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 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 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 88 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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- 90 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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 94 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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 96 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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, 98 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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 100 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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 102 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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 108 EUROPEAN LITERATURE LATER RENAISSANCE. 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*