Pablo de Segovia, the Spanish Sharper. Francisco de Quevedo
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the following brief details of so much of his life and work as he wishes to make public:—
20 Fevrier, 1892.
...Je suis né le 5 Mars, 1851, des l’âge de 3 ans je commençais à crayonner, il parait que c’était mon seul amusement d’enfant; mon pêre me voyant des dispositions serieuses pour le dessin me fit travailler sans relâche.
Ma santé jusqu’à 7 ans était délicate; pour ce motif mes parents ont quetté la ville, pour habiter un endroit, prés de Madrid, nommé Pinto, et là tout en remettant ma santé du matin au soir je prenais des croquis d’après nature.
En 1864 j’entrais à l’école des Beaux Arts de Madrid, J’avais comme maîtres, Madrazo, Fédérico, M. de Hatt, Borglini, etc. En 1865, le 18 Juillet, j’obtonais une mention honorable notée excelente. En 1866, le 8 Juillet, même récompense; en 1867, le 16 Juin, un diplome d’honneur. C’est à cette époque que j’ai illustré “Madrid la Nuit,” écrit par Eusebio Blasco; “Les Mystéres de Rome et du Globe.” A la suite au musée de Madrid, j’ai copié quantité d’études de peinture d’après Velasquez et Gohia. En 1869 j’arrivais à Paris avec l’espoire de ne faire que de la peinture, à peine dans cette ville la guerre Franco-Allemande éclata, par cet incident je me suis trouvé accaparé par “Le Monde Illustré” et par “La Vie Moderne.” A cette même époque j’ai illustré quantité de livres, entres autres, “Les Travailleurs de la Mer,” “Année Terrible,” “Notre-Dame de Paris” et d’autres écrits par Victor Hugo; “La Mosaïque,” “Le Musée des Familles,” “Le Magasin Pitoresque,” “Le Grand Tacagno” de Quevedo, “Les Contes” d’Edgar Poe, et aussi “L’histoire de France et la Revolution” de Michelet et quantité d’autres. En 1882 je fus nommé commandant ordinaire de la Reine d’Espagne Isabelle la Catholique. Le 29 Septembre, 1889, j’ai reçu la médaille d’or à l’Exposition Universelle de Paris de 1889, et le 29 Novembre, 1889, ma décoration de Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur....
Vierge.
QUEVEDO AND HIS WORKS:
With an Essay on the Picaresque Novel.
NOT more unquestioned is Cervantes’ claim to be the first of Spanish humorists than that of Quevedo to be the second. Among his own countrymen the title, which is generally the more disputable, has been by a singular consensus of opinion assigned to Quevedo. The author of Don Quixote apart, who is with the Immortals, there is no greater name among the writers of Spain than that of the author of The Visions, of Don Pablo, of innumerable poems, pamphlets, satires, pieces of wit, and works serious, moral, sportive, and fanciful. In that Golden Age, prolific of authors, the hundred years between the birth of Cervantes and the prime of Calderon, there was no genius so fruitful in every kind of intellectual product. Poet, politician, humorist, satirist, theologian, moralist, historian, novelist—Quevedo stands out a prodigy of learning, wit, and quick and various invention, even among the crowd of gifted writers who made that period famous in letters. He has been called the Spanish Juvenal—the Spanish Ovid—the Spanish Lucian. He is something of all these, and yet is unlike any of them. He wrote lyrics with the grace, simplicity, and ease of Horace. He is as prodigal of humour as Rabelais, whom he resembles also in his unfastidiousness, his obscurity, and his extravagance. He has been likened to our English Swift, to whom he is akin in the quality of his mordant wit, and almost approaches in his anti-humanity; but he is lacking in the creative force of the author of Gulliver. Not unlike Swift was Quevedo in fortune as in genius, for it was disappointed ambition which wore out his heart and drove him to satire, to visions, and assaults on human folly and vice.
From his earliest years Quevedo was marked for distinction. When scarcely more than twenty-three he corresponded with the great scholars of Germany and the Low Countries, the great Lipsius hailing him as magnum decus Hispanorum, and in complimentary epistles urging him to undertake the vindication of Homer. If we may believe the contemporary records, Quevedo had by this time acquired all profane knowledge and human learning. He was versed in all the languages, even Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. He began to write early, and continued to write during the whole of his busy and turbulent life, with an industry, energy, and fecundity which made him the wonder of his age. The catalogue of his works embraces every department of authorship, and there appears to be no species of composition, from an exhortation to a holy life to the more than ribald canzonet, which he did not attempt. The gayest themes were as much to his mind as the gravest studies, and from Paul the Apostle he could pass at will to Paul the Sharper, with no apparent effort of wit or strain of conscience. Some of his works have been lost, but enough remains to testify to the astonishing vigour, exuberance, and versatility of his genius. There are religious treatises and biographies of saints, a Defence of the Faith, and a homily on the sacred cradle and sepulchre. There is a metrical translation of Epictetus, and another of (the false) Phocylides. There is a life of Marcus Brutus. There are letters to kings and statesmen, and tracts on the currency. There are satires in verse and lampoons in prose. There are poems, odes, ballads, and sonnets innumerable. Even the drama he did not leave unattempted, though his comedies have perished, together with many other works, including Considerations on the New Testament and a Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul. Finally, there is the picaresque novel here presented to the English reader under the title of Don Pablo de Segovia, or Paul the Sharper.
Francisco de Quevedo, or, to give him his full title, Francisco de Gomez de Quevedo Villegas, was born at Madrid on the 26th of September, 1580. He was thus thirty-three years younger than Cervantes, eighteen years younger than Lope de Vega, and some twenty years older than Calderon. His father had been a servant to the Emperor Charles V., and his mother was a lady in attendance upon Philip II.’s fourth wife, Anne of Austria. The family of Quevedo drew its source from the mountains of Old Castile, near Burgos. This was a circumstance of which every good Spaniard of the age was proud, as proving that he was descended from the pure Gothic race, who maintained their hold of the soil even after the Moorish invasion, and therefore was an old Christian, of blood unmixed with Moor or Jew. From his parents’ position the young Francisco must have been early trained in the life of the Court and brought into contact with those who dispensed the power and patronage of the king. He was educated at the University of Alcalá de Henares, then in the height of its fame. At fifteen he graduated in theology, and soon afterwards acquired great distinction for his attainments in the civil and common law and in the learned languages. That he was early distinguished as a scholar is proved by his correspondence with Lipsius and other foreign men of learning, by whom he was addressed as an equal. For some time, however, Quevedo seems to have lived the usual life of a gay cavalier of the Court, indulging, as he confesses himself, in the pleasures of his age and the time, and taking part in those adventures which formed matter for his lighter works. At twenty-three he was already a poet distinguished enough to be included in Espinosa’s Flores de Poetas Ilustres (1603). A few years afterwards was published the first collection of his prose satires, which are better known to the world as Visions—the Zahurdas de Pluton (Pigstyes of Pluto), with a dedication to the Conde de Lemos—a Mæcenas of the period, to whom afterwards Cervantes dedicated the second part of his Don Quixote. The pieces which are known as Visions are among the most characteristic and original, as they have been the most popular, of all Quevedo’s works. They bear such titles as El Sueño de las Calaveras (The Dream of Skulls); El Alguacil Alguacilado (The Catchpole Caught); Visita de los Chistes (Visitation of the Jests); El Mundo por de Dentro (The World Inside Out); El Entremetido, la Dueña, y el Soplon (The Intermeddler, the Duenna, and the Informer); and (the authorship of which is more doubtful) La Casa de los Locos de Amor (The House of the Love-Madmen). These, which were published at various times, are satires of a kind then new to the world, or known only in the works of Lucian; audacious and somewhat extravagant of conception; abounding