Chapter X: The Age of Felipe IV. and Carlos the Bewitched (1)

1621-1700

The reign of Felipe IV. opens with as fair a promise of achievement as any in history. At Madrid, in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century, the court of the Grand Monarque was anticipated and perhaps outdone. We are inclined to think of Felipe as Velázquez has presented him, on his "Cordobese barb, the proud king of horses, and the fittest horse for a king"; and to recall the praise which William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, lavished on his horsemanship:—"The great King of Spain, deceased, did not only love it and understand it, but was absolutely the best horseman in all Spain." Yet is it a mistake to suppose him a mere hunter. Art and letters were his constant care; nor was he without a touch of individual accomplishment. He was not content with instructing his Ministers to buy every good picture offered in foreign markets: his own sketches show that he had profited by seeing Velázquez at work. It is no small point in his favour to have divined at a glance the genius of the unknown Sevillan master, and to have appointed him—scarcely out of his teens—court-painter. He likewise collated the artist, Alonso Cano, to a canonry at Granada, and, when the chapter protested that Cano had small Latin and less Greek, the King's reply was honourable to his taste and spirit:—"With a stroke of the pen I can make canons like you by the score; but Alonso Cano is a miracle of God." He would even stay the course of justice to protect an artist. Thus, when Velázquez's master, the half-mad Herrera, was charged with coining, the monarch intervened with the remark: "Remember his _St. Hermengild_." Music becalmed the King's fever, and the plays at the Buen Retiro vied with the masques of Whitehall. His antechambers were thronged with men of genius. Lope de Vega still survived, his glory waxing daily, though the best part of his life's work was finished. Vélez de Guevara was the royal chamberlain; Góngora, the court chaplain, hated, envied, and admired, was the dreaded chief of a combative poetic school; his disciple, Villamediana, struck terror with his vitriolic epigrams, his rancorous tongue; the aged Mariana represented the best tradition of Spanish history; Bartolomé de Argensola was official chronicler of Aragón; Tirso de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcón, and Rojas Zorrilla filled the theatres with their brilliant and ingenious fancies; the incorruptible satirist, Quevedo, was private secretary to the King; the boyish Calderón was growing into repute and royal favour.

Of the Aragonese playwright, Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, we have already spoken in a previous chapter. His brother, BARTOLOMÉ LEONARDO DE ARGENSOLA (1562-1631), took orders, and, through the influence of the Duque de Villahermosa, was named rector of the town whence his patron took his title. His earliest work, the _Conquista de las Islas Molucas_ (1609), written by order of the Conde de Lemos, is uncritical in conception and design; but the matter of its primitive, romantic, and even sentimental legends derives fresh charm from the author's apt and polished narrative. In 1611 he and his brother accompanied Lemos to Naples, thereby stirring the anger of Cervantes, who had hoped to be among the Viceroy's suite, as appears from a passage in the _Viaje del Parnaso_, which roundly insinuates that the Argensolas were a pair of intriguers. The disappointment was natural; yet posterity is even grateful for it, since a transfer to Naples would certainly have lost us the second _Don Quixote_. Doubtless the Argensolas, who were of Italian descent, were better fitted than Cervantes for commerce with Italian affairs, and Bartolomé made friends on all sides in Naples as in Rome. On his brother's death in 1613, he became official chronicler of Aragón, and, in 1631, published a sequel to _Zurita_, the _Anales de Aragón_, which deals so minutely with the events of the years 1516-20 as to become wearisome, despite all Argensola's grace of manner. The _Rimas_ of the two brothers, published posthumously in 1634 by Lupercio's son, Gabriel Leonardo de Albión, was stamped with the approval of the dictator, Lope de Vega, who declared that the authors "had come from Aragón to reform among our poets the Castilian language, which is suffering from new horrible phrases, more puzzling than enlightening."

This is an overstatement of a truth, due to Lope's aversion from Gongorism in all its shapes. Horace is the model of the Argensolas, whose renderings of the two odes _Ibam forte via sacra_ and _Beatus ille_ are among the happiest of versions. Their sobriety of thought is austere, and their classic correctness of diction is in curious contrast with the daring innovations of their time. Lupercio has a polite, humorous fancy, which shows through Mr. Gibson's translation of a well-known sonnet:—

"_I must confess, Don John, on due inspection,
That dame Elvira's charming red and white,
Though fair they seem, are only hers by right,
In that her money purchased their perfection;
But thou must grant as well, on calm reflection,
That her sweet lie hath such a lustre bright,
As fairly puts to shame the paler light,
And honest beauty of a true complexion!
And yet no wonder I distracted go
With such deceit, when 'tis within our ken
That nature blinds us with the self-same spell;
For that blue heaven above that charms us so,
Is neither heaven nor blue! Sad pity then
That so much beauty is not truth as well._"

Lupercio's manifold interests in politics, in history, and in the theatre left him little time for poetry, and a large proportion of his verses were destroyed after his death; still, partially represented as he is, the pretty wit, the pure idiom, and elegant form of his lyrical pieces vindicate his title to rank among Castilian poets of the second order. As for Bartolomé, he resembles his brother in natural faculty, but his fibre is stronger. A hard, dogmatic spirit, a bigot in his reverence for convention, an idolater of Terence, with a stern, patriotic hatred of novelties, he was regarded as the standard-bearer of the anti-Gongorists. Too deeply ingrained a doctrinaire to court popularity, he was content with the applause of a literary clique, and had practically no influence on his age. Yet his precept was valuable, and his practice, always sound, reaches real excellence in such devout numbers as his _Sonnet to Providence_.

Much meritorious academic verse is found in the works of other contemporary writers, though most rivals lapse into errors of taste and faults of expression from which the younger Argensola is honourably free. But no great leader is formed in the school of prudent correctness, and by temperament, as well as by training, the Rector of Villahermosa was unfit to cope with so virile and so combative a genius as LUIS DE ARGOTE Y GÓNGORA (1561-1627), the ideal chief of an aggressive movement. Son of Francisco de Argote, Corregidor of Córdoba, and of Leonora de Góngora, he adopted his mother's name, partly because of its nobility and partly because of its euphony. In his sixteenth year Góngora left his native Córdoba to read law at Salamanca, with a view to following his father's profession; but his studies were never serious, and, though he took his bachelor's degree, he gave most of his time to fencing and to dancing. To the consternation of his family, he abandoned law and announced himself as a professional poet. So early as 1585 Cervantes names him in the _Canto de Calíope_ as a rare and matchless genius—_raro ingenio sin segundo_—and, though flattery from Cervantes is too indiscriminating to mean much, the mention at least implies that Góngora's promise was already recognised. Few details of his career are with us, though rumour tells of platonic love-passages with a lady of Valencia, Luisa de Cardona, who finally entered a convent in Toledo. His repute as a poet, aided by his mother's connection with the ducal house of Almodóvar, won for him a lay canonry in 1590, and this increase of means enabled him to visit the capital, where he was instantly hailed as a wit and as a brilliant poet. His fame had hitherto been local; with the publication of his verses in Espinosa's _Flores de Poetas_. _ilustres_ (1605), it passed through the whole of Spain. In the same year, or at latest in 1606, Góngora was ordained priest. His private life was always exemplary, and this, together with his natural harshness, perhaps explains his intolerance for the foibles of Cervantes and of Lope. When the favourite, the Duque de Lerma, fell from power, Góngora attached himself to Sandoval, who nominated him to a small prebend at Toledo. As chaplain to the King, the poet's circle of friends enlarged, and his literary influence grew correspondingly. In 1626 he had a cerebral attack, during which the physicians of the Queen attended him. The story that he died insane is a gross exaggeration: he lingered on a year, having lost his memory, died of apoplexy at Córdoba on May 23, 1627, and is buried in the St. Bartholomew Chapel of the cathedral.

An _entremés_ entitled _La destrucción de Troya_, a play called _Las Firmezas de Isabela_ (written in collaboration with his brother, Juan de Argote), and a fragment, the _Comedia Venatoria_, remain to show that Góngora wrote for the stage. Whether he was ever played is doubtful, and, in any case, his gift is not dramatic. He was so curiously careless of his writings that he never troubled to print or even to keep copies of them, and a remark which he let fall during his last illness goes to show his artistic dissatisfaction:—"Just as I was beginning to know something of the first letters in my alphabet does God call me to Himself: His will be done!" His poems circulated mostly in manuscript copies, which underwent so many changes that the author often knew not his own work when it returned to his hands; and, but for the piety of Juan López de Vicuña, Góngora might be for us the shadow of a great name. López de Vicuña spent twenty years in collecting his scattered verse, which he published in the very year of the poet's death, under the resounding title of _Works in Verse of the Spanish Homer_. A later and better edition was produced by Gonzalo de Hoces y Córdoba (1633).

Góngora began with the lofty ode, as a strict observer of literary tradition, a reverent imitator of Herrera's heroics. His earliest essays are not very easy to distinguish from those of his contemporaries, save that his tone is nobler and that his execution is more conscientious. He was a craftsman from the outset, and his technical equipment is singularly complete. So far was he from showing any freakish originality, that he is open to the reproach of undue devotion to his masters. His thought is theirs as much as are his method, his form, his ornament, his ingenuity. An example of his early style is his _Ode to the Armada_, of which we may quote a stanza from Churton's translation:—

"_O Island, once so Catholic, so strong,
Fortress of Faith, now Heresy's foul shrine,
Camp of train'd war, and Wisdom's sacred school;
The time hath been, such majesty was thine,
The lustre of thy crown was first in song.
Now the dull weeds that spring by Stygian pool
Were fitting wreath for thee. Land of the rule
Of Arthurs, Edwards, Henries! Where are they?
Their Mother where, rejoicing in their sway,
Firm in the strength of Faith? To lasting shame
Condemn'd, through guilty blame
Of her who rules thee now.
O hateful Queen, so hard of heart and brow,
Wanton by turns, and cruel, fierce, and lewd,
Thou distaff on the throne, true virtue's bane,
Wolf-like in every mood,
May Heaven's just flame on thy false tresses rain!_"

This is excellent of its kind, and among all Herrera's imitators none comes so near to him as Góngora in lyrical melody, in fine workmanship, in a certain clear distinction of utterance. Yet already there are hints of qualities destined to bear down their owner. Not content with simple patriotism, with denunciation of schism and infidelity, Góngora foreshadows his future self as a very master of gibes and sneers. The note of altisonance, already emphatic in Herrera, is still more forced in the young Córdoban poet, who adds a taste for far-fetched conceits and extravagant metaphor, assuredly not learned in the Sevillan school. Rejecting experiments in the stately ode, he for many years continued his practice in another province of verse, and by rigorous discipline he learned to excel in virtue of his fine simplicity, his graceful imagery, and his urbane wit. It should seem that intellectual self-denial cost him little, for his transformations are among the most complete in literary history. Consider, for instance, the interval between the emphatic dignity of his Armada ode and the charming fancy, the distinguished cynicism of _Love in Reason_, as Archdeacon Churton gives it:—

"_I love thee, but let love be free:
I do not ask, I would not learn,
What scores of rival hearts for thee
Are breaking or in anguish burn._

_You die to tell, but leave untold,
The story of your Red-Cross Knight,
Who proffer'd mountain-heaps of gold
If he for you might ride and fight;_

_Or how the jolly soldier gay
Would wear your colours, all and some;
But you disdain'd their trumpet's bray,
And would not hear their tuck of drum._

_We love; but 'tis the simplest case:
The faith on which our hands have met
Is fix'd, as wax on deeds of grace,
To hold as grace, but not as debt._

_For well I wot that nowadays
Love's conquering bow is soonest bent
By him whose valiant hand displays
The largest roll of yearly rent...._

_So let us follow in the fashion,
Let love be gentle, mild, and cool:
For these are not the days of passion,
But calculation's sober rule._

_Your grace will cheer me like the sun;
But I can live content in shades.
Take me: you'll find when all is done,
Plain truth, and fewer serenades._"

Even in translation the humorous amenity is not altogether lost, though no version can reproduce the technical perfection of the original. For refined wit and brilliant effect Góngora has seldom been exceeded; yet his fighter pieces failed to bring him the renown and the high promotion which he expected. He feigned to despise popularity, declaring that he "desired to do something that would not be for the general"; but none was keener than he in courting applause on any terms. He would dazzle and surprise, if he could not enchant, his public, and forthwith he set to founding the school which bears the name of _culteranismo_. We do not know precisely when he first practised in this vein; but it seems certain that he was anticipated by a young soldier, Luis de Carrillo y Sotomayor (1583-1610), whose posthumous verses were published by his brother at Madrid in 1611. Carrillo had served in Italy, where he came under the spell of Giovanni Battista Marino, then at the height of his influence; and the _Obras_ of Carrillo contain the first intimations of the new manner. Many of Carrillo's poems are admirable for their verbal melody, his eclogues being distinguished for simple sincerity of sentiment and expression. But these passed almost unnoticed, for Carrillo was only doing well what Lope de Vega was doing better; and in fact it seems likely that the merits of the dead soldier-poet were unjustly overlooked by a generation which was content with two editions of his works.

He found, however, a passionate admirer in Góngora, who perceived in such work as Carrillo's _Sonnet to the Patience of his Jealous Hope_ the possibilities of a revolution. When Carrillo writes of "the proud sea bathing the blind forehead of the deaf sky," he is merely setting down a tasteless conceit, which gains nothing by a forced inversion of phrase; but, as it happened, conceit of this sort was a novelty in Spain, and Góngora, who had already shown a tendency to preciosity in Espinosa's collection, resolved to develop Carrillo's innovation. Few questions are more debated and less understood than this of Gongorism. So good a critic as Karl Hillebrand gives forth this strange utterance:—"Not only Italian and German Marinists were imitators of Spanish Gongorists: even your English Euphuism of Shakespeare's time had its origin in the _culteranismo_ of Spain." One hardly likes to accuse Hillebrand of writing nonsense, but he certainly comes near, perilously near it in this case. Lyly's _Euphues_ was published in 1579, while Góngora was still a student at Salamanca, and Shakespeare died nearly twelve years before a line of Góngora's later poems was in print. Spanish scholars, indeed, disclaim responsibility for Euphuism in any shape. They refuse to admit that Lord Berners' or North's translations of Guevara could have produced the effects ascribed to them; and they argue with much reason that Gongorism is but the local form of a disease which attacked all Europe. However that may be, there can exist no possible connection between English Euphuism and Spanish Gongorism, save such as comes from a common Italian origin. Gongorism derives directly from the Marinism propagated in Spain by Carrillo, though it must be confessed that Marino's extravagances pale beside those of Góngora.

This, in fact, is no more than we should expect, for Marino's conceits were, so to say, almost natural to him, while Góngora's are a pure effect of affectation. He wilfully got rid of his natural directness, and gave himself to cultivating artificial antithesis, violent inversions of words and phrases, exaggerated metaphors piled upon sense tropes devoid of meaning. Other poets appealed to the vulgar: he would charm the cultivated—_los cultos_. Hence the name _culteranismo_.[26] At the same time it is fair to say that he has been blamed for more crimes than he ever committed. Ticknor, more than most critics, loses his head whenever he mentions Góngora's name, and holds the Spaniard up to ridicule by printing a literal translation of his more daring flights. Thus he chooses a passage from the first of the _Soledades_, and asserts that Góngora sings the praise of "a maiden so beautiful, that she might parch up Norway with her two suns, and bleach Ethiopia with her two hands." Perhaps no poet that ever lived would survive the test of such bald, literal rendering as this, and a much more exact notion of the Spanish is afforded by Churton:—

"_Her twin-born sun-bright eyes
Might turn to summer Norway's wintry skies;
And the white wonder of her snowy hand
Blanch with surprise the sons of Ethiopian land._"

Another sonnet on Luis de Bavia's _Historia Pontifical_ is presented in this fashion:—"This poem which Bavia has now offered to the world, if not tied up in numbers, yet is filed down into a good arrangement, and licked into shape by learning; is a cultivated history, whose grey-headed style, though not metrical, is combed out, and robs three pilots of the sacred bark from time, and rescues them from oblivion. But the pen that thus immortalises the heavenly turnkeys on the bronzes of its history is not a pen, but the key of ages. It opens to their names, not the gates of failing memory, which stamps shadows on masses of foam, but those of immortality." This, again, is translation of a kind—of a kind very current among fourth-form boys, and, perpetrated by such an excellent scholar as Ticknor, is to be accepted as intentional caricature of the original. Once more the loyal Churton shall elucidate his author:—

"_This offering to the world by Bavia brought
Is poesy, by numbers unconfined;
Such order guides the master's march of mind,
Such skill refines the rich-drawn ore of thought.
The style, the matter, gray experience taught,
Art's rules adorn'd what metre might not bind:
The tale hath baffled time, that thief unkind,
And from Oblivion's bonds with toil hath brought_

_Three helmsmen of the sacred barque; the pen,
That so these heavenly wardens doth enhance,—
No pen, but rather key of Fame's proud dome,
Opening her everlasting doors to men,—
Is no poor drudge recording things of chance,
Which paints her shadowy forms on trembling foam._"

Still, when all allowance is made, it must be confessed that Góngora excels in hiding his meanings. By many his worst faults were extolled as beauties, and there was formed a school of disciples who agreed with Le Sage's Fabrice in holding the master for "le plus beau génie que l'Espagne ait jamais produit." But Góngora was not to conquer without a struggle. One illustrious writer was an early convert: Cervantes proclaimed himself an admirer of the _Polifemo_, which is among the most difficult of Góngora's works. Pedro de Valencia, one of Spain's best humanists, was the first to denounce Góngora's transpositions, licentious metaphors, and verbal inventions as manifested in the _Soledades_ (Solitary Musings), round which the controversy raged hottest. Within twenty-five years of Góngora's death the first _Soledad_ found an English translator in the person of Thomas Stanley (1651), who renders in this fashion:—

"_'Twas now the blooming season of the year,
And in disguise Europa's ravisher
(His brow arm'd with a crescent, with such beams
Encompast as the sun unclouded streams
The sparkling glory of the zodiac!) led
His numerous herd along the azure mead.
When he, whose right to beauty might remove
The youth of Ida from the cup of Jove,
Shipwreck't, repuls'd, and absent, did complain
Of his hard fate and mistress's disdain;
With such sad sweetness that the winds, and sea,
In sighs and murmurs kept him company....
By this time night begun t'ungild the skies,
Hills from the sea, seas from the hills arise,
Confusedly unequal; when once more
The unhappy youth invested in the poor
Remains of his late shipwreck, through sharp briars
And dusky shades up the high rock aspires.
The steep ascent scarce to be reach'd by aid
Of wings he climbs, less weary than afraid.
At last he gains the top; so strong and high
As scaling dreaded not, nor battery,
An equal judge the difference to decide
'Twixt the mute load and ever-sounding tide.
His steps now move secur'd; a glimmering light
(The Pharos of some cottage) takes his sight._"

And so on in passages where the darkness grows denser at every line. "C'est l'obscurité qui en fait tout le mérite," as Fabrice observes when Gil Blas fails to understand his friend's sonnet.

Valencia's protest was followed by another from the Sevillan, Juan de Jáuregui, whose preface to his _Rimas_ (1618) is a literary manifesto against those poems "which only contain an embellishment of words, being phantoms without soul or body." Jáuregui returned to the attack in his _Discurso poético_ (1623), a more formal and elaborate indictment of the whole Gongoristic movement. This treatise, of which only one copy is known to exist, has been reprinted with some curtailments by Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo in his _Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España_. It deserves study no less for its sound doctrine than for the admirable style of the writer, whose courtesy of tone makes him an exception among the polemists of his time. As Jáuregui represents the opposition of the Seville group, so Manuel Faria y Sousa, the editor of the _Lusiadas_, speaks in the name of Portugal. Faria y Sousa's theory of poetics is the simplest possible: there is but one great poet in the world, and his name is Camões. Faria y Sousa transforms the _Lusiadas_ into a dull allegory, where Mars typifies St. Peter; he writes down Tasso as "common, trivial, not worth mentioning, poor in knowledge and invention"; and, in accordance with these principles, he accuses Góngora of being no allegorist, and protests that to rank him with Camões is to compare "Marsyas to Apollo, a fly to an eagle."

A more formidable opponent for the Gongorists was Lope de Vega, who was himself accused of obscurity and affectation. Bouhours, in his _Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit_ (1687), tells that the Bishop of Belley, Jean-Pierre Camus, meeting Lope in Madrid, cross-examined him as to the meaning of one of his sonnets. With his usual good-nature, the poet listened, and "ayant leû et releû plusieurs fois son sonnet, avoua sincèrement qu'il ne l'entendoit pas luy mesme." It must have irked his inclination to take the field against Góngora, for whom he had a strong personal liking:—"He is a man whom I must esteem and love, accepting from him with humility what I can understand, and admiring with veneration what I cannot understand." Yet he loved truth (as he understood it) more than he loved Socrates. "You can make a _culto_ poet in twenty-four hours: a few inversions, four formulas, six Latin words, or emphatic phrases—and the trick is done," he writes in his _Respuesta_; and he follows up this plain speaking with a burlesque sonnet.

Of Faria y Sousa and his like, Góngora made small account: he fastened upon Lope as his victim, pursuing him with unsleeping vindictiveness. There is something pathetic in the Dictator's endeavours to soften his persecutor's heart. He courts Góngora with polite flatteries in print; he dedicates to Góngora the play, _Amor secreto_; he writes Góngora a private letter to remove a wrong impression given by one Mendoza; he repeats Góngora's witty sayings to his intimates; he makes personal overtures to Góngora at literary gatherings; and, if Góngora be not positively rude, Lope reports the fact to the Duque de Sessa as a personal triumph:—"_Está más humano conmigo, que le debo de haber pareçido más ombre de bien de lo que él me ymaginava_" ("He is gentler with me, and I must seem to him a better fellow than he thought"). Despite all his ingratiating arts, Lope failed to conciliate his foe, who rightly regarded him as the chief obstacle in _culteranismo's_ road. The relentless riddlemonger lost no opportunity of ridiculing Lope and his court in such a sonnet as the following, which Churton Englishes with undisguised gusto:—

"_Dear Geese, whose haunt is where weak waters flow,
From rude Castilian well-head, cheap supply,
That keeps your flowery Vega never dry,
True Vega, smooth, but somewhat flat and low;
Go; dabble, play, and cackle as ye go
Down that old stream of gray antiquity;
And blame the waves of nobler harmony,
Where birds, whose gentle grace you cannot know,
Are sailing. Attic wit and Roman skill
Are theirs; no swans that die in feeble song,
But nursed to life by Heliconian rill,
Where Wisdom breathes in Music. Cease your wrong,
Flock of the troubled pool: your vain endeavour
Will doom you else to duck and dive for ever._"

The warfare was carried on with singular ferocity, the careless Lope offering openings at every turn. "Remove those nineteen castles from your shield," sang Góngora, deriding Lope's foible in blazoning his descent. The amour with Marta Nevares Santoyo was the subject of obscene lampoons innumerable. A passage in the _Filomena_ volume arabesques the story of Perseus and Andromeda with a complimentary allusion to an anonymous poet whose name Lope withheld: "so as not to cause annoyance." Góngora's copy of the _Filomena_ exists with this holograph annotation on the margin:—"If you mean yourself, Lopillo, then you are an idiot without art or judgment." Yet, despite a hundred brutal personalities, Lope went his way unheeding, and on Góngora's death he penned a most brilliant sonnet in praise of that "swan of Betis," for whom his affection had never changed.

Góngora lived long enough to know that he had triumphed. Tirso de Molina and Calderón, with most of the younger dramatists, show the _culto_ influence in many plays; Jáuregui forgot his own principles, and accepted the new mode; even Lope himself, in passages of his later writings, yielded to preciosity. Quevedo began by quoting Epictetus's aphorism:—_Scholasticum esse animal quod ab omnibus irridetur_. And he renders the Latin in his own free style:—"The _culto_ brute is a general laughing-stock." But the "_culto_ brute" smiled to see Quevedo given over to _conceptismo_, an affectation not less disastrous in effect than Góngora's own. Meanwhile enthusiastic champions declared for the Córdoban master. Martín de Ángulo y Pulgar published his _Epístolas satisfactorias_ (1635) in answer to the censures of the learned Francisco de Cascales; Pellicer preached the Gongoristic gospel in his _Lecciones solemnes_ (1630); the _Defence of the Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe_ fills a quarto by Cristóbal de Salazar Mardones (1636); García de Salcedo Coronel's huge commentaries (1636-46) are perhaps, more obscure than anything in his author's text; and, so far away as Peru, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Rector of Cuzco, published an _Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora, Príncipe de los Poetas Lyricos de España_ (1694). There came a day when, as Salazar y Torres informs us, the _Polifemo_ and the _Soledades_ were recited on Speech-Day by the boys in Jesuit schools.

It took Spain a hundred years to rid her veins of the Gongoristic poison, and Gongorism has now become, in Spain itself, a synonym for all that is bad in literature. Undoubtedly Góngora did an infinite deal of mischief: his tricks of transposition were too easily learned by those hordes of imitators who see nothing but the obvious, and his verbal audacities were reproduced by men without a tithe of his taste and execution. And yet, though it be an unpopular thing to confess, one has a secret sympathy with him in his campaign. Lope de Vega and Cervantes are as unlike as two men may be; but they are twins in their slapdash methods, in their indifference to exquisiteness of form. Their fatal facility is common to their brethren: threadbare phrase, accepted without thought and repeated without heed, is, as often as not, the curse of the best Spanish work. It was, perhaps, not altogether love of notoriety which seduced Góngora into Carrillo's ways. He had, as his earliest work proves, a sounder method than his fellows and a purer artistic conscience. No trace of carelessness is visible in his juvenile poems, written in an obscurity which knew no encouragement. It is just to believe that his late ambition was not all self-seeking, and that he aspired to renew, or rather to enlarge, the poetic diction of his country.

The aim was excellent, and, if Góngora finally failed, he failed partly because his disciples burlesqued his theories, and partly because he strove to make words serve instead of ideas. That his endeavour was praiseworthy in itself is as certain as that he came at last to regard his principles as almost sacred. He doubtless found some pleasure in astounding and annoying the burgess; but he aimed at something beyond making readers marvel. And though he failed to impose his doctrines permanently, it is by no means certain that he laboured in vain. If any later Spaniard has worked in the conscious spirit of the artist, seeking to avoid the commonplace, to express high thoughts in terms of beauty—though he knows it not, he owes a debt to Góngora, whose hatred of the commonplace made Castilian richer. The _Soledades_ and the _Polifemo_ have passed away, but many of the words and phrases for which Góngora was censured are now in constant use; and, _culteranismo_ apart, Góngora ranks among the best lyrists of his land. Cascales, who was at once his friend and his opponent, said that there were two Góngoras—one an angel of light, the other an angel of darkness; and the saying was true in so far as it implied that in all circumstances his air of distinction never quits him. Still the earlier Góngora is the better, and before we leave him we should quote, as an example of that first happy manner, inimitable in its grace and humour, Churton's not too unsuccessful version of _The Country Bachelor's Complaint_:—

"_Time was, ere Love play'd tricks with me,
I lived at ease, a simple squire,
And sang my praise-song, fancy free,
At matins in the village quire...._

_I rambled by the mountain side,
Down sylvan glades where streamlets pass
Unnumber'd, glancing as they glide
Like crystal serpents through the grass...._

_And there the state I ruled from far,
And bade the winds to blow for me,
In succour to our ships of war,
That plough'd the Briton's rebel sea;_

_Oft boasting how the might of Spain
The world's old columns far outran,
And Hercules must come again,
And plant his barriers in Japan...._

_'Twas on St. Luke's soft, quiet day,
A vision to my sight was borne,
Fair as the blooming almond spray,
Blue-eyed, with tresses like the morn...._

_Ah! then I saw what love could do,
The power that bids us fall or rise,
That wounds the firm heart through and through,
And strikes, like Cæsar, at men's eyes._

_I saw how dupes, that fain would run,
Are caught, their breath and courage spent,
Chased by a foe they cannot shun,
Swift as Inquisitor on scent...._

_Yet I've a trick to cheat Love's search,
And refuge find too long delay'd;
I'll take the vows of Holy Church,
And seek some reverend cloister's shade._"

Among Góngora's followers none is better known than Juan de Tassis y Peralta, the second CONDE DE VILLAMEDIANA (1582-1622), whose ancestors came from Bergamo. His great-grandfather, Juan Bautista de Tassis, entered the service of Carlos Quinto; his grandfather, Raimundo de Tassis, was the first of his race to live in Spain, where he married into the illustrious family of Acuña; his father, Juan de Tassis y Acuña, rose to be Ambassador in Paris and Special Envoy in London. Villamediana's tutors were two well-known men of letters: Bartolomé Jiménez Patón, author of _Mercurius Trismegistus_, and Tribaldos de Toledo, whom we already know as editor of Figueroa and Mendoza. After a short stay at Salamanca, Villamediana was appointed to the King's household, and in 1601 married Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, grand-daughter in the fifth generation of Santillana. His reputation as a gambler was of the worst, and his winning thirty thousand gold ducats at a sitting led to his expulsion from court in 1608. He joined the army in Italy, returned to Spain in 1617, and at once launched into epigrams and satires against all and sundry. The court favourites were his special mark—Lerma, Osuna, Uceda, Rodrigo Calderón. In 1618 he was again banished, but returned in 1621 as Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen, Isabel de Bourbon, daughter of Henry of Navarre. At her request Villamediana wrote a masque, _La Gloria de Niquea_, in which the Queen acted on April 8, 1622, before Lord Bristol. If report speak truly, the performance led him to his death. When the second act opened, an overturned lamp set the theatre ablaze, and as Villamediana seized the Queen in his arms, and carried her out of danger, scandal declared the fire to be his doing, and gave him out as the Queen's lover. There is a well-known story that Felipe IV., stealing up behind the Queen one day, placed his hands on her eyes; whereon "Be quiet, Count," she said, and so unwittingly doomed Villamediana. The tale is even too well known. Brantôme had already told it in _Les Dames galantes_ before Felipe was born, and it really dates from the sixth century. Even so, Villamediana's admiration for the Queen was openly expressed. He appeared at a tournament covered with silver _reales_, and used the motto, "_Mis amores son reales_" (My love is royal). The King's confessor, Baltasar de Zúñiga, warned him that his life was in danger, and Villamediana laughed in his face. It was no joke, for he had contrived to make more dangerous enemies in four months than any other man has made in a lifetime. On August 21, 1622, as he was alighting from his coach, a stranger ran him through the body; "_¡Jesús! esto es hecho!_" ("My God! done for!") said Villamediana, and fell dead. The word was passed round that the assassin, Ignacio Méndez, should go free; tongues that had hitherto wagged were still. It is almost certain that the murder was done by the King's order. If it were so, Felipe IV. had more spirit at seventeen than he ever showed afterwards.

Villamediana had many of Góngora's qualities: his courage, his wit, his sense of form, his preciosity. In his _Fábula de Faetón_, as in his _Fábula de la Fénix_, he outdoes his master in eccentricity and verbal foppery: fish become "swimming birds of the cerulean seat," water is "liquid nutriment," time "gnaws statues and digests the marble"; and by hyperbaton and word-juggling he proves himself as _culto_ as he can. But it is fair to say that when it pleases him he is as simple and direct as the early Góngora. It must suffice here to quote Churton's rendering of a sonnet on the proposed marriage of the Infanta Doña María to the Prince of Wales:—

"_By Heresy upborne, that giantess
Whose pride heaven's battlements in fancy scales,
With Villiers his proud Admiral, Charles of Wales
To Mary's heavenly sphere would boldly press.
A heretic he is, he must confess
Heaven's light ne'er led his knighthood's roving sails;
But the bright cause his error countervails,
And heavenly beauty pleads for love's excess.
So now the lamb with cub of wolf must mate;
The dove must take the raven to her nest;
Our palace, like the old ark, must shelter all:
Confusion, as of Babylon the Great,
Is round us, and the faith of Spain, oppress'd
By fine State-reason, trembles to its fall._"

This expresses—much more clearly than the _Gloria de Niquea_—the true feeling of Góngora and his circle towards Steenie and Baby Charles.

Less nervous and energetic, but not less fantastic than Villamediana's worst extravagances, are the _Obras póstumas divinas y humanas_ (1641) of HORTENSIO FÉLIX PARAVICINO Y ARTEAGA (1580-1633), whose praises were sung by Lope:—

"_Divine Hortensio, whose exalted strain,
Sweet, pure, and witty, censure cannot wound,
The Cyril and the Chrysostom of Spain._"

The divine Hortensio was court-preacher to Felipe IV., and enchanted his congregations by preaching in the _culto_ style. His verses exaggerate Góngora's worst faults, and are disfigured by fulsome flattery of his leader, before whom, as he says, he is dumb with admiration. As thus:—"May my offering in gracious cloud, in equal wealth of fragrance, bestrew thine altars." Paravicino, whose works were published under the name of Arteaga, was a powerful centre of Gongoristic influence, and did more than most men to force _culteranismo_ into fashion. In sermons, poems, and a masque entitled _Gridonia_, he never ceases to spread the plague, which lasted for a century, attacking writers as far apart as Ambrosio Roca y Serna (whose _Luz del Alma_ appeared in 1623), and Agustín de Salazar, the author of the _Cítara de Apolo_ (1677).

Meanwhile a few held out against the mode. The Sevillan, Juan de Arguijo (? d. 1629), continued the tradition of Herrera, writing in Italian measures with a smoothness of versification and a dignified correctness which drew applause from one camp and hissing from the other. His townsman, JUAN DE JÁUREGUI Y AGUILAR (? 1570-1650), came into notice with his version of Tasso's _Aminta_ (1607), one of the best translations ever made, deserving of the high praise which Cervantes bestows on it and on Cristóbal de Figueroa's rendering of the _Pastor Fido_:—"They make us doubt which is the translation and which the original." In his _Aminta_, as in his original poems, Jáuregui's style is a model of purity and refinement, as might be expected from the _Discurso poético_ launched later against Góngora; but the tide was too strong for him. His _Orfeo_ (1624) shows signs of wavering, and in his translation, the _Farsalia_, which was not published till 1684, he is almost as extreme a Gongorist as the worst. Still it should be remembered that Lucan also was a Córdoban, practising early Gongorism at Nero's court, and a translator is prone to reproduce the defects of his original. Jáuregui has some points of resemblance with Rossetti, was a famous artist in his day, and is said, on the strength of a dubious passage in the prologue to the _Novelas_, to have painted Cervantes.

ESTEBAN MANUEL DE VILLEGAS (1596-1669) shows rare poetic qualities in his _Eróticas ó Amatorias_ (1617), in which he announces himself as the rising sun. _Sicut sol matutinus_ is printed on his title-page, where those waning stars, Lope, Calderón, and Quevedo, are also supplied with a prophetic motto: _Me surgente, quid istæ?_ His imitations of Anacreon and Catullus are done with amazing gusto, all the more wonderful when we remember that his "sweet songs and suave delights" were written at fourteen, retouched and published at twenty. But Villegas is one of the great disappointments of Castilian literature: he married in 1626, deserted verse for law, and ended life a poor, embittered attorney. The Sevillan canon and royal librarian, FRANCISCO DE RIOJA (? 1586-1659), follows the example of Herrera, his sonnets and _silvas_ being distinguished for their correct form and their philosophic melancholy. But Rioja has been unlucky. One poem, entitled _Las Ruinas de Itálica_, has won for him a very great reputation; and yet, in fact, as Fernández-Guerra y Orbe has proved, the _Ruinas_ is due to Rodrigo Caro (1573-1647), the archæologist who wrote the _Memorial de Utrera_ and the _Antigüedades de Sevilla_. Adolfo de Castro goes further, ascribing the _Epístola moral á Fabio_ to Pedro Fernández de Andrado, author of the _Libro de la Gineta_. Thus despoiled of two admirable pieces, Rioja is less important than he seemed thirty years since; yet, even so, he ranks, with the Príncipe de Esquilache (1581-1658) and the Conde de Rebolledo (1597-1676), among the sounder influences of his time.

The Segovian poet, Alonso de Ledesma Buitrago (1552-1623), founded the school of _conceptismo_ with its metaphysical conceits, philosophic paradoxes, and sententious moralisings, as of a Seneca gone mad. His _Conceptos espirituales_ and _Juegos de la Noche Buena_ (1611) lead up to the allegorical gibberish of his _Monstruo Imaginado_ (1615), and to the perverted ingenuity of Alonso de Bonilla's _Nuevo Jardín de Flores divinas_ (1617). _Conceptismo_ was no less an evil than _culteranismo_, but it was less likely to spread: the latter played with words, the former with ideas. A bizarre vocabulary was enough for a man to pass as _culto_; the _conceptista_ must be equipped with various learning, and must have a smattering of philosophy. Under such chiefs as Ledesma and Bonilla the new mania must have died; but _conceptismo_ was in the air, and, as Carrillo seduced Góngora, so Ledesma captured FRANCIS GÓMEZ DE QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS (1580-1645): (it should be said, however, that Quevedo nowhere mentions Ledesma by name). Like Lope, like Calderón, Quevedo was a highlander. His family boasted the punning motto:—"I am he who stopped—_el que vedó_—the Moors' advance." His father (who died early) and mother both held posts at court. At Alcalá de Henares, from 1596 onwards, Quevedo took honours in theology, law, French, Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew. He is also said to have studied medicine; and certainly he hated Sangrado as Dickens hated Bumble. When scarcely out of his teens he corresponded with Justus Lipsius, who hailed him as _μέγα κῦδος Ἱβήρων_, and at Madrid he speedily became the talk of the town. Strange stories were told of him: that he had pinked his man at Alcalá, that he ran Captain Rodríguez through the body rather than yield him the wall, that he put an escaped panther to the sword, that he disarmed the famous fencing-master, Pacheco Narváez. This last tale is true, and is curious in view of Quevedo's physical defects. His reply to Vicencio Valerio in _Su Espada por Santiago_ is well known:—"He says I hobble, and can't see. I should lie from head to foot if I denied it: my eyes and my gait would contradict me."

For all his short sight and clubbed feet, he was ever too ready with his rapier. On Maundy Thursday, 1611, he witnessed a scuffle between a man and woman during Tenebræ in St. Martin's Church. He intervened, the argument was continued outside, swords were crossed, and Quevedo's opponent fell mortally wounded. As the man was a noble, Quevedo prudently escaped from possible consequences to Sicily. He returned to his estate, La Torre de Juan Abad, in 1612, but soon wearied of country life, and was sent on diplomatic missions to Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Rome. On Osuna's promotion to Naples, Quevedo became Finance Minister, proving himself a capable administrator. In 1618 he meddled in the Spanish plot which forms the motive of Otway's _Venice Preserved_, and, disguised as a beggar, escaped from the bravos told off to murder him. His public career ended at this time, for his subsequent appointment as Felipe IV.'s secretary was merely nominal. In 1627 he shared in a furious polemic. Santa Teresa was canonised in 1622, and, at the joint instance of Carmelites and Jesuits, was made co-patron of Spain with Santiago. The Papal Bull (July 31, 1627) divided Spain into two camps. Quevedo, who was of the Order of Santiago—"red with the blood of the brave"—took up the cudgels for St. James, was branded a "hypocritical blackguard" by one party, and was extolled by the other as the "Captain of Combat," "the Ensign of the Apostle." He shamed Pope, King, Olivares, the religious, and half the laity, and the Bull was withdrawn (June 28, 1630). The victory cost him a year's exile, and when Olivares offered him the embassy at Genoa, he refused it, on the ground that he did not wish to have his mouth thus closed. After his unlucky marriage to Esperanza de Mendoza, widow of Juan Fernández de Heredia, he began a campaign against the royal favourite. Olivares' turn came in December 1639, when the King found by his plate a copy of verses urging him to cease his extravagance and to dismiss his incapable ministers. Quevedo was—perhaps rightly—suspected of writing these lines, was arrested at midnight, and was whisked away, half dressed, to the monastery of St. Mark in León. For four years he was imprisoned in a cell below the level of the river, and, when released after Olivares' fall in 1643, his health was broken. A flash of his old humour appears in his reply to the priest who begged him to arrange for music at his funeral:—"Nay, let them pay that hear it."

As a prose writer he began with a _Life of St. Thomas of Villanueva_ (1620), and ended with a _Life of St. Paul the Apostle_ (1644). These, and his other moralisings—_Virtue Militant_, the _Cradle and the Tomb_—call for no notice here. The _Política de Dios_ (1618) is apparently an abstract plea for absolutism; in fact, it exposes the weakness of Spanish administration just as the _Marcus Brutus_ (1644) is a vehicle for opinions on contemporary politics. Learned and acute, these treatises show Quevedo's concern for his country's future, and a passage in his sixty-eighth sonnet forecasts the future of the Spanish colonies:—"'Tis likelier far, O Spain! that what thou alone didst take from all, all will take from thee alone"—

"_Y es más facil! oh España ¡en muchas modas
Que lo que á todos les quitaste sola,
Te puedan á tí sola quitar todos._"

The prophecy is just being fulfilled, and the chief interest of Quevedo's prose treatises lies in their _conceptismo_—the flashy epigram, the pompous paradox, the strained antithesis, the hairsplitting and refining in and out of season. It was vain for Quevedo to edit Luis de León and Torre as a protest against Gongorism, for in his own practice he substituted one affectation for another.

The true and simpler Quevedo is to be sought elsewhere. His picaresque _Historia de la Vida del Buscón_, best known by its unauthorised title, _El Gran Tacaño_ (The Prime Scoundrel), though not published till 1626, was probably written soon after 1608. Pablo, son of a barber and a loose woman, follows a rich schoolfellow to Alcalá, where he shines in every kind of devilry. Thence he passes into a gang of thieves, is imprisoned, lives as a sham cripple, an actor, a bravo, and finally—his author being weary of him—emigrates to America. There is no attempt at creating character, no vulgar obtrusion of Alemán's moralising tone: such amusement as the novel contains is afforded by the invention of heartless incident and the acrid rendering of villany. The harsh jeering, the intense brutality, the unsympathetic wit and art of the _Buscón_, make it one of the cleverest books in the world, as it is one of the cruellest and coarsest in its misanthropic enjoyment of baseness and pain. No less characteristic of Quevedo are his _Sueños_ (Visions), printed in 1627. These fantastic pieces are really five in number, though most collections print seven or eight; for the _Infierno Enmendado_ (Hell Reformed) is not a vision, but is rather a sequel to the _Política de Dios_; the _Casa de Locos de Amor_ is probably the work of Quevedo's friend, Lorenzo van der Hammen; and the _Fortuna con Seso_ was not written till 1635. Quevedo himself calls the _Sueño de la Muerte_ (Vision of Death) the fifth and last of the series. Satire in Lucian's manner had already been introduced into Spanish literature by Valdés in the _Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón_, in the _Crotalón_ (which most authorities ascribe to Cristóbal de Villalón), and in the _Coloquio de los Perros_. In witty observation and ridicule of whole sections of society, Quevedo almost vies with Cervantes, though his unfeeling cynicism gives his work an individual flavour. His lost poets are doomed to hear each other's verses for eternity, his statesmen jostle bandits, doctors and murderers end their careers as brethren, comic men dwell in an inferno apart lest their jokes should damp hell's fires,—grim jests which may be read in Roger L'Estrange's spirited amplification.

Quevedo's serious poems suffer from the _conceptismo_ which disfigures his ambitious prose; his wit, his complete knowledge of low life, his mastery of language show to greater advantage in his picaroon ballads and exercises in lighter verse. His freedom of tone has brought upon him an undeserved reputation for obscenity; the fact being that lewd, timorous fellows have fathered their indecencies upon him. A passage from his _Last Will of Don Quixote_ may be cited, as Mr. Gibson gives it, to illustrate his natural method:—

"_Up and answered Sancho Panza;
List to what he said or sung,
With an accent rough and ready
And a forty-parson tongue:
''Tis not reason, good my master,
When thou goest forth, I wis,
To account to thy Creator,
Thou shouldst utter stuff like this;
As trustees, name thou the Curate
Who confesseth thee betimes,
And Per Anton, our good Provost,
And the goat-herd Gaffer Grimes;
Make clean sweep of the Esplandians,
Who have dinned us with their clatter;
Call thou in a ghostly hermit,
Who may aid thee in the matter.'
'Well thou speakest,' up and answered
Don Quixote, nowise dumb;
'Hie thee to the Rock of Dolour,
Bid Beltenebros to come!_'"

Overpraised and overblamed, Quevedo attempted too much. He had it in him to be a poet, or a theologian, or a stoic philosopher, or a critic, or a satirist, or a statesman: he insisted on being all of these together, and he has paid the penalty. Though he never fails ignominiously, he rarely achieves a genuine success, and the bulk of his writing is now neglected because of its local and ephemeral interest. Yet he deserves honour as the most widely-gifted Spaniard of his time, as a strong and honest man in a corrupt age, and as a brilliant writer whose hatred of the commonplace beguiled him into adopting a dull innovation. It is not likely that his numerous inedited lyrics will do more than increase our knowledge of Góngora's and Montalbán's failings; but the two plays promised by Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo—_Cómo ha de ser el Privado_ and _Pero Vázquez de Escamilla_—cannot but reveal a new aspect of a many-sided genius.

Quevedo was not, however, known as a dramatist to the same extent as the Valencian, GUILLÉN DE CASTRO Y BELLVIS (1569-1631), an erratic soldier who has achieved renown in and out of Spain. Castro is sometimes credited with the _Prodigio de los Montes_, whence Calderón derived his _Mágico Prodigioso_, but the _Prodigio_ is almost certainly by Lope. Castro's fame rests on his _Mocedades del Cid_ (The Cid's First Exploits), a dramatic adaptation of national tradition in Lope's manner. Ximena, daughter of Lozano, loves Rodrigo before the action begins, and, on Lozano's death by Rodrigo's hand, her passion and her duty are in conflict. Rodrigo's victories against the Moors help to expiate his crime: on a false rumour of his death, Ximena avows her love for him, and patriotism combines with inclination to yield a dramatic ending. Corneille, treating Castro's play with the freedom of a man of genius, founded the French school of tragedy; but not all his changes are improvements. By limiting the time of action he needlessly emphasises the difficulty of the situation. Castro's device is sounder when he prolongs the space which shall diminish Ximena's filial grief and increase her admiration of the Cid. The strife between love and honour exists already in the Spanish, and Corneille's merit lies in his suppression of Castro's superfluous third act, in his magnificent rhetoric, beside which the Spaniard's simplicity seems weak. But though Castro wrote no masterpiece, he begot one based upon his original conception, and some of Corneille's most admired tirades are but amplified translations.