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

Don Pablo de Segovia, here presented in an English dress, and, as we venture to believe, in a most appropriate and harmonious setting, through the art of M. Vierge. Don Pablo de Segovia, otherwise known as El Gran Tacaño (The Great Sharper), is a prime sample of that species of romance which was native of the soil of Spain⁠—there first engendered at least, and flourishing nowhere else in the same vigour and luxuriance⁠—the picaresque novel. The picaro⁠—from picar, to peck, to nibble at⁠—if he was not a special product of Spain, throve there in the sixteenth century as he did nowhere else in the nations. He was not necessarily a rogue, but always a vagabond. He was one who was at odds with the world⁠—a remnant left over in the making of society⁠—a survival of the age gone by. Of his order were all the broken men of the time⁠—a time in which there was much breaking of men⁠—those who lived by their wits on the witless, the mumpers and beggars, strolling quacks, sham pilgrims, charm-sellers, discharged or runaway soldiers, thieves by profession and knaves by necessity, gypsies, bullies and bravoes, jailbirds, roughs, prisoners, and the baser sort of parasites⁠—the excrement of life, the scum and draff of society. In this kind of material, admirable stuff for the humorist and the painter, Spain was especially rich in the sixteenth century. A capital sample of the accomplished picaro is Ginés de Pasamonte, the galley-slave freed by Don Quixote, who robbed Sancho of his ass, and afterwards appeared as Master Peter, the puppet-showman. He is the typical rogue, whose model in youth, in manhood, and in age is to be found on the canvas of Velasquez and of Murillo. He is a stock figure in the national drama. He must have been a familiar sight to the Spaniards of that age, standing at every street corner, every convent door. He was as common as the poor poet in the marketplace. The favourite haunts of the picaresque gentry, the Bohemian and the Alsatian, are they not enumerated by the roguish innkeeper in Don Quixote, himself one of the craft, who plays so deftly upon the knight and his humour?⁠—“the Fish-Market of Malaga, the Islets of Riarán, the Compass of Seville, the Aqueduct-Square of Segovia, the Olive Grove of Valencia, the Suburbs of Granada, the Strand of San Lucar, the Clot-Fountain of Córdova, the Pothouses of Toledo.”2

The causes of this rank growth of the picaresque element in Spain are to be sought in the national history. The long series of exhausting wars in the Netherlands and in Italy; the discovery and development of America; the monstrous multiplication of monks, priests, and religious houses during the reigns of Philip and of his successor⁠—these three, the chief causes of Spain’s decadence, may be taken to account for the poverty, and the vice, and the bitterness of the struggle for existence, of which the picaresque order, in its extraordinary luxuriance, was the outgrowth. The cutpurses, the beggars, the professional rogues and sharpers, were but the product of the unwholesome working of the organs of life⁠—the remainder ruffianry of that period of diseased energy. The internal corruption, of which they were the signs, was the consequence of the fever which shook the frame and the fury which stirred the blood of Spain during all that period of seeming grandeur but of real disease. The picaro was the adventurer who had missed his chance in the general scramble, who did not or could not go to Flanders or to America, or who, having been, had returned empty. He was the conquistador out of date⁠—the gold-seeker run to seed. How near he was to the failures of the Church⁠—the vagabond friar, the religious mendicant⁠—is clearly seen from this story of Paul the Sharper, as well as from the other tales of the class. The peace of 1609, which secured the independence of Holland and put an end to the long war in the Low Countries, only aggravated the evil condition of Spain, by filling the country with a swarm of needy adventurers and disabled and discharged soldiers, for whom the State made no provision. How fruitful a source of demoralization and misery they were we may learn from all the literature of the period, from Don Quixote downwards. As for America, the reaction of the tide which brought wealth and new life to Spain had set in even before the middle of the sixteenth century. The flood which carried all the men of enterprise and independent spirit to Peru or to Mexico had left Spain drained of her best lifeblood. The sudden influx of gold tended to sharpen the distinction between rich and poor⁠—to make it more difficult for the poor to live, while spoiling them for honesty. The old Castilian simplicity of life was destroyed, and the antique honour, the legacy left by the heroic age which closed with the fall of Granada, corrupted. The new rich introduced luxuries and vices which till then had been alien to the Spanish character. The fortunate adventurers who came back from the New World were as great a terror to public morals through their extravagance and their recklessness, as the unsuccessful through their destitution and despair. The national inclination to the sins of pride, idleness, and boastfulness⁠—how could it happen but that it should be enormously fostered and heightened by the easy conquests in America, following upon the shrinking of the martial power and the prodigious swelling of the ecclesiastical? With nearly ten thousand monasteries and nunneries, and more than thirty thousand monks, of the two orders, Franciscan and Dominican, alone⁠—is it a wonder that the Spain of Philip III should be hastening to decay? The picaro was the fungus which grew out of this mass of corruption. To these running sores was added the expulsion of the Moriscoes under Philip