A History of Spanish Literature

Obvious punctuation errors and misprints have been corrected. Blank pages present in the printed original have been deleted in the e-text version. Short Histories of the Literatures of the World Edited by Edmund Gosse A HISTORY OF SPANISH LITERATURE BY JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY C. DE LA REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1921 Copyright, 1898, By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. Printed in the United States of America PREFACE Spanish literature, in its broadest sense, might include writings in every tongue existing within the Spanish dominions; it might, at all events, include the four chief languages of Spain. Asturian and Galician both possess literatures which in their recent developments are artificial. Basque, the spoiled child of philologers, has not added greatly to the sum of the world's delight; and even if it had, I should be incapable of undertaking a task which would belong of right to experts like Mr. Wentworth Webster, M. Jules Vinson, and Professor Schuchardt. Catalan is so singularly rich and varied that it might well deserve separate treatment: its inclusion here would be as unjustifiable as the inclusion of Provençal in a work dealing with French literature. For the purposes of this book, minor varieties are neglected, and Spanish literature is taken as referring solely to Castilian—the speech of Juan Ruiz, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Quevedo, and Calderón. At the close of the last century, Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers raised a hubbub by asking two questions in the Encyclopédie Méthodique :—"Mais que doit-on l'Espagne? Et depuis deux siècles, depuis quatre, depuis six, qu'a-t elle fait pour l'Europe?" I have attempted an answer in this volume. The introductory chapter has been written to remind readers that the great figures of the Silver Age—Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian—were Spaniards as well as Romans. It further aims at tracing the stream of literature from its Roman fount to the channels of the Gothic period; at defining the limits of Arabic and Hebrew influence on Spanish letters; at refuting the theory which assumes the existence of immemorial romances , and at explaining the interaction between Spanish on the one side and Provençal and French on the other. It has been thought that this treatment saves much digression. Spanish literature, like our own, takes its root in French and in Italian soil; in the anonymous epics, in the fableaux , as in Dante, Petrarch, and…