This man looks out upon his world, with eyes of such a life, and decides, after twenty adverse years, again to write a book. He has read only the decadent offspring of chivalry’s literary flower. He does not know the original _chansons de geste_ nor the native water-clear _romans d’aventure_. The best he knows is the fifteenth century Romancero; is Ariosto and the ornate Italians; is the Castilian version of Amadís de Gaula which has come to Spain, over-blown, by Portugal out of Brittany and Wales. These are relatively pure beside their spawn of dull sons performing ridiculous wonders in a world of wooden magic. But the vogue of these knights is past. The books of _caballería_, which tempted the young Santa Teresa to go forth seeking martyrdom and adventure, have already ebbed. On the other hand, _La Celestina_ which appeared along with the first Castilian Amadis has thriven and inspired the pícaro who lives still in Spanish and in European letters. Vivid in Cervantes’ mind is the organic music--the first great Castilian prose--in which Fernando de Rojas sang the sordid fate of his Celestina. As with Amadis, this book has medieval roots. But unlike Amadis, it has classic form, and independent greatness. Amadis is a fatty degeneration of Roland, Parzival, Lancelot. La Celestina is a transfigurement of the comedy of Terence and Plautus, as well as of the romance of Aucassin and Nicolette, of Tristan and Isolt, of Romeo and Juliet. It is ironic, realistic, ruthlessly tragic as the romance was never. Chivalry expressed a childlike age which projected its own maturity into a Church and a Heaven. The romance at best was an adolescent form. As the Church dimmed and Heaven grew less sure and man began again to build upon himself, it was transfigured into the modern novel. _La Celestina_ is the first towering adult of the childlike race of the fabliaux and romances. Irony and a profound acceptance of natural justice--such are the transforming elements of _La Celestina_. Love’s medieval idyll is rotted and destroyed by the pragmatic world to which it has appealed for fulfillment. Loveliness is killed by lust. The whole infantile fantasy of the Middle Age is confronted with the fate of its own will: a fate of evil and of sordid passion. And Justice is implicit in the nature of events. This meeting of love and lust, of vice and beauty, this hot-and-cold inmixture of vision and of despair gives to the book of Rojas a dimension that relates it to Dostoievski and to Balzac. The pícaro novels of Spain’s sixteenth century continue the novel of Rojas and announce _Don Quixote_. Counterpoint of irony and naturalistic justice becomes the theme, variantly construed, of _Lazarillo de Tormes_, of Quevedo’s _El Buscón_, of Delicado’s _Lozana Andaluza_, of the _Guzmán_ of Mateo Alemán.