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

with his pen, to the detriment of his art. He is wanting in the exquisite simplicity and delicacy of the master of whose work he was a chief admirer, whose style he followed, and in whose path he attempted to walk⁠—his friend, Miguel de Cervantes. So passionate was his love for Don Quixote that we are told he would throw down the book in an ecstasy and declare that he would gladly burn all his works to be able to write something like Don Quixote. Between the two wits it is pleasant to record that there was nothing like jealousy. Cervantes, in the references he makes to Quevedo, seems to speak with more than his wonted kindliness of the younger man, as though from personal intimacy. In the Voyage to Parnassus Quevedo is rallied upon his lameness with a freedom which only a friend might take. In summing up the roll of the good poets who are to be Apollo’s allies in the winning of Parnassus, the name of Quevedo is last on the list. But Cervantes interrupts the god-messenger to remind him of Quevedo’s infirmity:⁠—

Scarce can Francisco de Quevedo be
In time, I said. Nay, quoth he, on this cruise
I do not go, unless he go with me;
He is Apollo’s son, son of the Muse
Calliope; we cannot, it is clear,
Go hence without him; I do not choose;
He is the scourge of all the poets drear,
And from Parnassus, at the point of wit,
Will chase the miscreants we expect and fear!
My lord, I said, his pace is most unfit,
He’ll be a century upon the route!
Quoth Mercury: It matters not a whit;
For be the poet gentleman to boot,
Upon a dappled cloud, and through the air,
He shall be borne, his courtly taste to suit!1

In the delightful prose appendix to the same poem, the “Adjunta al Parnaso,” Don Pancracio de Roncesvalles brings to Cervantes’ house a letter from the god Apollo, dated the 22nd of July, 1614. In this there is another reference to Quevedo: “If Don Francisco de Quevedo hath not left for Sicily, where they await him, seize him by the hand and tell him he must not fail to visit me in a neighbourly way; for his late sudden departure gave me no time to talk with him.”

Quevedo’s worldly circumstances, as the owner of a landed estate, and his rank in the public service under the powerful Duke of Osuna, kept him, happily, free from that necessity of writing for bread which oppressed the fine genius but could not stifle the kind heart of the author of Don Quixote. But they did not preserve him from the envy of his other less fortunate brothers of the pen. With Lope de Vega, with whom he could have no rivalry, whom he survived ten years, his relations seem to have been tolerably friendly⁠—that is to say, they exchanged compliments and commendatory sonnets. With Góngora there was too much similarity of humour to be much love. They had various tilts at each other, in which there was too much venom spilt for either to emerge with honour. When Góngora abandoned his early simplicity of style and took to that affected and extravagant way of writing which came to be called after him, Gongorismo, which corresponded to the disease called Euphuism in England and Marinism in Italy⁠—Quevedo took up his lance against the intruder and in defence of the language, writing a pamphlet, La Culta Latiniparla, in which, under the guise of a catechism for the instruction of ladies of culture in the new way of speech, he quizzes his rival and the new invention very happily. A French critic and student of Spanish letters, M. Germond de Lavigne, in his account of Quevedo, has shown himself so far lost to the sense of humour as to call this piece un discours critique litteraire; which is as though we should class Swift’s Argument Against the Abolition of Christianity among works of devotion. Quevedo’s wit had little effect in checking the depraved fashion of writing; and it is sad to tell that he himself, in his later years, was infected with the barbarous taste, and Gongorized like the rest. Góngora bitterly resented the attack upon his style, and there passed between the two much dyslogistic verse in the shape of epigram and sonnet. Góngora relieves his feelings by a poem in which he charges his critic with being no great scholar, and with “wandering slow with heavy pace”⁠—one who “sleeps in Spanish and dreams in Greek”⁠—insinuating that he is unsound in his religion. In another sonnet Góngora sneers at his critic’s learning, his limping gait, and his blindness, laughs at his red cross of Santiago, and his adventures, calling him borracho (drunkard), pedante gofo (stupid pedant), muy crítico y muy lego, etc. Quevedo retorted with equal spirit and good taste, reflecting on his rival’s origin, and hinting that he was no better Catholic than he should be:⁠—

He de untarte mis versos con tocino
Porque no me los roas, Gongorilla.

(I have to anoint my verses with bacon fat
That you may not gnaw them, Gongorilla.)

The point of which jest, heightened by the contemptuous diminutive, lies in the hint that Góngora, then a priest in orders, was no “old Christian,” but either Jew or Morisco. Another enemy of Quevedo was Pérez de Montalvan, a writer of plays the favourite disciple, parasite, and bully of Lope de Vega⁠—whom our satirist was fond of assailing in verse and prose for his dogmatism, his arrogance and his “inscrutable ignorance.” Montalvan took his revenge in a volume entitled El Tribunal de la Justa Venganza, written under an assumed name, in which Quevedo’s satirical works are tried and condemned for their offences against religion and morality.

Among the works of Quevedo, that which, perhaps, is most characteristic of his genius, and most valuable as a picture of contemporary life and manners, is