There was a young man who went to Granada. It was his first visit. On the night of his arrival, after dinner, too excited to stay in, he went down to the town. Here, because he was twenty-four and also perhaps a little because he thought the gesture suited to the occasion he had himself directed to a brothel. He picked out a girl of whom he could remember nothing afterwards but that she had large green eyes in a pallid face. He was struck by their colour, for it was that which the old Spanish poets and story-tellers were always giving to their heroines, and since it is a colour very seldom seen in Spain the commentators have opined that when the writers talked of green they meant something else. But here it was. When the girl stripped the young man was taken aback to see that she was still a child.
'You look very young to be in a place like this,' he said. 'How old are you?'
'Thirteen.'
'What made you come here?'
'Hambre,' she answered. 'Hunger.'
The young man suffered from a sensibility that was doubtless excessive. The tragic word stabbed him. Giving her money (he was poor and could not afford much) he told the girl to dress up again, and, all passion spent, slowly climbed up the hill and went to bed.
There is a passage in the autobiography (more or less true) of Alonso de Contreras, who began life as a scullion and ended it as a Knight of Malta, that has always seemed to me a masterpiece of narrative and an example of perfect style. Having at one period of his picturesque career married the well-to-do widow of a judge his suspicions were aroused that she was deceiving him with his most intimate friend. One morning he discovered them in one another's arms. 'Murieron,' he writes. 'They died.' With that one grim word he dismisses the matter and passes on to other things. That is proper writing.
There are innumerable idioms in Spanish; they give the language pungency. It makes an ampler and more complicated use of the subjunctive than most modern languages and so gets into its speech a great elegance. We have pretty well lost the use of this mood in English and when we resort to it now it falls upon the ear affectedly; but it cannot, I think, be denied that it adds grace and distinction to a language. It is startling, and to anyone sensitive to such things charming, to hear a peasant in the course of conversation use with the accuracy of second nature the various forms of the subjunctive that the grammars give. Spanish has a harsher sound than Italian; it has not the euphonious monotony that makes that language somewhat fatiguing to listen to; it has a leaping, quick vivacity that forces the attention. It has nobility and deliberation. Every letter counts; every syllable has value. I like the story they tell of Charles V: he said that German was the best language in which to address horses, French to converse with statesmen, Italian to talk to women, English to call to birds; but that Spanish was the only language in which to address kings, princes and God.
It is with a certain dismay then that the student of Spanish literature grows little by little conscious of the fact that Spain has produced few works that are worthy of the instrument the writers had at their disposal. There is an engaging little story in the Spanish grammar. One day Louis XIV asked one of his courtiers:
'Do you know Spanish?'
'No, sire,' answered the other. 'But I will learn it.'
He set to work, for he thought it was the King's intention to appoint him ambassador to the Court of Spain, and after a time said to the king:
'Sire, now I know Spanish.'
'Very good,' the king replied. 'Then you will be able to read Don Quixote in the original.'
That is a grand thing to be able to do It is an unforgettable experience; but it must be allowed that there is nothing else the foreigner can read (except perhaps a few poems by the enchanting Saint John of of the Cross) that will leave him spiritually very much the richer. The fact is that the Spanish are not a highly intellectual people. They have added surprisingly little to the great stock of thought that forms the working material of our world. They have produced neither a philosopher nor a man of science of the first rank. Their best poetry, putting aside the ballads, was derived from Italy. Their great mystics took their ideas from Germany and the Low Countries. The most intelligent of them was St. John of the Cross. He was a rare poet, as lovely as Vaughan and as poignant as George Herbert. His prose reveals a character of appealing sweetness, a clear and discriminating brain, but a genius that was neither very profound nor very original.
I have a notion that the writers of Spain were hampered not only by a natural want of parts, but by a very singular circumstance. The great works of its literature were not produced by professional writers but by amateurs. They were soldiers broken by the wars, diplomatists in retirement, clerics who wanted to beguile their leisure, doctors and civil servants. The only important writer I can think of who made writing his profession is Lope de Vega. Cervantes, as we know, wrote when he was out of a job and it is pretty certain that if he had got one of the posts in America he applied for we should never have had Don Quixote. The professional writer is one who makes writing the main business of his life; therefore, unless he has some fortune, it must be also his means of livelihood; but whether he is paid by a sinecure in the customs, by a benefice or by royalties is of no consequence. In every occupation the professional is better than the amateur. No one would dream of denying this in any practical matter and it would be a great fool who employed an amateur plumber to repair a leak in a pipe. In music, sculpture and painting the amateur is rightly regarded with disdain. It is understood that to compose a piece of music or to carve a statue, a long apprenticeship and a cognizance of technique are needed. But because everyone learns to write well enough to put on paper in some sort of fashion what he wants to say, it is supposed that anyone can write a book. It is asserted that everyone has it in him to wrote one book. It may be so, but if by this is meant that everyone has it in him to write one good book, the assertion is false. The writer needs as complete a training as the practitioner of any other of the arts and the technique of writing yields to none of them in its difficulty. It is true that many professional writers write very badly, but many composers compose trivial and imitative music, many painters paint bad pictures. It is true also that sometimes an amateur writes a book better than many a professional. This is the stumbling-block of my argument.
The professional writer is confounded by this or that book written by someone who has never written before, or by someone who writes only as a diversion from other work, and because it has merit he is thought bound to admit that in writing the professional and the amateur are equal. But they who claim that Jane Austen is an example are in error, for to write was surely the main occupation of her life and the progress she made in the art sufficiently proves that she was a professional writer. Only her comfortable circumstances prevented her from pursuing it as a means of livelihood. It is, however, true that the amateur has some advantages that may give his work charm. The occasions of his life may provide him with a subject that is in itself interesting. He may have an attractive freshness. If his character is engaging or odd, his inexperience may allow him to reveal it so unaffectedly that his work has a quality of delight. Sincerity and a natural distinction sometimes enable him to string words together with clearness and elegance. But this is rare. To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
As a rule the amateur is rhetorical. He has an inordinate liking for picturesque words and high-flown phrases. At the back of his mind are all manner of literary tags and he brings them in under the impression that they look workmanlike. He cannot say a thing directly; he muffles it up in a periphrase. He uses two words when one will do; he never learns the art to blot. He does not know where to begin nor when to stop. He is the slave of every idea that enters his head so that he wanders from his subject with every fancy that strikes him. He is long-winded. I should say that the three essentials of good writing are lucidity, euphony and simplicity; and their importance is according to the order in which I have placed them. It is good that the reader should know exactly what you want to say and it is good that your words should fall pleasantly on the ear; a simple vocabulary is very desirable, but it is well to be prepared to sacrifice it if your meaning is not clear and you may without reproach choose an elaborate word rather than a plain one if its sound, in its place, is more delightful. Now it is very seldom that these three things come from a happy accident of nature; for the most part they are achieved by intensive training and assiduous labour. It is only by practice that the writer learns to stick to his point, which is the first and best rule of composition, and it is again only by practice that he learns how to present his theme with order, balance and succinctness. To do this, writing must be not only the main, but the only occupation, of his life. It is not often that the amateur will write a book that has the beauty of finish.
But the worst thing about the amateur is that he has no capacity to progress. He is wise if he writes but one book. This may have uncommon merit, but the chances are that anything else he writes will have very little. No country can have a great literature that has not had a number of writers who have been copiously productive. A writer is not made by one book, but by a body of work. It will not be of equal value; his books will be tentative while he is learning the technique and developing his powers; and if, as most writers do, for it is a healthy occupation, he lives too long, his later work will show the decline due to advancing years; but there will be a period during which he will bring forth what he had it in him to bring forth in the perfection of which he was capable. For talent is not something that is set and unchanging. Talent, I take leave to suggest, is made up of two things. It consists of a natural aptitude for creation, which to some degree is common to all young people. Innumerable youths have a facility for writing, they are prodigious letter-writers, they keep voluminous diaries; and if they have it to a considerable extent, but not something else, they become journalists, critics, professors of literature and so forth. The something else is an outlook on life peculiar to themselves. When these two are combined you have talent. This peculiarity of outlook will appeal to a certain number of people, either from its strangeness, which excites their interest, or because they share it; and then the writer will have readers and they will think him a devilish clever fellow. Sometimes there will be found a man who has this facility for writing to an extraordinary degree and to this joins an outlook on life which is not only peculiar to himself, but appeals to all men, and then he will be called a genius. The word is used carelessly nowadays; I should have said that such a one arises not more than two or three times in a century.
If this is what talent is it is plain that the professional writer has an advantage over the amateur. For the aptitude for writing can certainly be improved by study and practice, while that idiosyncrasy, which I think is the important part of talent, can be developed by the hazards and experiences of life. A writer has talent because he is himself, but in youth he is himself uneasily and with timidity. He only learns to look at the world characteristically when from indifference or obstinate courage he has freed himself of the current prejudices that on all sides surround him.
On the whole the defects you find in the Spanish writers are those you expect amateurs to have. They wrote as a pastime or because, having failed in their lawful avocations, they were short of money. Conceptism and gongorism, which corrupted Spanish literature for the best part of a century, are the frivolous amusements of dilettantes. Common sense was sacrificed to a striving for wit. Authors asked you to warm yourself at a display of fireworks and to make your dinner on a dish of larks' tongues. (Conceptism is the search for brilliant and futile conceits and gongorism expresses them with an obscure vocabulary in affected language and with forced antitheses. Conceptism is to the thought what gongorism is to the expression.) Spanish literature is of no great imaginative power, for the imagination is a faculty that is increased by exercise; it is not with the first caper that it reaches its utmost heights. It is a literature not of sustained force, but of brilliant beginnings. It is not easy to find in it works that keep a bold and decided line from start to finish. A greater knowledge is required, a larger experience and a more solid technique, to produce a complete work, with its various parts in due relation to the whole, than the Spanish authors often had. Perfection, we know, is not to be reached, but I think it has never been more completely missed than in Spain by writers with such gifts. Don Quixote is a very great work; it would be hard to find one of so much importance (and it is the only Spanish work that has a sure place in the literature of the world) that had so many glaring defects. I should not venture to speak of so celebrated a book, but for the fact I have noticed that pretty well all the references that are made to it in the literature of to-day are taken from incidents that occur in the first eight or ten chapters. I surmise from this that few people have read more. It is a pity, since the rest of the book contains many things that are worth attention. Cervantes, soldier, captive, tax-collector, jail-bird, place-hunter and maquereau, was the typical amateur. Don Quixote, as we know, was begun as a short story (a medium that had great vogue during the Golden Age) and it was the success it had when he read it to his friends that is said to have decided Cervantes to make it into a book. It is interspersed after the fashion of the day with short stories. They are very dull. The critics carped at them and in the second part, though still fantastic and absurd, they are brought more naturally into the body of the work. The wise-cracks of Sancho Panza, which at the beginning fall so naturally from his lips, are later piled on one another so extravagantly that they become tedious. Cervantes fell into the common error of the amateur who, when he gets hold of a good thing, harps upon it out of all reason. The device by which much of the action in the second part is carried on is very clumsy. Cervantes feigned that the first part had been published and read by many of the persons with whom the knight on his last journey came in contact. To my mind he has thus deprived the second part of all sincerity. The reader is no longer asked to believe what he reads. The last chapters are scamped. But the greatest blot, which must outrage the feelings of any sensitive person, is that Cervantes understood the character of his hero so little as to make him do something that it was impossible for him to do. He tells us that Don Quixote confessed on his death-bed that he had invented the account of his adventures in the Cave of Montesinos. Everyone knows that Don Quixote was incapable of saying anything that he did not think was true. When Cervantes made him admit a lie he maligned his hero and stultified himself.
It is unnecessary for me to say anything of the merits of Don Quixote. They shine like the sun at noon. Don Quixote is the most human and the most lovable character that the mind of man has invented. One cherishes him with a tenderness that, alas, one can seldom consistently feel in this difficult world for creatures of flesh and blood. The knight and his squire are immortal. There is one very good thing to be said of posterity, and this is that it turns a blind eye on the defects of greatness. Contemporary opinion is more concerned with the faults of a writer than with his excellence, but posterity takes him as a whole and very sensibly accepts the faults as the inevitable price that must be paid for the excellence.
But it is no business of mine to write a discourse on Spanish literature; if the reader finds what I have had occasion to say tedious, I beg him to forgive me; my only concern is with certain writers I have studied for a special purpose. I would only add that Spanish literature of course has many virtues. If I have pointed out that they are the virtues of amateurs it has been mainly with the didactic intention of emphasising (for the good of my fellow-writers) that in literature, as in other æsthetic occupations, you are more likely to achieve art if you make a business of it. Spanish literature has spontaneity. It has strangeness. It has a savour of the soil. It represents very well those brutal, courageous, passionate, idealistic, earthy, humorous, cruel and humane men who subjected a continent and discovered a world.
One would have thought that it would be the most delightful thing possible to read the picaresque novels; especially if one had not only the interest of the stories and the various types that play their part in them, but also the interest of looking for telling details on the manners and customs of the day with the chance always of hitting upon an incident here and there that (following the example of many another writer) one could make profitable use of. On the contrary it is in the main a dreary business. It is far from my purpose to instruct the reader, I have quite enough to do to instruct myself, but I may state in passing that the picaresque novel is one in which the characters are taken from the dregs of society and in which the hero lives on his wits. It is generally written in the first person. The hero in the classic type of the kind is a serving-man who goes from master to master. This is obviously a very convenient way of taking him through a variety of adventures and showing a diversity of conditions. It is the most characteristic form of Spanish literature. Its widespread influence was peculiarly felt in England and but for its vogue the novels of Defoe, Fielding, Smollett and Charles Dickens would most likely be different from what they are. It is often said to have been invented in Spain and certainly no picaresque novels were more popular in Europe than the Spanish, but Spaniards have never so far as I know invented anything, and I should have thought students could trace the origins of the form without great difficulty back to the Golden Ass of Apuleius, the Satyricon of Petronius and the dialogues of Lucian. But this is of no great importance. It is the counterpart of the romances of chivalry, which as we know were for long inordinately enjoyed in Spain, and responds to that other side of the Spanish character, the mocking, realistic one, which so strangely exists cheek by jowl with the idealistic and mystical.
The best of these novels (barring Gil Blas, which was written by a Frenchman) is the shortest and the first. Its success established the form in the public favour. This is Lazarillo de Tormes. The historians of literature say that it was occasioned by the change in social conditions, the ruin of commerce, industry and agriculture, and the centralisation of power in the capital, which attracted to it adventurers of all kinds. But novels are not written for reasons of this sort now, at least not readable ones, and I very much doubt if they were in the sixteenth century. It never occurs to the critics that writers often write for fun. I should have thought the author, whether the monk Juan de Ortega or the retired diplomatist Diego de Mendoza, knowing his classics and being well acquainted with the Celestina of the Archpriest of Hita, thought it would be amusing to write the autobiography of a young scamp, and having got hold of a good idea, did what authors do in such a case, wrote it. He was a humorist and it gave him the opportunity to say many sharp things about monks and priests. The little book is no longer than Sterne's Sentimental Journey. It tells the birth and childhood of the picaroon and his sojourns with various masters, a blind beggar, a priest, a squire, a mendicant friar, a seller of indulgences, a chaplain and a policeman. It leaves him as town-crier and the complaisant husband of an archdeacon's mistress. The incidents follow so fast on one another that the reader is constantly entertained. In the squire whom Lazarillo served in Toledo the author was lucky enough to describe for the first time a type, the proud, hungry, dignified and melancholy gentleman, that, from its humour and pathos, went to the heart of his countrymen. It would be difficult to count the number of times this character has since then reappeared within the covers of a novel or on the stage of a theatre.
Lazarillo, wandering famished through the streets of Toledo, came upon a gentleman in sumptuous apparel who walked with measured steps. The gentleman looked at him.
'Boy, does thou want a master?'
'I would fain have a good master, sir.'
'Then follow me. God hath sent thee good fortune to meet with me, thou hast prayed well this day.'
The gentleman took him to a house, but the walls were naked, and there was not so much as a chair or a stool, nor a table, nor yet a coffer, so that you would have said it was uninhabited. And presently the gentleman asked him whether he had dined.
'No, sir, for it was not eight o'clock when I met with your mastership this morning.'
'Then,' said he, 'as early as it was, I had broken my fast, and whensoever I break my fast in the morning, I never eat again till it is night, therefore pass thou over the time as well as thou canst and we will make amends at supper.'
Taken aback, Lazarillo hid himself behind the door, where he drew some pieces of bread out of his bosom that he had been given in charity two days before. But the gentleman saw him.
'Come hither, boy,' he said. 'What does thou eat?'
He showed him the bread, and the gentleman took a piece.
'By my soul, methinks this bread is good and savorous,' he said.
No supper was forthcoming and next day, driven by hunger, Lazarillo went a-begging from door to door. When he came home again with his spoils, not only bread but tripe and a neat's foot, he found his master awaiting him.
'I have tarried for thee to dinner,' he said, mildly, 'and because I could not see thee come I dined alone.' The boy began to eat his victuals and his master eyed him hungrily. Whereupon the boy said:
'Sir, the good tools make the workman good, this bread hath good taste, and this neat's foot is so well sodden, and so cleanly dressed, that it is able with the savour of it only to entice any man to eat of it.'
'What is it, a neat's foot?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Now I promise thee it is the best morsel in the world, there is no pheasant that I would like so well.'
'I pray you, sir, prove of it better and see how you like it.'
The boy gave him the neat's foot, with two or three pieces of the whitest bread he had, whereupon the gentleman sat down beside him and began to eat like one that had great need, gnawing every one of those little bones better than any greyhound could have done for life.
He had land that, if it were in a better situation and had a great house on it, would be worth much money; and he had a dovecot that, had it not been in ruins, would yield him more than two hundred pigeons a year. These he had forsaken for matters that touched his honour. Had he not almost beaten a craftsman who on meeting him had greeted him with the words: 'Sir, God maintain your worship'? The proper way for a man of that condition to greet a knight or a gentleman was to say: 'I kiss your worship's hand'; and he would not suffer any man, unless it were the king, to say to him: 'Sir, God maintain you.' He was come to Toledo to serve some great nobleman. He was starving. But he remained dignified, kindly and courteous. He was bound to none but to God and to the Prince. He maintained his honour unsullied and that was the only refuge of an honest man.
In the morning when he rose he made clean his hose, his doublet and his cloak; Lazarillo gave him water for his hands; he combed his hair and taking his sword kissed the pommel. 'My boy,' he said, 'if thou knewest what a blade this is thou wouldst marvel; there is no gold that can buy it of me, for of as many as Antonio made he could never give such temper to any as he gave this.'
He drew it from the scabbard and tested the edge with his fingers.
'Seest thou it? I dare undertake to cut asunder with it a whole fleece of wool.'
Then putting up his sword, he hung it at his girdle and with leisurely gait strode out of the house. He held himself erect, casting the end of his cloak sometimes upon his shoulder and other whiles under his arm, with his right hand always on his side. He went up the street with such comely gesture and countenance that you would have judged him to be near kinsman to the High Constable of Spain. Who would have thought that such a noble gentleman had eaten nothing all yesterday but one piece of bread that his servant Lazarillo had kept in the chest of his bosom a day and a night? He went to a garden of the town over the water and dallied with personable women, devising and counterfeiting all kind of bravery, reciting more pleasant and sweet words than ever Ovid wrote. And when Lazarillo could beg nothing and his master had not a morsel to eat, still he would brave it out, walking at his accustomed stately pace, and when he came home stand at the door of his house and for his honour's sake pick his teeth with a straw to show to all men that he had richly dined.
Though hunger might gnaw his vitals despair could not subdue his courage. A gentleman and a man of honour he faced adversity without dismay. The Spanish, with a tear and a smile, have recognised in him a true Castilian. It was to such as he that they owed their greatness and their ruin. Even the scamp who served him loved him well. He pitied him for all that he saw him suffer and notwithstanding his fantastical pride was glad to have him for his master.
Tenderness like this is unique in the picaresque novels. They offer you but a monotonous recital of mean shifts, petty thieving and brutal jests. The most popular of them all was Guzman de Alfarache. Most of the critics describe it as a work of infinite tediousness; but I knew that my favourite Hazlitt greatly admired it; he praised it for the fine mixture of drollery and grave moralising. The witty and brilliant Jesuit Baltazar Gracian is said to have kept it constantly by his side both for its entertainment and its excellent style. I read it then with curiosity. Of the style a foreigner can only speak with diffidence, but even a foreigner can see that it is simple, unaffected and vivid. It has a coolness and discretion that you do not find in English till Dryden nearly a century later learnt it from the French. If good writing should be like the conversation of a well bred man then it is obviously very good writing indeed. But no academic critic could exaggerate the tediousness of the matter. I do not think it is in human nature to read the whole work through. The hero is by turns a scullion, a porter, a gallant, a soldier, a beggar, page to a cardinal and pimp to an ambassador, a merchant, a student and finally a galley slave. Each of his adventures is followed by a long moral disquisition and strangely enough it is to these intolerable homilies that was due the book's enormous vogue with the readers of its own day. It is interspersed with short stories, of which one, that of Dorido and Clorinia, has a grim brutality that is rather engaging. Of course it is possible to skip the stories and the moralising and read only the adventures. They are very boring. It is all pilfering, card-sharping, beastly practical jokes and vulgar cunning. They show a lamentable poverty of invention. Nor do any of the many characters that are introduced live. This fault Guzman de Alfarache shares with the rest of the picaresque novels. They are written, as I said, in the first person, and experience has shown that it is almost impossible to make the teller of his own story distinct and palpable. Even Le Sage, though not a few of his subsidiary characters are sharply outlined, left Gil Blas himself a baseless fabric. Guzman is little more than a common sneak-thief. The resourceful Raffles would despise his paltry cheats and pettifogging robbery and Sherlock Holmes would never waste his time to bring such an insipid scoundrel to justice. Edgar Wallace is better than all the picaresque novelists put together. Not only are the crimes he deals with on a grander scale, but he shows a vivacity of invention, a power of suspense, a feeling for the picturesqueness of life, that none of them approached. It would not be so very surprising if the critics of the future neglected the serious novels of our day in favour of detective stories, and in the histories of literature pointed out the variety of Edgar Wallace's characters and the raciness of his conversations. This is what has happened with these Spanish writers; for while the picaresque novels were being written, novels of a more serious nature, with a definite claim to be works of art, were being written too, the Diana Enamorada of Gil Polo, the Galatea of Cervantes, the Arcadia of Lope de Vega, and heaven knows how many more. Of one of them the curate in Don Quixote said that it was one of the most foolish books that had ever been written and the critics with one accord have found them unreadable.
In the whole course of Guzman de Alfarache's career of roguery there is but one enterprise that can afford satisfaction to the disinterested admirer of crime. He was the bastard son of a bankrupt Genoese settled in Seville and on his first arrival at Genoa, a ragged boy, he claimed relationship with his father's brother. With the ingenuous notion, common to the crooks of all ages, that though he used his fellows ill, his fellows were bound to use him well, he was much affronted when his uncle would not acknowledge him. Eight years elapsed and he made up his mind to get even with him. Having got possession of a considerable sum of money in Milan he set out for Genoa. There he passed himself off as Don Juan de Guzman, a Sevillan of means and birth. His father's family not recognising in this fine gentleman the rapscallion whom they had once driven out of the city, were glad to accept him for the wealth they presumed him to have and the grand connections of which he boasted. He spent his time in feasting and the society of comely women. He was open-handed. In order to keep the rich young man among them they went so far as to offer him in marriage a damsel of no fortune but great quality. He played cards with his visitors, allowing them to win when he pleased, but keeping the balance well in his favour; for the accomplishment on which he most prided himself was his skill in so manipulating the cards that he could afford to be indifferent to the luck of the game. He had made friends with the captain of a galley and by spinning him an elaborate yarn about an affront that he had to avenge, which would entail his secret departure from Genoa, arranged with him for a passage to Spain. When the sailing date was settled he got to work. He transferred his own effects secretly to the galley and bought trunks which he filled with stones. Two of them he deposited with his uncle for safety, under the pretence that they contained plate of great value and jewels. Two others, to give his landlord confidence, he left at the inn. He had a couple of chains, one of gold and the other of copper, but identical in appearance, and by a neat trick he managed to get a cousin to lend him six hundred ducats on the false one under the impression that he held the real one as security. He announced his immediate marriage to the poor but noble young woman who had been proposed to him, whereupon his acquaintance showered presents on him so rich that he confesses he was almost ashamed to take them. These also he conveyed to the galley. He arranged a final game of cards at the end of which all his friends' money was in his own pocket, went on board and in the morning found himself well out at sea with his booty.
Since the people he robbed are shown as despicable as the trickster, the reader is left with the satisfaction, which no pity disturbs, of a confidence trick carried out with complete success. It is a relief to turn from this dull book to the Life of Marcos de Obregon by Vicente Espinel. It was something new in the picaresque novel, for it was a romanticised autobiography. Espinel's life was in itself a picaresque novel and to write his book he had to do little more than narrate his own experiences. He was born in the wind-swept city of Ronda. His grandfather, a native of Santillana (the birthplace of Gil Blas) had taken part in the conquest of Granada and the Catholic Kings had made him a grant of land. Espinel learnt Latin grammar and the elements of music and at the age of twenty set out to pursue his studies at the University of Salamanca. After a residence of two years this was closed on account of the troubles occasioned by the trial of Luis de Leon, and he returned, for want of money travelling on foot, to his native town. Here relatives founded a chaplaincy of which they made him chaplain. It provided him with funds to return to Salamanca. He was a poet and a musician, and this enabled him to enter the society of the men of letters and the men of birth who who resided in the city. But the desire of fame made him once more abandon his studies. He enlisted in the fleet that was at that time being collected at Santander. Plague, however, broke out and the fleet was unable to sail. Espinel found his way to Valladolid, where he entered the service of the Count de Lemos. He grew tired of this peaceful life after four years and set off for Seville to join the expedition to Africa that resulted in the defeat and death of the romantic King Sebastian of Portugal. Fortunately he arrived too late.
For a year he earned his living in Seville by writing obscene verse and playing his guitar in taverns and brothels. Then he sailed for Italy. Landing on the island of Cabrera to get water for the ship he and his companions were captured by pirates, taken to Algiers and there sold in slavery to a renegade. He was put to row in a galley, and after various adventures the galley was captured by the Genoese; he was released and landed at Genoa. From here, provided with money and a horse, he made his way to Flanders, where he joined the army of Alexander Farnese and took part in the siege of Maestricht. He made friends with Don Hernando de Toledo and returned with him to Italy. Under his protection he resided there for three years, writing poetry and studying music; he visited the cities of that beautiful country and then, his health no longer what it was, his youth past, he began to think that a more peaceful life would befit him; he returned to Spain, was ordained a priest and settled down in Ronda to pass his declining years in respectable tranquillity. He published his poems and produced a translation of Horace's Ars Poetica. But Vicente Espinel was a man whose passions were music and the delightful art of conversation. In Ronda there was no one he could talk to. Its inhabitants were concerned with nothing but the weather and the crops. His verse grew melancholy. He complained that people spoke ill of him. Presently he betook himself to Madrid. Here through influence he obtained the profitable chaplaincy of the Royal Hospital at Ronda, but he had little intention of abandoning the capital and so named a substitute to perform the duties of his office. The authorities of Ronda complained and notwithstanding his protests a royal order forced him to fulfil his charge in person. He spent three unhappy years in Ronda. His fellow citizens reproached him, certainly with justice, for his bad behaviour and licentious life; and at last, appointing another substitute, he returned to Madrid. He graduated as master of arts at Alcalá and the Bishop of Plasencia made him his chaplain and master of his music. The salary was generous and he settled down for good in the capital.
He was famous. He added the fifth string to the guitar and his contemporaries ascribed to him the invention of a stanza which was called after him Espinela. (For those interested in such things I may state in passing that the pattern was as follows: a b b a a c c d d c.) He was the friend of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. He was a figure at literary gatherings. Authors submitted their works for his approval. In this pleasing manner he passed the last twenty-five years of his life. In his foolish youth, he wrote, he had had few virtues and many vices; he had not always observed the laws of temperance; he had enjoyed the pleasures of the table and had looked deep into the wine cup; he had made many a joyful sacrifice on the altar of the Cypriote. In plain words he had liked good food and good wine and wenched whenever he got the chance. Remembering past delights and hoping, he says, that his experiences would serve as a lesson to others, he wrote the novel which is called Vida de Marcos de Obregon. It was first published in 1618 when its author had reached the respectable age of sixty-six.
His aim was didactic, but his moral reflections are on the whole brief, and he reproved sin with the indulgence of one who knew the world. He ascribed the vices of men to error of judgment. Marcos de Obregon is not a knave who narrates his rogueries with complacency, but an observer who takes life as it comes. He does not move only in the dregs of society, but consorts also with gentlemen, men of letters and musicians. You cannot resist the conclusion that Vicente Espinel was a charming, amiable, courageous and sensible man. He had wit and he enjoyed life.
There is one episode in this book that is really moving. When Espinel (for it is of himself he writes though he purports to write of Marcos de Obregon) was captured by the Genoese in the Algerian galley they took him for a renegade, handcuffed him, beat him with cudgels and told him that on arriving in Genoa he would be hanged. When they beat him, he cried: 'They say there's no wood in Genoa, there's quite enough for me.' Two musicians who were standing by heard his retort and laughed. He knew one of them very well, but was ashamed to discover himself. The admiral, however, gave orders that until they knew who he was, for he denied that he was the renegade they took him for, he should not be ill-treated. They took off his handcuffs. There was something of a storm in the Gulf of Lyons and when it was past the Admiral, Marcello Doria, ordered his musicians to sing to him. The first thing they sang was a song that Espinel himself had written and composed. The refrain was:
'El bien dudoso, el mal seguro y cierto.'
('The good is doubtful. The bad sure and certain.')
They sang the verses one after the other, and when they came to the refrain for the last time he could not contain himself.
'And yet this pain of mine continues,' he cried.
The singer, hearing what he said, looked at him. But he was short-sighted and Espinel in rags. His hardships, his privations, had so changed him that he was scarcely recognisable. Francisco de la Peña, for that was the singer's name, stared at him, and then, suddenly, unable to speak, his eyes wet with tears, took him in his arms. He addressed the admiral.
'Whom does your excellency think that we have with us?' he said.
'Whom?'
'The author of these verses and this melody and of much else that we have sung to your excellency.'
'What do you say? Call him.'
The admiral was shocked to see a man of whom he had heard so much in such a plight. He forthwith gave him decent clothes and showed him favour.
It is a pleasant example of that peripeteia and anagnorisis which Aristotle considered the most affecting things in tragedy.
There is one thing that strikes the diligent reader of the picaresque novels and that is the strange way in which the authors neglected the opportunities the times afforded them. For it was a period of great events. Cervantes was wounded at the battle of Lepanto, the greatest victory of the second Philip's reign. The Netherlands revolted and the Duke of Alba was sent to quell the rebels. Portugal was joined to the Spanish Empire. In America new realms were added to it . Drake singed the King of Spain's beard at Cadiz and the Armada sailed from Lisbon to set the Infanta Isabel on the throne of England. I cannot remember that any of this material is used even for an incident. If the Indies are referred to it is only because an adventurer has returned from them with a fortune and there is a chance of robbing him. Certain personages have been to the wars in Flanders or set out for them. I have not read a story in which you are told what they did there. One would have thought that the expulsion of the Moriscos with the cruelty and extortion that attended it would have given Solorzano, for instance, one of the later picaresque authors, a subject he could have made good use of. For all you can tell none of them took the smallest interest in the happenings of their time. They continued to relate the knaveries of innkeepers, the wiles of beggars and the thefts of scullions. It seems all very odd till you remember that Jane Austen, during the Napoleonic wars, was content to describe (heaven knows, with exquisite humour) the sentimental dalliance of honest gentlefolk, and that Henry James, who beheld the rise of the United States from a provincial community to a world power, exercised his extreme subtlety on the anæmic passions of the fashionable world. I do not blame this; I merely remark on it: it may be that it is by a sound instinct that the novelist turns his back on the occurrences that are significant to the welfare of his country and the progress of civilisation to dwell upon the humdrum affairs of common life. There has only been one Sir Walter Scott and only one Tolstoi. It is true that the Moorish pirates ravaged the coasts of Spain and that the country was bankrupt and oppressed: the inns were shocking, the innkeepers extortionate and you might very well be given a cat for your dinner when you had ordered a hare.
Nor can the modern reader of these novels fail to be surprised at the small part that is taken by sex. I do not know whether this was due to the fear of the Inquisition (which kept a sharp eye on literary productions) or to the natural healthiness of the Spaniards who looked upon copulation as a normal function of the human animal of no more (and no less) consequence than eating and drinking. The fact remains that the picaresque novels are uncommonly chaste. Now and then the roguish hero casts an amorous glance on a lady of the town, but he is cheated of his money and sent unsatisfied away. Even this is rare. More often the young man's thoughts turn to the well-dowered maiden or the rich widow. His raptures have a practical basis. In such of these books as have a heroine for protagonist a good many assaults are made on her virtue (the Spaniard then as now conceiving sensibly that the first thing to do with a comely wench was to put her to bed), but she cunningly eludes pursuit; she makes good use of the effect she has produced to rob her admirers of their money, but does not surrender the precious jewel of her virginity except under the blessing of the church. There is thus a certain amount, though little, of honest-to-God lechery, but there is no love. On this subject I shall have a little more to say presently.
For love you must go to the autobiographical fragments which Agustin de Rojas inserted in his Diverting Journey. And in the life of himself written by the soldier Miguel de Castro, there is an account of his passion for a courtesan at Naples, which, sordid though it is, has the authentic thrill. It is not a romantic love that he feels for the pretty trollop, but it is love all the same, fierce, jealous, eager, a love for which he will incur any danger and take any risk, a love capable even of generosity and self-sacrifice. Incidentally the story gives an unexpected and agreeable light on the relations between soldiers and their officers, servants and masters. For Miguel de Castro at this time was body-servant to Don Francisco de Cañas, commander of the garrison. Having discovered his servant's infatuation Don Francisco, benevolently, though surely unreasonably, sought by reproof and good advice to wean him from it. But finding that notwithstanding his admonitions the gallant spent all his nights with the harlot he had the doors of the palace locked and the keys brought to his own chamber. Miguel de Castro stole them. Then he made him sleep in an inner chamber from which he could only get by passing through the room in which he himself slept. The lover found means to outwit him. Finally in despair he sentenced him to a month's imprisonment, thinking that thus he would put a stop to the attachment that not only outraged his sense of propriety, but jeopardised the soul of his unworthy servant. This is how Miguel de Castro describes what followed:
'On issuing from the prison and chamber of my seclusion, it was not half an hour before I went forthwith to see the crocodile of my ignorance, the siren of my senses, the rock of Sisyphus on my shoulders, the wheel of Ixion of my torment; for there was the Wagoner's Rest of my sensibility, the hostelry of my faculties, the theatre of my delights, the idol of my sacrifices and the law of my faith.'
A lover can't say fairer than that.
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