50 CHAPTER 2 THE HISPANIC BACKGROUND
peasants, artisans, and burghers. The noble con-
tempt for labor infected all classes. The number of
vagabonds steadily grew; meanwhile, agriculture
lacked enough laborers to till the land.
LITERARY AND ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENTS
Spreading into all areas of life, the decadencia (deca-
dence) inspired moods of pessimism, fatalism, and
cynicism. Spanish society presented extreme con-
trasts: great wealth and abject poverty, displays of
fanatical piety and scandalous manners, desper-
ate efforts to revive the imperial glories of a past
age by kings who sometimes lacked the cash to
pay their servants and supply the royal table. The
paradoxes of Spanish life, the contrast between the
ideal and the real, stimulated the literary imagina-
tion. In this time, so sterile in other respects, Spain
enjoyed a Golden Age of letters. As early as 1554,
the unknown author of Lazarillo de Tormes, fi rst of
the picaresque novels, captured the seamy reality
of a world teeming with rogues and vagabonds. Its
hero relates his adventures under a succession of
masters—a blind beggar, a stingy priest, a hun-
gry hidalgo; he fi nally attains his highest hope, a
sinecure as a town crier, secured for him by a priest
whose mistress he had married.
The picaresque genre reached its climax in the
Guzmán de Alfarache of Mateo de Alemán (1599),
with its note of somber pessimism: “All steal, all lie.... You will not fi nd a soul who is man unto man.”
The cleavage in the Castilian soul, the confl ict be-
tween the ideal and the real, acquired a universal
meaning and symbolism in the Don Quijote (1605)
of Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra. The corrosive
satires of Francisco Quevedo (1580–1645) gave
voice to the despair of many seventeenth-century
intellectuals. “There are many things here,” wrote
Diego Velázquez’s portrait Las Meniñas (The Maids of Honor) is a culminating work of
the Spanish seventeenth-century school of painting. Note the utter detachment with
which Velázquez treats the members of the Royal Family, the ladies-in-waiting, and
the dwarf, making no eff ort to enhance the dignity or beauty of one at the expense of
the other. [Las Meniñas (detail) by Diego Rodríguez Velázquez. Museo del Prado, Madrid/Alinari/Art
Resource, New York]