by Will Durant
What gentle sound of pretty lamentation!
What sweet caress! What angry modest mood
That into bright mirth knew sweet transformation!
From dawn till noon such pleasures they pursued
As Venus kindled to a conflagration,
Which men would rather taste of than condemn,
Rather condemn who cannot taste of them.51
Lest some such Portuguese should complain that these lines insulted monogamy, Camões assures us that the affair was quite allegorical, and that the nymphs were “nothing more than honors … whereby life is exalted and refined.”52 In any case the sailors allegorically stumble back to their ships, and the fleet finds its way back to Lisbon. The poem concludes with a plea to the King to reward merit everywhere, and not least this patriotic song.
Even through the mist of translation an alien can feel the rippling music and lyrical ecstasies of this remarkable poem, the warm blood of a soldierpoet who conveys to us the lusty mettle and adventurous history of the Portuguese in those expansive days. Tasso is reported to have named Camões as the only contemporary poet against whom he would not confidently measure himself; and Lope de Vega, when Spanish and Portuguese were not so far apart as now, ranked The Lusiads above both The Iliad and The Aeneid.53 Today the poem is a bond of unity, a flag of pride and hope, wherever Camões’ language is spoken—in lovely Lisbon, in decadent Goa and Macao, in thriving, burgeoning, spirited Brazil.
Camões, hearing that Philip was taking Portugal, is reported to have said, almost as his last words, “I loved my country so much that I shall die with her.”54 So long as Philip lived, the captive country fared reasonably well; but his successors violated his vows. Olivares proposed to merge the two nations and languages into one; Spain took most of the gains from Portugal’s colonies and trade; and the English and the Dutch, at war with Spain, captured or pillaged Portuguese as well as Spanish possessions, markets, and fleets. Spaniards crowded into Portuguese offices, Spanish ecclesiastics into Portuguese sees. The Inquisition laid a pall upon Portuguese literature and thought.
Popular discontent rose as national income declined, until at last the nobility and the clergy led the infuriated nation in revolt. Encouraged by England and Richelieu, the patriots declared John, Duke of Braganza, to be the King of Portugal (1640). France and the Dutch sent protective fleets into the Tagus, and France pledged itself never to make peace with Spain until the independence of Portugal was recognized. Spain was so harassed with foreign war that she had hardly any men or money to put down the resurgence of her neighbor; but when other pressures eased she sent two armies, totaling 35,000 troops, against the new government (1661). Portugal could raise only 13,000; but Charles II of England, in return for Catherine of Braganza, a more beautiful dowry, and a lucrative treaty of free trade with Portuguese ports in all continents, dispatched to Portugal a force under the brilliant General Friedrich Schomberg. The Spanish invaders were defeated at Évora (1663) and Montes Claros (1665), and in 1668 exhausted Spain acknowledged that Portugal was free.
* * *
I. Don Carlos was made the subject of plays by Schiller, Alfieri, Otway, Marie Joseph de Chénier, Juan Pérez de Montalván, etc,
II. “In the painful episode of the imprisonment and death of Don Carlos, Philip behaved honorably.”—Encyclopaedia Britannica, XVII, 722c. Cf. Martin Hume, Spain, Its Greatness and Decay, 150, and R. Trevor Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, 149η.
III. Juan de Ribera was canonized in 1960.
CHAPTER XI
The Golden Age of Spanish Literature
1556–1665
I. EL SIGLO DE ORO
“GREAT is the number of divine geniuses who live in our Spain today,” wrote Cervantes in 1584.1 Probably he alone then knew that he was the greatest of them; he had not yet written Don Quixote (1604). By that later time the “Century of Gold” (1560–1660) was in full course and splendor.
What caused this cultural explosion, this brilliant concourse of luminaries in literature and art? Probably the political, economic, and religious victories of Spain—the conquest and exploitation of the Americas, the power and profits of Spain in Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and India, and the triumph over the Moors in Spain and the Turks at Lepanto. We today, far from the crises of the Spanish soul, can hardly understand how both the dangers and the successes of those exciting years warmed the ardor of the Catholic faith, and made most Spaniards as proud of their religion as of their blood. Censorship and the Inquisition, which we should have thought stifling, were accepted by the nation as war measures necessary for national unity in the crusade against Islam; and the Spanish mind, forbidden to stray from the hallowed creed, soared within its narrowed bounds into an exalted world of fiction, poetry, drama, architecture, sculpture, and painting.
But it was also an age of conscientious scholars and bold historians, of notable works in theology, government, law, economics, geography, and classical and Oriental studies. The learned Hallam judged that “learning was farther advanced under Philip II than under Elizabeth.”2 Certainly education was more abundant. Poor as well as rich found their way into the many universities; twenty new universities were in this period added to those already renowned; and Salamanca alone had 5,856 students in 1551.3 “No one could call himself a caballero [gentleman] who was not a man of letters as well.”4 Kings, ministers, nobles, and prelates opened their purses to scholars, poets, artists, and musicians. There were, however, some discords in the crescendo: the Church held a whip over all teachers, and Philip II, to keep Spanish universities full and Spanish minds theologically pure, forbade Spanish youth to study in any foreign universities except Coimbra, Bologna, and Rome. After the Century of Gold this intellectual endogamy may have played a part in the cultural sterility of Spain.
Two remarkable Jesuits enter the picture at this point. Baltasar Graciáan, director of a Jesuit college at Tarragona, found time to write (1650–53) a three-volume novel, El criticón, describing the shipwreck of a Spanish gentleman on the island of St. Helena, his education of the solitary savage whom he found there (a source for Robinson Crusoe?), their travels together in the world, and their penetrating criticism of European civilization. Their pessimism and misogyny delighted Schopenhauer, who called this “one of the best books in the world.”5 A friend gave Gracián international currency by selecting from his works three hundred paragraphs and publishing these as Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1653)—A Handy Oracle and Art of Worldly Wisdom. Schopenhauer made one of the many translations. Some sample oracles:
Avoid outshining the master … Superiority has always been detested, and most thoroughly when greatest. A little care will serve to cloak your ordinary virtues, as you would hide your beauty in careless dress.6
Mediocrity gets further with industry than superiority without it.7
There are rules to luck, for to the wise not all is accident.8
The perfect does not lie in quantity but in quality…. Some judge books by their knees, as though they had been written to exercise the arms.9
Think as the few, speak as the many…. The truth is for the few … Let the wise man take refuge in silence; and when at times he permits himself to speak, let it be in the shelter of the few and the understanding.10
Know how to say No … Refusal should never be flat, the truth appearing by degrees…. Employ courtliness to fill the void of the denial.11
Maturity may be recognized in the slowness with which a man believes.12
There is always time to add a word, but none in which to take one back.13
The Spanish historians were at this time the best in Europe. Philip II gathered into archives at Simancas an extensive collection of official papers and other documents, because, he said, “chroniclers and historians were ill informed in matters of state, and it was desirable, in order to obviate that defect, to assemble all such materials as might prove serviceable.”14 These archives have been a treasure for historians ever since. Jerónimo de Zu
rita consulted thousands of original documents in preparing his Andes de la Corona de Aragó n (1562–80), and earned a European reputation as exactissimus scriptor.
The greatest of the Spanish historians, Juan de Mariana, began as the natural son of a canon at Talavera. Left in youth to shift for himself, he sharpened his wits on hard necessity and grinding poverty. The Jesuits, always quick to recognize talent, gave him a rigorous education. When he was twenty-four they sent him to teach in their college at Rome; later to Sicily; then to Paris, where his lectures on Aquinas drew enthusiastic audiences. His health broke down, and at the age of thirty-seven (1574) he was allowed to retire to the house of his order in Toledo, which he seldom left in his remaining forty-nine years. There he wrote some important treatises, one of which (as we shall see later) caused an international furor; another, On the Coinage of the Realm, was a brave attack upon Lerma’s debasement of the currency; still another, which he left unprinted, expounded The Errors in the Government of the Society of Jesus. The main industry of his final forty years was the composition of Historiae de rebus Hispaniae (1592), which he wrote in Latin so that all educated Europe might learn how Spain had risen to leadership and power. At the urging of Cardinal Bembo he translated most of it into purest Castilian as Historia de España (1601), which is the proudest achievement of Spanish historiography, vivid in narrative, beautiful in style, masterly in characterizations, fearless in honesty—”the most remarkable union of picturesque chronicling with sober history that the world has ever seen.”15
As, in such works, the old chronicles graduated into history as a form of literature and philosophy, so Spanish fiction, in this age, passed from the chivalric and pastoral romance to reach at one bound the highest point in the history of the novel. Romances of chivalry still abounded; everyone in Spain from St. Teresa to Cervantes read them hungrily. Perhaps for some readers they were a relief from the exalted intensity of Spanish religion, for the creed of the romances was love, and the devotion of the knights was not to the Virgin but to the ladies of their choice or fancy; to defend or possess these they would break many a lance, and not a few laws of God or man. But the rage for such stories was subsiding when Cervantes wrote; Montaigne and Juan Luis Vives had already ridiculed them; and the Cortes of Castile long ago (1538) had complained that “much harm” was “done to men, boys, girls, and others” by the romances, and that many were “seduced by them from the true Christian doctrine.”16
One other development led to the summit. In 1553 an author of uncertain identity had written, in Lazarillo de Tormes, the first novel in the gusto picaresco, the “roguish style” that made a hero of some jolly rascal (pícaro), who redeemed his poverty with lawlessness and his lawlessness with wit. In 1599 Mateo Alemán published a rollicking Vita del pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache. Five years later Cervantes took the two moods—the fading dream of the chivalrous knight and the humorous wisdom of the common man—and brought them together, soul to soul, in the most famous of all novels, and the best.
II. CERVANTES: 1547–1616
According to Spanish custom, which tended to name each child for the saint commemorated on the day of its birth, the creator of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza was baptized Miguel de Cervantes at Alcalá October 9, 1547. He—and perhaps his father—added the name Saavedra, from the Castilian family with which his Galician ancestors had intermarried in the fifteenth century. The father was an unlicensed physician, hard of hearing and short of funds, who traveled from town to town setting bones and alleviating minor injuries; apparently young Miguel accompanied him to Valladolid, Madrid, and Seville. Nothing is known of the boy’s education; though born in a university town, he seems to have had no college training; he remained unchastened and uncluttered by classics, and had to pick his knowledge of life from living.
The first fact that we have of him after his baptismal record is that in 1569 a Madrid schoolmaster published a volume that included six poems by “our dear and beloved pupil,” Cervantes. In September of that year a Myguel de Zerbantes was arrested for dueling, and was banished from Spain for ten years on penalty of losing his right hand. In December we find our Miguel serving in the household of a high ecclesiastic in Rome. On September 16, 1571, the same Miguel, probably (like Camões) choosing military service to escape jail, sailed from Messina on the ship Marquesa in the armada of Don Juan of Austria. When that fleet encountered the Turks at Lepanto Cervantes lay ill with fever in the hold; but as he insisted on playing his part, he was put in charge of twelve men in a boat by the ship’s side; he received three gunshot wounds, two in the chest and another that permanently maimed his left hand—”for the glory of the right,” he said. He was returned to a hospital in Messina and was paid eighty-two ducats by the Spanish government. He took part in other military actions—at Navarino, Tunis, and Goletta (La Goulette). Finally he was allowed to return to Spain; but on the voyage homeward he and his brother Rodrigo were captured by Barbary corsairs (September 26, 1575) and were sold into slavery in Algiers. The letters that he carried from Don Juan and others persuaded his captors that Miguel was a man of some worth; they placed a high ransom on his head, and, although his brother was released in 1577, Miguel was kept in bondage for five years. Repeatedly he tried to escape, only to have the severity of his treatment increased. The Dey, the local ruler, declared that “if he could keep that lame Spaniard well guarded, he should consider his capital, his slaves, and his galleys safe.”I17 His mother struggled to raise the five hundred crowns demanded for his release; his sisters sacrificed their marriage dowries for the same cause; at last (September 19, 1580) he was freed, and after an arduous journey he rejoined his mother’s family at Madrid.
Penniless and maimed, he found no way of making ends meet except to re-enlist in the army. There are indications that he saw service in Portugal and the Azores. He fell in love with a lady eighteen years his junior and rich only in names—Catalina de Palacio Salazar y Vozmédiano of Esquivias. Goaded by love and penury, Cervantes wrote a pastoral romance, Galatea, which he sold for 1,336 reales ($668?). The lady now married him (1584), after which he introduced to her, and persuaded her to rear as her own, an illegitimate daughter who had been born to him by a transient belle a year before.18 Catalina herself bore him no children. She berated him periodically for his poverty, but remained apparently loyal to him, survived him, and, dying, asked to be buried at his side.
The Galatea brought no further reales; its shepherds proved too eloquent, except in their poetry; and though Cervantes had planned a continuation, and to the end thought it his masterpiece, he never found time or spur to complete it. For twenty-five years he tried his hand at play-writing, and he composed some thirty plays; he considered them excellent, and assures us that they “were all acted without any offering of cucumbers”;19 but none of them touched the public fancy or a vein of gold. He resigned himself to a modest place in the commissary of the army and navy (1587), and in that capacity he traveled to a score of towns, leaving his wife at home. He helped to provision the Invincible Armada. In 1594 he was appointed taxgatherer for Granada. He was imprisoned at Seville for irregularities in his accounts, was released after three months, but was dismissed from the government service. He remained for several years in obscure poverty in Seville, trying to live on pen and ink. Then, wandering through Spain, he was arrested again, at Argamasilla. There in jail and in misery, says tradition, he continued writing one of the most cheerful books in the world. Back in Madrid, he sold to Francisco de Robles the manuscript of The Life and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha. It was published in 1605, and now at last, after fifty-eight years of struggling, Cervantes touched success.
Everyone except the critics hailed the book as a feast of humor and philosophy. Philip III (says an old tale), “standing one day on the balcony of the palace at Madrid, observed a student, with a book in his hand, on the opposite bank of the Manzanares. He was reading, but every now and then he interrupted his reading and gave himself violent blows upon t
he forehead, accompanied with innumerable motions of ecstasy and mirthfulness. ‘That student,’ said the King, ‘is either out of his wits or reading … Don Quixote: “20
As in every masterpiece, there are some flaws in these eight hundred pages. The plot is not very ingenious—a string of episodes, thickened with irrelevant interpolated tales, and as planless as the knight, who “rode on, leaving it to his horse’s discretion to go which way it pleased.” Some threads of the plot are left at loose ends or get tangled up, like the loss and unexplained reappearance of Sancho’s ass. Now and then the lively narrative grows dull, the grammar lax, and the language coarse; and geographers pronounce the geography impossible. But what does it matter? More and more, as we read on, carried by a genial pull through sense and nonsense, the wonder mounts that Cervantes, amid all his tribulations, could have put together such a panorama of idealism and humor and could have brought the two distant poles of human character into such illuminating apposition. The style is as it should be in a long narrative—not a fatiguing torrent of eloquence, but a clear and flowing stream, sparkling now and then with a pretty phrase (“he had a face like a blessing”21). The inventiveness of incident continues to the end, the well of Sancho’s proverbs is never exhausted, and the last bit of humor or pathos is as good as the first. Here, in what Cervantes calls “this most grave, high-sounding, minute, soft, and humorous history,” are the life and the people of Spain, described with a love that survives impartiality, and through a thousand trivial details that create and vitalize the revealing whole.
Adapting an old device, Cervantes pretends that his “history” is taken from the manuscript of an Arabian author, Cid Hamet Ben-Engeli. The preface declares his purpose clearly: to describe in “a satire of knighterrantry … the fall and destruction of that monstrous heap of ill-contrived romances … which have so strangely infatuated the greater part of mankind.” Chaucer had done something like this in The Canterbury Tales (“The Rhyme of Sir Topas”), Rabelais in Gargantua, Pulci in Il Morgante maggiore; Teofilo Folengo and other “macaronic” poets had burlesqued the knights, and Ariosto, in Orlando furioso, had made fun of his heroes and heroines. Cervantes does not reject the romances outright; some, like Amadis da Gaula and his own Galatea, he saves from the fire; and he inserts a few chivalric romances into his story. In the end his chivalrous Don, after a hundred defeats and ignominious catapults, is seen to have been the secret hero of the tale.