David Hannay

“ There has at all times been little love of beauty in the Spaniard, and not much faculty for ideal perfection of form. His greatest painting is realistic, the exact forcible rendering of the things seen with the eye of the flesh, selected, arranged, kept in their proper proportions in the picture, but rarely imagined. The things seen need not be the vulgar realities of life only. Velasquez is every whit as real in his presentment of the frigid dignity of the King, or in the “Lances,” as he is in the “Spinners” or the “Water-Seller.” ”

“ Poetry, heroic sentiment, or deep religious feeling we could not expect from what only professed to deal with the common and animal side of life. But they do not give what might have compensated for these things, average sensual human nature, acting credibly and drawn with humour. Their fun—and they strained at jocularity—is of the kind which delights to pull the chair from below you when you are about to sit down, and laughs consumedly at your bruises. To make the jest complete you must be old, ugly, sickly, and very poor. ”

“ But there is much good verse, easy, with a careless grace, and spirited in Lope, or stately with a peculiar Spanish dignity in Calderon; there is a fine wind of romance blowing all through, and there is ingenious, unresting, yet lucid action. If it never reaches the highest level of our Elizabethan drama, neither does it fall to the vacant horseplay which is to be found side by side with the tragedy of Marlowe or Middleton. ”

“ The distinction is less marked in prose, but even here it is real, while the poetry of the time is the work of a school, with a creed and a set of formulas all its own. It has ever been much the custom of the French, whether in politics, in art, or in literature, to move altogether, and to make a clean sweep. Every new school rejects its predecessor with more or less indiscriminate contempt, becomes a tyranny in its turn, and is, in the fulness of time, rebelled against, and destroyed. ”

“ If a writer is to be judged by his native force, his originality, the abundance of his work, the effect he produced on the literature of his country, and his fame in his own time, then Lope, to give him the name by which he was and is best known to his countrymen, must stand at the head of all Spain’s men of letters. [30]
If it is a rule admitting of no exception that the critic or historian of literature should have read all his author, then I at least must confess my incapacity to speak of this famous writer. ”

“ The nature of the artist is that he endeavours to give form to the passion or action which he can conceive, in the terms of his art, whether he be poet, painter, or actor. It is because he has the constructive imagination and the power of expression that he gives truth to his work. The genius which could give reality to the sorrow of Constance, to the manhood of the Bastard, to the jealousy of Othello, to more men, women, and passions than could be named on this page, was quite adequate to giving the same reality to the scheme of the Sonnets. ”

“ The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the real nature of some of Shakespeare’s characters is a tribute to their reality. We are never in the least doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille or Racine, or the galanes, damas, and jealous husbands of Lope and Calderon. In them we have certain qualities, certain manifestations of character, selected and kept so well before us that they explain themselves, as a Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. ”

“ But a beacon of life, to be other than a useless blaze, must be set to warn us off real dangers in real life: it must flame with satire on possible human errors. The satire of Aleman is akin to Marston’s, and Marston’s many followers among ourselves,—it is a loud bullying shout at mere basenesses made incredible by being abstracted from average human nature, and kneaded into dummies. ”

“ It was natural that a very active time of great literary vigour should be rich in historians. Spanish literature is, indeed, fertile in historical narratives of contemporary events written by eyewitnesses, and not less in authoritative narratives, the work of almost contemporary authors. A people so proud of the present could not be indifferent to the past. The Spaniard least of all; for he is, in his own phrase, linajudo—proud of his lineage—not less concerned to show that he had ancestors than to convince the world of his greatness. ”

“ La Noue was one of the small body of men who can be perfectly loyal to their own party, and yet never falsify the story in its favour. He is just to the chiefs on the other side. Though a profoundly moral man, he was saved from priggery by a very real sense of humour. He could see the laughable side of things. His style wants the inimitable flash of Monluc, and it has not got the very peculiar flavour of the prose of D’Aubigné, but it is nervous, clear, exact, and thoroughly excellent in its own way—the way of a wise temperate man, a quiet gentleman, and modest valiant soldier. ”

“ The Spaniard’s tendency to repeat stock types in the same kind of action was visible here as elsewhere. The Amadis gave the pattern, and it was followed. A hero who is the son of a king, and is also a model of knightly prowess and virtues, with a brother in arms who, while no less valiant, is decidedly less virtuous, are the chief figures. Amadis, the Beltenebros—the lovely dark man—is the pink of loyalty to his peerless Oriana, who is the fairest and most loving of women. Galaor is gay and volatile, light of love, but loyal in friendship. ”

“ The word “romance” bore originally in Spanish exactly the same meaning as in other tongues descended from the Latin. It was the vernacular, and to write en romance was to write Castilian, Galician, or Catalan. “Ni romance ni romano”—neither Romance nor Roman—is a phrase bearing more or less the meaning of our “neither rhyme nor reason.” But little by little, by use and wont, it came about the end of the sixteenth century to be applied exclusively to the form of verse dearest and most native to the Spaniard, the already mentioned trochaic eight-syllable assonant metre. ”

“ The genius of Spenser could perhaps have dispensed with a teacher, but as a matter of fact it did not. With no model save Chaucer he would yet have been one of the greatest of poets. He would not have been exactly the poet he was [376] without Ariosto, Tasso, and Du Bellay. Shakespeare had, of all sons of Adam, the least need to borrow, and yet without the influence of the Renaissance we should not have the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, or many passages in the plays. The English genius, in fact, accepted and absorbed the Renaissance without losing its native independence. ”

“ He did for France what Surrey and Wyatt began, and Spenser and Sidney completed for us, what the Spanish poets of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso attempted for Castilian. He set up a model of sweeter and statelier measures, and he brought the ancient classic inspiration out of pure scholarship into literature. If he had far less power than his English contemporaries, he was infinitely more original than the Spaniards. There is no mere slavish repetition of foreign models in him, but the constant and successful effort to give a genuine French equivalent, which is quite another thing. ”

“ The admiration which Monluc felt for his own business of soldiering, Brantôme extended to every manifestation of energetic character by deed or word, moral or immoral, with a marked, but mainly artistic, preference for good sayings and immorality. He is not to be trusted in details, but he is in himself an invaluable witness to the time which produced him. Nowhere else can we see so fully the combination of the French love of showy action, and indifference to what we call morality, with the cruel wickedness of Italy, which distinguished the Court of the later Valois. ”

“ Shakespeare always leaves the impression that he is within the limit of what he could do. The lyrics are the most perfect achievements of an age of lyric poetry. It is the presence of this note which atones for the much that is wanting in Lyly, Peele, and Greene. But if their best is put beside Shakespeare it suffers, as a pretty water-colour would suffer if hung [253] by the side of a Velasquez. They lose colour by the comparison. The age was rich in sonnets. It produced the passion and melody of Sidney, the beauty of Spenser, the accomplishment of Daniel, and the vigour of Drayton. ”

“ Every rule suffers exceptions. There are many pure comedies in our dramatic literature, while Ben Jonson showed at least a strong leaning to accept the unnecessary unities of time and place in order to attain more effectually the indispensable unity of action. Yet the distinguishing feature of our great dramatic literature on its constructive side is that it threw tragedy and comedy together, and that it relied for its unity on an inner binding force of life. ”

“ Yet while noting that Italian models were profusely imitated in Spain and Portugal, and that Castilian was perfected as a literary instrument by Italian influence, we can still maintain that the Renaissance bore less fruit in the Peninsula than in France or England. By “fruit” we ought to mean not mere writing, be its mechanical dexterity what it may, but that combination of form and matter which makes literature, and which before we can call it “national” must savour of the qualities of some one race. ”

“ She had many forerunners in mediæval literature, in and out of Spain. But she has never been surpassed in vividness of portraiture, while her household of loose women and bullies, with their intrigues and jealousies, their hangers-on, and their arts of temptation, is drawn with no less truth than gusto. The quality of their talk is admirable, and the personages are not described from the outside, or presented to us as puppet types, but allowed to manifest themselves, and to grow, with a convincing reality rare indeed in Spanish literature. ”

“ Lope de Vega was the real creator of the Spanish comedia, a word which must not be understood to mean only comedy, but stage-play of every kind. Others prepared the way, and some collaborated in the ending of the work, but the merit is none the less his. Without Lope there could have been no Calderon, who found the form ready made to his hands. That a writer of so much productiveness, and so little concentration, would have many faults will be easily understood. ”

“ It was very shrewdly noted by Aarsens van Sommelsdyck, a Hollander who visited Spain in the later seventeenth century, that however solemn the Spaniard may be in public, he is easy and jocular enough in private. He is very susceptible to what is lofty and noble, capable of ecstatic piety, of a decidedly grandiose loyalty and patriotism, endowed with a profound sense of his own dignity, which nerves him to bear adversity well, but which also causes him to be contumaciously impenetrable to facts when they tell him he must yield or amend his ways. ”

“ Poetry so completely dominated the literature of Elizabeth’s reign that we can leave not only the prose, which was entirely subordinate, but the drama, poetic as it was, aside for the time. There was no great drama till the poets had suppled and moulded the language. The example set by Surrey and Wyatt had no such immediate influence as had been exercised by Boscan and Garcilaso in Spain. Part even of their own work hardly rose above the level of the doggerel to which English verse had fallen. ”

“ The Dama Melindrosa would be easily intelligible and interesting to any audience to-day, but not Every Man in his Humour, or Epicene. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains—not in all cases, indeed, but in most—a play—that is, a consistent action—carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with unchanging human nature. ”

“ There is no laugh in the Novelas de Pícaros, only at their best a loud hard guffaw, and when they do not rise to that, a perpetual forced giggle. Truth to life is as far from them as from the Libros de Caballerías, but the two are on opposite sides. ”

“ Now the theatre, in the material sense, is as necessary to the dramatist as the model is to the painter. The most “learned” of artists will soon find that his work loses life and reality unless he keeps the living figure constantly before his eyes. A play is meant to be talked and acted to an audience. When it is written only to be read, it soon loses life. From “the cart of Thespis” down to the “four boards” of Lope de Rueda in the Spanish market-place, there has always been the stage first, and then the dramatic [325] literature. That is equally true in France. ”

“ The chorus, which in inferior hands offers irresistible temptations for wandering talk, always carries on the action, while what we see is the outward and visible sign of some terrible force working behind. This ever-present sense of the something reserved driving before it what we are allowed to see, with an undeviating directness of aim, gives by itself an awful unity of interest to the tragedy. The Spanish dramatist gains his unity by artful construction of his story, and by subordinating passion and character to the mere action. ”

“ It is not the least charm of the Essays that they invite desultory reading. If advice in this matter were ever of much value, we might recommend the reader who has Montaigne to begin, to start with the “Apologie for Raymond of Sebonde,” which will give him the whole spirit and way of thinking, and then to read as accident dictates. Orderly study is quite unnecessary with an author who starts from no premiss to arrive at no conclusion, whose unity is due not to doctrine but to character, and who “rays out curious observations on life” all illuminated by a vast learning and by humour. ”

“ And these two characters are types of immortal truth—the one a gentleman, brave, humane, courteous, of good faculty, for whom a slight madness has made the whole world fantastic; the other an average human being, selfish, not over-brave, though no mere coward, and ignorant, yet not unkindly, nor incapable of loyalty, and withal shrewd in what his limited vision can see when he is not blinded by his greed. ”