Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter V the spanish novel: its origin, tendency, and influence In previous chapters I have led the reader gradually along two different paths to the point where they converge. First the Oriental apologue, or short story to enforce a moral lesson, was traced onward to where (and especially under the influence of Boccaccio and the Italian renaissance) the anecdote was told for its own sake, and the moral suppressed or placed in the background; and secondly the kingly chronicle, which, when we left it, had in Spain degenerated through bombastic narratives of heroic adventures into the unreal and over-inflated romance of chivalry. Each successive romance of this sort, if it was to claim attention, had to make its giants bigger and more terrible than ever before, its sorceries more diabolical, its knights more altruistically heroic, and its afflicted maidens more ineffably beautiful. But for the absence of humour displayed in these stories, they must have burst with laughing at their own absurdity. And yet the Spaniards were in their very nature more apt to satirise by ridicule than any other people in Europe. 122 The only way to explain their having for a whole century overlooked the vulnerability of the romances of chivalry to the darts of their malicious wit, is to acknowledge that the gust of spiritual self-sacrificing exaltation that swept over the nation in the sixteenth century swamped for the time even their keen sense of humour. But the racial trait could not be hidden entirely for very long, and was to assert itself, at first tentatively and rarely, and later boldly, until out of the amusing short anecdote on the one hand, and the top-heavy chivalric romance of wandering knightserrant on the other, there was to spring a new form
