Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper. Francisco de QuevedoЧитать онлайн книгу.
same taste for the delights of office. He seems to have recovered some portion of the royal favour. He was offered various high posts in the State, among others the embassy to Genoa, but he refused them, and would only accept the honorary title of King’s Secretary. He did not wholly exclude himself from politics, however, but, like Swift, continued to vex himself with public affairs, showing by his sensibility to the follies and errors of statesmen where his heart lay, and what was the secret of the saeva indignatio by which he was tortured. He was free with his pen in condemnation of crying abuses and defects in the administration. He was prolific of letters, pamphlets, and satires in prose and verse, all written with a boldness and freedom to which the age was unaccustomed, which brought their author frequently into trouble. He assailed a scheme for the debasement of the coinage with a courage and a power of wit and sarcasm such as were not excelled even by the famous Drapier, on the same theme, a hundred years later. He exposed certain abuses in the distribution of the patronage of the military order of Santiago with a fearlessness which cost him another period of banishment from Court. He wrote letters to the King of France (Louis XIII.) and others, more or less directly impugning the conduct of affairs then under the worthless favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares.
In 1634 Quevedo, being in his fifty-fourth year, married—to the surprise, and somewhat to the amusement, of his friends. His way of life hitherto had scarcely been such as to proclaim his confidence in the married state; and a letter which he had written to his friend, the widowed Duchess of Lerma, on the qualities required of a wife, had seemed to set his standard of taste so high as to condemn him to celibacy. His wife died soon after their marriage, leaving Quevedo with fresh troubles, arising out of his satirical humour, or rather from his reputation for satire. He had betaken himself, after his wife’s death, to his country retreat at Torre de Juan Abad to seek consolation in literature; and this was probably his busiest period of production. He wrote a life of Marcus Brutus, of which the scarcely concealed intention was to point to the Cæsar who then tyrannized over Spain. He aimed satires in verse, after the classical model, at the reigning favourite. He wrote the Politica de Dios y Gobierno de Cristo (Policy of God and Government of Christ), which, under the guise of a religious work, was a biting satire on the King and the Count-Duke. He wrote other works, some of which have perished, distinguished by elegance of style and energy of expression, none of them deserving of more than a passing mention, and all belonging rather to the political history than to the literature of Spain. To this period also, probably, are to be referred the greater part of those satirical works, under the name of Visions, which have chiefly contributed to make the name of Quevedo known to the nations outside of Spain—those bitter, half-humorous, half-serious, and all-fantastical inventions, such as The Dream of Skulls and The World Inside Out.
In 1639, when it might have seemed to him that Fortune had already done her worst to plague him, and he had no more either to hope or fear from kings or ministers, there happened to Quevedo the worst of all the calamities which marked his busy and troubled life. A satirical sonnet was found under the King’s napkin at supper, which contained violent reflections on the Government of the Count-Duke Olivares. Quevedo was believed to be the author, and, without any inquiry or trial, he was seized at dead of night, in the Duke of Medina Celi’s palace, and hurried off to a dungeon under the cells of the Royal Convent of San Marcos at Leon. Here he was kept in strict confinement for nearly four years, in spite of a pitiful appeal to Olivares, in which, while protesting his innocence of the offence imputed to him, Quevedo wrote: No clemency can add many years to my life; no rigour can take many away. He was asked to declare which of the many satires there were going about were his and which were not, but he returned a proud and disdainful answer. The real author of the lampoon for which Quevedo was punished was discovered soon after, but this made little or no difference in the treatment to which he was subjected. In vain did he entreat the Count-Duke for justice and relief. He pleaded that he was blind of the left eye, crippled, and afflicted with ulcers, declaring that he sought not liberty but change of regimen and of prison, and this change, the gospel says, Christ granted to a great number of devils who besought it of Him. In vain were all these pleas. They were probably glad to be able to silence, on any pretext, that bold and biting tongue, which had already done so much to proclaim to posterity the iniquities of the Government. It was not until after the fall of the Count-Duke himself, amidst the rejoicings of the whole nation, that Quevedo was restored to liberty. But his four years’ imprisonment, during part of which time he had been treated, as he complains, like a wild beast shut up alone without human intercourse, had ruined his health and broken his spirits. His estate had been sequestrated, and he was never able to recover more than a small part of it, so that poverty was added, for the first time in his life, to his other trials. Worn out by his infirmities, he died at last, of an imposthume in the chest, contracted during his imprisonment in a damp cell of the Convent, on the 8th of September, 1645, having previously made his peace with God and the Church in the usual manner.
More fortunate than his master and great contemporary, Cervantes, Quevedo survives in canvas and in marble, so that we are able to realize the external features of the man. His portrait by Velasquez, representing him with a huge pair of spectacles on his nose and the cross of Santiago on his left bosom, is that by which he is best known. There is also a bust of him in the Public Library at Madrid. The first of his biographers, the Neapolitan Tarsia, has drawn this picture of him, evidently from recollection, in words: Quevedo was of middling stature; his hair black and somewhat frizzled (encrespado), his eyes very brilliant, but so short of sight that he constantly wore spectacles; the nose and other features well proportioned; and of a medium frame well made above, although lame and crippled in both feet, which were twisted inwards; somewhat bulky without being misshapen; very fair of countenance, and in the main with all those marks co-existent in his person which physiognomists commend as indicating a good temperament and a virtuous disposition. His biography by Tarsia, published in 1663, is a dull and tedious piece of work. By far the best account of Quevedo is that which I have made the basis of this sketch, the biography attached to the only complete collection of Quevedo’s works, by Don Aureliano Fernandez Guerra y Orbe, which forms three volumes in Rivadeneyra’s Biblioteca de los Autores Españoles. The Essai sur la Vie et les Œuvres de Quevedo, by Ernest Merimée (Paris, 1886), is a careful and painstaking work, of which the materials have been taken from Guerra y Orbe.
To judge the character of the man is easier for posterity than to estimate the worth of his products in literature. The greater part of his writings, those which brought him most fame in his lifetime, men have ceased to read even in Spain itself. Of the eleven octavo volumes which constituted the first complete edition of Quevedo’s works (1791-94) it may be said that it would be no loss to the world had three-fourths shared the doom which their author, on his death-bed, requested might overtake them all. The orthodox would thus have been saved much scandal, the expurgators a great deal of trouble, the critics and the commentators an endless amount of curious inquiry. The theology and the politics (these in Quevedo are much confused) have already perished. The satires have been visited by the destiny which invariably attends the works of wit which are dedicated to passing uses, when literature stoops to the service of politics.
But while the graver works of Quevedo, those which won him the applause of the learned and the favour of the great, have perished or are sunk into oblivion, there have survived enough of those lighter pieces born of his humour or his fancy, which he could scarcely be got to own in his lifetime, to keep his name alive and to secure for him a permanent place in literature. His lyrics are among the best in the language, and still keep their place in every collection of classic Castilian poetry. Those written in his early days, which include odes, sonnets, ballads, quintillas, and redondillas, mostly cast in a light and graceful mould, are distinguished for elegance of language, delicacy of fancy, and simple, tender expression. His burlesque poems (which include some pieces of a breadth such as excludes them from polite society), written in the picaresque dialect, of which, like Cervantes, he was a past master—the Jácaras, in which the people, the gitanos, the jaques, and the buzos, speak the language of Germania—the langue verte of Spain—are said still to be heard in the country, sung to the strumming of guitars. His regular verse is chiefly satire in the manner of Juvenal, against the corruption of morals and the evils of misgovernment. Of his prose writings the best are those which are purely