the practical discoveries that were being made on every
side ; but to kindle the imaginative men of his time it
needed the fire, the visionariness, the enthusiasm, the
impressiveness of Bacon's great style, rather than the dry
small facts of the men who were examining the blood-
vessels of frogs, and registering the movements of the stars.
Section IV. — In Spain.
At the end of the fifteenth century Spain was just enter-
ing upon her brief period of power and glory. After many
s ain'B centuries of struggle, the power of the Moors was,
golden in 1492, finally broken by the conquest of Gra-
nada, and, under the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella,
Spain at last became a united kingdom. Thenceforward
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126 THE RENAISSANCE
she rapidly advanced in wealth and honour, until she
became the foremost of the western nations. The acces-
sion of Charles V. with his Hapsburg possessions, and the
death of Maximilian, united a vast amount of new territory
under the Crown, and if, during the reign of Charles, Spain
seemed to be but a province in a vast empire, the division
at his death and the accession of Philip secured her
supremacy. The voyages of Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro,
and othfer bold adventurers, made her queen of the Western
seas, which yielded up to her their boundless stores of
wealth. But her ambition was insatiable. Not content
with Portugal and the Netherlands, England was to own
her sway, and all the New World was to be hers. The
Causes of tragic story of her collapse stands ever to point
her faU ^ moral to other nations. How her religious in-
tolerance, begotten of her long struggles with the infidel,
crushed out all that was freshest and noblest in her midst,
and caused the Netherlands to break away, at terrible cost
to themselves and loss to her ; how her headstrong expulsion,
first of Jews and then of the conquered Moors, drove away
all the sober trading and agricultural members of the com-
munity, and left the land to a race which was too proud and
too indolent to work upon it ; how the autocratic policy of
ambitious monarchs, keeping a large standing army and
grinding the faces of the people for supplies for their
foreign conquests, stirred up a rebellious spirit among the
communes ; how a false conception of wealth caused money
to be worshipped until the country was glutted with the gold
poured in from the Spanish Main ; how she sank under
this burden, and how England beat her back and buffeted
her on the high seas, took the treasures from her galleonfl
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SPANISH LITERATUKE 127
defied her pretensions in the New World, nay, sent her buc-
caneers to sail up her rivers and * singe the King of Spain's
beard* — all these make up the most dramatic of national
stories. But duringthosefew dazzling decades of prosperity,
and also in the first years of her decline, Spain felt the full
influence of the Renaissance and produced a literature
The instinct with life and enthusiasm. The type of
f m^ ra- character that prevailed among the Spaniards at
ment the commencement of the sixteenth century, and
which was reflected in their literature, was as interesting as
it was unique. Its chief characteristic was a vehement, even
fanatical, devotion to religion, the product of the centuries
during which, inch by inch, they had wrested back their
native land from the Moor. ' The Spaniards always felt
their warfare to be peculiarly that of soldiers of the Cross ;
they always felt themselves beyond everything else and
above everything else to be Christian men contending
against unbelief.'* But it was from their hated Arab
masters that they inherited the sensuous Oriental mysti-
cism which so strongly colours much of their literature.
It was the long crusade, too, which doubtless gave them
their peculiarly romantic and chivalrous spirit, so that,
long after other nations had put away such things as
childish, the stories of * Amadis of Gaul ' and his many
descendants, and the stories of the Palmerins were read
and re-read in Spain with passionate avidity, existing all
through the sixteenth century side by side with the new
Italianate literature, until Cervantes, by his satire, gave
them their death-blow. And it was not only in books that
the spirit of knight-errantry survived ; as late as the time
' Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. i. p. 816.
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128 THE KENAISSANCE
of Ferdinand and Isabella we hear of distinguished noble-
men who had gone into foreign countries ' in order/ as the
old chronicler says, ' to try the fortune of arms with any
cavalier that might be pleased to adventure it with them,
and so gain honour for themselves and the fame of valiant
and bold knights for the gentlemen of Castile.' ^ Intense
pride was of course almost synonymous with the very name
of a Spanish hidalgo, and with this was mingled on the
one side an unswerving loyalty to the prince, and on the
other an exaggerated devotion to * the point of honour/ .
which degenerated almost into a mania.
As one would imagine, the Spaniards were an extremely
poetic race. Spain was pre-eminently the land of ballads.
The gai saber of Provence had flourished in Catalonia and
Arragon almost as luxuriantly as in the land of its birth ;
but, partly from its own inherent delicacy, partly from the
gradual predominance of the sterner Castilian language and
literature, it was not destined for a much longer life than it
Jiad there. An element of it remained, however, even in the
courtly Castilian poetry, and we find the complainte and the
tenson and the glosa very popular among fifteenth-century
poets, who added their own intensity and fire to the honeyed
sweetness of the Provencal.
In that century the influence of Italy began to be felt.
There had naturally been much communication between
Italian ^^^ ^^o Countries from early times, for Sicily had
influence, j^^^j^ ^.j^^ g^f ^f Arragon from the thirteenth
century, and, in 1441, Alfonso V. acquired Naples. The
similarity of the languages made imitation easy, and
Boccaccio and Dante were probably known before the
* Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature^ vol. i. p. 228,
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SPANISH LITERATURE 1^9
fifteenth centniy. But it was the Marquis of Santillaiia
who first decidedly showed Italian influence in his writings.
The To him belongs the credit of introducing the
SwatiUwia! sonnet into Spain, in a series of seventeen, in
1898-1458 ^iiich he imitates not only Petrarch but Dante
and Guido Cavalcante. A friend and proUge of San-
tillana was Juan de Mena, who also imitated Dante in a
somewhat satirical poem called ' The Coronation,'
Mena, Written in honour of his patron; and, more
1411-1456 gQyiQ^giy^ in the ' Labyrinth,' a poem of 2,500
lines. Juan de Mena's great claim to the gratitude of his
countrymen consisted, however, in the service he rendered
to the Castilian tongue, which, like most of the old lan-
guages, was found inadequate for all the new ideas which
came crowding in during the fifteenth century. De Mena
borrowed words, not only from Latin but also from modem
tongues, and though many of his phrases were ill enough
adapted to the national genius, and never became current,
yet on the whole he left that noble ancient language
richer and stronger than he found it. Castilian hence-
forth became the literary language of Spain,
c. 1495- just as Tuscan was that of Italy ; and it was in
^^^^* this tongue that Boscan, the first modern poet
of Spain, wrote his Italianate verse.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century a fresh
impulse had been given to communication with Italy.
When Naples, instead of being ruled by descendants of
Alfonso v., was governed directly from Spain, and the
presence there of a small court of Spaniards was necessi-
tated, and when, a little later, the flower of Spanish chivalry
was gathered on the plains of Lombardy to do battle with
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180 THE RENAISSANCE
the French, the Spaniards were no more able than their
enemies to resist the fascinations of the fair land they were
despoiling. This was the zenith of Leo's golden age, and
among those who felt its magnetism was Juan Boscan, the
young Catalonian, who was fired with the idea of refashion-
ing Spanish verse (which had scarcely yet risen above the
old redondilla or ballad metre) by the smooth stately
measures of Italy. It would seem that the sonnets of the
Marquis of Santillana had made no deep impression on his
countrymen, for Boscan regarded himself, and was regarded
by his contemporaries, as a pioneer. The Spaniards were too
intensely conservative to receive the new style without oppo-
sition ; but on the whole it was favourably welcomed, and a
great number of poets began to essay the Italian measures*
Its success was due less, perhaps, to its originator
than to his friend Garcilasso, a poet of far higher genius.
Garciiasso, The latter, like Boscan, was a soldier, and in early
1508-1686 manhood he met his death in a deed of gallantry.
His adventurous life and early death (circumstances he
shared with so many of the heroes of the Renaissance) made
it impossible for him to leave any great amount of poetry;
what he did leave has a sad and tender grace, strangely at
variance with his stormy career. In his eclogues he shows
the influence of the * Arcadia ' of Sannazaro (himself a
Spaniard by descent), and also of Virgil and Theocritus.
His sonnets and canzoni are in Petrarch's manner, but
always with an individuality of their own, and not infre-
quently the poet forgets his models, remembering only the
restraint they have taught him, and gives free play to his
own ardent Spanish spirit. In his poetry we find the
dominant characteristic of Spanish literature — passionate,
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SPANISH LITERATURE 131
vehement emotion, which not seldom degenerates into
extravagance, but which, in the hands of such a master as
Garcilasso, and when tempered by Italian refinement, rises
to a note of intense melancholy sweetness. Garcilasso's
genius was fully recognised by his contemporaries. His
work passed through several editions, and suffered many
things at the hands of editors and commentators.
A third poet who, more perhaps by the greatness of his
name and fame, helped to firmly establish the Italian school
Mendoza, ^ Spain was Diego de Mendoza, great-grandson
1608-1575. Q^ ^jjQ Marquis of Santillana, and, like him, scholar
and soldier, poet and diplomatist, historian and statesman.
Most of his poems were written in his old age, and have
more of the gravity of the statesman and scholar than the
fire and tenderness of the young soldier. Mendoza did
not throw in his lot entirely with the Petrarquistas^ as their
opponents gibingly called the Italian school. -Like many
other poets of the time, he varied his measures, using the
hendecasyllabic or heptasyllabic for grave subjects, and
the old Spanish redondilla, with its sprightly, tripping
music, when in a lighter vein. He was a Humanist, collect-
ing and reading the works of the ancients as enthusiastic-
ally as any Italian of the fifteenth century ; but he exhibits
none of the slavishness of Italian Humanism. His classic
studies gdve strength and dignity and originality to his
compositions both in prose and verse. He was so far from
ignoring all that was not Greek or Latin that he made a
special study of Arabic, and was able, in his history of the
war of Granada, to enter into the feelings of the Moors in
a way that was not a little surprising in a member of one
• of the oldest and proudest of Spanish families. This book,
K 2
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132 THE KENAISSANCE
owing to its fairness and justice, was not published until
some years after the author's death, so fiercely did the
hatred of their old Arab masters still bum in Spanish
breasts. A book that had a much greater immediate
influence was a novel written by Mendoza in his gayer
youth, entitled * Lazarillo de T6rmes,' the story of a rascal
servant, whose amusing adventures under various employers
form a lively satire on contemporary manners. The
* Lazarillo ' was without any sort of precedent, but it took
the popular fancy at once, and became the parent of a
whole family of romances which related the adventures of
some picaro or rogue — a family which has no more famous
member than Gil Bias,
The picaresqvs novel could not, however, oust from
popular favour the chivalric romance, which was now more
beloved than ever, and had become so extravagant and wild,
and had acquired such a hold on the imagination of the
people, as to constitute, in the opinion of many of the more
thoughtful, a positive danger. But where neither counter-
attraction nor legislation availed anything, the irresistible
power of raillery proved effective. It was as impossible,
after the appearance of 'Don Quixote,' for any serious
interest to be taken in the chivalric romance as it is for us
to be moved by a sentimental poem when a parody on it is
ringing in our ears.
Cervantes is the one Spanish writer of this period
whose name is a household word. Of a humanity more
Cervantes simple and homely than Shakespeare's, of a
1547-1616 humour more tender and touched with pathos
than Rabelais', of a spirit nobler and more elevated than
Ariosto's, he unites with these three to represent to us the
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SPANISH LITERATUKE 333
Eenaissance. He brings before us a side of Spanish life
which has no longer that aspect of sombre, haughty magni-
ficence that it usually wore, but is no less truly national
— the life of the simple country people, the peasant, the
priest, the surgeon, the poor gentleman struggling with
his poverty ; he tells us of adventures by the wayside and
in the village inns. And again (in his * Novelas Exem-
plares ') he gives us vivid little pictures of life in the towns ;
the gay ladies and gentlemen, the gipsies, students, and
duennas, and all the incidents of a bright and busy life.
We know more of Cervantes the man than we do of
most of his contemporaries — far more than we know of
Shakespeare — and all we know endears yet more to us
this lovable, lighthearted, unfortunate gentleman. Nothing
can prove more amply than the story of his life how little
opposed he was to the true spirit of chivalry. No preux
chevalier could have been more honourable, more high-
souled than he showed himself, again and again, in the
course of his sad and troubled life. At the age of twenty-
four we see him, weak with fever, but burning with a
patriotic hatred of the Turk, flinging himself into the thick
of the sea-fight at Lepanto. A few years later we find
him, maimed and a captive, among the pirates of Algiers,
planning, with the same indomitable spirit, the escape
of himself and his comrades, taking all the responsi-
bility on himself with careless generosity when, time after
time, his plans were revealed to his cruel captors. And
again, at Valladolid, after long years of the grinding poverty
and neglect which are far harder to bear than Fate's
sharper buffets, we find him still facing life with a smile
on his lips, a smile bom of genuine humour and unfailing
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184 THE RENAISSANCE
sweetness of temper. He is growing old. One by one his
hopes have died away. Nothing is left but to drag out his
days amid sordid petty cares. He has but two wretched
rooms, and these he shares with his wife and several
female relations who have sacrificed all the little family
fortune for his ransom. But he settles down at his comer
of the table in the room that serves for kitchen and work-
room, and in the midst of the subdued chatter of the
women's voices and the litter of their silks and stuffs
(for all are working for their living), he turns all the
chequered past into a tissue of innocent fun that hides no
bitterness, of whimsical trouble that covers no complaint.^
Gradually his interest deepens in his hero — the Don
Quixote who is at first, with his soaring enthusiasms that
work out so unpractically, his great crusades that collapse
so lamentably, a sort of caricature of himself as well as of
an honourable gentleman crazed by much reading of
romances, but who gradually develops, by the addition of
one life-giving touch after another, into the gentle, high-
souled, mistaken enthusiast, whom we all love. Just in
the same way Sancho Panza, from a mere greedy gullible
bumpkin, develops into the mixture of simple loyalty and
shrewd cunning that makes him so admirable a foil to his
visionary master. The book touches a deeper spring of affec-
tion in us than any other of its time, and surely its tender-
ness, its humour, and its genial sympathy with all things
human, will prevent it from ever becoming antiquated.
But in the eyes of his contemporaries, Cervantes was
altogether eclipsed by a far more brilliant personality,
Lope de Vega, who not only was extraordinarily clever,
* See Mrs. Oliphant, Cervcmtes,
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SPANISH LITERATURE 136
but had that faculty for keeping himself in the foreground
that Cervantes neither had, nor perhaps cared to have.
It is as a dramatist that De Vega is most famous ;
Vega, but his pretensions as a poet and a writer of
fiction are not small. When he was twenty-six
he sailed with the Armada, and in the midst of all the
sufferings of that ill-fated expedition he found time to write
a lengthy poem, ' The Beauty of Angelica,' intended as a
continuation to the * Orlando Furioso.' In suffering from
inordinate length it only resembled the majority of Lope's
poems. Ideas seem to have flowed in so full a stream
in this man's mind, and he had such a facility for clothing
them in fluent verse, that he found it difficult to make an
end. Among his poems are 'Isidore the Ploughman,'
consisting of 10,000 lines in honour of that saint, and a
ten-canto poem entitled * La Dragontea,' an indictment of
Sir Francis Drake, the terror of the Spaniards, in which
he rejoices over the death of that ' Protestant Scotch Pirate,'
and speaks of Elizabeth as the Scarlet Woman of Babylon.
His most ambitious effort was the ' Jerusalen Conquistada,'
an imitation, of course, of Tasso, consisting of 22,000 verses,
which, in spite of its easy, graceful rhythm, is too tedious
and rambling to be read with interest.
Lope well illustrates the peculiar contradictions ot
the Spanish type of religion. A clever, dashing man of
the world, he yet delighted to sign himself ' Familiar of the
Holy Office ' (of the Inquisition) ; and he became a priest,
performing with regularity the duties of his order, while
he continued to produce dramas of, to say the least, ques-
tionable morality. Among his sacred works were a long
pastoral, in prose and verse, entitled * The Shepherds of
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136 THE RENAISSANCE
Bethlehem/ and several shorter poems. It is in these short
pieces, and in his ballads and redxmdillaSy that he best
shows the vein of real poetic tenderness that did exist
beneath the flood of easy eloquence. In such brilliant
spectacular functions as the literary contests at Madrid,
where Lope acted as Master of the Ceremonies, the famous
priest and dramatist, with his rich voice and his perfect
savoir faire, was in his element. Such was the impression
made upon his age by this brilliant personality, that his
death was regarded as a public calamity ; the funeral lasted
nine days, and the whole city was thrown into mourning.
Spain was not often so kind to her geniuses. Quevado,
the great satirist of the period, was embittered by the many
Quevado undeserved sufferings he endured — sufferings
1580-1645 which at last put an end to his life. For the
Spaniards, a grave haughty race, had little appreciation of
satire, especially when, like Quevado's, it had more of the
gall of Juvenal than the geniality of Horace. A man of
great talents and of administrative capacity, with which he
served his country well, Quevado's caustic wit brought
unmerited suspicion on him, and he was more than once
imprisoned for long periods. Soon after his final rejease,
ill and penniless, he died. He was a strong writer, em-
ploying a vivid, expressive, if frequently coarse, style. In
his prose satires, among which are a pica/resqne novel,
' The Great Sharper Paul of Segovia,' and a series of short
amusing sketches, his great power and fearless originality
found full play. In his sonnets he burlesqued the Italianate
school, and he also ridiculed the stilo culto, a species of
affected speech, whose chief exponent was G6ngora, and
which corresponded to the contemporary Euphuism and
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SPANISH LITERATURE 187
Marinism of England and Italy. But although Quevado
satirised the ' Cultos/ he himself belonged to a party who
practised a form of aflfectation quite as detestable, though not
so widespread. These were the ' Conceptistas,' a mystical
sect, who expressed their meaning under a cloak of meta-
phors and plays upon words.
Spain added her full share to the almost universal out-
burst of lyric song in the sixteenth century. Innumerable
Lyric sonnets were written, as well as the native
poetry villancicos and latrillas in which the humours
and the simple emotions of the people found a voice.
Ballads, such as seem to be bound up with the very life of
old Spain, became more popular than ever. The old ones
were gathered into collections, and many new ones were
added to them. There was scarcely a poet who did not
add to the number. When national subjects were ex-
hausted, classical history was ransacked for themes. The
ballads which G6ngora wrote, before he fell a victim to his
cuUismo, are peculiarly quaint and sprightly. Cervantes
and Lope de Vega helped to increase the vogue of the
ballad by introducing it into their plays.
In the domain of prose, romance holds the foremost
place. Little, indeed, is heard of the Ohivalric Romance
after the publication of * Don Quixote.' It was
partly superseded by the Pastoral Romance, which
was nowhere more admired than in Spain. Pastorals were
written by both Lope and Cervantes ; but the most famous
example is the ' Diana Enamorada,' of George de Monte-
mayor, a Portuguese (published 1542), which is considered
to surpass, in its pathos, its sweetness, and its interesting
plot, its great prototype the ' Arcadia ' of Sannazaro. The
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138 THE RENAISSANCE
* Diana ' itself gave rise to two or three sequels, and many
other imitations followed, the best of which is the * Golden
Age,' by Balbuena, which is remarkable for its descriptions
of scenery.
No less popular were the picaresque novels, already
mentioned, making fun of the idle rogues who especially
abounded in a country where war was considered the only
occupation worthy of a man. A notable example is the
' Guzman de Alfarache,' by Aleman, which was translated
and printed in almost every European language, and bo
which Ben Jonson refers as
. . . The Spanish Proteus, which, though writ
But in one tongue, was formed with the world*s wit.
A number of historical romances were produced, but
these were less popular. Great favour was shown to a
species of short story, somewhat resembling the Italian
novella^ though on the whole thoroughly national in style
and subject. Juan de Timoneda, dramatist, bookseller,
and ballad writer, was one of the earliest to form a collec-
tion of these tales, many of which were probably old stories
which had been told and re-told from the time of the
troubadours.
There is no doubt that the growth of serious, thought-
ful literature was impeded, choked, and finally checked
Influence altogether, by the religious bigotry of the
c th^iic Spaniards. If the English Renaissance had to
Reaction contend with the Reformation, the Spanish
Renaissance had the Catholic Reaction and its engine,
the Inquisition, to reckon with. It was only in Italy that
the secular movement had time to develop fully before the
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SPANISH LITERATURE 139
reaction which it provoked set in. Spain dragged all her
most enlightened and thoughtful men before the Inquisi-
tion, where, if they themselves escaped imprisonment and
torture, their books were often condemned and burnt.
While Lope de Vega was proud to sign himself its
* Familiar,' Mariana, the greaitest of Spanish historians, a
man of extraordinary power, political wisdom, and sincerity,
was imprisoned and punished, and his writings destroyed.
Luis de Leon, a poet, a profound scholar, a preacher of
burning eloquence, and a man of the holiest life, whose
only crime was that of translating the ' Canticles ' into