Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper - Francisco de Quevedo (good summer reads .TXT) 📗

works of this character, which are rather romances of real life than picaresque tales⁠—the Niña de los Embustes (the Child of Tricks) and the Garduña de Sevilla (the She-Marten of Seville) of Solorzano; the Diablo Cojuelo (the Lame Devil) of Guevara, and Estevanillo Gonzalez, attributed to the same author, which is the pretended autobiography of a buffoon, better known by Le Sage’s French version than in the original. Last of all, we come to that which by some is reckoned to be the picaresque novel par excellence⁠—the well-known work of Le Sage himself, in collaboration with many others, called Gil Blas. This, with all its merits, is no picaresque novel at all, except in an oblique sense as being the work of a “picaroon”⁠—a clever theft by an adept in literary conveyance, the very Autolycus of authors. While the matter is Spanish, the form and, oddly enough, a great deal of the spirit, is French. I will not go into the question of what were the sources from which Le Sage drew his story. That very Spanish and yet curiously French work (“Spanish bricks in French mortar”) is a wonderful piece of literary craft, showing a genius in the art of stealing which is equal to that of original composition, and even more rare. But Gil Blas, when all is said, is not a true picaroon, of the breed of Lazarillo and Rinconete. He is an impostor, but in another than the true sense. He is a fortune-hunter, who looks closely to the main chance, who descends to be respectable, who aims at a social position, like Jerome Paturot. He marries twice, and lives comfortably in a fine house⁠—a prosperous gentleman, after bidding hope and fortune farewell. He is no more a picaro than Ruy Blas is a Spaniard or Djalma an Indian prince.

Of the picaresque novel, which is the special product of Spain⁠—never successfully acclimatized in any other country, and as entirely Spanish as the olla or the gazpacho⁠—one of the purest specimens is Don Pablo de Segovia (Paul the Sharper), exemplo de Vagamundos y espejo de Tacaños⁠—pattern of Vagabonds and mirror of rogues. The book is generally known as El Buscón, or El Gran Tacaño. The latter title, which is not Quevedo’s, was made the leading designation of the book after the author’s death, and is still that by which the book is most popular in Spain. Buscón is from buscar, to seek, and means a pursuer of fortune, a searcher after the means of life, a cadger. Tacaño is ingeniously derived by old Covarrubias, in the earliest Spanish dictionary, from the Greek κακός, being a corruption of cacaño; or from the Hebrew tachach, which is said to mean fraud and deceit. Don Pablo, however his titles may be derived, is generally admitted to be the perfect type of an adventurer of the picaresque school. The book of his exploits, though left, like so many Spanish books, unfinished, is described by Quevedo’s best critic as “of all his writings the freest from affectation, the richest in lively and natural humours, the brightest, simplest, and most perspicuous; in which he comes nearest to the amenity, artlessness, and delightful and delicate style of Don Quixote.” These praises are not undeserved, although the knight of industry, in his quest of adventures, is very far from being of kin to the warrior of chivalry, the gentle and perfect knight of La Mancha. Disfigured as it is by all Quevedo’s faults of style and manner, Don Pablo deserves to be rescued from the fate to which its faults of language, rather than its defects of taste or its failure in the moral part, have hitherto consigned it, at least in England. As a picture of low, vagabond life, it necessarily deals with vice, but it cannot be said that the vice is rendered attractive. All the characters are bad, in the sense that they all belong to the class who have failed to achieve a decent life. The company is not select in which we move, but it can hardly be said that there is contamination in it any more than we get from looking at Hogarth’s Gin Lane, or the Borrachos of Velasquez. From beginning to end Don Pablo’s career is one of undisguised trickery, dissimulation, and lying. All his companions are thieves, or impostors, or rogues, patent or undetected. The scenes are laid almost entirely in the lowest places⁠—in the slums of Segovia, of Madrid, and of Seville, mostly in prison or in some refuge from the law. The manners of the people, men and women, are as repulsive as their morals; and they talk (which is not unusual) after their natures. When we concede all this we admit the worst which can be said of Quevedo’s work, and impute nothing against the author, either as artist or moralist. It is difficult to imagine any virtue of a texture so frail as to be injured by the reading of Paul the Sharper. There is no vice in the book, even though it deals exclusively with vicious people. There is nothing hurtful in the character of the complete rogue, nor is he painted in any but his natural colours, as a mean, sordid vagabond, who does or says nothing whatever to gild his trade or to embellish his calling. This is the crowning merit of Quevedo’s book, among those of its class, that there are no shabby tricks played upon the reader, such as other writers of even higher pretensions are guilty of⁠—no attempt to pass off a rogue as though he were a hero in distress⁠—a creature deserving of sympathy, who is only treating the world as the world treated him⁠—a victim of fortune, whose ill-usage by society justifies his attitude towards the social