124 CHAPTER V. SPANISH PROSE ROMANCE. PASTORALS AND SHORT STORIES-THE ORIGINAL WORK OF THE SPANIARD -THE LIBROS DE CABALLERÍAS"-THE " AMADIS OF GAUL' OF THE NOVELAS DE PÍCAROS "THE CELESTINA DE TORMÉS'-'GUZMAN DE ALFARACHE 'THE FOLLOWERS OF MATEO Pastorals and short stories. THE mere bulk of the Spanish stories was great, but it is subject to many deductions before we can disentangle the permanently important part. Pastorals, for instance, were much written in Spain, and one, the Diana1 of Jorge de Montemayor (1520 ?-1561 ?), is excellent in its insipid kind. But they were and could be only echoes of Sannazzaro. In estimating the literature of any nation we can afford to pass over what it has only taken from a neighbour with a notice that the imitation was made. The merit of creating the type, be 1 There is a pretty and not uncommon edition of the Diana published at Madrid by Villalpando in 1795. ' it great or little, belongs to the original. Even when an imitator is himself widely read, as was the case with Montemayor, he is but carrying on the work of the first master. Short stories, again, were popular enough in Spain; but to a large extent they, too, were imitations. The Patrañuelo-'The Story-Teller — of Juan de Timoneda, or the Cigarrales de Toledo of Tirso de Molina, are full of the matter of the Fabliaux and the Italian Novelli.1 What the Spaniard did which was also a contribution to the literature of Europe was done neither in the pastoral nor in the short story, but in the long tale of heroic or of vulgar adventure. His are the Libros de Caballerías -Books of Knightly Deeds'-which are the parents of the true modern romance; and the Novelas de Pícaros, or, 'Tales of Rogues,' the counterpart, and even perhaps a little the burlesque of the first, are the ancestors of all the line which comes through Gil Blas. Then his was Don Quixote, which belongs to no class, but is at once universal and a thing standing by itself, a burlesque of the Libros de Caballerías which grew into a sadly humorous picture of human delusion, and was also an expression of the genius of Miguel de Cervantes. The books of Chivalry, or of Knightly Deeds, which is perhaps the more accurate translation of the Spanish plural Caballerías, like the Romances, cannot be said 1 The Patrañuelo is reprinted by Ochoa in his Tesoro de Novelistas Españoles, Paris, 1847, vol. i. He also gives one story from Tirso de Molina-The Three Deceived Husbands. It is a fabliau. A Cigarral was the name given to a country villa near Toledo. to belong to the literature of the Renaissance. They were a survival of the Middle Ages, the direct successors of the Romans d'Aventures, which had sprung from the Chansons de Gestes. The Arthurian stories of Lancelot and of Merlin were known to the Spaniards, and had an enduring popularity by the side of their own Tales of Chivalry. There is even one book belonging in essential to the school which certainly preceded the Amadis. This is the Valencian Tirant lo Blanch, written in Catalan, of which the first three books are the work of Juan Martorell, and the fourth was added by Mosen Juan de Galbá, at the request of a lady, Isabel de Loriz. It was printed in Valencia in 1490, was translated into Spanish, though with suppressions, and had the rather curious fortune to be published in a French version in 1737 by a gentleman whose own name was not unworthy of a Libro de Caballerías, A. C. P. Tubières de Grimoard de Pestels de Levi, Count of Caylus. Here it is, perhaps, but fair to warn the reader of the extreme difficulty of making more than a slight acquaintance with these once widely read tales. Popularity and neglect have alike been fatal to them. They were thumbed to pieces while they were liked, and thrown aside as worthless when the fashion had changed. Single copies alone remain of some, as, for instance, the curious Don Florindo, he of the Strange Adventure,' of which Don Pascual de Gayangos gives a long analysis. Even Don Pascual had never seen the Spanish original of the once renowned Palmerin of England. Southey was compelled to make up his Palmerin by correcting Anthony Munday's translation from a French version. Surviving copies are scattered in the public libraries, and it is probable that nobody has seen them all. So we must speak with a certain reserve concerning them, but yet with a tolerably well-founded conviction that what one has not seen does not differ in material respects from what has come in one's way. It is not the matter of these tales, but the spirit, which attaches them to the Middle Ages. Knights and damsels errant, dwarfs, dragons, giants, and enchanters were not neglected by the poets of the Italian Renaissance, but they were dealt with in gaiety, and The Libros de more than half in mockery. But the Libros Caballerías. de Caballerías are very serious. Chivalry was not to their authors an old dream, but a still living standard of conduct, and they carried on the tradition of the Middle Ages with absolute sincerity. When the Libros de Caballerías are described as the direct descendants of the Romans d'Aventures, it must be understood that this does not imply that the actual story had its origin out of Spain. We cannot say stories, because there is in reality only one, which was constantly rewritten, with changes which in the majority of cases hardly go beyond the names. There is one parent story closely imitated by the others, and that is the Amadis of Gaul. The honour of the first invention has been claimed by the French, on the general The Amadis of 1 Libros de Caballerías in the Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra, with an exhaustive introduction by Don Pascual de Gayangos, vol. xl. ground that their influence in Spain and Portugal was great, and that therefore they must not only have carried the taste for tales of chivalrous adventure beyond the Pyrenees, but have created all the stories and personages. But the French Amadis has been lost, and though that may be his only defect, it suffices to leave us entitled to doubt whether he ever existed, except in the patriotic French literary imagination. What is certain is that Amadis was a popular hero of romance with the Castilians and Portuguese before the end of the fourteenth century. It also appears to be put beyond doubt that a version of the story was written by Vasco de Lobeira, a Portuguese gentleman who died in 1403. Whether it was the first, or was a version of a Castilian original, or whether the French, who were then very numerous both in Castile and Portugal, and had an undeniable influence on the poetry of both countries, and more especially of the second, did not at least inspire Vasco de Lobeira, are questions which can be debated for ever by national vanity, without settlement. The Amadis of Gaul, which belongs to literature, and not to the inane region of suppositions, disputes, and lost manuscripts, is the work of Garcia Ordoñez de Montalvo, of Medina del Campo in Leon. It was announced as an adaptation from the Portuguese. As the manuscript of Vasco de Lobeira was lost in the destruction of the Duke of Arveiro's library in the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, we cannot tell how far Montalvo followed, or improved upon, or did not improve upon, his original. Indeed, in the absence of |