SPANISH HISTORIANS—HISTORIES OF PARTICULAR EVENTS—EARLY HISTORIANS OF THE INDIES—GENERAL HISTORIANS OF THE INDIES—GóMARA, OVIEDO, LAS CASAS, HERRERA, THE INCA GARCILASO—MENDOZA, MONCADA, AND MELO—GENERAL HISTORIES—OCAMPO, ZURITA, MORALES—MARIANA—THE DECADENCE—SOLIS—MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS—GRACIAN AND THE PREVALENCE OF GóNGORISM—THE MYSTICS—SPANISH MYSTICISM—THE INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION ON SPANISH RELIGIOUS LITERATURE—MALON DE CHAIDE—JUAN DE áVILA—LUIS DE GRANADA—LUIS DE LEON—SANTA TERESA—JUAN DE LA CRUZ—DECADENCE OF THE MYSTIC WRITERS.
Spanish historians.

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. Thus the sixteenth century,[158] and the early years of the seventeenth, saw the production of a very important Spanish historical literature. It followed the fortunes of the country with curious exactness. Every great campaign, every great achievement in America during the reign of Charles V., has been well and amply described. The reign of Philip II. is equally well recorded by contemporaries, and was the period of the great general histories of Morales, Zurita, and Mariana. But as the seventeenth century drew on, there was less and less which the Spaniard cared to record, till after the revolt of Catalonia and the separation of Portugal in 1640 we come to a period of entire silence. The exhaustion of the national genius was felt here as elsewhere. When the voice of Spanish history was last heard, it was in the conquest of Mexico by Antonio de Solis—the work of an accomplished man of letters who looked back over the disasters of his own time to the more glorious achievement of the past.
Historians of particular events.

Much of the historical writing of the great epoch—the histories of religious orders, of which there are many, and of towns, of which there not a few, and genealogical histories, also numerous and valuable—does not, properly speaking, belong to literature. But it would be a very pedantic interpretation of the word which would exclude the Comentario de la Guerra de Alema?a[47] of Luis de ávila y Zu?iga. It is an account[159] of the war of the Smalkaldian League, written by an eyewitness who served the emperor, and attended him in his retirement at Yuste. The merit of this, and many other books of the same order, lies less in any beauty of style they possess than in the interest which attaches to the evidence of capable men who saw great events. Luis de ávila is also valuable because he gives expression to that pride and ambition of the emperor’s Spanish followers, who really dreamt that they were helping towards the establishment of a universal empire. Another writer of the same stamp, who lived when the fortune of Spain had reached its height and was beginning to turn, was Don Bernardino de Mendoza, a most typical Spaniard of his time. He was a soldier of the school of the Duke of Alva, a cavalry officer of distinction, was ambassador in England some years before the Armada, and in France during that great passage in history. He died at a great age, blind and “in religion,” having lived the full life of a fighting pious Spaniard who could use both sword and pen. He wrote commentaries on the war in the Low Countries between 1566 and 1577, and a treatise on the Theory and Practice of War. The commentaries were published in 1592. The treatise had appeared in 1577. The great subject of the Low Country wars of a somewhat later period—1588-1599—was also treated by another Spaniard of the same stamp as Don Bernardino. This was Don Carlos Coloma, Marquis of Espinar, who also was both soldier, diplomatist (he came on an embassy to England in the reign of[160] James I.), and man of letters. Besides his Guerras de los Paises Bajos he made a translation of Tacitus.
Early Historians of the Indies.

Contemporary with these and less famous authors of commentaries is the long line of writers usually classed together by the Spaniards as Early Historians of the Indies.[48] The desire to record what they had seen and suffered was strong in the conquistadores, and a long list might be made of their names. Only the most famous can be mentioned here. No more amazing story of shipwreck and misery among savages has ever been told than in the Naufragios of Alvar Nu?ez Cabeza de Vaca. He was wrecked in Florida, and remained wandering among the native tribes for ten years, 1527-1537. A power of endurance, wellnigh more than human, was required to bear up against all he suffered; but he lived to hold a governorship in the Rio de la Plata, of which also he has left an account. A much gayer and a more famous book is the account of the conquest of Mexico written by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the companions of Cortés, who survived nearly all his brothers in arms, and died at a great age in Guatemala, on the estate he had won with his sword. His True History was provoked by the earlier narrative of Gómara, and was written to vindicate the honour due to himself and his fellow-adventurers, which he thought had been unduly sacrificed by the official historian of Cortés. Bernal Diaz is a Spanish Monluc, but both ruder and more medi?val than the[161] inimitable Gascon. Francisco de Jerez, Augustin de Zarate, and Pedro Cieza de Leon (the work of the last-named has only been wholly published in our own time) give the Peruvian half of that wonderful generation of conquest.
General Historians of the Indies.

Beside these, the actual eyewitnesses of events, are to be put the general historians of the Indies. The first who published his work complete was Francisco Lopez de Gómara. He was born in 1510, too late to share in the conquest, and was, in fact, a man of letters, who travelled, indeed, but only in Italy. The accident that he was secretary to Cortés when he had returned for the last time to Spain probably directed Gómara’s studies. He was accused of knowing nothing of many parts of his subject except what Cortés had told him, and of having distorted truth in the interest of his patron. But Gómara wrote well, and the immense contemporary interest in the subject gave his History of the Indies and his Chronicle of New Spain, which is a panegyric of Cortés, a great vogue. They first appeared in 1552, 1553, and 1554. An older man, and a much greater authority, was Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557), whose General and Natural History of the Indies was partly published in 1535, before Gómara’s. But the author kept his work in hand till his death, and appears to have made corrections and additions to the last.[49] Oviedo was in[162] the West Indies in official posts for forty years, beginning in 1513, and was therefore a contemporary of, though not a partaker in, the great conquests. He is a garrulous writer of no great force of mind, much more a chronicler than a historian. Gómara, Oviedo, Las Casas, Herrera, the Inca Garcilaso. There are two general historians of the Indies of very different value from Oviedo. The first is the Bishop of Chiapa, the justly famous Bartolomé de las Casas (1474?-1566), who supplied the critics of his countrymen (most of whom afterwards showed that they wanted only the opportunity in order to equal the crimes) with weapons by his famous Very Brief Account of the Ruin of the Indies. This, first printed in 1542, was reprinted with other tracts written for the honourable purpose of defending the unfortunate Indians from oppression in 1552, and was made known to all Europe in translations. The general History of the Indies, which he wrote during his old age, remained unprinted till it was included in the Collection of inedited Documents for the History of Spain published by the Spanish Government.[50] Las Casas was a man of a stamp not unfamiliar to ourselves. His hatred of cruelty was equally vehement and sincere. In his perfectly genuine horror for the excesses of his countrymen, which are not to be denied, he sometimes exaggerated and was sometimes unjust. He was perhaps inevitably emotional in his style, yet the fact that he had principle and passion and a cause to plead, gives his book a marked superiority[163] over the mainly chronicle work of Gómara and Oviedo. Antonio de Herrera (1549-1625) was a very different man, an official historian—he was historiographer of the Indies—who served the king as literary advocate, and was supplied with good information. His General History of the Deeds of the Castilians in the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea was published in 1601-1615 at Madrid. While compiling this great book, the most valuable part of his work, Herrera was also engaged in drawing up a General History of the World in the time of our Lord the King Philip II., and other treatises, which are, in fact, statements on behalf of the Government, and have in historical literature something like the place of the yearly summaries in the old Annual Register. Herrera’s style was businesslike, but he can never have been read for the pleasure of reading him. With these writers may be placed the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1540-1616), an attractive and rather pathetic figure. His father was one of the conquistadores, and his mother belonged to the sacred Inca race. The son was almost equally proud of his pedigree on both sides. The Inca Garcilaso, as he is always called, did some other literary work, including a translation of the once famous Dialogues on Love by Leon Hebreo, an echo of the Florentine Platonists, written in Italian by the exiled Spanish Jew, Juda Abarbanel, but he is best known by the Commentaries on Peru. In this work, published in two parts in 1609 and 1617, he contrived to reconcile a genuine Christian zeal and an equally genuine Castilian pride of descent with a tender[164] memory of his mother’s people. Garcilaso, though weak and garrulous, is touching, and his commentaries have been the great storehouse of the more poetic legends told of the Incas.[51]

Though writers who recorded what they had seen, and others who only recorded what had happened in their time, or near it, cannot be wholly classed together, yet the authors named above have certain qualities in common. Of those mentioned here, almost all wrote in a straightforward manly fashion, with little straining after effect, and a manifest desire to tell the truth. There is little in them of that overweening arrogance which has become associated with the character of the Spaniard. There is no want of pride, which was, indeed, amply justified by the stories they had to tell, but little of the vanity so common in the time of Spain’s decadence.
Mendoza, Moncada, and Melo.

The account of the rebellion of the Moriscoes written by Don Diego de Mendoza supplies a link between the series of histories just named and the histories which belong wholly to learning and literature. The subject was contemporary to the author, and members of his family took an active part in the events; but Don Diego had a literary ambition which is only too visible. It was plainly his intention to make a careful copy of Latin models—chiefly Sallust—and in one passage he slavishly follows the account given by Tacitus of the discovery of the remains of the legions of Varus, by the soldiers of Germanicus.[165] But there was an intrinsic force in Diego de Mendoza which saved him from falling into a mere school exercise, and though the mould of sentence is too much taken from the Latin, the vocabulary is very pure Castilian. He protests in one place against the use of the foreign word centinela for a sentinel, in place of the old Spanish atalaya for the watch by day, and escucha (listen) for the watch by night. The Expedition of the Catalans and Aragonese against the Turks and Greeks of Francisco de Moncada, Count of Osona (1635), which Gibbon said he had read with pleasure, has a great reputation among the Spaniards. It is certainly a well-written account of the expedition of the Free Companions who were led by Roger de Flor to serve under the Paleologi against the Turks, and who, after making themselves intolerable to their employers, ended by expelling the Dukes of Athens of the house of Brienne from their duchy, and then held it for the crown of Aragon. Moncada was a viceroy and general who served with high distinction, and a very accomplished man of literary tastes; but his narrative, which is very brief, is mainly a good Castilian version of the Catalan Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner, and has, in a phrase dear to Mr Hallam, been praised to the full extent of its merits. It appeared in 1623, twelve years before the death of the author, who was then viceroy in Lombardy. A work on the same scale as Moncada’s, which has been praised much beyond its merits, is the account of the revolt of the Catalans against Philip IV. in 1640 by Francisco[166] Manuel de Melo. It contains only the beginning of the war, and though the author seems to promise a continuation, he never went further. The book was published in 1645. Melo had a curious literary history. He was a Portuguese in the Spanish service, and a kinsman of the unfortunate general who lost the battle of Rocroi. He lived long, wrote much, and it was his fortune to survive Góngorism. But his History of the Troubles, Secession, and War of Catalonia was written while he was under a bad literary influence. Without being exactly “Góngorical,” it is written in a strained, pretentious, snappy style, which covers a decided poverty of thought.
General Histories.

The great school of Spanish historians has an unbroken descent from the chronicles of the Middle Ages. It had been the custom of the kings of Castile from the reign of Alfonso XI. (1350-1369), surnamed the Implacable, or “he of the Rio Salado,” from the scene of the battle in which he overthrew the last considerable Moorish invasion of Spain, to appoint a chronicler. With Florian de Ocampo, who held this post under Charles V., the chronicler became the “historiographer.” He was not necessarily a scholar and student of the past, yet he might be if he so pleased, and the spirit of the time invited him to adopt the new character. Ocampo, Zurita, Morales. Ocampo himself showed little faculty, though his intentions were good; but his successor, Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1581), was a scholar in the fullest sense of the word. It was his wish to write a real history of Spain, based on chronicles and records. But he obtained his post[167] late in 1570, and his work is a fragment ending so early as 1037. Morales was unquestionably influenced by the example of his friend Gerónimo de Zurita, the historiographer of the crown of Aragon. The unanimous judgment of scholars has recognised the right of Zurita to the name of historian, and even to the honour of being the first of modern historians. His father had been physician to Ferdinand the Catholic, and he was himself one of the many secretaries of Philip II. Zurita, who was born in 1512 and died in 1580, was appointed historiographer of Aragon by the choice of the Cortes in 1548. For a man with the ambition to be a historian, the position was enviable. It gave him independence, a right of access to all records; he had a fine story to tell, and as he had no predecessors, he had no need to spend time in reading the works of others. Zurita was worthy of his fortune. His Annals of the Crown of Aragon down to the death of Ferdinand the Catholic, in six folio volumes, published between 1562 and 1580, has kept its place as a work of scholarship and criticism.
Mariana.

The great name of Spanish historical literature is that of Juan de Mariana,[52] the Jesuit, whose name once rang all over Europe for his defence of regicide in the treatise De Rege, written for the benefit of his pupil, Philip III. But this and his other treatises were written in Latin, and never[168] translated by himself. His place in Spanish literature is due to his history. Mariana was of the most humble birth, for he was a foundling. He was born at Talavera in 1536, and educated by the Jesuits, in whose college in Sicily he taught for many years; but his later life was spent in the house of his order at Toledo. His troubles with his superiors form a not very honourable passage in the history of the Jesuits. The first purpose of his great work was to make Europe acquainted with the past of Spain, and he wrote in Latin, the universal language of scholarship. Twenty of the thirty books were published in that language in 1572. But, unlike Bacon, Mariana did not believe that the learned language would outlive the modern tongues. He was induced to make a Castilian version of his own Latin, and when doing it he took the freedom which even the most strict critic will allow to belong to the translator of his own work. He enlarged, corrected, and amended, till the Castilian history, which appeared in 1601, was almost a new work. Four editions, further enlarged and amended, appeared before the author’s death in 1623.

In answering a minute critic, Mariana, with an audacity not perhaps to be excused, declared that if he had stopped to verify every small fact, Spain would have waited for ever for a history. This bold avowal of his indifference to the tithings of mint and anise illustrates sufficiently the spirit in which he wrote. He was not a historical scholar in the same sense as Zurita—a minute student of original records—but[169] a man of great learning and high patriotic spirit, who applied himself to the making of a work of literature worthy of the past of his country. The defects of the history are patent, and one of them is a mere matter of change of fashion. He took Livy for a model, and therefore put long speeches into the mouths of his personages. This, however, was a mere literary convention not intended to deceive anybody, and not likely to mislead the most uncritical reader. It was only a now disused way of giving what the modern historian would give in comment and illustration. The same following of Livy led him into including in his history, and presenting as history, a great deal of what he knew to be legend, simply because it was picturesque and familiar. Against these defects, which from the literary point of view are no defects at all, are to be put a fine style quite uncontaminated by the usual defects of Spanish prose, a great power of narrative, and then this, that Mariana gave the history of his country throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages in a lofty patriotic spirit, which may not interpret and explain ancient institutions, but does convey to us a sense that we see an energetic people of fine qualities struggling on to high destinies.
The decadence.

The fall from Mariana to any of his contemporaries or successors is great. The Cisma de Inglaterra—‘The English Schism’—by Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527-1611), enjoys the reputation of being a well-written account of the great movement by which the English Church vindicated its independence[170] of the see of Rome, told from the point of view of a Spanish Jesuit. Prudencio de Sandoval, a distinguished churchman and one of the historiographers of the Crown, continued the general history of Morales, and then added to Mariana a life of Charles V., which is of about the same length as the Jesuit’s whole history. Sandoval shows what the reign of the great emperor looked like to a learned Spaniard of the later sixteenth century, but it has no great force and no merit of style.[53]

Other names might be added—Bartolomé de Argensola’s History of the Moluccas (1609), the work of a pure man of letters who wrote to please his patron, and the History of the Goths of the diplomatist Saavedra-Fajardo, published at Munster in 1649—but they could swell a list to little purpose. All these writers had the good fortune to write before the invasion of Góngorism, except Saavedra-Fajardo, who escaped it by residence abroad. Solis. Antonio de Solis (1610-1686) had the honour of resisting the plague. If the second-rate men of a literature could be dealt with at any length in our limits, Solis would be an interesting figure to dwell on. He was an accomplished man, who did very creditable work both as poet and dramatist, but in the schools of other and more original writers. There are few more melancholy lives among the biographies of men of letters.[171] In spite of reputation and success, he was always poor. Although he held the post of Cronista Mayor of the Indies in the latter part of his life, he died in utter poverty, leaving “his soul to be the heir of his body”—that is, giving orders that his few belongings should be sold to pay for masses. In the general bankruptcy of Spain his salary was probably not paid. A sense of duty rather than an inclination to the task may be supposed to have led him to undertake the writing of a book which has always remained very dear to the Spaniards. This is The Conquest of Mexico, published by the help of a friend in 1684.[54] The excellence of the style was recognised from the first, and has preserved the reputation of the book. Yet it wants the rude life of the contemporary narratives, and the understanding of, or at least strenuous effort to understand, the native side, which is to be found in Mr Prescott. Flowing and eloquent as Solis is, he is also somewhat nerveless. Perhaps our knowledge of the fact that he stood on the very verge of the time when the voice of literature in Spain was to be silenced altogether makes the reader predisposed to find something in him of the signs of exhaustion. He closes the time when the Spaniards wrote for themselves, and also wrote well.
Miscellaneous writers.

Before closing this survey of the great period of Castilian literature by a notice, which must necessarily be brief, of one intensely national body of writers, some[172] words must be said about the large class of authors of miscellaneous books belonging to the first half of the seventeenth century. The press was active in those years. Unfortunately it was an age of oddity and extravagance. Gracian and the prevalence of Góngorism. Its dominating figure is that Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658) to whom the admiration of Sir M. Grant Duff among ourselves, and the whim, if not the cynicism, of Schopenhauer among the Germans, have given a limited revival of popularity in our own time. He was an Aragonese Jesuit, who published his books under the name of his brother Lorenzo. Gracian is not uninteresting as a finished example of all that bad taste and pretentiousness can do to make a man of some, though by no means considerable, faculty quite worthless. It was his chosen function to be the critic, prophet, and populariser of Góngorism. He wrote a treatise to expound the whole secret of the detestable art of saying everything in the least natural and perspicuous manner possible.[55] This Agudeza y Arte de Ingenios—‘Wit and the Wits’ Art’—was not written till he had published a book on The Hero to show that he had every right to speak with authority. Gracian was otherwise a copious writer. His Criticon, translated into English under the name of The Spanish Critic, by Paul Rycaut in 1681, about thirty years after it appeared, is an allegory of life, shown by the adventures of a shipwrecked Spaniard and a “natural man,” whom he finds on the island of[173] St Helena. It may have helped Swift by showing him how not to write Gulliver’s Travels. The work which has been revived of late by the freak of Schopenhauer is the Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia—‘Hand (or Pocket) Oracle and Art of Prudence.’ It is a collection of maxims. Mr Morley went to the extreme limit of good nature when he said that Gracian sometimes gives a neat turn to a commonplace. As a rule, his maxims are examples of all that maxims ought not to be—long, obscure by dint of straining after epigrammatic force, and in substance of platitude all compact. We soon find that we are dealing with a “haberdasher of small wares,” who is endeavouring to impose himself upon us as wise by dint of a short obscure manner and a made-up face of gravity.

Gracian is worth singling out, not for his merits, but because he so thoroughly typified a something in the Spaniard which, oddly mixed with his real humour and sound sense, gives him a leaning to the theatrical in the worst sense of the word. When Shakespeare drew Don Adriano de Armado, the fantastical Spaniard, he was not laughing at random at the foreigner. And this side of the people was never more conspicuous than in the middle seventeenth century. It came out everywhere, from serious treatises on politics down to the fencing-book of the egregious Don Luis de Narvaez de Pacheco. It was not that Spain wanted for able men. Diego de Saavedra-Fajardo, the author of the history of the Goths, and of a curious book of emblems called Empresas Politicas, or ‘The Idea of a[174] Political Christian Prince’; Vera y Figueroa, the author of The Ambassador; Suarez de Figueroa, who wrote the miscellaneous critical dialogues called El Pasagero—‘The Traveller,’—were none of them insignificant men, but there was a perpetual straining after sententious gravity in them, an effort to look wiser than life, an attempt to get better bread than could be made out of wheat. They helped to give Europe the old idea of the rigid sententious Spaniard which is so strangely unlike the real man. But it was the time of the frozen court etiquette of the Hapsburg dynasty, and of grave peremptory manners in public, covering an extraordinary relaxation of morals, and an unabashed taste for mere horseplay in private. These writers gave the literary expression of the artificial Spain of the seventeenth century. It adds to the piquancy of the contrast that at a time when Spain was marching resolutely, and with her eyes open, to ruin, by accumulating fault upon fault, the political writers named here, and others, abounded in good sense. To take a single example. Among the emblems of Saavedra-Fajardo is one representing a globe supported between the sterns of two warships, with the motto “His Polis.” In the Essay the Spanish diplomatist sets out the whole doctrine, so familiar in our own days as that of “sea-power,” with great force. Yet this was written, a melancholy example of useless wisdom, when his country was destroying its last chance of maintaining a navy, by bleeding itself nearly to death in the wars of Germany for the purpose of vindicating the claims of the house of Hapsburg.

[175]

Here may be mentioned, a little out of his date, but hardly out of his place, for it is difficult to say where he ought to be classed, the Viage Entretenido, or ‘Amusing Voyage,’ of Agustin de Roxas or Rojas. He was a very busy miscellaneous writer, who led a strange roaming life as a soldier, strolling actor, and in some sense pícaro. The Viage Entretenido is the only part of his work which survives. It is a rather incoherent autobiography, swollen out by specimens of the loas he wrote for his fellow-actors. The historical value of the book is considerable, for Roxas gives a very full account of the theatrical life of his time, and is the standard authority for the early history of the Spanish stage. The literary merits of the book are not small, for, consciously or unconsciously he takes, and keeps, the tone of the true artistic Bohemian, the wandering enfant sans souci to whom the hardships of his life, long tramping journeys, hunger, poverty, rags, and spasms of furious hard work are endurable because they give him intervals of reckless idleness, and save him from what he especially hates, which is orderly industry. The Viage Entretenido was the model of Scarron’s Voyage Comique. It appeared perhaps in 1603, but certainly very early in the seventeenth century.[56]
The Mystics.

A survey of Spanish literature of the great epoch cannot end more appropriately than with the writers who by common consent are called the Mystics. The term has become established in use, and there would be pedantry in rejecting it. Yet it is far from being[176] accurately applied. What is, properly speaking, called Mysticism is not congenial to the Spaniard, and was inevitably odious to the Inquisition. A train of religious thought which led infallibly to trust in the “Inner Light,” to the contempt for dogma, to indifference to the hierarchy, and to the preference for emotional piety over morality of conduct, could not but be suspect to a body which existed for the purpose of maintaining the authority of the Church. One Spaniard, Miguel de Molinos, did indeed show himself a true mystic, and was the father of the “Quietism” of the later seventeenth century. But Molinos lived in Italy, did not address his countrymen, and found his following mainly in France. There were a few alumbrados, as the Spaniards called them—“Illuminati”—in Spain, as there were a few Protestants; but they were exceptions, and examples of mere personal eccentricity. The Inquisition had the sincere support of the nation in stamping out both. When it went too far and condemned what the Spaniards did not dislike, as when, for instance, the Guia de Pecadores—‘The Guide for Sinners’—of Luis de Granada was put in the Index, the Inquisition was forced to reverse its decision. But it had the approval of the country in its efforts to suppress teaching which had a dangerous tendency to arrive at the doctrine that, when the soul of the believer is united in ecstatic devotion with God, the sins of the flesh are no sins at all. The common-sense of the Spaniard, which was never more conspicuous than in the greatest of his orthodox[177] mystics, Santa Teresa, left him in no doubt as to the real meaning of such teaching as that. The stern handling it received from the Inquisition had his sincere approval. Spanish mysticism. The mysticism of the Spaniards consisted wholly in a certain Platonism or Neo-Platonism, in the doctrine which can be sufficiently well learnt in Spenser’s Hymne of Heavenly Love. This might have lent itself to the extreme of Quietism or Antinomianism, but it was restrained by the sense of the necessity for active virtue, which was strong in the Spaniard, and was the result of the Church’s teaching that there is no salvation without works.

It is not, however, the doctrine of the mystics, but their importance, and the literary quality of their work, which concern us here. As regards their position in the country, and their influence with all ranks of Spaniards, there can be no question. It was shown not only by the deference of the austere Philip II. to Santa Teresa, but by the docility of his grandson, Philip IV.—a very different and a very pleasure-loving man—to Maria de Jesus de ágreda, a woman far inferior in intellect and force of character to the reformer of the Carmelites.[57] To their work we may apply the expression, very Platonist and old, which Diego de Estella uses of the soul in his Very Devout Meditations on the Love of God. “Da vida,” he says,[178] and “es la forma del cuerpo”—“It gives life, and is the form of the body.”
“For soul is form, and doth the body make,”

as the same truth stands in Spenser’s hymn. The intense religious spirit of the Spaniards gives their work life, and is the form of their body. All the best of this side, if one ought not to say this basis, of their character has gone into the “mystic” works. The influence of the Inquisition on Spanish religious literature. The Spaniard has not been a great preacher. Part of the explanation of this, on the face of it, rather surprising fact, is no doubt to be found in saying that if the Inquisition had listened to every denunciation of a preacher, nobody would have been found to risk going into a pulpit. For, while denying that the Holy Office was felt to be oppressive by the majority of Spaniards, there can be no doubt that its yoke was heavy on the neck of individuals—even of the most orthodox. The persecution of Luis de Granada, who as a Dominican, and therefore as a member of the order which controlled the Inquisition, might have been supposed to be sure of the most favourable treatment, is an example of the vigilance exercised over all who even approached religious questions. Luis de Leon incurred an imprisonment of five years on accusations brought by envious rivals at Salamanca, and too favourably received by the jealousy of the Dominicans, who were hostile to him as an Augustinian.[58] Santa Teresa was sequestered by the Inquisition[179] at Seville. Her disciple, Juan de la Cruz, who helped her in the reform of the Carmelites, was imprisoned for a year, and only released by the intrepid exertions of the saint and the use of the royal authority. It was dangerous to speak without much thought and care. So the Spaniards, who might have given their country what the great Caroline divines gave to English and Bossuet to French literature, preferred to confine themselves to writing, where they could weigh every word and subject their work to the revision of superiors.

The bulk of the Spanish mystic, religious, and ascetic writings is enormous. By far the greater part of them have fallen dead to the Spaniards themselves. They have never been made the subject of an exhaustive study by any native scholar.[59]
Malon de Chaide.

The great names among the Spanish mystics of the golden time of their literature are those of Malon de Chaide, Juan de ávila, Luis de Granada, Luis de Leon, Santa Teresa, and San Juan de la Cruz—and of these Santa Teresa alone is a living force. It is difficult to understand what sense the word mystic bore to the first person who applied it to Pedro Malon de Chaide (?1530——?). He was of the Order of St Augustine, and was a master of a fine-flowing, rather unctuous style. The work by which he is known in Spanish literature is The Treatise of the Conversion of the Glorious Mary Magdalen. It[180] was written for a young lady who had resolved to take the vows, but was not published till many years later. Malon de Chaide was one of those who denounced the evil influence of the books of chivalry; but his own style is very often—at least to our modern taste—more fit for a romance than a book of devotion. He wrote verse—and well. It must be read with a constant recollection that it was not written for us, but in a time when the application of the language of The Song of Solomon to devotion was justified by the all but universal belief in the allegorical character of the poem. In this practice, of which we have well-known examples of our own, Malon de Chaide never went to the extreme reached by Juan de la Cruz. Juan de ávila. The venerable master Juan de ávila (1502-1569), known as the Apostle of Andalucia, an older man than Malon de Chaide, was also much less the fashionable divine. The most famous of his many works is The Spiritual Treatise on the verse Audi, filia—“Hearken, O daughter, and consider,” &c. It was at first only a letter of advice written for a lady, Sancha Carrillo, who had resolved to take the vows, but ávila added to it largely, and in its final form it is a complete guide for those who wish to lead the religious life, whether in a monastery or in the century. It is not, perhaps, a book to be recommended to those who cannot read with the eyes of a Spanish Roman Catholic, or at least with as much critical faculty as will enable them to understand, and to allow for, that point of view. The style of Juan de ávila, though verbose in the weaker passages, has an ardent[181] eloquence at times, and has always a large share of the religious quality of unction.
Luis de Granada.

Luis de Granada (1504-1588) and Luis de Leon (1527-1601) were contemporaries, younger men than Juan de ávila, and to some extent his followers. The Guide for Sinners of the first, and the Perfecta Casada of the second, have remained more or less popular books of devotion. At least they are reprinted among the Spaniards. The Guide for Sinners was translated and read all over Europe. Granada’s Book of Prayer and Meditation on “the principal mysteries of our faith” was hardly less famous. He had both the qualities and the defects of the style of his master. Luis de Leon. Luis de Leon was probably the greatest of the mystics in intrinsic force of intellect and in learning, besides being master of a far more manly style than any of them. He was also a man of independent intrepid character, and it may be that the fear with which the Inquisition regarded him was largely inspired by his strictures on the ignorance of the clergy and their flocks. Inquiry and knowledge were dreaded at a time when the Protestants were using them as instruments against the Church. The Perfecta Casada was written for a lady, Do?a Maria Varela Osorio. These writers, it will be seen, worked much for women. It was the age of the directors as distinguished from the old confessors. Pious people, and more especially women, who wished to lead a religious life, and had been taught that it was necessary not only to do but to believe what was right, were anxious for the[182] constant guidance of a teacher who must be both orthodox and learned. Santa Teresa insisted greatly on this. The treatise is a long comment on the passage of Scripture which will suggest itself to everybody as fit for the purpose—the last chapter of Proverbs, beginning at the tenth verse. But the allegorical meaning is more insisted on than the plain sense of the words, and the Perfecta Casada is a treatise on doctrine. Luis de Leon wrote much else, including an exposition of the Names of Christ and of The Book of Job.
Santa Teresa.

The greatest name among the Spanish mystics, and one of the greatest in all religious history, is that of Teresa de Zepeda y Ahumada, who called herself “in religion” Teresa de Jesus. She was born of a noble family of ávila in Old Castile in 1515, and died in 1582. We are not directly concerned here with her religious life, her reform of the Carmelites, or her doctrine, which indeed was not original. The inspiring motive of Santa Teresa was her desire to save the souls of the Lutheran heretics, not by preaching to them, but by so reforming her own order, the Carmelites, that they should return to their original purity, and prove an effective instrument for the Church. Her literary work may be divided into two parts. One contains the different treatises she wrote by the order of her superiors, who probably began by wishing to test her orthodoxy, and who ended by revering her as one inspired. Then there are her many letters, written to all ranks of her contemporaries, from the king down to the nuns of her houses.[183] In both Santa Teresa wrote the same Castilian—the language as it was spoken by the nobles, not learned, indeed, but not wholly uneducated, who belonged to “the kidney of Castile,” and had not been affected by the Italianate style of the Court. Her own great character is stamped on every line. Nobody ever showed less of the merely emotional saintly character, “Meandering about, capricious, melodious, weak, at the will of devout whim mainly!” Her letters, which are not only the most attractive part of her writing but even the most valuable, show her not only as a great saint but as a great lady, with a very acute mind, a fine wit, and an abounding good sense.
Juan de la Cruz.

Santa Teresa’s disciple and colleague in the reform of the Carmelites, Juan de la Cruz, whose family name was Yepes (1542-1591), not unjustly named the Ecstatic Doctor, was emphatically a saint of the “melodious” order. His emotional—not to say gushing—style has been, and is, much admired by the Spaniards. To us it seems that nobody stands in greater need of being judged by the widest interpretation of the text, “To the pure all things are pure.” There is an amatory warmth of language, an application to religion of erotic images in Juan de la Cruz, which, considered in itself, and apart from what justified it at the time, is nauseous. A quite sufficient example will be found in the much-quoted verses in his Ascent of Mount Carmel, which begin, “En una noche escura.” Yet Juan de la Cruz wrote eloquently in his emotional way, and his verse is beautiful.
Decadence of the Mystic writers.

These are but a very few names from among the[184] Spanish mystic, moral, and ascetic writers, but it would only be a very full history of Spanish religious literature which would deal with Jerónimo Gracian (not to be confounded with Baltasar), with Juan de Jesus Maria, or Eusebio Nieremberg. As the seventeenth century drew on there was continually less thought in Spanish religious literature and more emotion, while that emotion had an increasing tendency to abound in the amatory images of Juan de la Cruz.