“Celestina” gives some inkling of the picaresque novels to come, of which the flower and cream is “Lazarillo de Tormes” (1554 is the date of our earliest edition), to be followed by “Guzmán de Alfarache,” “El Buscón,” and a long posterity in Spain, France, and England. This is no tale of true love like the “Celestina,” but of gnawing hunger and of the ingenious efforts of Lazarillo to procure himself bread. His successive masters, the blind beggar, the miserly priest, the penniless Castilian gentleman, the rascally seller of Papal bulls, are sketched in the autobiography of their servant Lazarillo, with the keen eye of famine, and are unforgettable, as is Lazarillo himself, whose name has become the common name in Spain for a blind man’s guide, just as Victor Hugo’s immortal Gavroche gave his name to the Paris _gamin_. It is, in fact, a masterpiece of seven short chapters, lively in every sentence, of a direct and biting humour, perhaps the most graphic story ever penned. A few terse phrases throw a scene or a character into amazingly high relief, and the picture is as fresh and living to-day as when it first appeared three and a half centuries ago. No other country and no other language could have produced a piece of realism so cynically bare, so completely charming. It has the caustic pithiness of Spanish proverbs, the bitter flavour of harsh Iberia. It belongs to life rather than to literature, but life portrayed with the restraint and force of a consummate art. It was early translated into English as “The Marvelus Dedes and the Lyf of Lazaro de Tormes.” The authorship of “Lazarillo” has been ascribed to this man and to that, and there has been great argument about it and about, without the least degree of certainty. The name of Hurtado de Mendoza is frequently to be found upon the title-page. Born in 1503, he was alive when the novel appeared; he was an author; he could write in trenchant, nay, in scurrilous style, as his letters concerning the Pope show--he calls him an old rascal, _vellaco_; but these are hardly conclusive proofs. Whoever the author, the work still reigns supreme, though many may have thought with Ginés de Pasamonte in “Don Quixote” that it would be an evil moment for “Lazarillo” when their memoirs appeared. Half a century after “Lazarillo” the same faithfulness to picaresque reality, with a broader outlook and a more universal sympathy, is to be found in the “Novelas Ejemplares” of Cervantes. Rinconete and Cortadillo, the eponymous heroes of one of his best-known stories, are closely related to Lazarillo; they are in fact the Lazarillos of the South of Spain. On the realism of “Don Quixote” it is unnecessary to lay stress. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, referring to its immediate triumph, says: “To contemporary readers the charm of ‘Don Quixote’ lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite sympathy and its persuasive humour. There was no question, then, as to whether ‘Don Quixote’ was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich of Quintanar; the goatherds seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering; the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together like beads on an iron chain; all these are observed and presented with masterly precision of detail.”[94]