come
those in which his hand, though never to be mis-
taken, is seen in least power Pericles and Henry VI.
Then come others in which we get most of the
mere fashion of the time, its euphuism and other
affectations The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's
Labour Lost, &c. Next follow the long series of
romantic plays and chronicle plays, darkened by
tragedy and irradiated by humour The Midsummer
Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV., As Yon
Like It. The great tragedies with what it is perhaps
more accurate to call the greater drama, The Tempest
and The Winter's Tale, belong to the later years.
The difficulty which meets the critic who wishes
to speak, after so many others, of Cervantes, stands
Estimates of in an even more formidable shape on the
Shakespeare. path Q f him who wishes to gpeak of gj^
speare. Most generations have produced those who
have spoken badly. When they were honest, and
were not also incapable of literature, which has some-
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 251
times been the case, they were enslaved to some
fashion, some pedantry of their own time. With
these have been the merely inept, and there has
not been wanting the buffoon, straining after singu-
larity. The gutter and the green-room have been
audible. But by the side of these there has been
an unbroken testimony to Shakespeare borne by the
greatest masters of English literature. It began with
Ben Jonson, and has lasted till it has become well-
nigh superfluous amid the general agreement of the
world. As in the case of Cervantes, this agreement
of the competent judges, this universal acceptance,
are by themselves enough to dispense us from proving
that in him there was something more than was
merely national. Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jonson,
all the Elizabethans, belong to us and to others only
as objects of literary study, as Garcilaso, Lope,
Calderon, all the others of Spain's great time, belong
to the Spaniards. But Shakespeare and Cervantes,
though the first is very English and the second very
Spanish, belong to the whole world. Their country-
men may understand them best, but there is that
in them which is common to all humanity. The
one star differs from the other in glory ; for if
Cervantes brought the matter of his masterpiece
under the "species of eternity," he brought much
less than Shakespeare, who included everything ex-
cept religion, and leaves us persuaded of his power
to deal with that. Don Quixote is equivalent to one
of the great dramas. Yet they meet in this supreme
quality of universality. So much can be said of only
252 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
one among their contemporaries, the Frenchman
Montaigne, in whom also there was something which
speaks to all men at all times.
The work of Shakespeare falls into two classes the
pure poetry and the drama. The second is, indeed,
Divisions of intensely poetic, both in form and spirit,
his work. so th^ tj ie division becomes unintelligent
if we push it too far. But when his poetry is dramatic
when it is employed to set forth an action by talk
it is used for another purpose, and is found in combin-
ation with other qualities than are to be found in the
pure poems. These are the Venus and Adonis, The
Rape of Lucrece, the sonnets, and the lyrics, which
are mostly to be found in the plays, but can be
detached from them. It is a sufficient proof of the
vast sweep of Shakespeare's genius that if we had
nothing of him but these, the loss to the literature of
the world would be irreparable, but he would still be
a great poet. The Venus and Adonis and
The poems.
The Rape of Lucrece are greater poems than
Marlowe's Hero and Zeander, more intense in passion,
more uniformly magnificent in expression. Marlowe
may reach their level when he is speaking to the full
extent of his power, but he is not always there.
Shakespeare always leaves the impression that he is
within the limit of what he could do. The lyrics are
the most perfect achievements of an age of lyric
poetry. It is the presence of this note which atones
for the much that is wanting in Lyly, Peele, and
Greene. But if their best is put beside Shakespeare
it suffers, as a pretty water-colour would suffer if hung
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 253
by the side of a Velasquez. They lose colour by the
comparison. The age was rich in sonnets. It pro-
duced the passion and melody of Sidney, the beauty of
Spenser, the accomplishment of Daniel, and the vigour
of Drayton. Yet Shakespeare's sonnets are no less
distinctly the greatest than his lyrics. It is even here
that his pre-eminence is the most marked, for he has
triumphed over more. The lyric is free and is brief.
The sonnet is bound by rigid laws, and a cycle of
sonnets is peculiarly liable to become monotonous, to
be redundant, to be mechanical and frigid. But
Shakespeare's sonnets, whether or no they be in the
order in which he would have put them, or were
written to fall into any particular order, gave a varied
yet consistent play of thought and passion, over-
shadowed by the ever-present consciousness of "the
barren rage of death's eternal cold." In them, too, we
always feel the superiority of the faculty to the work
done. There is no toil, no struggle to express. What
would have made another poet immortal, if said with
manifest effort, is all poured out in"a first fine care-
less rapture."
And beyond this ample forecourt and noble portico
lies the far - spreading palace of the plays. The
dramatic work of Shakespeare is greater
The dramas. . _ . .
than the purely poetic, mamly because of
its vastly greater scope. It contains all that is in the
poems, and so much more that they are, as it were,
lost in the abundance. In this stately pleasure-house
there are no doubt parts which diligent examination
will show to bear the traces of inexperience in the
254 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSAKCK.
builder, fragments of the work of others, and orna-
ments in the passing taste of the time. Shakespeare
laboured for the Globe Theatre. He rearranged stock
plays, and now and then he passed what he found
in them, not because it was good but because it
would suffice. He was an Elizabethan, and like others,
he let his spirits and his energies relax in mere play-
ing with words, in full-mouthed uproarious noise, and
the quibbles which made Dr Johnson shake his head.
In common with every other dramatist from Sophocles
downwards, he had to consider his theatre and his
audience. The mere man of letters writing " closet "
plays can forget the stage, and be punished by the
discovery that his masterpiece won't act. Shake-
speare aimed at being acted. His stage had no
change of scenery, and his audience loved action.
Therefore he could put in more words than can be
admitted when time must be found for the opera-
tions of the stage - carpenter and the scene -shifter.
Therefore also he could allow himself a licence in
the change of scene, which is impossible when it
carries with it a change of scenery. But all this is
either easily separable or can be amended by re-
arrangement. And therein lies the absolute differ-
ence between Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
The Jew of Malta could not be made an acting play
by any process of manipulation. Take from the best
of the others even from Ben Jonson what was
purely Elizabethan, and how much remains ? They
are excellent to read, and were good to act before an
audience which accepted their convention, but before
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 255
that only. For purely stage purposes, too, their con-
vention is inferior to the Spanish. The Dama Melin-
drosa would be easily intelligible and interesting to
any audience to-day, but not Every Man in his Humour,
or Epicene. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions
have been made and the scenes have been adapted to
new mechanical conditions, there still remains not in
all cases, indeed, but in most a play that is, a con-
sistent action carried on by possible characters, be-
having and speaking differently from ns in those things
which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in
all the essentials, both with themselves and with un-
changing human nature.
It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shake-
speare's plays their unity and their enduring vitality.
The superb verse, the faultless expression of every
human emotion, from the love of Romeo or the
intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque
devotion of Bardolph, " Would I were with him
wheresome'er he is, either in Heaven or in Hell,"
are the outward and visible signs of this inward and
spiritual truth to nature. Henry IV. and Henry V.
may seem to be but straggling plays when they are
compared with the exactly fitted plots of Lope de
Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action
of Eacine. So the free-growing forest-tree
The reality of # .
Shakespeare's is less trim and balanced than the clipped
yew. But it has the higher life and the
finer unity. The Henry V. who meets Falstaff with
" I know thee not, old man : fall to thy prayers ;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester !"
256 EUROPEAN L1TERATUKE LATEll KENAISSANCE.
is the same man as he who said
" I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness. . .
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill ;
Redeeming time when men think least I will."
Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent arch-
bishop to provide him with an excuse for a war of
aggression, and so having provided for both worlds,
takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the re-
sponsibility for the miseries of the war on the French.
In the tavern, in the council-chamber, on the battle-
field, by the sick-bed of his father, he is always the
same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able
selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magna-
nimity which costs him nothing a perfect portrait of
the " unconscious hypocrite." The circumstances may
change but not the man. He only adapts the out-
ward show to them. The incomparably more honest
nature of Falstaff is as consistent as the king's. He
is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor cruel, but who
simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously,
and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect
sincerity. Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral.
He is only exterior to morals. If he were cruel or
treacherous he would be horrible, but he is neither.
He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and ease-
loving animal. Given these two, and around them a
crowd of others, heroic, grotesque, or even only com-
monplace, all doing credible things on the green
earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made
THE EARLIER DRAMATISTS. 257
on the model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent,
because being real and true to life, the characters act
intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused, unnatural, or
inconsequent.
The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the
real nature of some of Shakespeare's characters is a
tribute to their reality. We are never in the least
doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille or
Eacine, or the galanes, damas, and jealous husbands of
Lope and Calderon. In them we have certain qualities,
certain manifestations of character, selected and kept
so well before us that they explain themselves, as a
Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. Even Moliere,
who comes nearest to Shakespeare, is simple and trans-
parent, because he also is, in comparison, narrow and
arbitrary. We may differ as to his purpose in writing
Don Juan or Tartuffe. Was he only drawing infidelity
and hypocrisy to make them hateful ? Was he speak-
ing for the libertins of the seventeenth century, the
forerunners of the philosophy of the eighteenth, who
were in revolt against the claim of religion to be a
guide of life and to control conduct? But the per-
sonages explain themselves. Again, when we meet
one of those sudden, unexplained, or insufficiently ex-
plained alterations of the whole nature of a man or
woman, so common with the other Elizabethan drama-
tists, and not very rare with the Spaniards, we know
it to be false to life, and put it down at once as a
clumsy playwright's device. But the characters of
Shakespeare are like the great figures of history, real,
and yet not always to be understood at once, because
R
258 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
they have the variety, the complexity, and the mystery
of nature.
The men who grew up around Shakespeare in the
last years of the sixteenth century, and who outlived
him, do not belong to our subject. It is enough to
point out how unlikely it was that they would continue
him. Ben Jonson, who was by far the strongest of
them, tacitly confessed that there could be no Shake-
spearian drama without Shakespeare, when he deliber-
ately sacrificed character to the convenient simplicity
of the "humour," and looked for the structural co-
herence of his plays to the unities. Other men who
were less wise preferred to keep the freedom which
they had not the strength to bear.
259
CHAPTER IX.
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS.
ELIZABETHAN PROSE TWO SCHOOLS OF WRITERS ROGER ASCHAM HIS
BOOKS AND STYLE WEBBE AND PUTTENHAM THE SENTENCE
EUPHUISM THE ' ARCADIA ' SIDNEY'S STYLE SHORT STORIES
NASH'S 'UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER' NASH AND THE PAMPHLET-
EERS MARTIN MARPRELATE ORIGIN OF THE MARPRELATE TRACTS
THE 'DIOTREPHES' COURSE OF THE CONTROVERSY ITS PLACE
IN LITERARY HISTORY HOOKER ' THE ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.'
The reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James,
which cover the period of the Later Renaissance in
Elizabethan England, were times of poetry and not of
prose. prose. It is true that much prose was
written, that some of it is admirable, and that more
is interesting. It is also true that some of the greatest
masters of English prose were alive, and were working
in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was
Bacon, belong, by their character, their influence, and
by the dates of their greatest achievements, to the
generations described as Jacobean and Caroline. In
the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very
2 GO EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
great name among prose - writers, that of Hooker ;
while before him and around him there are many
whose work was meritorious, or interesting, or curious
anything, in fact, but great and of not a few of
them it has to be said that in the long-run they were
not profitable.
The difficulty of marshalling these men of letters in
an orderly way is not small. The chronological arrange-
ment, besides being ill - adapted to contemporaries,
does not show their real relations to one another, or
their place in English literature. The division by
subject is utterly mechanical, when very different
matter was handled in the same style and often by
the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he
was writing Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, or Have ivith
you to Saffron Walden, or The Unfortunate Traveller.
We shall be better able to make a survey of this side
of the literature of the Later Eenaissance in England
if we class its prose- writers by their spirit and their
style, and treat their dates and their matter (which,
however, are not to be dismissed as of no importance)
as subordinate.
If this classification, then, is permitted, we may
divide the Elizabethan prose - writers into those whose
Two schools of aim it was to give " English matter in the
writers. English tongue for Englishmen," and those
who strove for something better, more ornate, lofty,
peculiar, and, as they held, more literary, than was to
be reached by the pursuit of this modest purpose.
The chief of the first in order of time was Ascham,
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 261
who, however, belonged to an earlier generation,
though he died in the queen's reign, and part of
his work was published after his death. The great
exemplar of the second was Lyly. In neither case
did the followers merely imitate their leader. There
is much in Hooker which is not in Ascham. The
enredados razones the roundabout affectations of the
authors of the Spanish Libros de Caballerias may
have had some influence on Sidney, who certainly
knew them. Kabelais and Aretino were much read
and imitated by some who also "parled Euphues."
But the distinction holds good none the less. On
the one side are those who, having something to
say, were content to say it perspicuously. On the
other were those who, whether they had something
to say or whether they were simply determined
to be talking, were careful to give their utterances
some stamp of distinction. If the first were liable
to become pedestrian, the second were threatened by
an obvious danger. It is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for the writer who
has got tired of milking the cow, and wants to milk
the bull, to escape sheer affectation which affecta-
tion, again, is in the great majority of cases a trick,
a juggle with words repeated over and over again.
The prose which was first written for literary pur-
poses in Elizabeth's time was an inheritance from the
reign of Henry VIII. It was the plain downright
style of Ascham the style of a man who thought in
Latin, and turned it into good current English.
262 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Yet the writers who were content to be as plain and
downright as Ascham do not require many words.
webbe and Such treatises as Webbe's Discourse of Eng-
PvttenMm. j^ Fodrie> p r i nte d in 1586, or the Arte
of English Poesie, published in 1589, and attributed
to George Puttenham by Carew in 1614, are interest-
ing, but it cannot be said that they hold an impor-
tant place in English literature, or had any consider-
able effect. The Arte of English Poesie is indeed a
very sane and thorough critical treatise, one proof
among others that if so many of the Elizabethan
writers were wild and shapeless, it was not because
none in their time thought wisely on questions of lit-
erary principle and of form. The explanation of their
extravagance may be more safely looked for else-
where. When Nash was reproached for his " boister-
ous compound words," he answered, "That no wind
that blows strong but is boisterous, no speech or words
of any power or force to confute, or persuade, but must
be swelling and boisterous." This is Brantome's ex-
cuse for the rodomontade, that superb and swelling
words go well with daring deeds. The Elizabethans
were so vehement and headlong, that they sought
naturally for the " word of power," for the altisonant
and ear-filling in language, and were more tolerant
of bombast than of the pedestrian. Their general
inability to confine themselves to the Sen-
ile sentence.
tence may be excused on the same ground.
They felt so much, and so strongly, that they could
not stop to disentangle and arrange. Certainly if
Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the
THE ELIZABETHAN PSOSK-WRITBRS. 263
light. Models were not wanting to them, and they
were not unaware of the virtue of being clear and
coherent. Whoever the author of Martin Marpre-
late's Epistle may have been Penry, Udall, Barrow,
or another he knew a bad sentence as well as any
of the Queen Anne men. He fixes, as any of them
might have done, on the confused heap of clauses
which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges's
Defence of the Government of the Church of England.
"And learned brother Bridges," he writes, "a man
might almost run himself out of breath before he
could come to a full point in many places in your
book. Page 69, line 3, speaking of the extraordinary
gifts in the Apostles' time, you have this sweet learn-
ing, 1 ' Yea some of them have for a great part of the
time, continued even till our times, and yet continue,
as the operation of great works, or if they mean mira-
cles, which were not ordinary, no not in that extra-
ordinary time, and as the hypocrites had them, so
might and had divers of the Papists, and yet their
cause never the better, and the like may we say of the
gifts of speaking with tongues which have not been
with study before learned, as Anthony, &c, and divers
also among the ancient fathers, and some among the
Papists, and some among us, have not been destitute
of the gifts of prophesying, and much more may I say
this of the gift of healing, for none of those gifts or
1 These two sentences are reprinted as one by Petheram, but it is
obvious that the want of a full stop after " book " is a printer's error.
No changes in the punctuation can reduce Dean Bridges to order.
It would be necessary to treat him as Cobbett did Castlereagh.
264 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
graces given then or since, or yet to men, infer the
grace of God's election to be of necessity to salvation.' "
The Dean's meaning reveals itself at the third or
fourth reading, but this is the style of Mrs Nickleby.
Martin Marprelate saw its vices, and noted on the
margin, " Hoo hoo, Dean, take breath and then to it
again," as Swift himself might have done. Dr Bridges
is no authority in English literature, but he was a
learned man, and must have had some practice in
preaching. Yet we see that he fell into a confusion
which at any time after the seventeenth century
would have been a proof either of extreme ignorance,
or of some such defect of power to express himself as
accounts for the obscurity of Castlereagh. Dean
Bridges shows only the disastrous consequences of
that disregard of the proper limit of the sentence
which was common with some of the greatest writers
of his time. Take, for instance, this passage from Sir
Walter Baleigh's account of the loss of the Revenge,
published in 1591. He begins admirably: "All the
powder of the Revenge was now spent, all her pikes
were broken, forty of her best men slain, and the
most part of the rest hurt." Several rapid sentences
follow, and then we come to : 1 " Sir Richard finding
himself in this distress, and unable any longer to
make resistance having endured in this fifteen hours'
1 Last Fight of the Revenge in Arber's English Reprints. I have
suppressed the full stop after "assaults and entries," which is plainly
a printer's error. Raleigh would have been as inarticulate as Dr
Bridges if he thought that a new sentence could begin at "and that
himself." When the full stop is replaced by a comma, what we
have is a grammatical though overladen and redundant sentence.
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 265
fight, the assault of fifteen several Armadoes, all by
turns aboard him, and by estimation eight hundred
shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and
entries, and that himself and the ship must needs be
possessed by the enemy, who were now all cast in a
ring about him; the Eevenge not able to move one
way or other but as she was moved with the waves
and billow of the sea, commanded the Master Gunner,
whom he knew to be a most resolute man, to split and
sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of
glory or victory to the Spaniards, seeing in so many
hours' fight, and with so great a navy they were not
able to take her, having had fifteen hours' time, fifteen
thousand men, and fifty and three sail of men of war
to perform it withal. And persuaded the company or
as many as he could induce to yield themselves unto
God, and to the mercy of none else, but as they had
like valiant resolute men repulsed so many enemies,
they should not now shorten the honour of their
nation, by prolonging their own lives for a few hours
or a few days."
This is the style of a writer who does not know
when a sentence has come to an end, and who, when
he writes one which is properly constructed, does it
mainly by good fortune. If it is more intelligible
than Dr Bridges, the cause of the superiority lies
at least partly in this, that Ealeigh had the easier
task to perform. He had only to state facts, not
to expound doctrine.
While making allowance for the inward and
spiritual cause of the invasion of English by the
2GG EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
long, confused, overladen sentence, it must also be
confessed that the evil was largely due to the
prevalence of affected styles of writing, which lent
themselves to over - elaboration. Two bad models
were set before Englishmen about the middle of
the queen's reign, and they unfortunately became,
and remained for long, exceedingly popular Lyly's
euphuism, and the wiredrawn finicking style of
Sidney's Arcadia, to which no name has ever been
given. The lives of these authors have already
been dealt with under another head. Their style,
as shown in their stories, and its effect on English
literature, are the matters in hand. Euphuism and
the manner of the Arcadia appear to have been
elaborated by their authors about the same time,
though Lyly takes precedence in the order of
publication. Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, was
printed in 1579, Euphues and his England in the
following year. 1
Euphuism has become a name for literary affecta-
tion, and is in that sense often used with very little
precision. It is a very peculiar form of
Euphuism. * .
affectation. The two main features of the
style the mechanical antitheses and the abuse of
similes have been described already. Euphues, in
so far as it is a story, is as near as may be naught.
The hero from whom it takes its name is the grand-
father of all virtuous, solemn, and didactic prigs.
He makes two excursions into the world from his
native Athens. In the first he induces a lady at
1 Arbor's English Reprints. John Lyly, M.A., Euphues. 1868.
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS. 267
Naples to jilt her lover Philautus, and is by her
most justly jilted in turn. He floods southern Italy
with antithetical platitude, and retires to Athens.
Then Euphues and Philautus come to England, where
the second, after philandering with one lady, marries
another. Euphues remains didactic and superior.
At last he goes back to a cave in Silexedra. There is
a great deal of praise of Queen Elizabeth in the second
part, as indeed there was in all the literature of her
time as high as Shakespeare's plays and the Ecclesi-
astical Polity. There are also pages of such matter as
this : " But as the cypress-tree the more it is watered
the more it withereth, and the oftener it is lopped the
sooner it dieth, so unbridled youth the more it is also
by grave advice counselled or due correction controlled,
the sooner it falleth to confusion, hating all reasons
that would bring it from folly, as that tree doeth
all remedies, that should make it fertile." Un-
bridled youth might have answered that if lopping
and watering are bad for the cypress he must be
a poor forester who persists in lopping and water-
ing. But the youth of Queen Elizabeth's reign,
which was unbridled enough, was also more respect-
ful. It listened to the due correction and grave
counsel of Euphues with deference. It did more,
for it imitated him. The unbridled Nash euphuised,
and so did many another. Alongside the fire from
heaven, and elsewhere, of the Elizabethan time, there
was an unending wishy - washy, though frequently
turbid, flow of copy-book heading, which came from
the great Lylyan source. It looks strange that a
268 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
time which loved Tamburlaine and produced the
great lyric, should also have delighted in this square-
toed finical vacuity. But perhaps, again, it is not
so wonderful. There was also in the Elizabethan
time a liking for what looked superior to the com-
mon herd. About the Court there was much foppery,
and there were many who wished to resemble
the fine gentlemen of the Court, while the reviv-
ing morality of the age, compatible as it was with
much individual profligacy, made men respectful of
virtuous commonplace. With the minority of Edward
VI. and the brutality of the Court of Henry VIII.
close behind them, it was as yet hardly the case
that "the cardinal virtues were to be taken for
granted among English gentlemen." Surrey may
have been jesting when he told his sister to make
herself the king's mistress, but what a society that
must have been in which a brother, and he " a mirror
of chivalry," thought this a mere jest. Now Lyly
was very moral, a fop to his fingers' ends, and with
all his oddity and his pedantry, there is a real,
though very artificial, distinction about him. Fin-
ally, there were as yet few and insignificant rivals.
It is not then at all surprising that his style was
taken up at Court as "the thing," and accepted by
the honest admiration, to say nothing of the snob-
bery, of the outer world.
Lyly sinned by setting an example of a stilted style ;
but his sentence (for he had but one) is as complete
as the constant use of the formula, " As the A is B, so
the C is D, and the more E is F the more G is H,"
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 269
can make it. With Sidney's Arcadia 1 we come to
another kind of affectation. The circumstances in
which it was written must be taken into
The Arcadia. . .
account. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to please
his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a lady who was
somewhat of a prScieuse, and who was all her life the
centre of some literary coterie. Her patronage of the
Senecan play shows that her leanings were towards
the superfine, and away from what was natural to
Englishmen. The Arcadia, therefore, is coterie work,
and does not seem to have been looked upon as very
serious by Sir Philip himself. It was written by fits
and starts, and sent off to his sister in instalments.
The date of composition must have been about
1580 and later, but it was not published till after
the author's death in 1584, and remains a fragment,
though a large one. The Arcadia is much longer
than the " tedious brief " masterpiece of Lyly, even
without taking into account the verse, of which much
is written in the classic metres. It is also far more
interesting: Although we are accustomed to speak
of it as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength
of the name, it is much more a Libro de Caballerias.
There is a pastoral element in it unquestionably, as
there is in the stories of Feliciano de Silva, but in the
main its matter is that of the books of "Knightly
Deeds" challenges and defiances, combats of cham-
pions, loves of cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs
of plebeians by the single arm of the knight. There
1 We still await a good edition of the Arcadia. The old are
numerous. Dr Sommer's reprint (London, 1891) is useful.
270 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
are wicked knights who drag off ladies on the pommel
of their saddles and beat them, good knights who
rescue these victims, captures and deliverances of
damsels, and everywhere the finest sentiments or the
most extreme wickedness, just as in the Amadis or
the Palmerin. It is a very entangled book, and is not
made clearer by the fact that one of the heroes, who
is disguised as an amazon, figures alternately as
"he" and as "she." Yet Sidney does achieve the
great end of the story-teller, which is to keep alive
his reader's desire to know what is going to happen
next. The morality of the book has been very dif-
ferently judged. It has been called " a vain and
amatorious poem," a " cobweb across the face of
nature," and it has also been described as noble and
elevating. Yet it would be a curious morality which
could be affected by the doings of personages who are
either too seraphic for flesh and blood, or so wicked
that the most shameless of mankind would resent
being compared to them.
The " vanity " of the book lies in the wordy araa-
toriousness of its style. We have perhaps pushed
the practice of accounting for all fashions
Sidney's style. . . T
m literature by imitation too lar. It is
quite as possible to explain Lyly without Guevara
as it would be to account for Gongora without Lyly.
Given the desire to write in a fine peculiar form, and
the adoption of some trick with words follows natur-
ally, while the number of tricks which can be played
is not indefinite. Yet it is at least as likely that Sir
Philip Sidney was set on his peculiar form of affecta-
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 271
tion by the Libros de Caballcrias, published from thirty
to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him.
Such sentences as these send us back at once to
Feliciano de Silva: "Most beloved lady, the incom-
parable excellences of yourself, waited on by the
greatness of your estate, and the importance of the
thing whereon my life consisteth, doth require both
many ceremonies before the beginning and many cir-
cumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold
and fearful." And, " Since no words can carry with
them the life of the inward feeling, I desire that my
desire may be weighed in the balances of honour, and
let Virtue hold them ; for if the highest love in no
base person may aspire to grace, then may I hope
your beauty will not be without pity." Turn to the
first chapter of Shelton's Don Quixote, and you meet
with those " intricate sentences " from Feliciano : " The
reason of the unreasonableness which against my
reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason as
with all reason I doe justly complaine on your
beauty." And, " The High Heavens which with
your divinity doe fortifie you divinely with the
starres, and make you deserveresse of the deserts
that your greatnesse deserves," &C. 1
1 The first of these sentences hardly gives the full absurdity of the
Spanish. "La razon de la sinrazon que a mi razon se hace de tal
manera mi razon enflaquece, que con razon me que jo de la vuestra
fermosura " i.e., " The cause of the wrong, which is done to my
right, so weakens my reason, that with reason I complain of your
beauty." The Spaniard punned on the different meanings of the
word razon. Accurate translation does not diminish the likeness to
Sidney, who must have known the original.
272 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
We must not push the comparison too far. Sidney
had qualities of imagination which raised him far
above the Spaniard, and he never rings the changes
on the same word so fatuously as Feliciano and other
later authors of Libros de Caballerias. Yet the juggle
on the two forces of the word " desire " is quite in the
Spanish taste. The immediate success of Don Quixote
in England may be explained not only by the per-
manent merits of Cervantes' romance, but by the fact
that we had our examples of the literary affectation
which he attacked. The practice of labouring the
expression of sentiment, of repeating, qualifying, and
counterbalancing, would inevitably lead to long strag-
gling sentences, while it was also a direct invitation
to the frigid conceits in which Sidney abounds.
Stories of a kind, translations from or adaptations
of the Italians, and notably Bandello, with imitations
of Euphues and the Pastorals, were common
Short Stories. . , _ .
m Elizabethan literature. But, perhaps
because it suffered from the overpowering rivalry of
poetry and the stage, the prose tale is rarely among the
good things of the time. Greene, Lodge, and Breton 1
are interesting to the student, but it cannot be said,
with any measure of accuracy, that they have a place
in the history of the English novel. They were part
of the literary production of their time, but were
mostly imitation, and were too completely forgotten,
and too soon, to produce any effect. An exceptional
interest attaches to Nash's Unfortunate, Traveller, to
1 Greene and Breton have been reprinted by Dr Grosart. Lodge's
Euphues' Golden Legacy is in the Shakespeare's Library, vol. ii.
THE ELIZABETHAN PllOSE-WUITERS. 273
which attention has again been attracted of late. It
is curious that a story which has considerable intrinsic
force should have put the model of the Novelet de
Picaros before English readers five years earlier than
the publication of Gtizman de Alfarache in Spain, and
that it should have been so completely forgotten that
when this model was again introduced among us by
Defoe, his inspiration came from Le Sage. 1
Thomas Nash (1567-1601), who was chiefly known
as a pamphleteer, published The Unfortunate Traveller
in 1594. It is difficult to read, at any rate
Nash's ' J
unfortunate the earlier parts of the story, and we doubt
that the author had seen, if not the original
of the Lazarillo de Tormes, then at any rate the French
version of Jean Saugrain, published in 1561. If his
work is quite independent, then we have a very remark-
able instance of exact similarity in the method and
spirit of two writers separated from one another in
race and by an interval of nearly half a century, dur-
ing which the first had enjoyed a wide popularity.
This is difficult to believe. Nothing can be more like
Lazarillo's doings than the tricks which Nash's hero,
Jack Wilton, plays on the old cider-selling lord and
the captain. It would seem, however, that the time
had not come when the picaresque method was to be
really congenial to Englishmen. Nash wanders away
from it when he introduces the story of Surrey and
1 Complete works of Thomas Nash, in six vols. Dr Grosart in
"The Huth Library," 1883-1884. Guzman de Alfarache was trans-
lated into English by Mabbe, the translator of the Celestina, in 1623,
and was imitated in The English Rogue, but the inspiration for
Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders did not come from either.
S
2<T4 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
the Fair Geraldine. Yet be comes back to it with
the hero's love-affairs with Diamante, the wife of a
Venetian, whom he meets in prison at Venice. He
keeps to it very close when Wilton runs away with
his " courtezan," and gives himself out to be the Earl
of Surrey. From the time the hero and Diamante
reach Eome the picaresque tone disappears, and Nash
drops into familiar Elizabethan " blood and thunder."
With the inconsequence of his time he gives at the
end a defiant last dying speech and confession of an
Italian malefactor, who bears the English name of
Cutwolf. Perhaps a certain want of finish, and an
air there is about it of being hasty work done to make
a little money, injured its effect. Yet The Unfortunate
Traveller did show Englishmen a way they were to
follow in the future, and it came before the Guzman
dc Alfarache.
Thomas Nash was himself perhaps intrinsically the
most able, and certainly not the least typical, member
Nash and the of a whole class of Elizabethan men of
pamphleteers, fetters. He was born at Lowestoft, " a son
of the manse," in 1567, and was educated at St John's,
Cambridge. It has been supposed on the strength
of some passages in his writings that he travelled
abroad in his youth, though he does not write in his
Unfortunate Traveller like a man who had seen Venice
and Rome. He was settled in London by 1588, and
lived the very necessitous life of a man of letters
who depended wholly on his pen, till his early death
in 1601. It was the misfortune of Nash and of many
of his contemporaries that they were born too soon
THE ELIZABETHAN PllOSE-WMTEltS. 275
for the magazine or newspaper. His work consists
mainly of matter written to please prevailing tastes
of the time. Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, a long,
wordy, and decidedly pretentious collection of preach-
ment, and denunciation of the sins of London, his
violent quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, or rather with
the whole Harvey family, which was rolled out in
pamphlets for the amusement of the world, his col-
lection of ghost stories, The Terrors of the Night, and
what he called Toys for Gentlemen, which are lost, and
into the nature of which it is perhaps better not to
inquire, were journalism before its time. His Have
with you to Saffron Walden, a piece of vigorous literary
horseplay at the expense of Gabriel Harvey, is an
excellent pamphlet of its kind in the kind of Mr
Pott and Mr Slurk; while his burlesque almanac,
called A wonderful strange and miraculous Astronom-
ical Prognostication, though undoubtedly suggested by
Eabelais, and therefore not quite original, is a piece
of solemn fun worthy of the irony and the good sense
of Swift. Nash had ideas of style which sometimes
led him into involved pomposity, but which also sup-
plied him with an effective, though blackguard, con-
troversial manner. Nobody was a greater master of
loud - mouthed bragging, of the fashion of telling an
opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful
things you are going to do with him. Consciously,
or unconsciously, the Elizabethans were great be-
lievers in the maxim that if you throw mud enough
some will stick, and it was one of the signs of their
youth and primitive simplicity of nature that when
276 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
they were angry they gave way to the instinct which
leads men to scream vituperation and curses, with
no regard to their application to the subject. To
call a very eminent man on his trial for treason
and on the most flimsy evidence too "a spider
of hell" would now be thought not less silly than
ignoble. But that is what Coke called Baleigh, and
it is a very fair specimen of Elizabethan satirical
controversy. Around Nash was a whole class of men
engaged in the same work of writing little stories
pastoral or euphuistic and pamphlets moral, satirical,
political, which were often in verse. When they
dealt with the low life of London, as in the case of
Dekker (1570 ?-1641 ?), they possess a certain value
as illustrations of contemporary manners. It is curi-
ous, when their bulk and their popularity are con-
sidered, that no London printer thought of bringing
out a miscellany of them at regular intervals. He
would have found abundant matter ready to his hand,
and the magazine, if not the newspaper, would have
been founded at once.
One section of the pamphlet literature of the time
possesses an enduring interest, if not for its intrinsic
Martin value, though that is not inconsiderable,
MarpreMe. ^hen for historical reasons. This was the
famous Martin Marprelate controversy, which was
not the first example of an appeal to the people by
the press on religious and political questions, for that
had been done on the Continent by the Huguenots,
but was the earliest effective instance among us. It
grew out of the conflict between the Church, which
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 277
was fighting for uniformity with the hearty support
of the queen at least from the day on which she
found her power sufficiently established to allow her
to disregard the Calvinist princes of the Continent
and a body of Englishmen who were desirous to
adopt the Calvinist Presbyterian model. 1 According
to our view the question was one to be argued peace-
fully, and those who could not believe the same
things ought to have agreed to differ. That was not
the opinion of any country, or of either side in the
sixteenth century. The Puritans were as convinced
of the need for uniformity as the Church or the
Spanish Inquisition, and would have enforced it with
no sparing hand if they had had the power. They
complained quite as bitterly of the toleration which
they alleged was shown to the Papists (who for their
part cried out loudly of persecution), as of the sever-
ities exercised on themselves. As the power was with
the bishops, those who would not conform were ex-
pelled from the universities and from their livings.
The persecution to which they were subjected was
enough to exasperate, but not to crush, and the em-
bittered Puritans cast about for a weapon to use against
their opponents. The pamphlet lay ready to their hand. 2
1 The Puritan position is very clearly stated in John Udall's
Demonstration of Discipline. Arber's " English Scholar's Library."
2 Maskell's History of the Martin Marprelate Controversy, 1845,
and Mr Arber's " Introduction," give accounts of the conflict from
very different points of view. Mr Arber has reprinted Udall's
Diotrephes and Demonstration of Discipline in his " English Scholar's
Library." The chief among the succeeding tracts were reprinted in
1845-1846 by Petheram under the title of Puritan Discipline Tracts.
278 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
The chief dates in the controversy were these. In
1587 Dr John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, and after-
wards Bishop of Oxford, published A
Origin of the ,
M'upreiate Defence of the Government established in
the Church of England for Ecclesiastical
Matters, in answer to the Puritan controversialists
Cartwright and Travers a very long, well-meant,
and learned, but lumbering book. Just at this time
the Act of Uniformity was pressing heavily on
the Puritans. There were two who were especially
aggrieved, John Udall, who had been expelled from
his pulpit at Kingston because, as his friends alleged,
he had denounced a local money-lender from whom
the archdeacon of the diocese wanted to borrow 100 ;
and John Penry, an able, honest, but headlong Welsh-
man. In or about March 1587 Penry published at
Oxford a tract with a long-winded title, which is
called for short The Equity of a Humble Supplication.
It was an address to Parliament representing the
undeniably neglected state of the Welsh parishes.
Unfortunately for Penry, it contained one passage
which, with no more unfairness than was usual in
State prosecutions, whether conducted for the king
or the Long Parliament, in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, might be represented to be treason-
able. It insinuated plainly that the queen consented
to leave Wales in religious ignorance and immorality.
The press was then under censorship. Only two
printers were allowed out of London one at Oxford,
another at Cambridge. In London the number was
limited. No press could be held except by a member of
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 279
the Stationers' Company, and any one could be confis-
cated by the Warden, over whom the Bishop of London
had general powers of control as censor. Penry's
treatise was suppressed, and he was in great peril.
Here then were two men, both angry, both able,
both accustomed to appeal directly to ignorant audi-
ences with whom it was necessary to make things
clear. Both, too, were bold men, and honest in the
sense that they were ready to risk their lives for
their cause. It would have been strange if they had
not seized on the pamphlet, as their one remaining
weapon against the bishops. Udall began by pub-
lishing, in April 1588, his dialogue com-
The Diotrephes. c
monly called Diotrephes. 1 The choice or
the name was not the worst stroke of satire in the
controversy. Diotrephes was that person mentioned in
the ninth verse of the Third Epistle of St John " who
loveth to have the pre-eminence " and who " receiveth
us not." It was a great belief among the Puritans
that no minister should have authority over another,
and that the bishops who had " pre-eminence " were
" antichrists " and " petty popes." The dialogue tells
how a bishop, a papist, a money-lender, and an inn-
keeper were all rebuked by Paul, a preacher. The
usurer alone shows signs of compunction, while
the bishop goes off thirsting for the blood of the
1 The full title is, ' ' The state of the Church of England, laid open
in a Conference between Diotrephes a Bishop, Tertullus a Papist,
Demetrius a Usurer, Pandochus an Inn-Keeper, and Paul a Preacher
of the Word of God " ; with quotations from Psalm cxxii. 6 and
Revelations xiv. 9, 10. The titles of all these pamphlets are long,
and commonly also abusive.
280 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
saints, with the hearty approval of the papist, and
of the tavern-keeper, who explains that he lives by
the vices of his neighbours, and is like to be ruined
by the preaching of such men as Paul. This pamphlet
was printed by John Waldegrave, a Puritan printer
in London, who was deprived of his licence in con-
sequence. His press was broken up, but he contrived
to conceal a fount of type. A printing-press was
smuggled in by Penry, and a campaign of unlicensed
pamphlets was begun.
The details are obscure. The names of the authors
can only be guessed at. The controversy lasted from
course of the the end of 1588 to the end of 1590. At
controversy. fi rst t h e p ur itans swept all before them.
They had many friends at Court, where indeed their
doctrine that the bishops' lands should be taken and
given to gentlemen who could serve the queen was
not likely " to want for favourable or attentive
hearers." Some country gentlemen gave them help
notably Sir R. Knightley of Fawsley, in Northampton-
shire (always a Puritan county), and Job Throck-
morton, who appears to have been what we should
now call a bitter anti-clerical. The press was con-
cealed by them in different parts of the country till
it was captured by the Earl of Derby. Penry was
probably the leader of the fight on the Puritan side.
It began by the publication of Martin Marprelate's
Epistle directed against Dr John Bridges, in November
1588. This drew a grave Admonition to the People
of England from Dr Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Win-
chester, in or about January 1589. Martin followed
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS. 281
up his attack on Dr Bridges by the Epitome, printed
before the Epistle, but not issued till February of
1589. Then he turned on the Bishop of Winchester
in Hay any Work for Cooper}
The success of those pamphlets was great. A well-
known story tells how when order was issued that
they were not to be read, the Earl of Oxford pulled
one of them out of his pocket, and presented it to the
queen. Solemn " admonitions " were found to be too
awkward in such a conflict, and counter-pamphleteers
were called in on the bishops' side. This part of the
controversy is no less obscure than the other. It has
been guessed that Lyly and Nash struck in for the
bishops. Both have been credited with the author-
ship of a Pappe with a Hatchet and An Almond for a
Parrot, which appeared respectively at the end of
1589 and the beginning of 1590. They are now
generally attributed to Lyly. Then third parties
struck in and denounced both houses, or endeavoured
1 The titles of these pamphlets were very important parts of them,
and this may be quoted as an example : " Hay any Work for Cooper,
or a briefe Pistle directed by way of hublication to the reverend
Byshopps, counselling them if they will needs be barrelled up, for
fear of smelling in the nostrels of her Magestie and the State, that
they would use the advice of reverend Martin, for the providing of
their Cooper. Because the reverend T. C. (by which mystical letters
is meant either the bouncing Parson of Eastmcane, or Tom Coakes
his Chaplaine) hath showne himself in his late Admonition to the
people of England to bee an unskilfull and deceytfull tub-trimmer.
Wherein worthy Martin quits himselfe like a man, I warrant you, in
the modest defences of his self and his learned Pistles, and makes
the Cooper's hoops to fly off, and the Bishops' tubs to leake out of all
crye. Penned and compiled by Martin the Metropolitane. Printed
in Europe, not farre from some of the Bounsing Priests.
282 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
to hush the clamour, by such appeals as Plain Perceval
the Peace-Maker of England,
Although they naturally fell into neglect so soon
as the occasion had passed, the Martin Marprelate
pamphlets are of great importance in the history
of English literature. The euphuistic, pastoral, and
other tales of the time served a mere fashion of the
day, and are forgettable as well as forgotten. But
when Martin Marprelate published his unlicensed
Epistle he set an example which has been excellently
well followed. His pamphlet stands at the head of
the long list which includes the Areopagitica, the
Anatomy of an Equivalent, the Public Spirit of the
Whigs, the Shortest Way with the Dissenters, the Letters
of Junius, the Begicide Peace, and it is not absurd
to say the Reflections on the Revolution in France,
which is a very long, great, and eloquent pamphlet,
but a pamphlet still. The Epistle and its immediate
successors were not unworthy to be the beginners of
so vital a part of English literature.
"Si nous avions 1' ambition d'etre complet, et si
c'etait l'etre que de tout dire," it would be necessary
to examine all the pamphlets in detail. But many
are practically inaccessible, and there is so much
repetition among them that they can be adequately
judged by selected examples. The vital examples are
those which set the model. On the Puritan side
there are four, the Diotrephes, which, though strictly
speaking antecedent to Martin, gave tone and marked
the lines, the Epistle, the Epitome, and the Hay any
Work for Cooper. The Pappc with a Hatchet and An
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 283
Almond for a Parrot may stand as examples of the
anti-Martinist pamphlets. The peacemakers were of
less account. The proposition that there is a great
deal to be said on both sides, and the appeal " Why
cannot you be reasonable ? " may be full of good sense,
but they seldom inspire men to words or deeds of a
decisive character. Looking at the leading things on
either side, one sees that they have one feature in
common. They are extremely unfair. But there is a
great difference in their way of being unjust, and on
that depends their literary value. The distinction is
all to the honour of the Puritan pamphlets. Diotrephes
shows both the doctrine and the spirit of the writers.
They started by laying down the law to the effect that
whoever exercises pre-eminence over his brethren in
the ministry is an " antichrist " and a " petty pope,"
and that no church office not explicitly mentioned in
the New Testament is Christian. Therefore they
endeavoured to discredit the bishops by showing that
they habitually did such acts as an antichrist and
petty pope might be expected to do. We need not
stop to argue that this was unjust. Of course it was,
but from the literary point of view the interesting
question is, How was the injustice worded ? The
Martin Marprelate men had a firm grip of the
pamphlet style. The ridicule they poured on the
long-winded sentences of Dr Bridges and Bishop
Cooper shows that they were perfectly well aware
of the advantages of a simple direct manner. Their
own sentences are brief, and stab with a rapid alert
movement. Their abuse is furious, but it is seldom
284 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
mere scream. " Sodden-headed ass " is bad language,
but if it is ever to be pardonable, it is when you have
caught your adversary reasoning badly, and this the
Martinists at least tried to do. It was indecent to
call the Bishop of Winchester " Mistress Cooper's
husband." It is a foul hit to remind your opponent
that his wife is a profligate termagant, but more
ingenuity is needed to do that, by naming what it
would have been more fair to pass in silence, than
merely to bawl the slang name for the husband of
an unfaithful wife, and apply it to a whole class of
men at large. And Martin had intelligence enough
to understand that a show of fairness can be effec-
tive. He could bring himself to allow that if John
of Canterbury (Dr Whitgift) did ever marry, he
would no doubt choose a Christian woman.
When we turn to the anti - Martinist pamphlets
we find the same unfairness of spirit, with little and
often none of the cleverness and the ingenious form.
If Lyly wrote the Pappe with a Hatchet, he was
in a better place when he was in Euphues his
lonely cave in Silexedra. The elegance, real of its
artificial kind, is gone, and in place of it we get
a loud vaunting howl of abuse. One -half of the
qualification of the "slating reviewer" was wanting
to the anti-Martinists. They hated the man, but they
did not know the subject. The Royalist general who
answered Fairfax's self-righteous boasting of the good
discipline of the Parliamentary soldiers by telling him
that the Puritan had the sins of the Devil, " which are
spiritual pride and rebellion," struck him harder, and
THE ELIZABETHAN PKOSE- WRITERS. 285
showed a finer wit than all the pamphleteers whom it
has been in my power to see. They miss his vulnerable
points, they bellow bad language and accusations of
the kind of misconduct from which the Puritan was as
free as the universal passions of humanity permitted.
The difference between the two may be quite fairly
put this way. The worst calumny of the Martinists
can be quoted, but the anti- Martinists are naught
when they are not using language which is nearly as
unquotable as any written by the worst scribblers of
the Eestoration. The least nauseous passages are
those in which these defenders of the Church gloat
over the whips, branding-irons, and mutilating knife
of Ball the Hangman. Now Martin rarely goes beyond
threatening the bishops with a premunire, and when
he does he stops at a "hemp collar." The Martin
Marprelate men were fighting in a now obsolete cause,
in a style which has manifest faults of taste and
temper. But they were on the right path, they set
the example of pamphlet controversy from which the
its place in iu- press was to come in time, and they did it
crary history. | n a way w hi cn only needed amending
The author of the Anatomy of an Equivalent had
learnt that when you have proved your opponent to
be "a sodden -headed ass," it is superfluous to pelt
him with the name. Yet he was truly the successor
of Martin, while the line of the anti-Martinists ended
in Ned Ward.
It is sometimes said that the Martinists were routed
by Lyly and Nash, which is certainly unfair to the
Earl of Derby, and not quite just to Ball the Hangman.
286 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
As far as they were routed by literary weapons, the
honour of defeating them is due to a very different
hand. The doctrine of the Puritans was confuted
in the Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard Hooker the
greatest masterpiece of Elizabethan prose. 1 Hooker
was born at Heavitree, near Exeter, in
1553. His family was poor, and, like many
of his contemporaries, he was educated by the kind-
ness of patrons. Dr Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury,
and Edwin Sandys, then Bishop of London, and after-
wards Archbishop of York, successively protected him
at Oxford. He was tutor to Sandys' sons. If Isaac
Walton was correctly informed, he was somewhat
tamely annexed by a scheming landlady as husband
for her daughter. He had to resign his fellowship
upon his marriage in 1584, and was appointed to the
living of Drayton Beauchamp, in Buckinghamshire.
In the following year he was appointed Master of the
Temple. Here he became widely known by a contro-
versy with the Puritan Walter Travers, conducted on
both sides with more moderation than was usual in
those times. After holding the Mastership for seven
years, he resigned it for a living in Wiltshire. He
died at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, in 1600.
In the chapter of his Constitutional History which
deals with Elizabeth's laws against the Non- Con-
formists, Mr Hallam has written: "But while these
scenes of pride and persecution on one hand, and of
sectarian insolence on the other, were deforming the
bosom of the English Church, she found a defender of
1 Works of Richard Hooker. Oxford, 1841.
THE ELIZABETHAN PR0SE-W1UTERS. 287
her institutions in one who mingled in these vulgar
controversies like a knight of romance among caitiff
brawlers, with arms of finer temper and worthy to be
proved in a nobler field." If this sentence is to be
understood to mean as from the context it perhaps
must that Hooker mingled in the Martin Mar-
Thc Ecciesi- prelate conflict, it is inaccurate. He an-
asticai Polity. swere( } Cartwright and Travers, as Dr
Bridges had done, and whatever may be said of these
men it would be silly to call them caitiff brawlers,
while it would be difficult to say what nobler field
Hooker could have found for his arms than that in
which he justified the faith and religious practices of
Englishmen. Yet Mr Hallam has fairly singled out
the predominant characteristic of Hooker. There is
something knightly about him, something of the
chivalry of Sir Galahad. He could strike with telling
force, as he does in the one passage of fine scorn
devoted to the jeering Puritan pamphlets beside
which all the scolding of their proper opponents is
mere brutal noise. Yet what prevails with him so
completely that the exceptions are hardly noticeable
is the moderation which has earned him his name of
" Judicious." It is not the easy moderation of one
who does not care much, but of a man who was very
convinced, very earnest, and also very good. The
Ecclesiastical Polity is not chiefly valuable as a piece
of reasoning. It has for one thing not reached us
complete. The first four books, which must have been
begun while he was at the Temple, were published in
1594. The long fifth book appeared in 1597. The
288 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
three, which make up the total number of eight, were
left unfinished at his death, and passed into careless,
if not unfaithful, hands. But the five undoubted
books were enough to do Hooker's work for the
Church of England, and they did not do it by pre-
senting his readers with such a closely reasoned and
compact system as they might have found in the
Institutions of Calvin. Englishmen have never cared
much for consistency of system. It was enough for
them that Hooker justified usages, ceremonies, and
forms of Church government to which they were
accustomed, against the "Disciplinarians" who con-
demned them for wanting the express authority of
the New Testament, by proving that they had pre-
vailed among pious men of former times, were in
themselves innocent, and could therefore be accepted
by sincere Christians as convenient, pious, and of good
example, even if they had no "divine right," when
they were imposed by authority. In substance this
was no new doctrine. Her Majesty in Council had
been saying as much for years, and so had Whitgift
and Bridges, and all the defenders of the Establish-
ment. But what they did by dry injunction or
laboured scholastic argument, Hooker did by per-
suasion, by pathos, and by noble rhetoric. The criti-
cism that he sometimes gives eloquence where he
ought to give argument, does not go far when the
purpose of his book is allowed for. It was not by
logic that God elected to save His Church in former
centuries, nor yet in the sixteenth. In Hooker's case,
as fully as in the case of any poet, literature vindi-
THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE- WRITERS. 289
cated itself. The beauty of the style, always essenti-
ally pure English in spite of an occasional Latin turn
of the sentence, is the great merit of the Ecclesiastical
Polity. The famous eloquent passages arise naturally
because they always correspond to the greater pathos,
or sanctity, or the deeper passion of that part of his
subject which he is handling at the moment. The
Englishman stood between the Galvinist on the one
hand and the Eoman Catholic on the other, both
appealing to him on religious grounds. There was a
real danger that his own Church would find nothing
to tell him except that decency was decent, that he
had better not trouble himself about debatable matters
he would never understand, and that he must obey the
Queen. If this was all it could fin# to say, English-
men who were concerned about religion the majority
of thinking men, whether ignorant or learned would
assuredly have gone either to Geneva or to Eome,
while the unthinking mass alone would have remained
to the Church. In that case it would have gone down
for ever in the Civil War. From that fate it was
saved by Hooker.
290
CHAPTEK X.
FRANCE. POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE.
THE PLEH.DE EONSARD THE LESSER STARS ' THE DEFENSE ET
ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANAISE ' THE WORK OF RONSARD
HIS PLACE IN POETRY JOACHIM DU BELLAT REMI BELLEAU
BAIF DU BARTAS D'aUBIGNE THE DRAMATIC WORK OF THE
PLEIADE JODEDtte GREVIN AND LA TAILLE MONTCHRESTIEN
THE COMEDY ' LA RECONNUE ' CAUSES OF FAILURE OF EARLY
DRAMATIC LITERATURE.
The French literature of the later Renaissance is
divided, almost as it were by visible mechanical bar-
riers, from what had gone before, and from what was
to come after. The distinction is less marked in
prose, but even here it is real, while the poetry of the
time is the work of a school, with a creed and a set
of formulas all its own. It has ever been much the
custom of the French, whether in politics, in art, or
in literature, to move altogether, and to make a clean
sweep. Every new school rejects its predecessor
with more or less indiscriminate contempt, becomes
a tyranny in its turn, and is, in the fulness of time, re*
belled against, and destroyed. The process has never
been shown more fully and with fewer disturbing
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 291
elements than in the history of the Pleiade. Exactly
in the middle of the century a small body of young
writers took possession of French poetry, dismissed
the forms of their elders as " grocery " {tpicerics), just
as the romantic writers of this century labelled the
classic style as " wig " (perruquc), and ruled without
opposition, till one fine day they were scored out by
the equally irreverent, though more pedantic, and less
generous pen of Malherbe.
The poets of the Pleiade are entitled to the respect
of the historian of literature for several reasons, and
to his gratitude for this, that they formed
The Pleiade. . . , .. *
a compact body which he need be at no
trouble to disentangle, because they stood deliberately
apart, or to define, because they did the work for him,
by publishing an exhaustive manifesto of their prin-
ciples. There is nowhere a better example of that
situation nette which the French love. The Pleiade
knew its own mind, and what it wanted to do. More-
over, if it did not always achieve its purpose, at least
it knew how the work was to be done. Some slight
doubt exists as to the names of the seven forming the
original constellation. The most orthodox list gives
Daurat, Ptonsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, Ba'if, Jodelle, and
Pontus de Thyard, but another of less authority re-
places the sixth and seventh by Scevole de Sainte
Marthe and Muret. It does not matter which of the
two is taken, since both include the important names.
Jodelle has a notable place in French dramatic litera-
ture, but the drama is subordinate in the history of
the Pleiade. Pontus de Thyard (1521-1603), though
292 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
the first-born and the last survivor of the fellowship,
is not an essential member, and may pass behind his
leaders, Eonsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, and Baif.
All these poets were by birth gentlemen, and
several of them were highly connected. Pierre de
Bonsard, the master of them all, and the
Konsard. .
" Prince of Poets of his century, not only
in the opinion of his countrymen, but by the consent
of many foreigners, was the son of the maitre cChotel
(steward of the household) of Francis I. He was
born at Yendome in 1524, and entered the service
of the Duke of Orleans as page. When James V.
brought back his second wife, Mary of Lorraine, to
Scotland, Bonsard followed them, and spent thirty
months in their service, returning to France by way
of England. When hors de page, he was attached
to the suite of more than one ambassador. Among
them was Lazare de Baif, whose natural son, Jean
Antoine de Baif, was receiving his education under
the care of the humanist, Jean Dorat, Daurat, or
D'Aurat (1508-1588). Bonsard showed a taste for
reading from his early years, and if he rejected the
forms of Clement Marot, it was not without know-
ing them. An illness, which may have been the result
of his sufferings during a shipwreck on the coast of
Scotland, left him deaf in 1546. He now, and as it
would seem not unwillingly, left the service of the
Court, and betook himself to study at the college of
Coqueret under the direction of Daurat, and in com-
pany of Jean Antoine de Baif. Bemi Belleau was a
pupil at the same college. An accidental meeting
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 293
between Ronsarcl and Joachim du Bellay added this
latter to the fellowship. The four, Daurat
advising and approving, undertook to rev-
olutionise French poetry, and they did it. The later
dates in their biographies may be briefly noted.
Konsard enjoyed great favour at Court, earned not
only by admiration of his poetry, but by his singularly
amiable personal character. On the death of Charles
IX., himself a fair verse-writer, Eonsard retired to the
Abbey of Croix Val, of which he was lay abbot, and
died in 1584. Semi Belleau (1528-1577) passed a
peaceful life in the service of the house of Lorraine,
and was carried to his grave by brother poets. Joachim
du Bellay (1525 ?-1560), member of a very distin-
guished family of soldiers and statesmen, some of
whom made their mark in French memoir literature,
accompanied his kinsman the Cardinal du Bellay to
Rome, but fell out of favour and returned to France.
He was of weak health, and appears to have suffered
from family troubles. He died suddenly of apoplexy
at the age of thirty-six. Jean Antoine de Barf (1532-
1589) had a busy life in public affairs, and suffered
changes of fortune. Characteristically enough he
founded an early French Academy, for which he re-
ceived a patent from Charles IX. in 1570. 1 It lasted
for several years.
The Defense et Illustration de la Langue Frangaise,
which is the manifesto of the school, was written by
1 Sainte - Beuve, Tableau historique et critique de la Poesie Fran-
caise et du Theatre Francais au XVIme- Steele. Le Seizieme Siicle
en France. Par MM. Darnisteter et Hatzfeld.
294 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Joachim du Bellay. It was published in February
1550, according to the modern calendar,
illustration de but 1549 in the old, which made the year
laLangue begin on Lady Day. If Boileau, before
dismissing Eonsard and his friends so con-
temptuously, had taken the trouble to read this
treatise, he would have learnt that it was not their
intention to speak Latin and Greek in French, or
to make a new art after their own fashion. Their
purpose was very different. It was their aim to
write good French, but to use all the resources of the
language in order to reproduce the forms of the great
classic literatures the Epic, the Drama, the Satire,
the Ode, and the Italian models the Canzone and the
Sonnet. They held, and not unjustly, that the French
verse of Marot's school was poor in rhythm, and
"frivolous." It had come to be satisfied with turn-
ing out nine insignificant verses, if it can put "le
petit mot pour rire " into the tenth. A sham Middle
Age was lingering on the mere remnants and echo
of the Roman de la Rose allegory. Du Bellay speaks
of the Roman and of its authors Guillaume de
Lorris and Jean de Meung with respect. He was
sufficiently an admirer of French mediaeval literature
to quote the stories of Lancelot as fit to be used for
epic. But he insists that the prosaic language used
by the school of Marot was not adequate for poetry,
and that a new poetic tongue must be formed, which
could only be done by the ardent study of Greek and
Latin. What the student learnt he was to assimilate
and make French. There was nothing in this which
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 295
was not at once inevitable when the immense influ-
ence of the classic literatures in that generation is
allowed for, and was not also in itself sound. It
was a misfortune that the Pleiade cut itself off so
completely from the mediaeval tradition; and there
is unanswerable force in Sainte-Beuve's criticism that
if Eonsard and his school were looking for ipieerie$ t
they had as good cause to condemn the sonnet as
the "rondeau" or the "ballade." Yet it was not
the great mediaeval literature which they had before
them. That was already forgotten. They did a work
by which the seventeenth century, while treating them
with contempt, profited. If they did not achieve all
they aimed at, it was because no one among them
not even Eonsard was a man of the first rank of
poetic genius, not because their principles and method
were at fault. And there is this to be said that if
some of their followers fell into extravagances of lan-
guage (the poets of the Pleiade proper and their con-
temporaries were not, at least in their earlier years,
open to the reproach), they did not impoverish the
French tongue. They did not reduce it, when used
for literary purposes, to colourless general terms ; nor
did they tie the Alexandrine into sets of two lines
by making a meaningless rule that the sense was
never to be carried over into a third. Their revo-
lution was more fruitful, and less merely destructive,
than Malherbe's.
Although Du Bellay appeared as the spokesman of
the school, he was instantly eclipsed by Eonsard.
The Odes of the " Prince of Poets " were published
296 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
in 1550, at about the same time .as the Sonnets to
tu work of Olive (an anagram of Mile, de Yiole) of
Ronsard. jj u j> e ii av He was at once accepted as the
poet of his time, and his supremacy endured till his
death without question, exept for one moment in his
later years when it appeared to be shaken by the
popularity of Du Bartas. The Amours de Cassandre 1
followed in 1552, with a second edition in the follow-
ing years, which contains the famous " Mignonne allons
voir si la rose." In 1555 appeared the Hymns, and
in 1560 he collected all he had as yet written in a
complete edition at the request of Queen Mary,
who was his ardent admirer, as was also Queen
Elizabeth. Between 1561 and 1574 he was attached
to the service of Charles IX., who treated him with
kindness, and whose " virtues " he celebrated, even
after his death, in terms which sound strange to us.
As Court poet he wrote " by command," which is not
a favourable source of inspiration. It was to please the
king that he wrote his fragmentary epic. Franciade,
which his most sincere admirers have to confess is
" dull." It had the misfortune to be published on the
eve of the Saint Bartholomew. Yet his Discours des
Mis&res du Temps (1562) and his Remonstrance au Peuple
de France (1563) belong to these years, and they were
drawn from him by the shocking miseries of the
time. Henri III., though generous to some, was less
a favourer of poets than his brother, and Eonsard
was free to express himself in the lyrics and melan-
1 (Euvres completes de P. de Ronsard, edited by M. Prosper
Blanchemain. Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, 1858.
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 297
choly sonnets of his last years. At the very end,
when his health was broken down and his mind
affected, he made an unfortunate and negligible
revision of his work, published in 1584.
It is perhaps some excuse for the sweeping con-
demnation of Eonsard by Malherbe that even the
ins place in Romantic reaction of this century has not
p etr y- succeeded in regaining favour for the part
of the poetry of the chief of the Pleiade for which he
was most admired by his contemporaries, and of which
he was most proud. In the vigorous sonnet beginning
" lis ont menty, d'Aurat," written against Du Bartas
or at least against his admirers Eonsard appealed
to his own Francus, and
" Les neuf belles sceurs
Qui tremperent mes vers clans leurs graves douceurs,"
as witnesses that he was not less than the author of
the Semaine. Now it is precisely this part of his
poetry, that in which he would be an epic poet, or
wear the Pindaric robe, which is dead, and can by no
effort be brought to life again. When Malherbe con-
demned it he passed a sentence which no later admirer
of the poetry of the sixteenth century has been able
to reverse. The gross error of the later school was
that it did not make allowance for the passing and
temporary fashion of imitation of the classic models,
and did shut its eyes to the fact that, besides Eonsard
le Pindarique, there was Eonsard the author of
" Mignonne allons voir si la Rose," and the beautiful
sonnet to Helene, " Quand tu seras bien vieille." This
298 EURCTEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Eonsard was a very genuine, and elegant, if not very
great, poet. That he would not himself have been
pleased to know that he was to be admired for these
themes, and not for his Franciadc and his Pindaric
ode to Michel de L'Hospital, is possible. Yet his
erroneous estimate of the relative values of different
parts of his work does not affect his real glory, which
is that he raised French verse from the condition of
prose tagged with rhyme, into which it had fallen,
gave it a new melody, and breathed into it a new
poetic spirit. He did for France what Surrey and
Wyatt began, and Spenser and Sidney completed for
us, what the Spanish poets of the school of Boscan
and Garcilaso attempted for Castilian. He set up a
model of sweeter and statelier measures, and he brought
the ancient classic inspiration out of pure scholarship
into literature. If he had far less power than his
English contemporaries, he was infinitely more original
than the Spaniards. There is no mere slavish repeti-
tion of foreign models in him, but the constant and
successful effort to give a genuine French equivalent,
which is quite another thing.
The followers of " a prince " are inevitably eclipsed
by their leader, and that is the more likely to be the
joacum du case when a body of poets are memorable
Beiiay. f or their accomplishment, their general
poetic spirit, their scholarship for anything, in short,
rather than for power. Power, indeed, is not what
can be attributed to the poets of the PMiade. When
it appears among the younger men it is in the verse
of the Huguenots Du Bartas and D'Aubigno, in whom
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 299
there is again less scholarly accomplishment. Among
the other poets of Bonsard's school, from his brother
in literature Joachim du Bellay down to his last
follower Jean Bertaut (1532-1611), the best is com-
monly what is melancholy or what is gay and graceful.
Joachim du Bellay 1 published his first volume, which
contained the Sonnets to Olive, the Mtcsagnceomctchie,
or "Battle between the Muses and Ignorance," and
some Odes in 1550, a little before Eonsard. The
sonnet had already been written in Trench by Mellin
de Saint -Gelais, but Du Bellay claimed, and was
allowed, the honour of having first u acclimatised " it.
The model adopted and constantly followed in France
was the Petrarchan. His most memorable work was
born of his new experiences in Italy. It was there
that he wrote the Antiquite's de Borne the sonnets
translated by Spenser under the name of The Ruins
his Regrets, in which he gives expression to his disgust
at the papal capital and his home-sickness, and his
Jeux Rustiques, inspired by the Latin poetry of Nava-
giero, the Venetian who advised Boscan to write in the
Italian manner. Du Bellay himself wrote Latin verse.
The Jeux Rustiques, published at the same time as the
Regrets, 1558, contain his best known pieces, the per-
fectly gay and graceful Vanneur (" the Winnower "),
and the lines to Venus, in which he has done all there
was to be done with that very artificial product the
pastoral poetry of learned poets. Withal Du Bellay
carried beak and claws. He was praised for having
put the epigram into the sonnet, and there are cer-
1 Ed. Marty-Laveaux. 2 vols.
300 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
tainly few better examples how that can be achieved
than in the numbers of the Regrets which contrast the
outward courtesy and dignity with the inward treason
and meanness of the Eoman court. Du Bellay is
more uniformly excellent than Eonsard, but the bulk
of his work is far smaller and he tried less.
The gentil Belleau was a less strong man than Du
Bellay, and it is to the honour of his critical faculty
that he recognised the truth. He left the
Bemi Belleau. . .
ode, Pindaric or Horatian, alone, and de-
voted himself either to translation (he translated
Anacreon) or to poetry of the style of the Jeux
Bustiques. His Bergerie, 1565, and his DeuxUme
JournSe de la Bergerie, 1572, are of this order, while
his Amours et Nouveciu Bschanges des jpierres pre'eieuses
vertus et propr 'ie'te's d'icelles is an imitation, or adapta-
tion, of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the poets of the
Greek decadence, based on a book about the properties
of precious stones, written by a Bishop of Eennes in
the eleventh century. Our own Euphuists must have
gone to the same source. The first Bergerie contains
the really delightful
" Avril l'honneur et des Bois
Et des Mois,"
which ranks with Du Bellay 's Vanneur as the master-
piece of the style. It is a curious comment on the
theory which accounts for literature by the "circum-
stances " that all this light verse about graceful things
belongs to the years of the conspiracy of Amboise,
when the streets of that town were, in the vehement
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 301
words of Eegnier de la Planche, tapestried with the
corpses of executed Huguenots, and while the wars of
Religion, the Saint Bartholomew, and the League
were deluging France in blood.
Like Belleau, J. B. de Ba'if was a translator. His ver-
sions of the Antigone, and of the Eunuchus of Terence,
were published in 1565, and other transla-
tions of Greek and Latin drama were left
unpublished by him at his death, and have been lost.
Ba'if was also the author of a comedy imitated from
Plautus, Le Brave, acted in 1567. His poetry includes
the Bavissement d'Europe and Les Amours de Mdine,
1552. Les Amours de Francine, 1555 these are sonnet
cycles the Meteor es of 1567, his iJtrennes de Foesie
Francaise, 1574, and the Mimes, 1576. Ba'if, who was
more scholar than poet, took the lead in an attempt
to reform French spelling, which indeed at that time
stood in no small need of being reduced to order, and
he also was one of a small body of writers who re-
peated in France the hopeless attempt to force the
poetry of modern languages to conform to classic
metres. His Academy has already been mentioned.
Jean Daurat and Pontus de Thyard are chiefly worth
mention because their names are associated with those
of more original men. Daurat was a humanist, whose
share in producing the poetry of the Pleiade was to
direct the reading of his pupils at the college of
Coqueret, and to write Greek and Latin verse in
praise of them. His French verse is insignificant.
Pontus de Thyard could claim to be a forerunner
of the Pleiade, for his Erreurs Amoureuses appeared
302 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
shortly before the first published verse of Ronsard
and Du Bellay. But he soon renounced verse for
theology and mathematics. 1
Of most of the poets who followed "the con-
quering banner" of their Prince, Eonsard, as of the
lesser learned poets of Spain, no detailed mention can
be made here. The abundance of literary talent which
has seldom been wanting in France accounts suffici-
ently for the "crop of poets" which sprang up "at
the summons of Du Bellay, and under the hand of
Ronsard." That time of war, oppression, and conspir-
acy might have seemed to be " wholly consecrated to
the Muses." Olivier de Magny (d. 1560), Jacques
Tahureau (1527-1555), Nicolas Denisot (1515-1559),
called "le Comte d'Alsinois" by anagram, Louis le
Caron (1536 - 1617), who called himself Charondas,
Estienne de la Boetie (1530-1563), the friend of Mon-
taigne, who indeed saved him from oblivion, and
others whom it were tedious to mention, were men of
talent, respectable members of the army of minor
poets, which in nations of considerable literary faculty,
and in times of literary vigour, has never been want-
ing. One really original poet usually makes many
who are accomplished, but who without the example
might never have written, and would certainly not
have written so well. It was perhaps the necessity
for finding a rhyme to haut which induced Boileau
to quote, from among all the followers of Ronsard, the
1 A Selection of Ba'if's verse has been made by M. Becq de Fon-
quieres, 1874, and his Mimes have been reprinted by M. Blanche-
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 303
names of "Desportes and Bertaut." His dogmatic
assertion that they were made " more restrained " by
the fall of Eonsard is perfectly unfounded. Desportes
(1546-1606), who in character was a courtier of the
baser kind, owed his great popularity at Court to the
fact that he was an echo of one part of Eonsard. 1 Ber-
taut (1552-1611), another courtier, was also another
Desportes. Their greater measure was mainly due to
the fact that they represented the decadence of their
school.
There are, however, three poets of the later sixteenth
century in France who stand apart, though all are
fairly describable as followers of Eonsard, and to one
of them it was given, in the French phrase, to " tell its
fact " to the meticulous criticism of Malherbe. They
are Du Bartas, Aubigne\ and Eegnier.
Guillaume Salluste, Seigneur du Bartas, was born in
or about 1544, at Montfort, near Auch, in Gascony.
He served Henry IV. both in diplomacv
Du Bartas. * . r j
and in war, and died in 1590 of wounds
received at the battle of Ivry. Du Bartas was one of
the many of his time who in a once favourite phrase
were " tarn Marte quam Mercurio," equally devoted to
arms and to letters. On the suggestion of Jeanne
d'Albret, the Queen of Navarre, he began by writing a
poem on the story of Judith; but his fame was gained
by the Semaine, or " Week of Creation," published in
1579. It was followed by the Uranie, the Triomphe
de la Foi, and the Seconde Semainc, of which part was
published in 1584, and which remained unfinished at
1 Ed. M. Alfred Michiels. 1858.
304 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
his death. Du Bartas is an interesting figure, and his
literary fortune has been curious. With men of his
class in France a profession of Protestantism was
commonly only a form of political opposition. They
were " of the Beligion " because they were the enemies
of the House of Guise, and the great majority of them
fell away from it in the following generations. But
with Du Bartas the religious enthusiasm was mani-
festly real. He was of the Puritan type, and in that
lies part, at least, of the explanation of his strange
literary fortune in his own country. He was at first
extraordinarily popular. Even Eonsard praised him,
and sent him a present of a pen. But his party
began to claim that he was the superior of the courtier
poet. This not unnaturally drew from Eonsard the
emphatic denial of the sonnet to Daurat, and the
opinion of Frenchmen has been favourable to the
older poet. Du Bartas has been treated with neglect,
and even contempt, by his own countrymen. 1 Abroad
he has had better fortune. He was widely trans-
lated. The English version of Joshua Sylvester
was long popular with us, and in comparatively
recent times he has been praised by Goethe for
showing qualities wanting in other Frenchmen. But
Frenchmen, to whom the Puritan type has always been
uncongenial, have disliked him on those very grounds.
They have always insisted on looking exclusively at
his faults, his want of taste, his provincialism, and his
pedantry. All are undeniable, but the critics who
1 There is still no modern edition of Du Bartas. The standard
edition is that of 1610-1611, in 2 vols, folio.
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 305
have endeavoured to secure justice for the Pl&ade
ought to have remembered that this last was only an
exaggeration of the teaching of Eonsard and Du
Bellay. They had recommended adaptation of the
language of classic poetry, Greek and Latin. They
had used inversions, and had argued that French
writers were entitled to form compound words on the
Greek model. Du Bellay, for example, justifies the
construction of such a word as " fervetu." Du Bartas
certainly took a very wide licence in this respect. He
wrote such lines as
"Le feu donne-clarte, porte-chaud jette-flamme ;"
and careful examiners have found more than three
hundred examples of such words in his verse. As
the French have not chosen to make use of a freedom
legitimate enough in a language which contains such
words as marche - pied and aigredoux, Du Bartas
has suffered for his boldness. It is easy enough to
find pedantry and bad taste in him; and it would
be easy, by confining attention to the " Pindaric " side
of Eonsard, to show that he was a stilted and pompous
writer. But it is no less the case that there is a
vehement grandeur in Du Bartas which is painfully
rare in the correct poetry of France. It may be
fairly said that if the quality of the French mind,
which Frenchmen call " le bon sens francais," achieved
one of its triumphs when it wholly rejected Du Bartas,
it also condemned its literature to possess no Milton.
When it is your exclusive ambition to be without
fault, to be merely correct, your safest course is to
u
306 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
abstain. If you will keep from the " wine cup " and
"the red gold," from love, adventure, and ambition,
then you may " easy live and quiet die " ; but you
will hardly do anything passionate. Nothing is so
"correct" as cold water.
Theodore Agrippa D'Aubigne, the contemporary,
friend, and kindred spirit of Du Bartas, was a gentle-
man of an ancient family in Saintonge.
vauUq. His lon S life was M1 of agitation and
many-sided activity. Jean D'Aubigne, his
father, was Chancellor of Navarre. The son was born
in 1550, and received a careful education, by which he
unquestionably profited, though we may doubt the
exact accuracy of his own assertion that he could read
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew at the age of six. Jean
D'Aubigne was a vehement Calvinist. It is one of
the best-known stories of the time that he made his
son, then a mere boy, swear, in the presence of the
decapitated heads of La Eenaudie and the other chiefs
of the conspiracy of Amboise, to revenge their deaths.
D'Aubigne kept this "oath of Hannibal" to the end
of his life. When only nine years old he risked the
stake, " his horror of the Mass having overcome his
fear of the fire." He took part in the defence of
Orleans in the first war of Eeligion, and from thence
escaped to Geneva, where he studied under Theodore
Beza. At a later time he served under Conde, and
then attached himself to Henry of Navarre. It was
his good fortune to be in hiding for a duel when the
Massacre of Saint Bartholomew took place. He re-
mained with Henry at the French Court. During
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 307
this period he seems to have so far departed from
the rigidity of his principles as to bow down with
his master "in the temple of Eimmon." At this
time he certainly met Eonsard, and fell under his
influence. He wrote court poetry, composed a tragedy,
and belonged to the Academy of Baif. When Henry
of Navarre made his escape, D'Aubigne" accompanied
him. The Bearnais had no more daring or faithful
servant, and none who spoke to him with a ruder
frankness. The abjuration of Henry IV. was a bitter
blow to D'Aubigne, and he risked his master's favour
by his blunt condemnation of that politic act. Yet
Henry knew the essential fidelity of D'Aubigne, and
left him the possession of his offices of Governor of
Saintonge and Vice-Admiral of Poitou. After the
murder of the king he took part in the unfortunate
opposition to Marie de Medici. The publication of
his Histoirc Universcllc aroused enemies against him,
and in 1620 he fled to Geneva, where he died in
1630, energetic to the last "lasse de vains travaux,
rassasie, et non ennuye de vivre," as he describes
himself in his will. The prose work of D'Aubigne" is
very large, and will be dealt with elsewhere. 1 His
poetry is divided into the lighter verse which he wrote
under the influence of Eonsard, and Lcs Tragiques,
which unquestionably show the influence of Du
Bartas. If his own words are to be taken in the
literal sense, they were written in the very stress of
1 An edition of the works of D'Aubigne, complete with the excep-
tion of L'llistoire Universcllc, was published in Paris, 1873-1892, by
MM. Reaume et de Caussade. Partial reprints are numerous.
308 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
the war with the League ; but there is internal evi-
dence that this can only be true of the three first.
The others were at least largely written after the peace
of Vervins in 1598. There are seven poems in Les
Tragiques, called Miseres, Princes, La Chambre Doree,
Les Feux, Les Fers, Vengeances, Jugement. They
are historical poems, written in verse which is some-
times heavy, but often magnificent, and always ani-
mated by a grim force. D'Aubigne denounces wicked-
ness in the form of a Latin satirist; but the spirit
comes from the Hebrew prophet, and that is perhaps
belittled if we call it satire.
It would be difficult to find a sharper contrast than
is shown between the long restless life of D'Aubigne
and the career of Mathurin Eegnier. He was born at
Chartres in 1573, in a family of the middle class, and
was nephew to the prosperous court poet Desportes.
His family destined him to the Church, and he was
tonsured at the age of eleven. By the influence, in all
probability, of his uncle, he was appointed to a place
in the suite of the Cardinal Joyeuse, French Ambas-
sador in Italy. Later on he was provided for by a
canonry in his native town, and died there in 1613.
The character of Eegnier may unfortunately be de-
scribed nearly in the terms which the Duke of Wel-
lington used of an English military adventurer who
had served under him in the Peninsula. He was, said
the Duke, " a brave fellow, but a sad drunken dog."
A considerable poet, but a sad drunken dog, is, it is
to be feared, the description of Eegnier. His habits
rather than the quality of his verse justify the epithet
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 309
of " cynical " which has been applied to him. 1 Al-
though he wrote other verse, including some fine
lyrics, Eegnier is chiefly memorable as a satirist.
This he was in the proper sense of the word. He
attacked vices, and did not only say savage things
about people whom he disliked. In the form of his
verse Eegnier was so far correct that he escaped the
condemnation which the school of Malherbe passed on
all the other poets of his century. Yet he kept much
of the freedom of the earlier time, and in his ninth
satire he pointed out with admirable precision exactly
what were the weaknesses of the reform of Malherbe.
There is an individuality and an air of sincerity in
Eegnier which saves his work from the too common
fault of modern satire which is to be a mere echo of
Juvenal, verse written not because the author feels
any indignation, but only because he thought it a
distinguished action to imitate the classics and scold
his contemporaries.
The ambition of the Pleiade included the reform
of dramatic as well as of other literature. Its poets
wished to replace the Mysteries, Moralities, " Sotties,"
and " Farces " by tragedy and comedy. Their chances
of success in this field might have seemed, if anything,
more promising than elsewhere. The taste for the
theatre was very strong in France. In Paris there
existed a guild, established by charter from the king
in 1402, for the performance of mysteries and moral-
ities, which possessed a theatre at the Hospital de
la Trinite, near the gate of St Denis. Two other
1 Ed. M, Prosper Poitevin.
310 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
societies, the Clercs de la Bazoche, or Clerks of the
Parliament of Paris, and the Enfants sans Souci, a
body of volunteers who performed farces, existed by
the side of, and to some extent under the control of,
the chief guild, which was called the Confrerie de
la Passion. In the provinces there were numerous
societies named pwys which existed to produce plays.
And while the stage enjoyed so much popularity, a
number of causes were at work to render it no longer
possible to continue the religious plays of the Middle
Ages. The influence of the Eenaissance helped to
discredit their form, while the spread of the Eeforma-
tion began to make their old downright realistic piety
look ridiculous. As early as 1540 the Parliament of
Paris had protested against the performances of the
Confrerie de la Passion as leading to scandal. In
1548 it was strictly forbidden to present religious
mysteries.
As the poets of the Pleiade were just about
organising themselves in those years, and were to
present their first attempt to repeat the
The dramatic * , - . .
work of the classic models in French in 1552, it would
seem on the face of it that they had a
singularly favourable opportunity. They had only
to step into the place left vacant. But that was in
reality far from being the case. Although the Con-
frerie de la Passion was forbidden to play sacred
mysteries, it was left in possession of its exclusive
privilege to open a theatre in Paris, and was thus
able to silence all rivals. The tradesmen and artisans
who formed the guild were little likely to favour their
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 311
contemptuous literary rivals, while the poets were as
little disposed to go cap in hand to such masters.
Thus the men of letters were practically shut out
from the real stage, and were driven to seek a chance
of getting their pieces acted at Court or in colleges.
They had no access to any body of actors. We need
not attach too great importance to this exclusion from
the real theatre. If Jodelle and Gamier had pos-
sessed dramatic genius of a high order, their works
would bear witness for them. In time, too the date
is 1588 the Confrerie de la Passion did consent to
the establishment of an independent theatre. After
the restoration of peace in 1593 there was always
one in Paris. Thenceforward it was within the power
of any Frenchman who possessed the necessary facul-
ties to be the Lope de Vega or the Shakespeare of
his country. If none appeared, it was doubtless be-
cause no such Frenchman was born ; and perhaps
in the long-run the non-appearance of the right man
is the one adequate explanation of the want of any
form of literature in any country. Yet it may be
allowed that the monopoly of the Confrerie did have
a certain effect on the dramatic work of the Pl^iade
by confining them to coteries and colleges, and so
intensifying whatever tendency there was in them
to produce mere school exercises on a classic model.
It must also be kept in mind that the sacred mys-
teries continued to be acted in the provinces. A
few traces of them are to be found to this day in
the form of the religious marionette plays performed
in Brittany. In Paris itself the Confrerie de la
312 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Passion continued to give profane mysteries, which
appear to have been long straggling successions of
scenes taken from history, or from the tales of
chivalry through Ariosto. Its stage has this much
vitality, that it was used for political purposes by
the League. But all this belongs to the history of
the stage proper or to curiosity, not to literature.
Whatever causes may be held to be responsible, the
fact remains that the dramatic is the weakest part of
the work of the poets of the Pleiade. Here they
made little effort to assimilate and reproduce in
genuine French form. They repeated the shape
slavishly. In tragedy they did not try at all to go
beyond the model given them by Buchanan in the
Latin plays written for his pupils at Bordeaux, which
again were taken from Seneca. In comedy there was
less slavery, and less break with the mediaeval litera-
ture. But the poets did comparatively little in
comedy ; and the liveliest comic writer of the later
sixteenth century in France, Larivey, who was of
Italian descent, did not achieve more than to give
bold adaptations of Italian originals.
The title of father of modern French dramatic
literature, tragic and comic, belongs to Estienne
Jodelle, Seigneur de Lymodin. He was
Jodelle. . J
born at Paris in 1532. Jodelle. was a
copious miscellaneous writer ; but only two tragedies,
one comedy, and some poetry written in his youth,
survive. 1 His CUopatre Captive, and the comedy
1 Ed. Marty Laveaux, 1868-1870 ; and Ancien Theatre Francois in
the " Bibliotheque Elzevirienne," vol. iv.
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 313
Eugtne, were performed before King Henry II. in
1552 by Jodelle himself and his friends. The king
was so pleased that he gave the dramatist five hundred
crowns, a handsome sum of money at the time. In the
pardonable joy of their hearts, Jodelle and his friends
celebrated their success by a supper at Arcueil, which
became the excuse for a scandal. Being full of a
classic zeal, not always according to knowledge, the
poets impounded a goat, crowned it, and chanted some
nonsense verses, largely composed of Greek words, the
work of Baif. The New Learning had always been
open to the reproach of paganism, and the Beformers
accused the party of having performed a heathen
sacrifice. The Confrerie de la Passion, glad of an
excuse to bring rivals into trouble, joined in the cry.
Jodelle's second tragedy, Didon se sacrifiant, was written
later, and apparently never played. In 1558 he fell
into disgrace through the failure of a mask on the
Argonauts, provided for the reception of Henry II. at
the Hotel de Ville. It is said that the stage carpenter
mistook the word rockers for dockers, and provided
bell-towers instead of rocks in the properties. Jodelle
never recovered favour; but this accident is not
accountable for the misfortunes of his later years.
There is evidence that " much bad living kill'd Teste
Noire at last," for Jodelle, unlike his brother poets, who
seem to have been orderly people, was of the character
of our own Bohemian forerunners of Shakespeare. He
died worn out, and in great distress, in 1573.
Jodelle is of importance rather because of his date,
and on the ground that he indicated the road which
314 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
French literary drama was to follow, than for his
Thesenecan intrinsic merits. His tragedies are little
piays. more than school exercises. His model was
the Latin tragedy of Seneca, which in itself is a thin
dry copy of the mere machinery of the Greeks. The
popularity of these very tiresome pieces during the
Eenaissance can be partly accounted for by the fact
that Greek was far less familiar than Latin. But it
is easy to make too much of this. Sophocles and
Euripides were not unknown. Buchanan caused
Greek plays to be performed by his pupils at Bor-
deaux ; while, if Jodelle could not read Greek himself,
he might have had the help of Daurat, and he had the
translations of Sophocles by Lazare de Baif and others
to guide him to a better model than Seneca. They
would have been quite enough for a writer who had
any dramatic instinct. But Seneca was easy to
imitate. A well-known story, told mostly in long
speeches, by a messenger or other " utility," no play
of character, and a chorus which chants common-
places, having only a very general relation to the
story these are the notes of the Senecan tragedy.
It is obvious that they are easy to reproduce. The
opening they afforded for serious moral reflection
must have had an attraction for the poets of the
Pl&ade, who had a very definite purpose to expel
"frivolity" from poetry.
A tragedy which began in such conditions as those
described here could hardly hope to become a national
drama. It is certainly the fact that very little which
was written before the seventeenth century has much
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 315
interest except as a curiosity. Jodelle and his imme-
diate successors can hardly be said even to have
written for the stage in the proper sense of the word.
When they were acted at all, it was at the Court or
in colleges. They had so far an influence that they
succeeded in establishing the chorus as a necessity.
It was introduced even into the wild anti-Eoyalist
pieces of the League; but these writers understood
the classic model so little that they treated the chorus
as a mere means of filling in the intervals between
the acts, and not as an integral part of the play.
They in fact exaggerated one of the defects of Seneca,
as is the way with the mere imitator. "We have to
wait for the generation of Eotrou and Corneille before
seeing how an intelligent attempt could be made to
give a new form to the principles of the classic drama.
As for the earlier poets, as they chose to allow them-
selves to be bound by the pedantic rules laid down by
Joseph Scaliger in his Be Tragecliis et Comediis (1560),
which said that this and the other must be done by
every right-minded man because Seneca had done
them, their plays were doomed to want life.
Of Jodelle's two tragedies, the CUopdtrc possesses,
though by no merit of his, the better plot. The story
of the death of the Queen of Egypt is in itself so
picturesque and so complete that it would be difficult
to spoil it altogether. His second tragedy is rather
better written. There is more force in the dialogue,
more poetry in the moral reflections of the chorus of
Didon ; but then the plot is inevitably inferior. It is
difficult indeed to see what could be done with the
31 G EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
story of Dido and iEneas on the stage, unless the
intention is to make the hero odious or ridiculous.
It is true that Jodelle does not fail to attain to a
comic effect, which is, however, too obviously unde-
signed. The last words he puts into the mouth of
iEneas are
" Pauvre Didon, helas ! mettras-tu l'assurance
Sur les vaisseaux marins, que n'ont point de Constance."
These are too like the sailor's traditional excuse to be
worthy of the son of Anchises, who at least had the
grace to sail " multa gemens, magnoque animum
labef actus amore." It is but just to add that not
dissimilar plunges into the ridiculous where what
was called for was the sublime, might be found in
the great, the truly great, Corneille. It must also be
remembered that Jodelle established the Alexandrine
as the metre of French tragedy, though he did not
submit to the strict rules enforced in the next
century.
The names of Jacques Grevin and Jean de la Taille
are entitled to little more than bare mention among
Grevin and tne followers of Jodelle. Grevin (1540?-
La Taiiie. 1570) was for a time a favourite with
Eonsard ; but he was a strong Calvinist, and broke
with the Prince of Poets in resentment against the
Discours sur les Misdres du Temps. Eonsard retaliated
by cancelling his praise of Grevin. One tragedy,
Ce'sar, and two comedies, La Trtsoribre and Les
Esbahis, all three written in his youth, still survive. 1
1 Ed. 1562, but Les Esbahis is in the Ancien Theatre Francais.
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 317
Jacques de la Taille (1540 ?-1608), a soldier, and in
poetry a follower of Konsard, lives in all literary
histories by a piece of unjust ill-luck. He wrote the
two famous lines at which everybody has laughed
" Ma mere et mes en fans aye en recommanda . . .
II ne put achever car la mort l'engarda (l'empecha)."
M. Suard, who habitually took a contemptuous tone
to the early dramatists of his country, made the
remark a very fair example of the silly would-be
clever that La Taille found it easier to shorten his
words than to lengthen his line. Yet such a stroke
of mistaken realism as this is less essentially foolish
than the flat absurdity which Jodelle puts into the
mouth of iEneas. The attempt to be true to life was
at least meritorious in intention, and there is force in
La Taille's tragedy of Les Gabaonites, on the story of
the sons of Kizpah. 1
Eobert Gamier (1545-1601) was a far stronger man
than any of these three. He was born at La Ferte-
Bernard, was a magistrate all his life, and
Gamier. on -i
was finally made Counsellor of State by
Henry IV. Gamier was much less open to the
reproach of being " a barren rascal " than Jodelle,
Grevin, or La Taille. His list of plays is of re-
spectable length. Porcie was written in 1568,
Corndic (translated into English by Kyd) in 1574,
and Marc Antoine in 1578. Z'Hippolyte, the Troade,
and the Antigone are translations or adaptations of
Sophocles and Euripides. There are two other plays
1 Ed. M. Rene de Maulde. 4 vols., 1878-1882.
318 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
more original than either of these Les Juives (1583),
a " Sacred Tragedy " founded on the story of Zede-
kiah; and Bradamante (1582), a romantic drama
founded on passages in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. 1
These two plays are of special interest. Les Juives
is an example of all that could be done with
Garnier's model. The story supplies just such a
catastrophe as was fit to be treated in the meas-
ured, and, when good, stately Senecan fashion. The
prophet, to whom Gamier gives no name, Zedekiah
and his mother Amutal (Sedecie and Amital in
the French), the King of Babylon and his general
Nabuzardan, are exactly the characters required ;
while the chorus is abundantly provided with matter
for lamentations, reflections on the instability of all
human things, the justice of God, and the cruelty
of the wicked. In this case also the chorus of
Jewesses, to which the play owes its name, though
less truly a personage in the drama than it is in
the (Edipus the King or the Agamemnon, is not a
mere voice used to fill up the intervals between the
acts. Gamier was very free from the want of taste
which allowed Jodelle to drop into vulgarity. He
had an instinct for the "grand manner," and does
not fall below his subject. The Bradamante is a
still more interesting play than Les Juives. There
is something almost pathetic about it, for in the
Bradamante Gamier may be said to have brought
French literary drama to within touch of emancipa-
1 Eel. of 1585 reprinted in Sammlung Franzosischer Neudrucke.
Heilbronn, by Herr Wendelin Funster.
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 319
tiou from the tyranny of Seneca's form. If he had
gone a step further, or had found a worthy follower,
the work of Corneille might have been antedated by
half a century, and in happier circumstances. The
subject is neither classical nor Biblical, and this
perhaps gave Gamier the courage to drop the chorus.
As the Bradamante is not, in the full sense of the
word, a tragedy, since it has a happy ending, the
chorus was not strictly necessary ; but as it was
not meant to be a comic piece, the natural course
at the time would have been to supply one. As has
been noted above, the chorus was habitually intro-
duced into pieces which were meant to be serious
even when the subject was not classical. At the
same time Gamier showed, by introducing a "con-
fidant," that he had a real sense of the theatre.
He knew that over and above the main personages
there must always be some who explain, or to whom
explanations are made, and to whom it falls to render
the action intelligible. The name does not alter the
nature of the thing. Horatio is a confidant, and
Mercutio is not much else, though we do not call
them by the title. That they are also interesting
human beings is an argument for incorporating the
chorus in the play, not a proof that some such wheel
in the machinery is superfluous. 1 Then, as he was
1 It is advisable not to burden one's page with illustrations, but
it may be pointed out that the modern "well-made play" supplies
copious examples of what is said above. The Jalin of Alexandre
Dumas fils, in the Demi Monde, or the Due de Montmeyran in Le
Gendre de M. Poirier of Emile Angier, are chorus ; and it may be
added that they are also legion.
320 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
not under the obligation to maintain the perpetual
gravity proper to classical and Biblical subjects,
Gamier felt free to relieve the heroic passages by
comedy. Aymon, the father of Bradamante, is a
human, peppery, and peremptory old gentleman, very
much the barba of the Spanish comedia, and a true
figure of comedy. This, it need hardly be said, is
quite a different thing from the introduction of scenes
of clowns who have nothing to do with the action.
It is a detail worth noting that Gamier, who does
not seem to have cared much whether his play was
acted or not, adds a note to his preliminary argument
to tell any manager who chooses to bring it out that
he is free to replace the absent chorus by interludes
between the acts, "in order that they may not be
confounded, and not to join together what requires
a certain interval of time." This, besides proving
how fully the French dramatists of the day accepted
Scaliger's most disputable theory, that the chorus
served only to separate the acts, is an example of
what has already been said of the Spanish and the
English stages namely, that an audience expected
something more than the play, which the Spaniards
gave in saynetes and dances between the acts, and
the English inserted in the body of the piece.
Antoine de Montchrestien, the last survivor of the
French dramatists of the sixteenth century, may by a
slight stretch of charity be described as
the Eacine of the epoch in which Gamier
was the Corneille. The date of his birth is unknown,
but he was killed in a skirmish during a Huguenot
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 321
rising in 1621, after a very agitated life. At one time
he was an exile in England on a charge of homicide,
and owed his pardon to the intercession of James L,
whose favour he had earned by a play on the death of
Mary Queen of Scots, called I? ficossaise. It is sad to
relate that he was afterwards accused of coining false
money. In 1615 he published a TraiU de V Economic
Politique, and was indeed the first to use the term.
Montchrestien wrote a poem Suzanne, and a Bergerie,
or Pastoral, in addition to his six tragedies SopJw-
nisbe, or La Cartagenoisc (translated from Trissino),
Les Lacdnes, David, Aman, Hector, and L'lZcossaise.
Montchrestien was an accomplished writer of the
school to which he belonged, but his plays show no
great originality. They were published in 1601, and
were probably all written in his youth. It does
not appear that they were ever acted.
The comedy of this school was less a pure imitation
of classic models, but it was also on the whole less
interesting, and cannot be described as
The comedy. , . _ ,
original, since it took freely from the
Italians. Every one of the nine surviving plays of
Pierre Larivey (1540 ?-1611 ?) has an Italian original.
He was descended from the family of the Giunti,
printers at Florence and Venice. 1 His father had
settled at Troyes, and had translated his name into
L'Arrive, which was again corrupted into Larivey.
Pierre was a copious translator from his father's
native language. The nine comedies he left are
1 Ancien Theatre Francais. Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. Vols. v.
and vi.
X
322 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
adaptations as well as translations. He subjected
his originals to the revision which the English play-
wright has so often applied to French plays, but it was
not for the purpose of forcing them to become decent.
Through Larivey much of the common matter of
comedy was handed on to Moliere, who may also have
owed his predecessor something on the side of the
technical skill. It is, however, mainly on this ground
that they belong to French literature. The comedy
of the later sixteenth century is on the whole un-
important. It cannot be said to have had any par-
ticular character of its own. One piece has indeed
some promise and considerable merit of execution.
This is the Reconnue of Belleau. 1
The story has the merit of being drawn from the
real life of the time. A young lady named Henriette
has been placed while a child in a religious
La Reconnue. , _. . . ni i i
house at Poitiers. She has no vocation,
and escapes from the convent to become a Huguenot.
In the storm of the city by the king's army she is made
prize by a certain Captain Eodomont, whom (a pleas-
ing touch of the manners of the age) she fully
recognises as her lawful master. The captain is a
very honest man, who is well disposed to marry his
captive. But he is summoned away to take part in
the recovery of Havre from the English, and leaves
her, having always " treated her as a sister," in charge
of an old lawyer in Paris. At this point the play
begins. The old lawyer falls in love with Henriette,
and thereby arouses the jealousy of his wife. To
1 A?icien Thedtrc Frangais, vol. iv.
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 323
quiet her he arranges to marry Henriette to his clerk,
Jehan, who is likely to prove a complacent husband.
He tells Henriette that the captain has been killed at
Havre. In the meantime we learn that a certain
young advocate has fallen in love with Henriette.
She, who would willingly marry either the captain or
the advocate for she is a downright though honest
young person nevertheless resigns herself to marry
Jehan, seeing that the captain is dead, and she dare
not go home. At this crisis the captain turns up en-
riched by booty, and immediately afterwards Henriette's
father. The " recognition " gives its name to the play.
Henriette is married to the advocate. The captain is
consoled with the promise of another wife, and all
ends happily. Here are the elements of a very lively
play, and one can imagine what Lope de Vega or
Dekker would have made of them. Belleau falls
much short of what was possible, largely because his
respect for classic models made him feel it incumbent
on him to tell his story, not by dialogue and action, but
by narratives. The return of the captain, for instance,
which might have made an excellent scene, is only
described by the old lawyer's servant. The merits
of the comedy are none the less considerable. They
lie in the brisk flowing verse of the dialogue, which,
as was to be expected of "le gentil Belleau," is wholly
free from mere grossness, and in the human truth of
the characters. Even the author's excessive deference
to the classics is partly atoned for. His descriptions of
what it would have been better to tell by action are
mostly given by Jeanne, the lawyer's servant, who is an
324 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
excellent study of that very French personage, the
Bonne & tout /aire, the general servant, who is partly
the drudge, but also partly the friend, and a little the
tyrant, of the family. Jeanne is truly the ancestress of
the servante of Moliere. With La Beconnue, as with
Garnier's Bradamante, we feel that only a little was
wanted to make a complete success. But that little
was not supplied, and the difference between the
complete and the incomplete is in itself infinite. Of
the dramatic work of the French poets of
ulTof tie early t ne later sixteenth century it has to be said
dramatic utera- that on the whole it was lost labour. The
hire.
tragedy is too artificial, too slavishly imi-
tated from a poor model. The comedy, as all can see
who will look at the EugHe, of Jodelle, or the Esbahis
of Grevin, was incoherent, being partly a rehandling
of the " sotties " and the " farces " of the Middle Ages,
partly an imitation of Plautus and Terence, nowhere
an original growth. Its authors were men of letters,
doing exercises in kinds of literature to which they
were attracted by their prestige. They did not really
work for the stage. Now the theatre, in the material
sense, is as necessary to the dramatist as the model is
to the painter. The most "learned" of artists will
soon find that his work loses life and reality unless he
keeps the living figure constantly before his eyes. A
play is meant to be talked and acted to an audience.
When it is written only to be read, it soon loses life.
From " the cart of Thespis " down to the " four boards "
of Lope de Eueda in the Spanish market-place, there
has always been the stage first, and then the dramatic
FRANCE: POETRY OF THE LATER RENAISSANCE. 325
literature. That is equally true in France. The
history of the French stage is continuous from the
Confrerie de la Passion, through the Enfants sans
Souci, and the professional actors who succeeded
them at the Hotel de Bourgogne, down to the
" maison de Moliere." But in the sixteenth century
it skirted literature, and the alliance was not made
between them till the time of Eotrou and Corneille.
So the earlier dramatic literature remains a curiosity,
or at the most an indication of what was to come.
Its best tragedy is an " essai pale et noble," and its
comedy a rough experiment, too often the very reverse
of noble. In order to show how the writers of the
great time, and of the eighteenth century classic
school, while working on the same fund of prin-
ciples, and with similar aims, differed from their pre-
decessors, it would be necessary to go beyond the
scope of this book.
326
CHAPTEE XL
FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS OP THE LATER SIXTEENTH
CENTURY.
ABUNDANCE OP LATER SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE A DISTINCTION SULLY
BODIN THE GREAT MEMOIR -WRITERS CARLOIX LA NOUK
D'AUBIGNE MONLUC BRANTOME THE ' SATYRE M^NIP^E ' ITS
^ ORIGIN ITS AUTHORS ITS FORM AND SPIRIT MONTAIGNE HIS
/ 'ESSAYS' THE SCEPTICISM OF MONTAIGNE HIS STYLE CHARRON
AND DU VAIR.
No race has ever allowed less of what it has done,
suffered, or even only seen, to be lost than the French.
It has ever been the ambition of the men
Abundance of
later sixteenth- of that people to leave some record of
century prose. themselves> ^ have to thank what an
ill-conditioned critic might call its vanity for a
memoir - literature which would be inadequately
praised if it were only called the first in the world.
The world has not only no equal, but no second, to
be used as a comparison. The France of the wars of
Religion, agitated as it was, was exceptionally rich in
these delightful books. For that we have good reason
to be grateful, since this time, full as it was of colour,
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 327
of ability, of passion, and of the most remote extremes
in character, has left us the means of knowing it more
fully than we can know our own generation. As it
was also an age of great political and religious strife,
treatises on politics and religion were naturally written,
seeing that amid all the turmoil and fury men con-
tinued to write. There is more cause for surprise
when we meet also with works of science, or on the
arts though the surprise is not perhaps fully justified,
since even in the wildest times the great mass of men
live their lives very much as in peace. When com-
motions have reached the point of causing universal
disturbance, they soon end. Mankind would starve
if they were not suspended.
Out of all the mass of writing produced in the
second half of the sixteenth century in France (or by
men who must be assigned to that period
but who lived into the seventeenth), which is
valuable for one reason or another, all is not literature.
Only a part can be read from any other motive than
interest in the matter. The historians Palma Cayet,
Jean de Serres, and his brother Olivier de Serres,
author of the TMdtre oV Agriculture, for instance, will
hardly be read for their style, or except by students.
As much must be said of the memoirs of
Sully, which are called for short Les
(Economies Boyales. 1 It is not because this book
1 The true title, which is too characteristic not to be given in full,
is, " Des Sages et Roy ales (Economies domestiques, politiques, et
militaires de Henri le Grand, le prince des vertus, des armes, et des
lois, et le pere en effet [i.e., en realite] de ses peuples francois. Et
328 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
began to be published at the Chateau de Sully in
1638 that we must leave it aside, for in matter and
spirit it belongs to the previous century. Nor is it
because Les (Economies Royales are wanting in interest.
They are of great historical value, and the form is
attractive from its mere oddity. Sully employed four
secretaries to tell him his own life, so that they are
found informing their master, " Monsieur your father
had four sons, for whom he had no other ambition
than to make them such gallant men that they might
raise their house to its ancient splendour, from which
the fall of the elder line to the distaff [i.e., to female
heirs] three times, and the unthrifty courses of his
ancestors, and especially of his father, had much
diminished it in goods." Or a little further on, " This
[viz., to be a faithful and obedient servant] you also
swore to him in such fair terms, with so much con-
fidence, and in so agreeable a tone of voice, that he at
once conceived great hopes of you." Yet the oddity
and the matter are the virtues of the (Economies
Royales. Something equivalent must needs be said
of the memoirs of Castelnau, of Graspard de Saulx-
des servitudes utiles, obeissantes, convenables, et administrations
loyales de Maximilien de Bdthune, l'un des plus confidents familiers
et utiles soldats et serviteurs du grand Mars des Francois. Dedies
a la France, a tous les bons soldats et tous peuples Francois." It is
described as printed at Amestelredam (Amsterdam), at the sign of
the three immortal virtues crowned with amaranth i.e., Faith,
Hope, Charity (of which last Sully had no great share), by Alethinos-
graphe of Clearetimdlee, and Graphexechon of Pistariste i.e., Vera-
cious-Writer of Glory - Virtue - Care, and Emeritus Secretary of
High Probity. The (Economies Royales are included by M. Petitot
in his collection of memoirs, 2nd series, vols, i.-ix.
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 329
Tavannes written by his son Jean of Conde, of
Francois de Guise, and many others. 1
Jean Bodin (1530-1596) is a great name in political
science. His Rdpiiblique, first published in French in
1578 and then enlarged and translated into
Latin by the author in 1586, must always
remain of value, if for no other reason than because
it shows how it was possible for men of the sixteenth
century who were not merely servile courtiers, to
believe in the "right divine" of kings and the ex-
cellence of despotism. Bodin's influence, even among
ourselves, was strong in the seventeenth century.
Strafford was almost certainly thinking of him when
he told the Council that the king was entitled, as
representative of the State, to act legibus solutus ; and
his doctrine was taught in incomparable English by
Hobbes. Yet Bodin will hardly be read for his
French, and what we cannot read for the form can-
not be called literature.
It shows, as fully as anything well could, the wealth
of French prose that we can leave aside so many
writers, even in what is not one of the
The great
memoir- great periods, and yet retain a considerable
body of literature in the very fullest sense
of the word. Montaigne, who is pre-eminent, stands
1 These memoirs are included in the great collections of Petitot,
and Michaud and Poujoulat. M. Zeller, in two volumes of his
excellent Histoire de France racontee par les contemporains, has made
up a consecutive story by extracts from the writers named above and
others. No other literature could supply so much good reading of
the same kind, and they are to be obtained for the "ridiculous sum "
of tenpence each.
330 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
by himself, alike in form and in matter, and so for
other reasons does the Satyre MSnippte. But among
the memoir - writers who also were in some cases
historians, there are five who would of themselves
be enough to make the wealth of any other literature
in this kind Carloix, La Noue, D'Aubigne', Monluc,
and Brantome. They came indeed in a happy hour.
The generation was full of strong and violent char-
acters, and of sudden picturesque events to supply
them with matter. The language had been developed
and shaped by Babelais, Calvin, and the translators
with Amyot at their head, while it had not yet been
pruned by the pedantry of the seventeenth century.
It still kept its colour. In history the classics and
the Italians had supplied models of more capability
than the chronicles which Comines had followed. For
the model of the memoir, a people who could look
back to Joinville and Villehardouin had no need of
foreign influence.
The five writers just named are not only excellent
in themselves, but each of them is either in his own
person the representative of a class, or
makes us acquainted with one. Vincent
Carloix wrote, not his own life, but that of his master,
Francois de Scepeaux, Marshal de Vieilleville (1509-
1571). 1 Carloix was the Marshal's secretary for thirty-
five years, and was fully trusted by him. It was by
Vieilleville's direction that the secretary undertook
the memoirs, for which he was supplied with ample
materials. He gives, as to the matter, the picture of
1 Petitot, vols, xxvi.-xxviii.
FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS. 331
a very important member of the party called " Les
Politiques" that is, those Frenchmen who, with no
wish to separate from the Church of Eome, had yet
no fanatical enmity to the Huguenots on religious
grounds, but who were the enemies of the Dukes of
Guise of the house of Lorraine. " Les Politiques " con-
quered in the end by alliance with Henry IV., and
from them, years after the death of Vieilleville, came
one of the most remarkable of political satires, the
Satyre Me'nippe'e. The style of Carloix is one of singular
life and colour, " although," as the editor of the edition
of 1757 says, "it is full of Gaulish, and antiquated,
phrases and expressions." It would now appear more
proper to put "because." Carloix has been said to
have taken " Le Loyal Serviteur," who wrote the life
of Bayard, as his model. But if so, he followed him
only in his plain narrative. Carloix has a wit and
a share of the quality called by the French malice,
wanting to Bayard's simple-hearted squire. Under
his air of candour he is a shrewd experienced man
of the world.
Francois de la Noue, called Iron Arm, was born in
Brittany of a well-connected family in 1531, and was
killed at the siege of Lamballe in 1591.
La Aof.
His character was drawn in the concise
words of Henry IV. : " He was a thorough good soldier,
and, still more, a thorough good man." " C'etait un
grand homme cle guerre, encore plus un grand homme
de bien." "What are called his memoirs form the
twenty-sixth book of his Discours Politiques et Mili-
taries, a great work of description, criticism, and
332 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
reflection, rather than history, composed while he was
a prisoner in the hands of the Spaniards in the Low
Countries. 1 La Noue, who was converted to " the reli-
gion " by the chaplain of Coligny, was a type of all that
was best among the Huguenots. He did not embrace
the fanaticism together with the principles of his
party. The memoirs, which are in fact an account of
the wars of Eeligion, from the first "taking up of
arms" in 1562 till 1570, are remarkably impartial.
La Noue was one of the small body of men who can be
perfectly loyal to their own party, and yet never fal-
sify the story in its favour. He is just to the chiefs
on the other side. Though a profoundly moral man,
he was saved from priggery by a very real sense of
humour. He could see the laughable side of things.
His style wants the inimitable flash of Monluc, and it
has not got the very peculiar flavour of the prose
of D'Aubigne, but it is nervous, clear, exact, and
thoroughly excellent in its own way the way of a
wise temperate man, a quiet gentleman, and modest
valiant soldier.
The title of memoir-writer must be understood in a
very wide sense when it is applied to D'Aubigne.
Strictly speaking, the short Vie a ses En-
D'Aubigne. . . . .
fants is his memoir/ The Histoire TJm-
verselle, his main work in prose, is a great general
history of contemporary events at home and abroad.
But then it is also a history of events in which
D'Aubigne himself played an active part, and which
1 The memoirs are printed in the thirty-fourth volume of Petitot.
2 Ed. of M. L. Lalanne, 1854.
FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS. 333
he tells from an intensely personal point of view. It
is to be noted that it ends with the wars of Beligion,
and the peace which was brought about by the abjura-
tion of the king that is to say, when D'Aubigne
himself ceased to take a prominent share in public
affairs. To judge by his other prose work, which is
considerable, 1 D'Aubigne was by nature a vehement
or even virulent pamphleteer. His Baron de
Foeneste and his Confession de Sancy are fiercely
satirical. They are also rather obscure, and not
easily readable. It was on the suggestion of Henry
IV. that he first began to think of writing the history
of his time. He was to have worked in co-operation
with the President Jeannin, an ex - Leaguer, and
another thorough-going partisan. It is difficult to
imagine what they could have produced between
them. This fantastic scheme was dropped, and the
Histoirc Universelle was written after the king's death.
The style of D'Aubigne shows the influence of his
learned education, and of his practice in the poetic
school of Eonsard. He sometimes uses purely pe-
dantic words, as when he says that his father put
him under the charge of a tutor, "Jean Costin,
homme astorge et impiteux." Astorge is a Greek
word (ao-To/0709), which would never have been used
by Carloix, La Noue, or Monluc. Again, he deliber-
ately followed classic models in the long speeches,
frequently delivered by himself, which abound in
his History, and are the most carefully written
1 Much remained imprinted till it was published by MM. Reaunie
and Caussade.
334 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
parts. When he tells Henry IV. in one of these
addresses that it is useless for him to endeavour to
make peace with the Court, because " you are guilty
of your birth, and of the wrongs which have been done
you," the echo of Sallust and of Tacitus is distinctly
audible ; yet he can also be colloquial, and has no
scruple in using idiomatic and proverbial phrases
which a later generation would have rejected as un-
worthy of the " dignity of history." Dignity is not
wanting to D'Aubigne, but it is given by the force of
his thoughts and of his character, which is that of a
man who might be a tyrannical friend and an exacting
servant, but who was brave and high-minded.
For a perfect picture of a partisan on the other side
we have only to go to the Commentaries of one whom
D'Aubigne describes as "ce vieux renard
de Monluc." Yet Blaise de Lasseran-Mas-
sencome, Seigneur de Monluc, is perhaps hardly to
be called a party man. Like the Lord Byron of our
own civil war, he "was passionately the king's." He
was born in or about 1503, near Condom, of an ancient
and impoverished family of Gascony. Though the
eldest son, he had even less than the traditional
cadet's portion. He could boast that, though a gentle-
man born, he had fought his way up from the lowest
rank. After serving in the wars of Italy, he was
named Governor of Guyenne by the king, and there
distinguished himself by a ferocity exceptional even
in those times. An arquebuse-wound in the face at
the siege of Eabastens in 1570 disabled him for active
service. His Commentaries were dictated in his last
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 335
years, and he died in 1577. 1 It is one of the many
sayings attributed to Henry IV. that the Commentaries
of Monluc are "the Soldier's Bible." Whether the
king said it or not, no truer description of this delight-
ful book could be given. Monluc was a man of his
time and his race. He " had the honour to be a Gas-
con " in every sense of the word, having all the valour,
enterprise, craft, humour, and expansive vanity of the
type. But he was also a perfect soldier, and pro-
foundly convinced that his business was the greatest
a man could follow. His Commentaries were avowedly
written to show the " captains and lieutenants of
France " what a soldier ought to be, by the example
of Blaise de Monluc. The very thoroughness of his
vanity gives the book a sincere tone. We feel that
he was far too well pleased with himself to think it
necessary to lie. That he saw things through the
colouring medium of his self-sufficiency is possible
even certain but at least he gives them as he saw
them. Monluc was also a very able man, who was
not wanting in appreciation of the humorous side of
his own gasconnades, and therefore his vanity is never
silly. The style is that of a book dictated by a man
with a boundless faconde that is to say, command of
ready language ; but it is too vivid and has too much
substance ever to be garrulous. At times he can
strike out images of great force.
1 The Commentaries of Monluc are included in Petitot's Collection,
vols, xx.-xxii., but the definitive edition is that of M. Alphonse de
Ruble, published by the Societe* de l'Histoire de France. The first
three volumes contain the Commentaries; the fourth and fifth the
Letters, which M. de Ruble discovered in Russia.
336 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Different though they were in life and character,
there is a certain resemblance between Monluc and
Brantome. Both have the same air of per-
Brantome. .. .
feet satisfaction with themselves, and both
pour out the fruits of their varied experience with the
same appearance of colloquial confidence. 1 Pierre de
Bourdeilles, called Brantome from the name of an
abbey of which he was lay abbot that is to say, of
which he drew the abbot's portion by favour of the
king, without taking the vows was a younger son
of a distinguished family of Perigord. He was born
about 1540, and died in 1614. During many years he
travelled much, fought more or less, and lived at Court
in the intervals of journeys or campaigns. Being
disappointed of a place which the king had promised
him, he was preparing to revenge himself by treason,
when his horse fell with him, and crippled him for
life. Brantome now betook himself to writing his
reminiscences as a consolation. Though he professed
a certain contempt for letters, he spent great pains on
his work, and its bulk is considerable. In addition to
some minor treatises the so-called Discours des Duels,
the Rodomontades Espaignolles, and a few others he
made two great collections, which he named Des
Hommes and Des Femmes. These he rewrote and
revised not a little. It was his wish that they should
be published as he left them, but his heirs neglected
his directions. His manuscripts were copied, handed
1 The best edition of Brantome is that of the Socio" te de l'Histoire
de France. Prosper Merimee edited an incomplete edition in the
" Bibliothecpue Elzcvirienne. " Partial reprints are numerous.
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 337
about, and finally straggled into print by fragments,
to which the booksellers gave fancy names, such as
Les Grandes Dames, Les Dames Galantes, and so forth.
The admiration which Monluc felt for his own busi-
ness of soldiering, Brantome extended to every mani-
festation of energetic character by deed or word, moral
or immoral, with a marked, but mainly artistic, prefer-
ence for good sayings and immorality. He is not to be
trusted in details, but he is in himself an invaluable wit-
ness to the time which produced him. Nowhere else
can we see so fully the combination of the French love
of showy action, and indifference to what we call
morality, with the cruel wickedness of Italy, which
distinguished the Court of the later Valois. He does
not seem to have been in himself a bad man, and yet
it does not appear that he saw any difference between
right and wrong. Murders, and breaches of the seventh
commandment, committed by ladies and gentlemen
in a spirited way, have his admiration quite as easily
as the most honourable actions. He tells all in the
same brightly coloured, rapid, gossipping style, and
stops to rejoice over every striking story which runs
from his pen, whether it be a trait of magnanimity on
the part of the Duke of Guise, or the brutal murder of
three unarmed traders by one of his own friends, who
was angry, and relieved his feelings by a butchery.
The attempt to enumerate all the writers who may
be classed with one or another of the five just named
could lead to nothing but a catalogue of mere names.
Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the wife whom
Henry IV. married at the "red wedding" of Saint
Y
338 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Bartholomew, and afterwards repudiated, wrote me-
moirs under the direct inspiration of her friend and
admirer Brantome. Pierre de l'Estoile (1545-1611) 1
wrote MSmoires-Journaux i.e., a diary of his time.
The Correspondence of Catherine de Medici recently
edited by M. de Ferriere of Duplessis-Mornay (1549-
1623), and of the Cardinal D'Ossat (1557-1604), which
have long been known, the Negotiations of Pierre
Jeannin (1546-1632), the great History of De Thou,
written in Latin, are all of value, and are all well
written. The list could easily be swollen, but it
would be to little purpose where space does not allow
of more than mention. Prom the literary point of view
they are notable as showing that the autobiographical,
anecdotic, historical, and, in short, average practical
writing faculty of the French, which has given their
literature its unrivalled continuity, was in full vigour
during these generations, when, as one is tempted to
think, men must have been far too intent on keeping
themselves alive in the prevailing anarchy to have
leisure for the use of the pen. Spain, in its happier
days, produced something approaching the French
historical and memoir work of the later sixteenth
century. Elizabethan England, rich beyond compari-
son in poetic genius, has nothing like it to show. It
could not be, of course ; and yet we could have spared,
not Marlowe, but perhaps Greene and Peele, and
certainly Nash, Lodge (the lyrics apart), and Breton,
to see the Armada, and the voyages to the Isles,
through the eyes of an English Monluc, or the pacifi-
1 Ed. Brunet et Champollion, 1875-1881.
FRENCH PROSE-WRITERS. 339
cation of Ireland as told by a La Noue of our own,
or such a picture of the Court of Elizabeth as could
have been painted by the nearest conceivable English
approach to Brantome.
There is, however, one piece of French prose of
what may be called the practical order written, that
The satyre is to sav > to secure a definite business end
Menippee. which is far too good in itself, as well as
too important in its consequences, to be passed with a
mere mention. This is the famous, and in some ways
still unrivalled, Satyre Me'nippe'e. 1 The book is a small
collection of pamphlets, burlesques, and satiric verse.
When due precaution is taken to avoid exaggeration
and misunderstanding, it may be compared to our own
Martin Mar-Prelate pamphlets. Both were the work
of a body of men not individually of importance, who
yet produced a great effect by combined action for a
cause. Each is the beginning of journalism in its
own country. They were nearly contemporary, but
Martin Mar-Prelate came a little earlier. His dates
are 1589-1592, and the Satyre M6nipp6e belongs to
1593 and 1594. The comparison must not be pushed
further, since the Satyre MSnippe'e is markedly superior
to Martin in artistic skill, and, it must be allowed, in
dignity of purpose also, however kindly we may wish
to think of the Puritan writers. Neither is there any
reason to suppose that any connection existed between
the two. If the writers of the Satyre Me'nippe'e had any
inspiration other than their own desire to answer the
1 Ed. M. Ch. Read, Paris, 1880, in Jouaust's " Librairie des
Bibliophile*."
340 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
virulent sermons and speeches of the League, they
probably found it in Erasmus, and in the Upistolce
Ohscurorum Virorum of Ulrich von Hutten. The fact
that the Satyre and Martin appeared almost side by
side, only shows that the causes which were making
for the establishment of journalism were working in
France as well as in England. Use had already been
made of the printing-press, the pulpit, and, in France
at least, of the stage, for controversy. But much had
been written in Latin, whether of the study or of the
kennel. The anti-papal " sotties " of Gringore, played
by the encouragement of Louis XIX, the an ti- Church
farces of the Eeformers, the sermons and the
pamphlets of the Xeague, were individual work, the
still uncollected raw material of possible journalism.
The next step was to organise collective action. It
was done roughly, and unhappily for a party purpose,
in England, but in France with skill, with much
literary finish, and for a national cause.
In order to appreciate the full merit of the Satyre
Mtnyppde, the reader must call to mind that after the
murder of Henry III. his cousin of Navarre
became King of France by inheritance.
Henry IY. had the support not only of his own sub-
jects and the Huguenots, but of the " Politiques," the
moderate men, as we might say, among the Eoman
Catholics. The ardent partisans of the Church turned
against him, and banded themselves with the princes
of the house of Guise. The Catholic League, which
had been first founded by Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes
nearly thirty years before, after the conspiracy of
FKENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 341
Amboise, was extended, and became a great organisa-
tion for the purpose of setting aside the heretic King
of Navarre, and putting some assured Eomanist on
the throne. In reality it was little more than a cloak
for the ambition of the Guises, and the partisans who
saw a chance of profiting by anarchy. It had the
support of the King of Spain. Paris was held, partly
by the help of the more fanatical Eoman Catholic
clergy and the mob, partly by a so-called Spanish
garrison Moors, Neapolitans, and what not made
up out of the sweepings of Philip II.'s army. Even
the conversion of Henry did not disarm the League.
It called a sham meeting of the Estates of the realm
to debate the question of setting him aside. At this
moment a body of men in Paris combined to assail
these so-called fitats with ridicule; and when we
remember how brutally the " Guisards " had disposed
of opponents and critics, it is hard to exaggerate the
courage they showed.
The leader of the band was Pierre Leroy, canon of
the Sainte Chapelle. It was to him that the idea
first suggested itself, and he drew about
Its authors.
him his friends Gillot, Passerat, Eapin,
Chrestien, Pithou, and Durant. As may well be
supposed, the early history of an anonymous work
is somewhat obscure. It was at first a small manu-
script pamphlet, handed about quietly. Additions
were made. The verse seems to have been intro-
duced at the later stages. Whether it was actually
printed in 1593 appears very doubtful. The first
known example is of 1594, and, as was natural
342 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
enough, the Satyr e was subject to a good deal of
modification. The names of men who had been
attacked, and who passed over later to Henry IV.,
were dropped out. Even the title was altered. The
first chosen was "Abbrege et TArne des Estatz con-
voquez a Paris en l'an 1593 le 10 Eebvrier. Jouxte
la relation de Mademoiselle de la Lande, Messieurs
Domay et Victon Penitens blancqs." An alternative
title was "Le Catholicum de la Ligue, 1593." The
name of Satyre Minippe'e (taken from Lucian) seems
to have been given by common consent rather than
by the authors, and the first undoubted edition is
called "La Vertu du Catholicon d'Espagne, avec un
Abrege de la tenue des Estats de Paris convoquez
aux de Febvrier 1593 par les chefs de la Ligue. Tire
des memoires de Mademoiselle de la Lande, alias la
Bayonnoise, et des secrettes confabulations d'elle et du
Pere Cornmelaid."
In its final form the Satyre Me'nippe'e has some
resemblance in form, and a marked likeness in spirit,
its Mm and to our own Anti- Jacobin as it was in the
spirit. fi rS an( j most militant stage. The authors
of both were fighting with a combination of ridicule
and argument against anarchy, and in the name of
common - sense and patriotism. There is the same
resistance to the foreigner in both. The Gallican
clergy of the stamp of Leroy were no friends to the
interference of the Pope in French affairs. That
Philip II. was a foreigner could be disputed by
nobody ; and though the Lorraine princes had played
a great part in France, and were connected with
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 343
the Valois by marriage, they were still considered
strangers. The Satyre MSnippe'e opens by a burlesque
speech delivered by a quack in praise of the Catholi-
con or universal cure of Spain of the bribes which
Philip II. was lavishing in order to promote the
misfortunes of his neighbours. Then comes a de-
scription of the procession at the opening of the
Estates, and of the tapestry on the walls, in which
the different chiefs of the League are ridiculed, and
the misfortunes they were bringing on the country
shown. Then Mayenne makes a speech as Lieuten-
ant-General of the kingdom the sort of speech he
would have made if he had told the truth. Various
churchmen then speak Italian or Italianate priests
who were prepared to sacrifice France to the Pope,
or mere beaters of the drum ecclesiastic. Then
comes what is perhaps the best single thing in the
Satyre, the speech of . M. des Eieux, who speaks for
the noblesse. The choice of this man an historical
character who was finally hanged as a brigand to
speak for the nobles is in itself a most ingenious
stroke. He was a thorough military ruffian of the
worst stamp, low-born and ignorant, who had obtained
command of a castle, and who lived by plundering
his neighbours. Des Eieux begins by giving it as his
opinion that nothing could prove the excellence of the
League more fully than just this, that the like of
him could come to speak for the nobles. He goes
on in the same tone, which is the swagger of a vulgar
adventurer who feels himself safe. No more artful
way of showing to what the League was reducing
344 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
France could have been chosen. The speech of Des
Eieux is attributed to Jacques Gillot, clerk to the
Parliament of Paris. Then the tone of burlesque is
dropped, and a vigorous denunciation of the League is
delivered by M. d'Aubray as the spokesman of the
Third Estate, the Burgesses. This, the longest of all,
is said to be the work of Pierre Pithou. The verse,
partly scattered through the book and partly col-
lected at the end, belongs to Jean Passerat, the
successor of Eamus at the College Eoyal, and to
Gilles Durant, a lawyer and country gentleman.
Both Passerat and Durant wrote other verse of
excellence.
All this memoir, history, and satire is interesting,
but no part of it belongs to the literature which every
thinking man in every country has read, or knows
that it would be good to read. They may be all left
aside, not without loss indeed, yet without irreparable
loss. But whoever has not read the Essays of Mon-
taigne has missed something necessary for the " criti-
cism of life" the exposition of a habit of thought,
a way of looking at things, of discussing and deciding
questions of conduct and principle, which are not only
French and peculiar to one time, but human and
universal.
Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, was born
at the Chateau de Montaigne in Perigord, near Bor-
deaux, in 1533. A legend, which appears
Montaigne. .
to have no foundation, asserts that the
family was of English origin. It had risen by the
salt-fish trade, and its nobility was of recent origin,
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 345
facts which Montaigne did not recognise so calmly as
a philosopher should. His father served under Francis
I. in the wars of Italy, and increased the considerable
fortune he had inherited, by a rich marriage with
Antoinette de Louppes, or Lopes, a Spanish Jewess
by descent. Michel was educated at the College of
Bordeaux by Buchanan, Muretus, and other famous
scholars. By a fad of his father's, he was surrounded
from the beginning by people who only spoke Latin,
and so learned the language naturally. His schooling
came to an end when he was thirteen. Although he
inherited a strong frame from his father, and did
possibly serve one or two campaigns, he applied him-
self to the law, and not to arms, as a profession.
He held a judicial post, first at Perigueux, then at
Bordeaux, but resigned it early, and retired to his
own house. Montaigne was known at Court, which
he visited several times, even before he published
the first two books of his Essays in 1580. Dur-
ing one visit to Paris in 1588 to superintend the pub-
lication of the third book, he was an eye-witness of
the "day of the barricades," and was imprisoned in
the Bastille by Leaguers. He travelled abroad, and
returned to hold municipal office at Bordeaux, where
he showed more caution than courage during a visita-
tion of the plague. He died at his own house of
Montaigne in 1592, just as the long anarchy of the
wars of Beligion, which he had never allowed to
ruffle the calm of his life, was coming to an end. 1
1 The standard edition of Montaigne's Essays is still that of Le
Clerc, reprinted in 1865-66. There have been two recent reprints of
34:6 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
The fame of Montaigne was great in his own time,
and has never suffered eclipse. Nor is it possible
that it ever should, since, in addition to personal
qualities of an amusing and attractive kind, he was
the thorough type of a certain stamp of intellect.
He was as complete a Gascon as his countryman
Monluc, and may even be said to have carried the
peculiar quality of his race to a yet higher pitch. Mon-
luc was resolved that all the world should know him
for the astute and intrepid soldier he was. Montaigne
did not condescend to justify himself by his deeds.
He asked the world to be interested in him, not as a
soldier, nor indeed as anything, except just a thinking
man. And the world has never denied that the man
and his thoughts were worth knowing.
The subject of his Essays is always sub-
stantially Michel of Montaigne, his health, his read-
ing, his views of men, things, and opinions, his habits
of mind and body. In matter, in form, and in intel-
lectual scope he is all the world apart from Bran-
tome, and yet he is not wholly unlike the old dis-
appointed courtier of the Yalois, discoursing Des
Hommcs and Des Femmes. Both talk out all that
was in them, with a certain affectation of careless-
ness, but in reality with thought, and no small toil
over the manner of saying. During his later years
Montaigne employed himself much in covering the
our own excellent and contemporary translation by John Florio;
one, very handsome, in Mr Henley's "Tudor Translations"; and
another, cheap and pretty, edited by Mr Waller, in six small
volumes.
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 347
margins of a copy of the so - called fifth edition of
his Essays with corrections and additions. The book
still exists in the library at Bordeaux. After his
death his widow intrusted his friend, Pierre de Brach,
with the task of editing a revised edition. Brach,
who had the help of Montaigne's adopted daughter,
Mdlle. de Gournay, produced what was for long the
accepted text in the edition of 1595. But though
Pierre de Brach and Mdlle. de Gournay worked with
care, they omitted a good deal, and misunderstood
something. Successive editors in this century have
laboured to correct their errors of omission and
commission, but the text of Montaigne has never
yet been fixed to the satisfaction of exacting critics.
It is but natural that a writer who deals with
permanently interesting questions of principle and
The scepticism conduct, and who has always been read,
of Montaigne, should have been diversely judged during
the very different centuries which have passed since
his death. The judgments of the seventeenth and the
eighteenth centuries on the scepticism of Montaigne
are in fact examples of a truth which he has himself
most excellently stated namely, that we read much
of ourselves into our authors. During the strong
Eoman Catholic reaction of the seventeenth century
his amused interest in both sides of all questions, and
his favourite thesis that no doctrine is so sure that we
are justified in killing men for it, were found exasperat-
ing by those who were terribly in earnest. In the
eighteenth century he was praised, and accepted as a
forerunner of Voltaire, on these very grounds. What
348 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
one body of critics called poorness of spirit and cold-
ness of heart, another called wisdom. For that he
would himself have been prepared. In the first of
his Essays, " By divers meanes men come unto a like
end," he states what was perhaps the firmest of his
convictions to wit, that " surely man is a wonderfull,
vaine, divers, and wavering subject ; it is very hard to
ground any directly-constant and uniforme judgement
upon him." We shall perhaps not go far wrong if we
describe the scepticism of Montaigne as a constant
recollection that whatever men have said, thought, or
done, has been necessarily the work of this "vaine,
divers, and wavering subject," and is not to be taken
too seriously. A wise man will accept the social and
religious order of his country, even with its vices,
since we have so little wisdom that our efforts at
amendment will probably produce more mischief than
they will correct. In any case, what has existed and
stood the test of experience has more claim on our
loyalty than the mere guesses of the reformer. Yet,
while accepting existing order, he need not believe in
it too much, and he certainly need not deny himself
the pleasure of noting the innumerable absurdities of
even the most respectable parts of man's handiwork.
Science is vain, since it is but speculation on subjects
we shall never really understand. Conduct is the
important thing. Do not lie, do not be cruel, do not
be a pedant (on these points indeed there was no
scepticism in Montaigne) ; do not strive after unattain-
able ideals of truth (for what is truth except what we
think about the causes and nature of things, and what
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 349
are we but " vaine, diverse, and wavering subjects " ?),
or of virtue, or of chastity. Let us live our lives,
exercising all our faculties of body and mind in
prudent moderation, and with due regard to our time
of life. It is not the greatest advice which can be
given to man. If the human race had acted up to
Montaigne's standard of wisdom, there would have
been no prophets, no saints, no martyrs, hardly any
great thinkers, or great explorers. It would be
possible to follow Montaigne and be a haberdasher
of small-wares. One could not follow him and be a
bigot, "une bonne ligne droite de ferocite sotte," in
any cause, or disgrace knowledge by pedantry, or
conquest and discovery by cruelty and avarice. But
it is an idle question whether he was better or worse
than Luther or Saint Francis de Sales. He was
different, and he is a perfect example of a stamp of
man who will never fail while the human race lasts
and thinks the sagacious man who is naturally
kind and honest, but is not virtuous in any lofty
sense, or capable of strong conviction. Amid the
clash of dogmatists, all fanatically sure they were
right, and all cruel, which filled the sixteenth century
with tumult, the voice of Montaigne supplied some-
thing which was sorely needed.
As a writer the importance of Montaigne can
hardly be exaggerated. To him modern literature
owes the essay, which of itself would be
His style. .
a claim to immortality. He first set the
example of discussing great questions in the tone of
the man of the world speaking to men of the world.
350 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
His style, which can be eloquent to the highest
degree, is more commonly easy and " savoury "
full, that is to say, of colour and character. His
amplifications, and his constant use of quotations, his
lawless wanderings away from his subject, and then
through many turnings back to it when he has a
subject at all his amazing indiscretions concerning
his health, his morals, and his family history, his fre-
quent sudden appeals to the reader, as of one speak-
ing in confidence and on the spur of the moment,
make up a combination which cannot be defined in
its inexhaustible variety. It is not the least charm
of the Essays that they invite desultory reading. If
advice in this matter were ever of much value, we
might recommend the reader who has Montaigne to
begin, to start with the "Apologie for Eaymond of
Sebonde," which will give him the whole spirit and
way of thinking, and then to read as accident dictates.
Orderly study is quite unnecessary with an author
who starts from no premiss to arrive at no conclusion,
whose unity is due not to doctrine but to character,
and who " rays out curious observations on life " all
illuminated by a vast learning and by humour.
The teaching of Montaigne was expounded by
Pierre Charron (1541 - 1603), a lawyer, who took
charronand orders, and had written against the League
Du vair. an( j ^ e Protestants, before he fell under
the influence of the author of the Essays. His most
famous or rather, his one surviving work, the
TraiU de la Sag 'esse (1601 ), 1 is a restatement in more
1 Ed. Amaury Duval, 1828.
FRENCH PROSE- WRITERS. 351
scholastic form of the ideas of Montaigne. Charron
also drew largely, for he was not by any means an
original writer, on Guillaume du Yair (1556-1621),
Du Vair, who is considered one of the best prose-
writers of his time, was the author of many treatises
on philosophical subjects ; 1 but he is remembered
mainly for his famous Suasion, or plea for the Salic
Law, delivered before the Estates summoned by the
League in 1593. He represented the magistracy, and
it is said that his argument persuaded the Estates
to reject the candidature of the Infanta of Spain, who
had been brought forward by the extreme Catholic
party as rival to Henry IV.
1 CEuvres Completes, 1641.
352
CHAPTEE XII.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY TORQUATO TASSO HIS WORK THE
'GERUSALEMME LIBERATA' GIORDANO BRUNO LITERARY CHARAC-
TER OF HIS WORK GIAMBATT1STA GUARINI.
The Later Renaissance, which was so great in Spain
and in England, and in France was important, was
elsewhere a time of decline, of silence, or of very-
faint beginnings. The literature of Germany has
been broken into periods of vigour, with long in-
tervals of silence between. The second half of the
sixteenth century was one of these. Among the
smaller peoples, with Holland at their head, there
was as yet little more than the attempt to produce
literature. The case of Italy was more fortunate than
that of Germany. She at least can count two of her
most interesting sons among the men of letters of
this time, Tasso and Bruno. But here the decadence
had begun, and had made no small progress towards
the sheer dexterous futility which was to be personi-
fied in Marini. The spirit of the Renaissance was
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 353
worn out, and was replaced by mere accomplishment,
and by the nervous fear which is visible all through
m T , D the life of Tasso. The Eoman Catholic
The Later Re-
naissance in reaction was not favourable to literature.
It brought with it the tyranny,, or at
least the predominance, of a religion which could
no longer inspire. The Popes of the time endeavoured
to make Eome moral by methods which might have
commended themselves to the strictest sect of the
Puritans ; and commendable as this effort to restrain
the licence of the earlier Renaissance and the period
of the Italian wars may have been, still it was an
example of the attempt to repress which was being
made everywhere in Italy, and which succeeded, since
it had only to deal with men of a weak generation.
Giordano Bruno was, indeed, indisciplined enough ; but
he spent the active part of his life out of Italy, and
when he did return, his fate was a severe warning
against independence of character.
The life of Torquato Tasso is of itself enough to
show under what a gloomy cloud literature had to
work in Italy all through the later six-
Torquato Tasso. J
teenth century. It was a life of depend-
ence, and was dominated by fear fear of rivals, of
envy, of accusations of heresy, and even of murder.
That this fear was not quite sane in Tasso's case is
true ; but though his contemporaries saw it to be un-
founded, they do not seem to have thought it absurd.
He was born in 1544, the third son of Bernardo Tasso
of Bergamo, who was secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino,
Prince of Salerno. His mother was Porzia de Eossi, a
z
354 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
lady of a distinguished Neapolitan family. Bernardo
Tasso, who was himself a verse-writer, and who gained
some fame in his time as the author of a long epic
founded on the Amadis of Gaul, was compelled to fly
when his patron was driven from his principality of
Salerno. Porzia, his wife, was detained in Naples by
her family, which was meanly anxious not to pay
her dowry. She died without again seeing her hus-
band, but the young Torquato was allowed to return
to his father. Bernardo, who found a refuge in the
service of the Dukes of Urbino, sent his son to the
famous legal university of Padua. Here Torquato
read, but not at the law, and wrote his epic poem the
Binaldo little to the satisfaction of his father, who,
though a verse - writer himself, wished his son to
qualify for a lucrative trade. But the son was re-
solved to be a poet, and not a lawyer, which decision
brought with it the absolute necessity of finding a
patron. The Cardinal Luigi d'Este introduced him
to the Court of Ferrara. Tasso had already begun his
Jerusalem Delivered and his play of Torrismondo, and
had written his Discourses on Epic Poetry. Alphonso II.
d'Este, the Duke of Ferrara, received him, and seems
to have treated him in the main with great kindness.
The story of Tasso's stay at this typical Italian Court,
of his passion for Leonora d'Este, of the Duke's dis-
covery, and of the false accusation of madness, on
which the poet was imprisoned for years, is one of the
best known romances of literary history ; but that it
is a romance there can be no doubt. From his early
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 355
years Tasso seems to have suffered from a continual
fear of persecution and the plots of enemies. When
he accompanied the Cardinal Luigi d'Este to Paris, he
imagined that some treason was being plotted against
him at home. Later he thought he had been accused
of heresy, and refused to be pacified by the assurances
of the Duke and the head of the Inquisition, to whom
he subjected his writings. He fled twice from Ferrara,
and twice came back. He began to accuse the Duke
of intending to have him murdered, and finally drew
his dagger in the Palace on a servant whom he sus-
pected of trying to poison him. Duke Alphonso vin-
dicated his own character, and also gave the exact
measure of the morality of the time by saying that
it was absurd to suppose that he thought of killing
" il Signor Tasso," since if he wished to do so he had
only to give the order. At last, and not until the
Duke had displayed a patience which is sufficient
evidence that he had no animosity against his servant,
Tasso in 1579 was imprisoned as mad in the hospital
of Saint Anne. The treatment of the mad was every-
where harsh at that time, but the poet appears to have
received exceptional kindness. Friends exerted them-
selves for him, some from pity, others moved by the
desire to be thought patrons of literature. In 1586
he was released, on condition that he would not return
to Ferrara. During the last years of his life he wan-
dered from one Italian Court to another, always quar-
relling with his patrons, but always finding protectors.
He died at Eome in 1595, when he was about to be
356 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
crowned as Poet Laureate on the Capitol. His Jeru-
salem Delivered was printed in a pirated edition during
his imprisonment. 1
The bulk of Tasso's work is very great. In addition
to the Einaldo, and two forms of the Jerusalem, he
wrote the pastoral play Aminta, the
tragedy of Torrismondo, much minor verse,
many sonnets, and many treatises in prose. A large
number of his letters have been preserved. In his
latter years, and in the undeniable decadence of his
powers, he wrote a long poem in blank verse on the
Seven Days of Creation.
Tasso's minor work is no doubt of value for the
study of his genius. His philosophic treatises, mostly
in dialogue, would, I presume, for I cannot profess to
speak of them with knowledge, be useful to the
student of Italian thought under the Eoman Catholic
reaction. Even his play of Torrismondo, begun in his
youth, and finished after his imprisonment in the
hospital of Saint Anne, has a place in the history of
the "classic" drama. In itself it is not attractive.
It is an unpleasant, and even rather commonplace,
story of suicide and accidental incest, frigidly told,
with all the Senecan apparatus. The pastoral poem
of Aminta is of more historical importance, and has
some biographical interest, while the subject suited
Tasso's faculty for tender images and luscious verse.
But he owes his place in literature to his Jerusalem
Delivered.
Something has been said of the history of this poem.
1 Opere. Edited by Giov. Rosini. Pisa, 33 vols., 1821-1832.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 357
It was begun in his youth, was continued during his
stay at the Court of Ferrara, was read in parts to
his patrons, and subjected to the criticism of friends.
The desire to secure the honour of the dedication for
the house of Este, which had already patronised
Ariosto, is said, very plausibly, to have had a good
deal to do with the Duke's long-suffering towards the
author. When published it was made the excuse for
a dispute between the Academies which overran all
Italy in the sixteenth century, and were already
become the homes of mere word-splitting. The
Jerusalem in fact became almost an affair of State
at Ferrara. Its publication in a very inaccurate form
in a pirated edition during his imprisonment was one
of the most bitter, and certainly not the least genuine,
of the grievances of a poet who had an artistic care
about the execution of the work he published. The
pirated edition bore the name which Tasso had chosen,
Godfrey of Boulogne, but which he changed for
Gerusalemme Liberata in the first authorised edition of
1581. Under the influence of the fretful piety of his
later years he made his ill-advised recension, to which
he gave the name of Gerusalemme Conquistata.
The enduring popularity of the Jerusalem Delivered
in Italy has been vouched for by such well-known
_. stories as that which tells how it was sung
The Gerus- o
aiemme by gondoliers and country people even
into this century. Ugo Foscolo has re-
corded that he heard a passage chanted by galley-
slaves. Its acceptance among poets and men of
letters, both in the sixteenth century and since, is
358 EUEOPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
not a matter of legend. Milton admired Tasso, and
Spenser did him the signal honour of direct imitation.
Acrasia's Bower of Bliss, and indeed the final adven-
ture of Sir Guyon and the Palmer in the Second
Book of the Faerie Qtoeen, are modelled on, and in
some passages are taken directly from, the description
of the garden of Armida, and the rescue of Binaldo in
the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of the Jerusalem.
The poem was three times translated in whole or in
part into English before 1600, and one of these ver-
sions, Fairfax's, has been given rank as a classic. 1
1 The Godfrey of Bulloigne of Fairfax has been praised well beyond
the full extent of its merits. The sober fact concerning it is that
though the language has a real interest, the translation has not the
merit of great accuracy, and it is wanting in those flashes of original
power with which Fairfax's contemporaries seldom failed to redeem
their infidelity to their author. He, on the contrary, is too often far
below Tasso, and he is addicted to the detestable practice of replacing
the simplicity of the Italian by classic commonplaces. Now and
then he is inept, or shirks a difficulty which he ought to have faced.
Examples of all three vices may be found in the beginning of the
fifteenth canto. Tasso opens with the simple and direct words
" Gia richiamava il bel nascente raggio
All' opere ogni animal clie 'n terra alberga."
For this Fairfax writes
" The rosy-fingered morn with gladsome ray
Rose to her task from old Tithonus' lap "
the commonplace of a boy doing a copy of Latin verse. In the
second stanza, where the Italian has
" Erano essi gia sorti, e 1' arme intorno
Alle robuste membra avean gia messe "
Fairfax renders-
" They started up, and every tender limb
In sturdy steel and stubborn plate they dight.
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 359
The popularity of Tasso's epic with those Italians,
who would inevitably know nothing of Dante, and
very little of Ariosto, and the admiration expressed for
it by poets or men of letters, are both well justified,
though for different reasons. The Jerusalem Delivered
has a beauty of form which naturally delights
people who have a real love of melody, while the
matter is no less acceptable to all who are attracted
rather by the pretty and the sympathetic than by
the great or brilliant. The allegory, which Tasso
himself afterwards expounded at length, is of the
order which " bites " nobody, and we can watch the
fortunes of Tancred and Clorinda, of Einaldo and
Armida, of Godfrey and the crusaders, " as if we looked
on that scene through an inverted telescope, where-
by the whole was carried far away into the distance,
the life-large figures compressed into brilliant minia-
tures, so clear, so real, yet tiny elf-like and beautified
as well as lessened, their colours being now closer and
brighter, the shadows and trivial features no longer
visible." Carlyle was kinder and less critical than
The tender limbs of two hardened old soldiers is surely weak.
At the end of the next stanza, we have in the Italian
" E in poppa quella
Che guidar gli dovea, fatal donzella."
The word "fatal," an appropriate epithet for Fortune, who sits
in the stern to steer the boat, disappears in Fairfax, and we get the
colourless line
" Wherein a damsel sate the stern to guide."
And these are not exceptions. Fairfax constantly gives the in-
applicable adjective, or the vague general term, where Tasso is fault-
less in his precision.
360 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
was his wont, when he classed the Jerusalem Delivered
with the Nibelungen Lied for Dresden china shep-
herdesses are not more unlike the statues of Michel-
angelo than are the personages of Tasso to Kriem-
hilda or Hagen von Tronegk. Yet he has summed up
the general impression left by the poem, as of a small,
graceful, and, in spite of its great historical original,
unimportant series of events transacting itself without
passion. There is little life in its heroes and heroines.
We never hear the " dreadful clamour " of battle, and
the duels of the champions smack of the school of arms,
for Tasso, though no fighter, was an accomplished
swordsman. Yet the story is unquestionably pretty,
and the tiny elf-like figures have charm. To the poet
and the man of letters, though his fame is less in the
world than it was, Tasso must always be admirable,
because he was a thorough workman. He was the
poet of a decline. The choice of words, the use of the
file, the avoidance of improprieties of metre, are more
with him than inspiration. But he did at least reap
the benefit of all that his predecessors had done for
the language, and he left a finished example of the
"learned" poetry of Southern Europe in the later
sixteenth century.
It would tax the power of the greatest creative
dramatist to draw two conceivable human beings who
Giordano should differ so widely as Tasso and his
Bmno. on jy Italian contemporary who can be
said to stand on a corresponding level of genius
Giordano Bruno. The Nolan, to give him the title
which he habitually used, was probably the more con-
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 361
siderable man of the two in intrinsic power, while
both his life and his character are more interesting.
But then he is incomparably more difficult to under-
stand. I cannot profess to deal with what, to the
majority of those who have paid much attention to
his work, is most valuable in him his philosophic
ideas, and the influence he may have had on later
thinkers. His life is of the kind which it is a pleasure
to tell, in spite of the final tragedy, so full is it of
incident and of manifestations of a certain stamp of
character. 1 Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near
Naples, in 1548. His father was a soldier, and his
mother a German woman. He became a Dominican
friar very early, and his unruly character brought
him speedily into difficulties with his superiors. Be-
fore he was twenty he fled from his Order, and
escaped to Geneva by way of Genoa. This was in
1576. For fourteen years he led a wandering life.
His movements can be traced from Geneva to Lyons,
thence to Toulouse, Paris, England, once more to Paris,
and from thence to Wittenberg, Prague, and Prank-
fort. Wherever he went he asked leave to teach, and
he speedily entangled himself in a quarrel with the
authorities. He defended the doctrines of Copernicus,
and he expounded, more or less obscurely, his doctrines
on the soul and the nature of man. Bruno had an
" art of memory " which was founded upon, or was an
adaptation of, the curious reasoning machine invented
by Eaymond Lully, the Catalan scholastic and mystic
1 Life of Giordano Bruno, by Mr L. Frith : London, 1897. Opere
de Giordano Bruno, ed. Wagner : Leipzig, 1830.
3G2 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
of the thirteenth century. Even if I could profess to
understand his doctrines, which I do not, this would
not be the place to expound them. What does appear
very clearly is, that he was a man of extreme and
passionate arrogance. The doctrine he most certainly
held is, that the Nolan was the one man who had even
a glimpse of the only important truths, and that official
teachers who did not accept him at his own valuation
were pigs, dogs, brutes, and beasts. He poured these
epithets over the heads of houses at Oxford, whither
he had been taken by Sir Philip Sidney, who was
kind to him, and on whom he may have had some
influence. The only place in which he escaped a
violent quarrel with authority was at Wittenberg.
Even there he could not rest, and he committed him-
self to a public and sweeping denunciation of the
Papacy. At last he received an invitation from a
Venetian magnifico of the house of Mocenigo to come
and be his teacher. Mocenigo had heard of Bruno's
" art of memory," and probably also believed him to
be a wizard who could make gold. In an evil hour
Bruno accepted the invitation, and went to Venice on
the hopeless errand of making Mocenigo so wise that
the Council of Ten would no longer be able to treat
him as a person of no importance. Within a very
few months this strange bargain bore its fruit. The
magnifico discovered that he was no wiser than before,
and that so far from being richer, he had given money
to the Nolan for which no equivalent had been re-
turned. He accused his teacher of being a cheat ; and
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 363
Bruno, whose temper had never been under restraint,
answered, with more truth than prudence, that his
employer was a fool. Mocenigo denounced him to
the Inquisition. The Pope claimed him, and after
some demur he was surrendered by the Serene Ke-
public. On his trial before the Inquisition Bruno
protested that he was a loyal son of the Church, and
that if he had spoken heresy it was when he was
speaking philosophically, and not theologically. The
distinction would not serve, and he was condemned to
death. Whether he was burnt in the body or only in
effigy has been disputed. The balance of evidence is
in favour of the contention that he actually suffered.
In that case the date of his death is 1599.
Some anti-clerical writers on the Continent, and a
few Englishmen who sympathise with them, have
been attracted to Bruno because they can
Literary char- . ,
actero/his use his name as a weapon in their warfare
work ' with ecclesiastical authority. It is needless
to add that numbers quote him as an example of
papal tyranny who have never made the certainly
not inconsiderable effort required to read any one of
his treatises. We can speak of him here only as a
man of letters, and can put aside his Latin treatises
and purely philosophic work. His wandering life,
and perhaps the restless explosive nature of the man,
made it impossible for him to produce books on a
large scale. Bruno was essentially a writer of
pamphlets, which he produced as opportunity served.
Three of these may be mentioned here as especially
364 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
characteristic of the Nolan's genius and spirit La
Ccna del le Ccneri ('The Ash Wednesday Supper'),
dedicated to Castelnau de Mauvissiere, French ambas-
sador in London ; the Spaccio delta Bestia Trionfante
(' The Driving out of the Triumphant Beast ') ; and Gli
Eroici Furori (' The Heroic Furies '), the latter two
dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. All are in dialogue,
and the last-named contains much verse. Although
he excuses himself for part of what appears in Spaccio
delta Bestia Trionfante by saying that it is the person-
ages who speak in their character, not he, the dialogue
form (the most difficult perhaps of all in literature)
does not appear to me to be well managed. There is
too much of the Nolan, and the other personages are apt
to be too obviously dummies, who either repeat him,
or are put up merely to be knocked over. But this
in itself is typical of the author. The dialogues are
the literary expression of the very remarkable human
being who was Giordano Bruno, the most volcanic
and fuliginous of men. He is for ever bursting into
rockets of rhetoric, while the epithets fly out in sheets
as of sparks from an anvil. What he means or is
endeavouring to prove is far from being always clear,
not because his language is obscure, for on the con-
trary his sentences are commonly simple enough, but
because there was always far more passion and
emotion in Giordano Bruno than reasoning power.
The title of his dialogues, ' The Heroic Furies,' is in
a way a description of his whole work. There is in
him a constant heroic fury of effort towards some
vaguely indicated manifestations of individual force
THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 365
and greatness. This of itself is attractive. With all
his smoky obscurity there is a very real fire in
Giordano Bruno, which finds its best expression in
verse. Whether he is profitable to read is perhaps
doubtful, but he is most interesting to look at. He
was a real Faust, who strove to grasp
" Was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhalt ; "
who thought he had read the riddle, and who justified
an illimitable intellectual arrogance, often superbly
expressed, by his imaginary discovery.
The fall from Tasso and Bruno to any of their
contemporaries is very great. There was abundant
interest of a kind in literary matters, there was no
want of criticism, and the Academies were active.
The long controversy over the Jerusalem in which
Tasso allowed himself to be entangled is, if valuable
for nothing else, at least a proof that Italians read
poetry, and could talk about it. 1 What they could
not at this period do was to produce anything original
and valuable with the exception of Tasso himself,
and of Bruno. The once famous Pastor Fido of Giam-
battista Guarini (1537-1612) is in fact a terrible
example of what may happen to a literature when
its writers have become extremely cultivated in all
that is mere matter of language, but have unfortu-
nately nothing to say or, if they have something to
1 This controversy has its place in every life of Tasso, and is told at
length by Serassi, Vita dc Tasso: Bergamo, 1790. My own trifling
acquaintance with it has given me the impression that it can be
profitable to no mortal, except perhaps a historian of criticism.
366 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
say, are cowed into insignificance by the fear of
compromising themselves. 1
Guarini was a man of character, a little querulous,
and afflicted by a vanity which caused him to be for
ever comparing himself to Tasso, and complaining of
his contemporary's greater fame, but by no means
without parts or knowledge. Yet his Pastor Fido is
a mere echo of the Aminta. Guarini's play if
play it can be called was first acted at Turin in
1585, and was published in Venice in 1590. From
the Aminta, and through the Pastor Fido, came the
line of the Italian literary opera of later times. The
verse is flowing with touches of a somewhat sensual
lusciousness but withal it is nerveless and imitative.
1 II Pastor Fido. Verona, 1735.
367
CHAPTER XIII.
CONCLUSION.
The wealth of the period which we here call the Later
Renaissance makes the task of giving the results of
a survey of its manifold activities one of extreme
difficulty. It is, indeed, sufficiently easy to point out
the common element of the time namely, the revival
or the development of the literary genius of Spain,
England, and France, under the influence of the
classic models, and of Italy. In Italy itself the
classic impulse had been felt earlier and had borne
its best fruits before the middle of the sixteenth
century. The time there was one of decadence.
Tasso and Giordano Bruno are unquestionably, though
in widely different ways, writers of original force.
But the author of the Jerusalem Delivered was a
survivor, one, too, who had lived into an unhappy
time. His weakness of health and character may
have or rather must have made him suffer with
exaggerated acuteness from the forces which were
weighing on the intellect of Italy. Yet on that
368 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
very account he shows only the more clearly the
exhaustion of the race, and the deadening influence
of the Eoman Catholic revival. As for Bruno, interest-
ing, and in a way attractive, figure as he is, it is
doubtful whether he can be said to have had any
literary influence at all. His modern fame is even
not quite legitimate, since he owes it in some measure
to the circumstances of his death. In his own age
he fell rapidly into obscurity. He also had lived
into an unhappy time, though he bore himself in it
very differently from Tasso. Too Italian to reconcile
himself to Calvinism or Lutheranism, too independent
in mind to be an obedient son of the Church, from
the moment he was asked for more than mere out-
ward conformity to ceremonies, he was destined to
be crushed between hammer and anvil in an age of
religious strife. There was no room for independence
of mind in Italy, and there was to be none for long, as
the lives of Galileo and of Fra Paolo Sarpi were to
show. It required all the power, and the strong poli-
tical anti-papal spirit of Venice, to preserve Fra Paolo.
In literature nothing was any longer quite safe except
the more or less elegant presentment of harmless
matter. Tasso did the utmost which it was now
allowed to an Italian poet to achieve. Beyond him
there could only be mere echo, as in the case of
Guarini. Beyond Guarini the downward path of
Italian literature led only to the preciosities and
affectations of Marini.
The difficulty of summing up and defining becomes
really sensible when an attempt has to be made to
CONCLUSION. 369
estimate the different ways, and the different degrees,
in which the influence of the Eenaissance made itself
felt in Spain, England, and France. In all three
countries it met a strong national genius which it
could stimulate, but could not affect in essentials.
Garcilaso, Spenser, and Eonsard were all equally in-
tent on making a new poetry for their countries, and
all three succeeded. Yet they remained respectively
a Spaniard, an Englishman, and a Frenchman, and in
their works were as unlike one another as they were
to their common models.
It is, I think, fairly accurate to say that the Ee-
naissance influenced each of the three Western coun-
tries with increasing force in the order in which they
are arranged here. Spain felt it least and France
most. The case is emphatically one for the use of the
distinguo. When we wish to measure the influence
which one literature has had on another, it is surely
very necessary to keep the form and the spirit well
apart. When only the bulk of what was written, and
the bare form, and the mere language, are allowed
for, then it is obvious that the Eenaissance did affect
Spain very much. The hendecasyllabic, the prevailing
use of the double rhyme, the ottava rima, the capi-
tolo, and the canzone, were all taken by the Spaniards
with slavish fidelity. The very close connection be-
tween the languages and the peoples may have made
this minute imitation inevitable. Again, it is not to
be denied that Italian had a marked influence on
literary Castilian as it was written in the later six-
teenth century. Very strict critics have noted the
2 A
370 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
presence of Italian constructions in Cervantes. The
point is not one on which I care to speak as having
authority, and for two reasons. Experience only in-
creases my sense of the danger of expressing opinions
as to what is legitimate in a language which is not
one's own and even in one which is. Then, too,
before a new phrase is condemned for being foreign,
we have to settle the preliminary questions, Was it
taken from a sister tongue or not ? Was it superfluous
or not ? The Spaniard who wishes to say, " Of two
things the one," &c, and who uses the words " De dos
cosas, una," is guilty of a Gallicism, and is wrong, be-
cause his own Castilian supplies him with the terser and
equally lucid formula, " De dos, una." Yet the French
original might have been taken with profit, and very
legitimately, if it had been wanted, since it comes from
a kindred tongue, and does no violence to the genius
of Spanish. Such a word as " reliable " is an offence
mainly because it is displacing an excellent equivalent,
and because in itself it is a barbarism only to be ex-
cused on the ground of necessity.
Yet while noting that Italian models were profusely
imitated in Spain and Portugal, and that Castilian was
perfected as a literary instrument by Italian influence,
we can still maintain that the Eenaissance bore less
fruit in the Peninsula than in France or England. By
"fruit" we ought to mean not mere writing, be its
mechanical dexterity what it may, but that combina-
tion of form and matter which makes literature, and
which before we can call it " national " must savour of
the qualities of some one race. Now, when we look at
CONCLUSION. 371
the literary activity of the Peninsula during the Golden
Age, we can find very little which will stand the triple
test in matter, form, and national character, and of
which we can yet say that it shows the spirit of the
Eenaissance. Portugal can be left aside with the due
passing salute to the great name, and the real, though
hardly proportionate, merit of Camoens. What else
we find there 1 is no more than a somewhat weaker ver-
sion of the learned poetry of Spain, of which it has to
be said that it might be deducted without reducing the
place of Spanish literature in the world. All men who
have written well are entitled to their honour. They
were skilful workmen, and that too in no mean matter.
Yet there is a wide difference between the man of whom
we can say that if he had never taken pen in hand, his
form and his matter might yet be found in equal per-
fection elsewhere and in foreign tongues, and that other
of whom we are bound to say that if he had remained
silent then something would have been missing which
no other race could have supplied. Now, if Boscan
had never taken the advice of Navagiero, if Garcilaso
had never written, if all the learned poets had remained
silent, then Spain would not have shown her capacity
to produce men who could handle Italian metres com-
petently and yet her place in the literature of the
world would be essentially what it is. The Celestina,
from which, through the Novela de Picaros, came Le
1 The names of Corte-Real (1540-1593), P. de Andrade (1576-1660),
Sa de Menezes ( ?-1664), may represent this class. Others, with
the classical prose of Vieira and G. de Andrade, which continued
the work of Barros (1496-1570), may be referred to in the next
volume.
372 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
Sage and Smollett and Dickens, would remain, and so
would the Amadis of Gaul, the romances, the comedia,
Don Quixote, the great adventurers, and Santa Teresa
all in short that makes Spain in literature.
And now, allowing that there was something Spanish
which found adequate expression in the Golden Age,
and is also the best of the national literature, there
comes the difficulty, which I dread to find insuperable,
of finding a definition of that something. To say that
there is Spanish quality in las cosas de Uspana, and
that this is why they are Spanish, is the explanation of
Moliere's doctors. Again, it is mere reasoning in a
circle to begin by taking it for granted that the learned
poets who copied the Italian forms were not truly
Spanish, and that therefore Spain was not in essentials
influenced by the Eenaissance. Either form of ab-
surdity is to be avoided. Perhaps the only way of
escape lies in defining what we mean by the spirit of
the Eenaissance. Without professing to be equal to
so great a task, it is permissible to assert that there are
certain notes which we describe as of the Eenaissance,
and to which the Italian, the Frenchman, or the Eng-
lishman gave expression in forms proper to himself.
A love of beauty, a sense of joy, a vehement longing
for strong expressions of individual character and of
passion, a delight in the exercise of a bold, inquisi-
tive intellect all these, and the reaction from them,
which is a deep melancholy, are the notes of the Ee-
naissance. In the learned poetry of Spain they are
rarely heard. The commonplaces of form, with here
and there a piety and patriotism which are mediaeval
CONCLUSION. 373
and Spanish, are given in their stead. Therefore it is
quite fair to say that the Spaniard was not greatly
influenced by the Eenaissance that there was some-
thing in it not congenial to him.
There remains the difficulty of saying exactly what
is the Spanish quality of the true cosas de Uspafia.
Mr Ford, who knew the flavour well, gave it a name
the oorracha which, being interpreted, is the wine-
skin, and the smack it lends to the juice of the grape.
The Spaniards say that there are three natural per-
fumes, and the first of them is the smell of the dry
earth after rain. The horracha, and the pungent scent
of the "dura tellus Iberige" when wet, are not to
everybody's taste. Neither is their equivalent in
literature, except where we find it purified and
humanised by the genius of Cervantes. There has at
all times been little love of beauty in the Spaniard,
and not much faculty for ideal perfection of form.
His greatest painting is realistic, the exact forcible
rendering of the things seen with the eye of the flesh,
selected, arranged, kept in their proper proportions in
the picture, but rarely imagined. The things seen need
not be the vulgar realities of life only. Velasquez is
every whit as real in his presentment of the frigid
dignity of the King, or in the " Lances," as he is in
the " Spinners " or the " Water- Seller." Zurbaran's
friars are perfectly real, and their ecstatic devotion
was also chose vue. It is the extent of his range of
vision which gives Velasquez his solitary eminence
among Spanish painters. Among their brother artists,
the men of letters, there is the same faculty for seeing
374 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
and reproducing the common life, though this must
be understood to include that devotion to the Church
which was far from being the least genuine thing in
Spain. All did not see with the same breadth of
vision. A Velasquez is rare. It is comparatively
easy to be Zurbaran. As a rule the Spaniard could
express types better than individuals. The jealous
husband, the adventurer, heroic as in Amadis, or
rascally as in Lazarillo, a rigid ideal of honour, an
orthodox pattern of piety, are what the Spaniard gives
us these, and the stirring action of which they form
a part. He drew from the world he saw around him,
and fitted his materials into a pattern for the stage,
or for the story. The gout du tcrroir, the essentially
Spanish borracha, is on it all. The flavour is not
delicate. There is little gaiety in the Spaniard, but
instead of it a hard jocularity. He very rarely says
the profound and universally true thing. It would
be hard to make a collection of " beauties " from his
literature. In so far as he has helped the general
literature of the world, it has been by supplying a
model of machinery for the play and the prose story.
Therefore his literature stands apart in the modern
world. If you are to enjoy it you must be prepared
to be satisfied with the action, the ideal of honour,
the enthusiastic piety which he can give. And to
enjoy them you must read them in his own Castilian.
All translation is as the back of the tapestry, but no
original loses more than does the Spaniard when he is
divested of his own language and lets slip the merits
of its terse gravity, its varied picturesque force.
CONCLUSION. 375
In Spain, then, the Eenaissance met something on
which it could secure no hold, something in a sense
barbarous, not quite European, and recalcitrant to
all classic influences. In England it met a strong
national genius, but not one which was entirely alien.
Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe showed the influence of
the Eenaissance, not as mere imitators of forms, but
as Englishmen, and yet fully. In Shakespeare it was
included with much more. Its love of beauty and its
sense of form were never better expressed than in the
lyrics. The difference between the two nations is
profound. The Spaniard either copied the mere form,
or produced what one feels would have come as a
natural growth from the Middle Ages, the Libro de
Cdballerias, the Novela de Picaros, the Auto Sacra-
mental, and even the comedia, in which no trace of the
classic influence is to be seen. A drama which is in
no sense classic might have developed from the
morality and the farce. As much might be said of
the form of the English drama. Seneca might
have been forgotten, and Tansillo might never have
written (without Seneca he never would have
written as he did), as far as the construction of the
English play is concerned. But then much of the
Eenaissance spirit did pass into Elizabethan liter-
ature. We could not deduct what it shared with
Italy without fatal loss. The genius of Spenser could
perhaps have dispensed with a teacher, but as a matter
of fact it did not. With no model save Chaucer he
would yet have been one of the greatest of poets.
He would not have been exactly the poet he was
376 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
without Ariosto, Tasso, and Du Bellay. Shakespeare
had, of all sons of Adam, the least need to borrow,
and yet without the influence of the Eenaissance
we should not have the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis,
The Rape of Lucrece, or many passages in the plays.
The English genius, in fact, accepted and absorbed the
Eenaissance without losing its native independence.
All the manifestations of its freedom were not
equally admirable. The wild incoherence of the early
dramatists is not good in itself. When we see it at
its worst, we are half tempted to wish that Greene
and Marlowe had been more subservient. Yet it was
good in so far as it was a striving after an ideal both
national and good. It was the necessary preparation
for Shakespeare and the great things of the Eliza-
bethan drama. If the time was less mighty in prose
than in verse, yet the germs of all that was to come
were in Hooker. He had the secret of lucid arrange-
ment, the art of dealing with the greatest questions
in his own tongue, and in a form at once unaffected,
instantly intelligible to the average thoughtful man,
and yet eloquent where the occasion required him to
rise above the usual level of speech.
The natural aptitude of the French for discipline in
literature, and their tendency to form schools, to set up
a doctrine, and to reject all that is not compatible with
it, have never been more strongly shown than during
the Later Eenaissance. Other influences were at work.
It would be very rash to say that classic or Italian
models had a visible influence on Carloix's memoirs
of Vielleville, or the commentaries of Monluc, or even
CONCLUSION. 377
the vast unnamed, or misnamed, compilation of Bran-
tome. Yet the Kenaissance did, on the whole, dominate
France, though it could not eliminate, or suppress, what
was essentially French. Its intense interest in the life
and the character of man was never better shown than
by Montaigne. In poetry the attempt to adapt the
classic and Italian models to French use swept all
before it. Nowhere was the French disposition to find
its freedom in the service of a classic model more
clearly seen than in the drama of the Pleiade. It is true
that Jodelle, Gamier, Belleau, Grevin, and the others
may be said to have failed. They did not produce
any dramatic literature which has much more than an
interest of curiosity. Yet the later history of the
French stage proves that they were making their
efforts on lines congenial to their nation. The
dramatists of the Augustan age did no more than
work in the same spirit, and to the same ends as their
forgotten predecessors, with altered and but slightly
altered means.
A comparison between the three literatures will go
far to explain their respective fates. For the Spanish
there could not well be any future. A strong national
character, unchanging, and so close in the fibre that
it never really admits a foreign influence, could not
well do more than express itself once. The time came
when it had said its say and nothing then remained
except, first mere juggling with words, and then silence
Gongorism and Decadence. In England and in
France there was the hope, and even the assurance,
of far more to come. Though the Spanish story has
378 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE.
been carried beyond the dates allowed for France and
England, there is no unfairness in this sentence. In
1616 Lope had still much of his best work to do.
Quevedo, Calderon, and Gongora were to come; but the
first and second brought nothing, or at least very little,
absolutely new, and the third brought destruction.
Lope was only to do what he had done already. When
Shakespeare died in England and Mathurin Eegnier
in France, a long succession was to follow them.
Englishmen and Frenchmen had learnt their lesson
from the Eenaissance, and were to use their know-
ledge.
INDEX.
Aeuiia, Ferdinand de, 43.
Alarcon, Juan Ruiz de, 83, 93,
] 02-105.
Aleman, Mateo, 7, 137, 141.
Amadis of Gaul, 127 sq.
Antonio, Biblioteca Hispana, 3.
Argensola, Bartolome de, 48, 170.
Argensola, Lupercio de, 48.
Arte of English Poesie, Tlie, 188.
Aubertin, Mr, 57 note, 58 note.
Aubigne, Theodore Agrippa D',
, 306-308, 332 sq.
Avila, Juan de, 180.
Avila, Luis de, 158.
Baif, Jean Antoine de, 293, 301.
Barons' War, The, 210.
Bartas, Du, 303-306.
Bellay, Joachim du, 24, 293 sq.,
298-300.
Belleau, Remi, 293, 300.
Bertaut, Jean, 299.
Biblioteca de Aribau or de Riba-
deneyra, 40 note.
Bodin, Jean, 329.
Borrow, George, 26.
Boscan, Juan, 10, 30 sq., 41.
Brant ome, Pierre de, 336.
Breton, 272.
Bruno, Giordano, 360-365.
Burtou, Sir Richard, 58 note.
Calderon, 80, 83-90, 93, 94, 111-120.
Caminha, Pedro de Andrade, 55.
Camoens, Luiz da, 57-59.
Campion, Thomas, 189.
Cancioneros, the, 10 sq.
Cano, Dominican Melchior, 46.
Carloix, Vincent, 330.
Carvajal, Micael de, 65.
Casas, Bartolome de las, 162.
Castellanos, Juan de, 53.
Castillejo, Cristobal de, 10, 25, 35.
Castillo, Hernan del, 11, 15.
Castro, Guillen de, 82.
Celestina, 6, 64, 138, 139.
Cervantes, 5, 61, 120 sq., 145-156.
Cetina, Gutierre de, 32, 43.
Chaide, Malon de, 179.
Charron, Pierre, 350.
Coloma, Carlos, Marquis of Espinar,
159.
Cruz, Juan de la, 179, 183.
Cueva, Juan de la, 37 sq., 71, 92.
Daniel, Samuel, 213-215.
Daurat, Jean, 292, 301.
Dekker, 276.
Didlogo de la Lengua, 23.
Diaz, Bemal, 160.
Drayton, 210, 216-219.
Encina, Juan del, 8, 10, 64 sq.
Ercilla, Alonso de, 54 sq.
Espinel, Vicente, 143.
Estella, Diego de, 177.
Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 58 note.
380
INDEX.
Farsa del Sacramento de Peral-
forja, 63.
Ferreira, Antonio, 55, 66.
Figueroa, Francisco de, 48.
Figueroa, Snarez de, 174.
Figueroa, Vera y, 174.
Fitz-Geoffrey, Charles, 211.
Fontaine, 27.
Garcilaso, 10, 31, 41 sq.
Gamier, Robert, 317-320.
Gascoigne, George, 191.
Gomara, Francisco Lopez de, 161.
Gomez, Enriquez, 138.
Gongora and Gongorism, 34, 48 sq.
Googe, Barnabe, 191.
Gorboduc, 232.
Gosson, Stephen, 201.
Gracian, Baltasar, 172.
Granada, Luis de, 176, 181.
Grant-Duff, Sir M. E., 172.
Greene, Robert, 238-240, 272.
Grevin, Jacques, 316.
Guarini, Giambattista, 365.
Guevara, Antonio de, 26 sq.
Guevara, Luis Velez de, 156 note.
Hall, Joseph, 219 sq.
Hallam, 286.
Harvey, Gabriel, 186.
Herrera, Antonio de, 1(33.
Herrera, Hernan de, 10, 41, 42, 45,
47.
History of the Civil War, 210.
Hita, Gines Perez de, 136.
Hooker, Richard, 286-289.
Inca Garcilaso, the, 163.
Jerez, Francisco de, 161.
Jodelle, Estienne, 312-316.
John II., 7.
Johnson, Dr, 46.
Kyd, Thomas, 242.
Larivey, Pierre, 321-324.
Lazarillo de Tormgs, 7, 140.
Ledesma, Alonso de, 51.
Leon, Luis de, 34, 45 sq., 181.
Leon, Pedro Cieza de, 161.
Lewes, G. H., 86 note.
Libros de Caballerias, 125 sq.
Lockhart, J. G., 18 sq.
Lodge, 219, 235, 272.
Longfellow, H. W., 9.
Lyly, John, 235, 266 sq.
Manrique, Jorge, 42.
Mardones, Cristobal de Salazar, 49
sq.
Mariana, Juan de, 167-169.
Markham, Gervase, 211.
Marlowe, Christopher, 242-245.
Marprelate, Martin, 263 sq., 276-
285.
Marston, 219 sq.
Melo, Francisco Manuel de, 166.
Mena, Juan de, 7 sq., 35.
Mendoza, Bernardino de, 159.
Mendoza, Diego de, 32, 43 sq. , 140,
164.
Menendez, Don M., 40, 61, 86 note.
Molina, Tirso de, 29, 81, 105-110,
125.
Molinos, Miguel de, 176.
Moncada, Francisco de, 165.
Monluc, Blaise de, 334.
Montaigne, Michel de, 344-350.
Montalvo, Garcia Ordonez de, 128.
Montchrestien, Antoine de, 320.
Montemayor, Jorge de, 124.
Morales, Ambrosio de, 166.
Morel-Fatio, M. Alfred, 43 note.
Moreto, 90.
Morley, Mr John, 173.
Naharro, Bartolome de Torres, 67.
Nash, Thomas, 235, 273-276.
Nebrissensis, 22.
Noue, Francois de la, 331.
Ocampo, Florian de, 166.
Oliva, Fernan Perez de, 22.
Ortega, Fray Juan de, 140.
Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernandez de, 161.
" Palmerines," the, 130 sq.
Pedroso, Eduardo Gonzalez, 62 note.
Peele, George, 240-242.
Perez, Andreas, 143.
Pleiade, the, 291, 310 sq.
Puttenham, George, 188, 262.
Quevedo, 51, 144 sq.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 264 sq.
Regnier, Mathurin, 308.
INDEX.
381
Rengifo, Juan Diaz, 36.
Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 169.
Ronwnceros, the, 14 sq.
Ronsard, Pierre de, 34, 292, 295-
298.
RoxavS, Agustin de, 175.
Roxas, Francisco de, 90.
Rneda, Lope de, 68 sq.
Sa de Miranda, Francisco de, 55.
Saavedra-Fajardo, Diego de, 170,
173.
Sackville, Sir Thomas, 189, 232.
Sanchez, Francisco, 42.
Sandoval, Prudencio de, 170.
Santillana, Marquis of, 8, 25, 35.
Satyre Menippee, the, 339-344.
Schlegel, A. W., 122.
Sempere, Hieronimo, 52.
Shakespeare, 247-258.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 37, 200-204,
269-272.
Silva, Feliciano de, 131.
Solis, Antonio de, 170.
Sommelsdyck, Aarsens van, 6.
Song-books, Elizabethan, 208.
Sonneteers, Elizabethan, 206.
Southey, Robert, 55 sq.
Spenser, Edmund, 185, 192-199.
Still, John, 231.
Sully, 327.
Taille, Jacques de la, 317.
Tasso, Torquato, 353-360.
Teresa, Santa, 177-182.
Thyard, Pontus de, 301.
Ticknor, Mr, 28, 30, 40, 64 note,
87.
Timoneda, Juan de, 63, 70, 125.
Tirant lo Blanch, 126.
Turberville, George, 190 sq.
Udall, Nicholas, 230.
Vaca, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de,
160.
Vair, Guillaume du, 351.
Valdes, Juan de, 23.
Valera, Don Juan, 4.
Valois, Marguerite de, 337.
Vega, Lope de, 28, 48, t>3, 61, 64,
72-80, 92, 94-102.
Vicente, Gil, 62.
Villalobos, Francisco de, 22.
Virues, Cristobal de, 71.
Warner, William, 211-213.
Watson, Thomas, 204-206.
Webbe, 187, 190, 262.
Zapata, Luis de, 52.
Zarate, Augustin de, 161.
Zurita, Geronimo de, 167.
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