THE LATER RENAISSANCE. CHAPTER I. THE LATER RENAISSANCE IN SPAIN. THE UNITY OF SPANISH LITERATURE-LIMITS OF TREATMENT-A PREVAIL- The unity of THE Literature of Spain, of which the Portuguese is the little sister, or even at times the echo, stands apart. In this fact lies the excuse for the Spanish Litera division adopted in this volume. There is at first sight something arbitrary in beginning a survey of Literature of the later Renaissance with a book written at the close of the fifteenth century. To carry the story on till the close of the ture. A seventeenth may well appear to be a violation of proportion. The Renaissance even in Italy was not in its later stages in 1500, and it is far behind us when we get to the years in which Boileau, Molière, and Racine were writing in France, while Dryden was the undisputed prince of English poets and prosewriters. Yet there is good critical reason for making a wide distinction between the one period of literary greatness of the Peninsula and those stages in the history of the Literatures of England, France, or Italy, which belong to the time of the later Renaissance. It is this—that we cannot, without separating things which are identical, divide the literature of Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The years between the appearance of the Shepherd's Calendar and the death of Shakespeare form a period possessing a character of its own in the history of our poetry, our prose, and our drama. It is still more emphatically true that French literature, between the rise of the Pléiade and the death of Mathurin Regnier, is marked off sharply, both from what had gone before and what was to follow. But we cannot draw a line anywhere across the Spanish drama, poetry, or prose story of the great time and say, Here an old influence ended, here a new one began. We have to deal with the slow growth, very brief culmination, and sudden extinction of a brilliant literature, which came late and went early, and which for the short time that it lasted is one and indivisible. It grew up partly from native roots, partly under an influence imparted by Italy; attained its full stature in the early years of the seventeenth century; then "withered, fell into puerile ravings, and died," with the close of the Austrian dynasty. treatment As, then, the Golden Age of Spain is one, we are justified in taking it as a whole, even though we Limits of appear to violate the harmony of the arrangement of the series to which this volume belongs. And this division of the matter imposes an obvious limitation on the treatment to be adopted. Spanish literature is, in one sense, exceedingly rich. During the century and a half, or so, of its vigour, it produced a vast number of books, and the catalogue of its authors is very long. Don Nicolas Antonio, the industrious compiler of the Biblioteca Hispana, has calculated the number of mystic and ascetic works (of which some are among the best of Spanish books) at over three thousand. The fecundity of its theatre is a commonplace; the fluency of its poets is boundless; the bulk of its prose stories is considerable; its historians are many, and not a few are good. It is needless to add that much was written on law, theology, and the arts which has value. In dealing with all this mass of printed matter in the space at our disposal, it is clearly necessary to remember the injunction, "il faut savoir se borner." We must, to begin with, leave aside all that is not primarily literature, except when it can be shown to have influenced that which is. Again, even in dealing with our proper subject, we must submit to limits. It is manifestly necessary to omit scores nay, hundreds of minor names. But that is not all. In making a survey of a fertile literature in a brief space, we are always obliged to go by kinds and classes rather than by individual writers. But in Spanish literature this is more especially true. A prevailing characteristic. In the course of an introduction to a translation of Shakespeare's plays by Señor Clarke, Don Juan Valera (himself the author of stories both Spanish and good) has made a complaint, which is of the nature of an unconscious confession. He has lamented that the characters of Spanish drama are so little known. An artist, so he says, has only to paint a young man in a picturesque dress on a ropeladder, with a beautiful young woman on a balcony above him, and all the world recognises Romeo and Juliet. If he takes his anecdote from Lope and Calderon, nobody will be able to guess what it is all about. With less than his usual good sense, Señor Valera accounts for the obscurity into which the world has been content to allow the characters and scenes of the Spanish drama to fall, by the political decadence of his country at the end of the seventeenth century. Yet the passing away of Spain's greatness has not prevented Don Quixote and Sancho from being familiar to the whole world. If anecdote pictures are to be the test, Cervantes has no reason to fear the rivalry of the English dramatic poet. There is less of Spanish pride than of its ugly shadow, Spanish vanity, in Don Juan Valera's explanation. The Drama of Spain, brilliant as it was within its limits, is not universally known, because it does not |