The difficulty of summing up and defining becomes really sensible when an attempt has to be made to[369] estimate the different ways, and the different degrees, in which the influence of the Renaissance made itself felt in Spain, England, and France. In all three countries it met a strong national genius which it could stimulate12, but could not affect in essentials. Garcilaso, Spenser, and Ronsard were all equally intent on making a new poetry for their countries, and all three succeeded. Yet they remained respectively a Spaniard, an Englishman, and a Frenchman, and in their works were as unlike one another as they were to their common models.
It is, I think, fairly accurate to say that the Renaissance influenced each of the three Western countries with increasing force in the order in which they are arranged here. Spain felt it least and France most. The case is emphatically one for the use of the distinguo. When we wish to measure the influence which one literature has had on another, it is surely very necessary to keep the form and the spirit well apart. When only the bulk of what was written, and the bare form, and the mere language, are allowed for, then it is obvious that the Renaissance did affect Spain very much. The hendecasyllabic, the prevailing13 use of the double rhyme, the ottava rima, the capitolo, and the canzone, were all taken by the Spaniards with slavish fidelity14. The very close connection between the languages and the peoples may have made this minute imitation inevitable15. Again, it is not to be denied that Italian had a marked influence on literary Castilian as it was written in the later sixteenth century. Very strict critics have noted16 the[370] presence of Italian constructions in Cervantes. The point is not one on which I care to speak as having authority, and for two reasons. Experience only increases my sense of the danger of expressing opinions as to what is legitimate in a language which is not one’s own—and even in one which is. Then, too, before a new phrase is condemned17 for being foreign, we have to settle the preliminary questions, Was it taken from a sister tongue or not? Was it superfluous18 or not? The Spaniard who wishes to say, “Of two things the one,” &c., and who uses the words “De dos cosas, una,” is guilty of a Gallicism, and is wrong, because his own Castilian supplies him with the terser19 and equally lucid21 formula, “De dos, una.” Yet the French original might have been taken with profit, and very legitimately22, if it had been wanted, since it comes from a kindred tongue, and does no violence to the genius of Spanish. Such a word as “reliable” is an offence mainly because it is displacing an excellent equivalent, and because in itself it is a barbarism only to be excused on the ground of necessity.
Yet while noting that Italian models were profusely23 imitated in Spain and Portugal, and that Castilian was perfected as a literary instrument by Italian influence, we can still maintain that the Renaissance bore less fruit in the Peninsula than in France or England. By “fruit” we ought to mean not mere writing, be its mechanical dexterity24 what it may, but that combination of form and matter which makes literature, and which before we can call it “national” must savour of the qualities of some one race. Now, when we look at[371] the literary activity of the Peninsula during the Golden Age, we can find very little which will stand the triple test in matter, form, and national character, and of which we can yet say that it shows the spirit of the Renaissance. Portugal can be left aside with the due passing salute25 to the great name, and the real, though hardly proportionate, merit of Camoens. What else we find there[122] is no more than a somewhat weaker version of the learned poetry of Spain, of which it has to be said that it might be deducted26 without reducing the place of Spanish literature in the world. All men who have written well are entitled to their honour. They were skilful28 workmen, and that too in no mean matter. Yet there is a wide difference between the man of whom we can say that if he had never taken pen in hand, his form and his matter might yet be found in equal perfection elsewhere and in foreign tongues, and that other of whom we are bound to say that if he had remained silent then something would have been missing which no other race could have supplied. Now, if Boscan had never taken the advice of Navagiero, if Garcilaso had never written, if all the learned poets had remained silent, then Spain would not have shown her capacity to produce men who could handle Italian metres competently—and yet her place in the literature of the world would be essentially29 what it is. The Celestina, from which, through the Novela de Pícaros, came Le[372] Sage30 and Smollett and Dickens, would remain, and so would the Amadis of Gaul, the romances, the comedia, Don Quixote, the great adventurers, and Santa Teresa—all in short that makes Spain in literature.
And now, allowing that there was something Spanish which found adequate expression in the Golden Age, and is also the best of the national literature, there comes the difficulty, which I dread31 to find insuperable, of finding a definition of that something. To say that there is Spanish quality in las cosas de Espa?a, and that this is why they are Spanish, is the explanation of Molière’s doctors. Again, it is mere reasoning in a circle to begin by taking it for granted that the learned poets who copied the Italian forms were not truly Spanish, and that therefore Spain was not in essentials influenced by the Renaissance. Either form of absurdity32 is to be avoided. Perhaps the only way of escape lies in defining what we mean by the spirit of the Renaissance. Without professing33 to be equal to so great a task, it is permissible34 to assert that there are certain notes which we describe as of the Renaissance, and to which the Italian, the Frenchman, or the Englishman gave expression in forms proper to himself. A love of beauty, a sense of joy, a vehement35 longing36 for strong expressions of individual character and of passion, a delight in the exercise of a bold, inquisitive37 intellect—all these, and the reaction from them, which is a deep melancholy38, are the notes of the Renaissance. In the learned poetry of Spain they are rarely heard. The commonplaces of form, with here and there a piety39 and patriotism40 which are medi?val[373] and Spanish, are given in their stead. Therefore it is quite fair to say that the Spaniard was not greatly influenced by the Renaissance—that there was something in it not congenial to him.
There remains41 the difficulty of saying exactly what is the Spanish quality of the true cosas de Espa?a. Mr Ford42, who knew the flavour well, gave it a name—the borracha—which, being interpreted, is the wine-skin, and the smack43 it lends to the juice of the grape. The Spaniards say that there are three natural perfumes, and the first of them is the smell of the dry earth after rain. The borracha, and the pungent45 scent46 of the “dura tellus Iberi?” when wet, are not to everybody’s taste. Neither is their equivalent in literature, except where we find it purified and humanised by the genius of Cervantes. There has at all times been little love of beauty in the Spaniard, and not much faculty47 for ideal perfection of form. His greatest painting is realistic, the exact forcible rendering48 of the things seen with the eye of the flesh, selected, arranged, kept in their proper proportions in the picture, but rarely imagined. The things seen need not be the vulgar realities of life only. Velasquez is every whit49 as real in his presentment of the frigid50 dignity of the King, or in the “Lances,” as he is in the “Spinners” or the “Water-Seller.” Zurbaran’s friars are perfectly52 real, and their ecstatic devotion was also chose vue. It is the extent of his range of vision which gives Velasquez his solitary53 eminence54 among Spanish painters. Among their brother artists, the men of letters, there is the same faculty for seeing[374] and reproducing the common life, though this must be understood to include that devotion to the Church which was far from being the least genuine thing in Spain. All did not see with the same breadth of vision. A Velasquez is rare. It is comparatively easy to be Zurbaran. As a rule the Spaniard could express types better than individuals. The jealous husband, the adventurer, heroic as in Amadis, or rascally55 as in Lazarillo, a rigid51 ideal of honour, an orthodox pattern of piety, are what the Spaniard gives us—these, and the stirring action of which they form a part. He drew from the world he saw around him, and fitted his materials into a pattern for the stage, or for the story. The go?t du terroir, the essentially Spanish borracha, is on it all. The flavour is not delicate. There is little gaiety in the Spaniard, but instead of it a hard jocularity. He very rarely says the profound and universally true thing. It would be hard to make a collection of “beauties” from his literature. In so far as he has helped the general literature of the world, it has been by supplying a model of machinery56 for the play and the prose story. Therefore his literature stands apart in the modern world. If you are to enjoy it you must be prepared to be satisfied with the action, the ideal of honour, the enthusiastic piety which he can give. And to enjoy them you must read them in his own Castilian. All translation is as the back of the tapestry57, but no original loses more than does the Spaniard when he is divested58 of his own language and lets slip the merits of its terse20 gravity, its varied59 picturesque60 force.
[375]
In Spain, then, the Renaissance met something on which it could secure no hold, something in a sense barbarous, not quite European, and recalcitrant61 to all classic influences. In England it met a strong national genius, but not one which was entirely62 alien. Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe showed the influence of the Renaissance, not as mere imitators of forms, but as Englishmen, and yet fully63. In Shakespeare it was included with much more. Its love of beauty and its sense of form were never better expressed than in the lyrics64. The difference between the two nations is profound. The Spaniard either copied the mere form, or produced what one feels would have come as a natural growth from the Middle Ages, the Libro de Caballerías, the Novela de Pícaros, the Auto65 Sacramental, and even the comedia, in which no trace of the classic influence is to be seen. A drama which is in no sense classic might have developed from the morality and the farce66. As much might be said of the form of the English drama. Seneca might have been forgotten, and Tansillo might never have written (without Seneca he never would have written as he did), as far as the construction of the English play is concerned. But then much of the Renaissance spirit did pass into Elizabethan literature. We could not deduct27 what it shared with Italy without fatal loss. The genius of Spenser could perhaps have dispensed67 with a teacher, but as a matter of fact it did not. With no model save Chaucer he would yet have been one of the greatest of poets. He would not have been exactly the poet he was[376] without Ariosto, Tasso, and Du Bellay. Shakespeare had, of all sons of Adam, the least need to borrow, and yet without the influence of the Renaissance we should not have the Sonnets68, Venus and Adonis, The Rape44 of Lucrece, or many passages in the plays. The English genius, in fact, accepted and absorbed the Renaissance without losing its native independence. All the manifestations69 of its freedom were not equally admirable. The wild incoherence of the early dramatists is not good in itself. When we see it at its worst, we are half tempted70 to wish that Greene and Marlowe had been more subservient71. Yet it was good in so far as it was a striving after an ideal both national and good. It was the necessary preparation for Shakespeare and the great things of the Elizabethan drama. If the time was less mighty72 in prose than in verse, yet the germs of all that was to come were in Hooker. He had the secret of lucid arrangement, the art of dealing73 with the greatest questions in his own tongue, and in a form at once unaffected, instantly intelligible74 to the average thoughtful man, and yet eloquent75 where the occasion required him to rise above the usual level of speech.
The natural aptitude76 of the French for discipline in literature, and their tendency to form schools, to set up a doctrine77, and to reject all that is not compatible with it, have never been more strongly shown than during the Later Renaissance. Other influences were at work. It would be very rash to say that classic or Italian models had a visible influence on Carloix’s memoirs78 of Vielleville, or the commentaries of Monluc, or even[377] the vast unnamed, or misnamed, compilation79 of Brant?me. Yet the Renaissance did, on the whole, dominate France, though it could not eliminate, or suppress, what was essentially French. Its intense interest in the life and the character of man was never better shown than by Montaigne. In poetry the attempt to adapt the classic and Italian models to French use swept all before it. Nowhere was the French disposition80 to find its freedom in the service of a classic model more clearly seen than in the drama of the Pléiade. It is true that Jodelle, Garnier, Belleau, Grévin, and the others may be said to have failed. They did not produce any dramatic literature which has much more than an interest of curiosity. Yet the later history of the French stage proves that they were making their efforts on lines congenial to their nation. The dramatists of the Augustan age did no more than work in the same spirit, and to the same ends as their forgotten predecessors81, with altered—and but slightly altered—means.
A comparison between the three literatures will go far to explain their respective fates. For the Spanish there could not well be any future. A strong national character, unchanging, and so close in the fibre that it never really admits a foreign influence, could not well do more than express itself once. The time came when it had said its say—and nothing then remained except, first mere juggling82 with words, and then silence—Góngorism and Decadence. In England and in France there was the hope, and even the assurance, of far more to come. Though the Spanish story has[378] been carried beyond the dates allowed for France and England, there is no unfairness in this sentence. In 1616 Lope had still much of his best work to do. Quevedo, Calderon, and Góngora were to come; but the first and second brought nothing, or at least very little, absolutely new, and the third brought destruction. Lope was only to do what he had done already. When Shakespeare died in England and Mathurin Regnier in France, a long succession was to follow them. Englishmen and Frenchmen had learnt their lesson from the Renaissance, and were to use their knowledge.
The End
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renaissance
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| n.复活，复兴，文艺复兴 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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decadence
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| n.衰落，颓废 | |
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exhaustion
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| n.耗尽枯竭，疲惫，筋疲力尽，竭尽，详尽无遗的论述 | |
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legitimate
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| adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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conformity
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| n.一致，遵从，顺从 | |
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destined
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| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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anvil
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| n.铁钻 | |
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strife
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| n.争吵，冲突，倾轧，竞争 | |
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stimulate
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| vt.刺激，使兴奋；激励，使…振奋 | |
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prevailing
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| adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的 | |
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fidelity
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| n.忠诚，忠实；精确 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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superfluous
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| adj.过多的，过剩的，多余的 | |
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terser
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| （说话、文笔等）精练的，简洁的，扼要的( terse的比较级 ) | |
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terse
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| adj.(说话，文笔)精炼的，简明的 | |
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lucid
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| adj.明白易懂的，清晰的，头脑清楚的 | |
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legitimately
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| ad.合法地；正当地，合理地 | |
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profusely
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| ad.abundantly | |
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dexterity
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| n.(手的)灵巧，灵活 | |
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salute
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| vi.行礼，致意，问候，放礼炮；vt.向…致意，迎接，赞扬；n.招呼，敬礼，礼炮 | |
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deducted
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| v.扣除，减去( deduct的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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deduct
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| vt.扣除，减去 | |
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skilful
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| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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sage
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| n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的 | |
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dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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absurdity
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| n.荒谬，愚蠢；谬论 | |
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professing
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| 声称( profess的现在分词 )； 宣称； 公开表明； 信奉 | |
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permissible
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| adj.可允许的，许可的 | |
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vehement
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| adj.感情强烈的；热烈的；(人)有强烈感情的 | |
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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inquisitive
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| adj.求知欲强的，好奇的，好寻根究底的 | |
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melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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piety
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| n.虔诚，虔敬 | |
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patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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Ford
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| n.浅滩，水浅可涉处；v.涉水，涉过 | |
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smack
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| vt.拍，打，掴；咂嘴；vi.含有…意味；n.拍 | |
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rape
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| n.抢夺，掠夺，强奸；vt.掠夺，抢夺，强奸 | |
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pungent
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| adj.（气味、味道）刺激性的，辛辣的；尖锐的 | |
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scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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rendering
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| n.表现，描写 | |
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whit
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| n.一点，丝毫 | |
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frigid
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| adj.寒冷的，凛冽的；冷淡的；拘禁的 | |
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rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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eminence
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| n.卓越，显赫；高地，高处；名家 | |
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rascally
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| adj. 无赖的，恶棍的 adv. 无赖地，卑鄙地 | |
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machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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tapestry
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| n.挂毯，丰富多采的画面 | |
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divested
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| v.剥夺( divest的过去式和过去分词 )；脱去（衣服）；2。从…取去…；1。（给某人）脱衣服 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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recalcitrant
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| adj.倔强的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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lyrics
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| n.歌词 | |
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auto
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| n.(=automobile)(口语)汽车 | |
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farce
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| n.闹剧，笑剧，滑稽戏；胡闹 | |
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dispensed
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| v.分配( dispense的过去式和过去分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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sonnets
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| n.十四行诗( sonnet的名词复数 ) | |
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manifestations
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| n.表示，显示（manifestation的复数形式） | |
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tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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subservient
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| adj.卑屈的，阿谀的 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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intelligible
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| adj.可理解的，明白易懂的，清楚的 | |
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eloquent
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| adj.雄辩的，口才流利的；明白显示出的 | |
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aptitude
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| n.(学习方面的)才能，资质，天资 | |
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doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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memoirs
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| n.回忆录；回忆录传( mem,自oir的名词复数) | |
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79
compilation
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| n.编译，编辑 | |
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80
disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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81
predecessors
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| n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 )；前辈；（被取代的）原有事物；前身 | |
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82
juggling
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| n. 欺骗, 杂耍(=jugglery) adj. 欺骗的, 欺诈的 动词juggle的现在分词 | |
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