James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

“ The genuine Campoamor is a poet of the sunniest humour who, under the pretence of teaching morality by satire, is really seeking to utter the gay scepticism of a genial, epicurean nature. His influence has not been altogether for good. His formula is too easily mastered, and to his example is due a plague of doloras and humoradas by poetasters who have caricatured their model. Campoamor, as he himself said, did not practise art for art’s sake; he used art as the medium of ideas, and in ideas his imitators are poor. ”

“ Though failing in health, he worked assiduously at Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, which, as he had jocosely prophesied in the preface to the second part of Don Quixote, would be “either the worst or the best book ever written in our tongue.” It is the most carefully written of his prose works, and the least animated or attractive of them; signs of fatigue and of waning powers are unmistakably visible. Cervantes was not destined to see it in print. ”

“ The baffling compound of fact with fiction and the lucid style of which Espinel was a master would suffice to win for Marcos de Obregon a permanent place in the history of Spanish literature, the fact that it was largely utilized by Le Sage in Gil Blas has won for it a place in the history of comparative literature. ”

“ It is quite possible that Don Quixote might have been left incomplete but for this insulting intrusion; Cervantes was a leisurely writer and was, as he states, engaged on El Engaño à los ojos, Las Semanas del Jardín and El Famoso Bernardo, none of which have been preserved. Avellaneda forced him to concentrate his attention on his masterpiece, and the authentic second part of Don Quixote appeared towards the end of 1615. No book more signally contradicts the maxim, quoted by the Bachelor Carrasco, that “no second part was ever good.” ”

“ Not merely in Spain, but in every land where Spanish is spoken, and in cities as remote from Madrid as Munich and Stockholm, he has met with an appreciation incomparably beyond that accorded to any other Spanish dramatist of recent years. But it would be more than usually rash to prophesy that this exceptional popularity will endure. There have been signs of a reaction in Spain itself, and Echegaray’s return to politics in 1905 was significant enough. He applies his mathematics to the drama ”

“ Cervantes’ wife died without issue on the 31st of October 1626; his natural daughter, who survived both the child of her first marriage and her second husband, died on the 20th of September 1652. Cervantes is represented solely by his works. The Novelas exemplares alone would give him the foremost place among Spanish novelists; Don Quixote entitles him to rank with the greatest writers of all time: “children turn its leaves, young people read it, grown men understand it, old folk praise it.” ”

“ The Roman bourgeois (1666) of Antoine Furetiere is generally described as a picaresque novel, but this involves a new definition of the adjective; the Roman bourgeois includes some portraits and more satire which seem suggested by picaresque reading, but it is concerned with the foibles of the middle class rather than with the sly devices of common vagabonds.
The Spanish picaroon lives again in Gil Blas, where, with a dexterity almost rarer than original genius, a master of literary manipulation fuses materials unearthed from forgotten and seemingly worthless Spanish quarries. ”

“ It is difficult to define a dolora. One critic has described it as a didactic, symbolic stanza which combines the lightness and grace of the epigram, the melancholy of the endecha, the concise narrative of the ballad, and the philosophic intention of the apologue. The poet himself declared that a dolora is a dramatic humorada, and that a pequeño poema is a dolora on a larger scale. These definitions are unsatisfactory. The humoristic, philosophic epigram is an ancient poetic form to which Campoamor has given a new name; his invention goes no further. ”

“ The humour is more subtle and mature; the style is of more even excellence; and the characters of the bachelor and of the physician, Pedro Recio de Agüero, are presented with a more vivid effect than any of the secondary characters in the first part. Cervantes had clearly profited by the criticism of those who objected to “the countless cudgellings inflicted on Señor Don Quixote,” and to the irrelevant interpolation of extraneous stories in the text. Don Quixote moves through the second part with unruffled dignity ”

“ Cervantes was celebrated in and out of Spain, but his celebrity had not brought him wealth. The members of the French special embassy, sent to Madrid in February 1615, under the Commandeur de Sillery, heard with amazement that the author of the Galatea, the Novelas exemplares and Don Quixote was “old, a soldier, a gentleman and poor.” ”

“ Gil Blas is a creation of the gentler, sunnier French spirit; like Beaumarchais’ Figaro he is a Spaniard born, reared and humanized in Paris, and these two are the only picaroons whose relative refinement has not been gained at the cost of verisimilitude. But the old original scoundrel was not yet extinct: in the interval between the appearance of the Barbier de Séville and the Mariage de Figaro Restif de la Bretonne produced a sequel (1776) to the Buscón—a sequel so dull as to be wellnigh unreadable. ”

“ Sebastian Covarrubias y Orozco, the best of Spanish lexicographers, describes a picaro as a man of loose character engaged in menial work and-by extension-a rascal who attains his ends by skilful dissimulation; and the earliest application of the expression picaro to a Character in fiction occurs in Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache, the first part of which was published in 1599. But a genuine novola picaresca existed in Spain before the word picaro became generally current. ”

“ The picaroon, or rogue type, is represented by Encolpos, Ascyltos and G1ton in the Satyricon which tradition ascribes to Petronius; it persists in Lucian, in the Roman de Renart, in the fableaux, and in other works popular during the middle ages; and it is incarnated in real life by such men of genius as the Archpriest of Hita and François Villon. But in its final form the picaresque novel may be regarded as a Spanish invention. ”

“ Valera' was educated at Malaga and at the university of Granada, where he took a-degree in law. Entering diplomacy in 1847, he became unpaid attaché to the Spanish embassy at Naples under the famous Duke de Rivas, the leader of the romantic movement in Spain. Valera witnessed the events of the Revolution, was promoted second secretary to the embassy at Lisbon in 1850, and in 1851 was transferred as first secretary to Rio de Janeiro, where he remained for two years. ”

“ His philosophical treatises abound with incoherent formulae to which, according to their inventor, every demonstration in every science may be reduced, and posterity has ratified Bacon’s disdainful verdict on Lull’s pretensions as a thinker; still the fact that he broke away from the scholastic system has recommended him to the historians of philosophy, and the subtle ingenuity of his dialectic has compelled the admiration of men so far apart in opinion as Giordano Bruno and Leibniz. ”

“ ALARCÓN, PEDRO ANTONIO DE (1833–1891) , Spanish writer, was born on the 10th of March 1833 at Guadix. He graduated at the university of Granada, studied law and theology privately, and made his first appearance as a dramatist before he was of age. Deciding to follow literature as a profession, he joined with Torcuato Tárrago y Mateos in editing a Cadiz newspaper entitled El Eco de Occidente. In 1853 he travelled to Madrid in the hope of finding a publisher for his continuation of Espronceda’s celebrated poem, El Diablo Mundo. ”

“ With the exception of Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, no Spanish book of the period was more successful. Modern criticism is prone to regard Don Quixote as a symbolic, didactic or controversial work intended to bring about radical reforms in church and state. Such interpretations did not occur to Cervantes’ contemporaries, nor to Cervantes himself. ”

“ Against the Portuguese claim it is argued that the Villancico corresponding to João de Lobeiro’s poem is an interpolation in the Spanish text, that Portuguese prose was in a rudimentary stage of development at the period when—ex hypothesi—the romance was composed, and that the book was very popular in Spain almost a century before it is even mentioned in Portugal. Lastly, there is the incontrovertible fact that Amadís de Gaula exists in Castilian, while it remains to be proved that it ever existed in Portuguese. ”

“ More than any other Spanish dramatist, Alarcón is preoccupied with ethical aims, and his gift of dramatic presentation is as brilliant as his dialogue is natural and vivacious. It has been alleged that his foreign origin is noticeable in his plays, and there is some foundation for the criticism ”

“ A pension of 30,000 reales secured him from want in his old age, and the reaction in his favour became an apotheosis. In 1885 the Spanish Academy, which had elected him a member many years before, presented him with a gold medal of honour, and in 1889 he was publicly crowned at Granada as the national laureate. He died at Madrid on the 23rd of January 1893.
Zorrilla is so intensely Spanish that it is difficult for foreign critics to do him justice. It is certain that the extraordinary rapidity of his methods seriously injured his work. ”

“ Calderón retorted by introducing into El Príncipe constante a mocking reference (afterwards cancelled) to Paravicino’s gongoristic verbiage, and was committed to prison. He was soon released, grew rapidly in reputation as a playwright, and, on the death of Lope de Vega in 1635, was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. A volume of his plays, edited by his brother José in 1636, contains such celebrated and diverse productions as La Vida es sueño, El Purgatorío de San Patricia, La Devoción de la cruz, La Dama duende and Peor está que estaba. ”

“ The title of a philosophic poet will be denied to him. But he will certainly survive, at least in extract, as a distinguished humorist, an expert in epigrammatic and sententious aphorism, an artist of extremely finished execution. ”

“ Moreover, there is an abiding dramatic interest in the baffling personality of the solitary high-born student whom Lope de Vega introduces in Porfiar hasta morir, whom Ruiz de Alarcón presents in La Cueva de Salamanca, and who reappears in the 19th century in Larra's Macias and in Hartzenbusch's play La Redoma encantada. ”

“ They are conventional, no doubt, in the sense that all representations of a specially artificial society must be conventional; but they are true to life, and are still as interesting as when they first appeared. ”

“ Hassan refused to accept less than five hundred gold ducats for his slave; the available funds fell short of this amount, and the balance was collected from the Christian traders of Algiers. Cervantes was already embarked for Constantinople when the money was paid on the 19th of September 1580. The first use that he made of his liberty was to cause affidavits of his proceedings at Algiers to be drawn up; he sailed for Spain towards the end of October, landed at Denia in November, and made his way to Madrid. ”

“ In 1833 he was sent to read law at the University of Toledo, but, after a year of idleness, he fled to Madrid, where he horrified the friends of his absolutist father by making violent speeches and by founding a newspaper which was promptly suppressed by the government. He narrowly escaped transportation to the Philippines, and passed the next few years in poverty. The death of the satirist Larra brought Zorrilla into notice. His elegiac poem, declaimed at Larra's funeral in February 1837, served as an introduction to the leading men of letters. ”

“ Yet Gautier conscientiously provides a Spanish atmosphere; the personages have Spanish names; the knife has a Spanish inscription; the host speaks French with a Spanish accent; Vallombreuse parts from the marquis with a Spanish formula: “beso á vuestra merced la mano, caballero.” Capitaine Fracasse is the last important book which continues the picaresque tradition. The possibilities of picaresque fiction can never be exhausted while human nature is unchanged. ”

“ The Spanish tradition was followed by Martin Frewden in a continuation (1626) of Guzmán de Alfarache, but the only original picaresque novel of real value in German is Grimmelhausen’s Simplicissimus. The attempt to acclimatize the picaresque novel in Italy failed completely. Barezzo Barezzi translated Guzmán de Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes and the Pícara Justina in 1606, 1622 and 1624 respectively, and Giovanni Pietro Franco did the Buscan into Italian in 1634; but there was no important native development. The same may be said of Portugal ”

“ AYALA Y HERRERA, ADELARDO LOPEZ DE (1828–1879) , Spanish writer and politician, was born at Guadalcanal on the 1st of May 1828, and at a very early age began writing for the theatre of his native town. The titles of these juvenile performances, which were played by amateurs, were Salga por donde saliere, Me voy á Sevilla and La Corona y el Puñal. As travelling companies never visited Guadalcanal, and as ladies took no part in the representations, these three plays were written for men only. ”

“ He was ordained in 1651, was presented to a living in the parish of San Salvador at Madrid, and, according to his statement made a year or two later, determined to give up writing for the stage. He did not adhere to this resolution after his preferment to a prebend at Toledo in 1653, though he confined himself as much as possible to the composition of autos sacramentales—allegorical pieces in which the mystery of the Eucharist was illustrated dramatically, and which were performed with great pomp on the feast of Corpus Christi and during the weeks immediately ensuing. ”

“ He himself recognized its defects; with all his weakness for the Galatea, he ruefully allows that “it proposes something and concludes nothing.” Its comparative failure was a serious matter for Cervantes who had no other resource but his pen; his plays were probably less successful than his account of them would imply, and at any rate play-writing was not at this time a lucrative occupation in Spain. No doubt the death of his father on the 13th of June 1585 increased the burden of Cervantes’ responsibilities ”

“ Like most Spanish dramatists, Calderón wrote too much and too speedily, and he was too often content to recast the productions of his predecessors. His Saber del mal y del bien is an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s play, Las Mudanzas de la fortuna y sucesos de Don Beltran de Aragón ”