Chapter XL
CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THE SECOND PERIOD.--DECAY OF THE NATIONAL CHARACTER.--DIMINISHED NUMBER OF WRITERS AND DIMINISHED INTEREST OF THE PUBLIC IN LETTERS.--RUIN OF THE STATE BEGUN IN THE TIME OF PHILIP THE SECOND, AND CONTINUED IN THE REIGNS OF PHILIP THE THIRD, PHILIP THE FOURTH, AND CHARLES THE SECOND.--EFFECTS OF THIS CONDITION OF THINGS ON LITERARY CULTURE.--FALSE INFLUENCES OF RELIGION.--FALSE INFLUENCES OF LOYALTY.
It is impossible to study with care the Spanish literature of the seventeenth century, and not feel that we are in the presence of a general decay of the national character. At every step, as we advance, the number of writers that surround us is diminished. In what crowds they were gathered together during the reigns of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, we may see in the long lists of poets given by Cervantes in his “Galatea” and his “Journey to Parnassus,” and by Lope de Vega in his “Laurel of Apollo.” But in the reign of Philip the Fourth, though the theatre, from accidental circumstances, flourished more than ever, the other departments showed symptoms of decline; and in the reign of Charles the Second, wherever we turn, the number of authors sinks away, till it is obvious that some great change must take place, or elegant literature in Spain will speedily become extinct.
The public interest, too, in the few writers that remained, was gone. At least, that general, national interest, which alone can sustain the life it alone can give to the literature of any country, was no longer there; and all the favor, that Spanish poets and men of letters enjoyed at the end of the century, came from the court and the superficial fashion of the time, which patronized the affected style of those followers of Góngora, whose bad taste seemed to go on increasing in extravagance, as talent among them grew more rare.
Every thing, meanwhile, announced, that the great foundations of the national character were giving way on all sides; and that the failing literature of the country was only one of the phases and signs of the coming overthrow of its institutions. The decay which was so visible on the surface of things had, however, long mined unseen beneath what had been thought a period of extraordinary security and glory. Charles the Fifth, while, on the one side, by the war of the Comuneros, he had crushed nearly all of political liberty that Cardinal Ximenes had left in the old constitutions of Castile, had given, on the other, by his magnificent foreign conquests, a false direction to the character of his people at home;--both tending alike to waste away that vigor and independence which the Moorish wars had nourished in the hearts of the nation, and which had so long constituted its real strength. Philip the Second had been less successful than his father in his great labors to advance the permanent prosperity of the monarchy. He had, indeed, added Portugal and the Philippine Islands to his empire, which now comprehended above a hundred millions of human beings, and seemed to threaten the interests of all the rest of Europe. But such doubtful benefits were heavily overbalanced by the religious rebellion of the Netherlands, the fatal source of unnumbered mischiefs; by the exhausting wars with Elizabeth of England and Henry the Fourth of France; by the contempt for labor, that followed the extraordinary prevalence of a spirit of military adventure, and broke down the industry of the country; by the vast increase of the ecclesiastical institutions, which created a ruinous amount of pensioned idleness; and by the wasteful luxury brought in with the gold of America, which seemed to corrupt whatever it touched; so that, when that wary prince died, he left an impoverished people, whose energies he had overstrained and impaired by his despotism, and whose character he had warped and misdirected by his unrelenting and unscrupulous bigotry.[262]
[262] There is a remarkable paper, in the sixth volume of the “Seminario Erudito,” on the causes of the decline of Spain;--remarkable because, though written in the reign of Philip IV., by Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, an ecclesiastic of rank, whom Charles III. afterwards asked to have canonized, it yet attributes the origin of the prostration under which Spain suffered in his time mainly to the war with the Netherlands.
His successor, feeble-minded and superstitious, was neither able to repair the results of such mischiefs, nor to contend with the difficulties they entailed upon his country. The power of the clergy, grown enormous by the favor of Philip the Second and the consolidated influence of the Jesuits, continued to gain strength, as it were of itself; and, under the direct persuasions of this mighty hierarchy, nearly six hundred thousand descendants of Moors--who, though preserving, as their fathers had done for a century, the external appearances of Christianity, were yet suspected of being Mohammedans at heart--were now, by a great crime of state, expelled from the land of their birth; a crime followed by injuries to the agriculture and wealth of the South of Spain, and indeed of the whole country, from which they have never recovered.[263]
[263] There is a great discrepancy in the accounts of the number of Moriscos expelled from Spain, 1609-11,--several making it a million, and one reducing it so low as a hundred and sixty thousand. But, whatever may have been the number expelled, all accounts agree as to the disastrous effects produced on a population already decaying by the loss of so many persons, who had long been the most skilful manufacturers and agriculturists in the kingdom; effects to which the many despoblados noted on our recent maps of Spain still bear melancholy testimony. (Clemencin, Notes to Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 54.) In stating six hundred thousand to have been the number driven out, I have taken the reckoning of Circourt, (Tom. III. p. 103,) which seems made with care.
These unhappy persons had among them a good deal of Castilian culture, whose traces still remain in manuscripts, which, like that of the old poem of Joseph, already described, (Period I. chap. 5,) are composed in Spanish, but are written throughout in the Arabic character. Of parts of two such manuscripts I possess copies, through the kindness of Don Pascual de Gayangos. The first is a poem written in 1603, and entitled, “Discourse on the Light, and Descent, and Lineage of our Chief and Blessed Prophet, Mohammed Çalam, composed and compiled by his Servant, who most needs his Pardon, Mohammed Rabadan, a Native of Rueda, on the River Xalon.” It is divided into eight Histories, of which I possess the fourth, entitled, “History of Hexim,” who was one of the ancestors of the Prophet. It contains above two thousand lines in the short, Castilian ballad measure, and is remarkably Arabic and Mohammedan in its general tone, though with occasional allusions to the Greek mythology. It is, too, not without poetical merit, as in the following lines, which open the second canto, and describe the auspicious morning of Hexim’s marriage.
Al tiempo que el alba bella Enseña su rostro alegre, Y, rompiendo las tinieblas, Su clara luz resplandece, Dando las nuevas que el dia En su seguimiento viene, Y el roxo Apolo tras ella, Dexando los campos verdes; Quando las aves nocturnas Se recogen en su albergue, Y las que la luz gobiernan El delgado viento hienden; Quando los hombres despiertan Y el pesado sueño vencen, Para dar á su Hacedor El debito que le deben;-- En este tiempo la compañia Del hijo de Abdulmunef Se levantan y aperciben Al casamiento solemne.
In the preface to the whole poem, the author says Allah alone knows how much labor it has cost him to collect the manuscripts necessary for his task, “scattered,” he adds, “as they were, all over Spain, and lost and hidden through fear of the Inquisition.”
The other work to which I refer is chiefly in prose, and is anonymous. Its author says he was driven from Spain in 1610, and was landed at Tunis with above three thousand of his unhappy countrymen, who, through the long abode of their race in a Christian land and under the fierce persecutions of the Inquisition, had not only so lost a knowledge of the rites and ceremonies of their religion, that it was necessary to indoctrinate them like children, but had so lost all proper knowledge of the Arabic, that it was necessary to do it through the Castilian. The Bashaw of Tunis, therefore, sent for the author, and commanded him to write a book in Castilian, for the instruction of these singular neophytes. He did so, and produced the present work, which he called “Mumin,” or the Believer in Allah; a word which he uses to signify a city populous and fortified, which is attacked by the Vices and defended by the Virtues of the Mohammedan religion, and in which one of the personages relates a history of his own life, adventures, and sufferings; all so given as to instruct, sometimes by direct precept and sometimes by example, the newly arrived Moriscos in their duties and faith. It is, of course, partly allegorical and romantic. Its air is often Arabic, and so is its style occasionally; but some of its scenes are between lovers at grated windows, as if in a Castilian city, and it is interspersed with Castilian poems by Montemayor, Góngora, and the Argensolas, with, perhaps, some by the author himself, who seems to have been a man of cultivation and of a gentle spirit. Of this manuscript I have eighty pages,--about a fifth of the whole.
Further notices on the Morisco-Spanish literature may be found in an account by the Orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy, of two manuscripts in France, like those just described (Ochoa, Manuscritos Españoles, 1844, pp. 6-21); but a more ample and satisfactory discussion of it occurs in a learned article in the British and Foreign Review, January, 1839.
It should be remembered that Morisco was substituted for Moro, after the overthrow of the Moorish power in Spain, as an expression of the contempt with which the Christian Spaniards have never ceased to pursue their old conquerors and hated enemies, from the time of the fall of Granada to the present day.
Encouraged by the expulsion of the Jews, in 1492, and by that of the Moors, in 1609-11, Don Sancho de Moncada, a professor in the University of Toledo, addressed Philip III., in a discourse published in 1619, urging that monarch to drive out the Gypsies. But he failed. His discourse is in Hidalgo, “Romances de Germania,” (Madrid, 1779, 8vo,) and is translated by Borrow, in his remarkable work on the Gypsies (London, 1841, 8vo, Vol. I. chap. xi.). Salazar de Mendoza, at the end of his “Dignidades de Castilla,” published in 1618, says he had himself prepared a memorial to the same effect, for driving out the Gypsies; and he adds, in a true Castilian spirit, that “it is being over-nice to tolerate such a pernicious and perverse race.”
The easy, gay selfishness of Philip the Fourth, and the open profligacy of his ministers, gave increased activity to the causes that were hastening on the threatened ruin. Catalonia broke out into rebellion; Jamaica was seized by the English; Roussillon was ceded to France; Portugal, which had never been heartily incorporated into the monarchy, resumed her ancient place among the independent nations of the earth;--every thing, in short, showed how the external relations of the state were disturbed and endangered. Its internal condition, meanwhile, was no less shaken. The coin, notwithstanding the wise warnings of Mariana, had been adulterated anew; the taxes had been shamelessly increased, while the interest on the ever-growing public debt was dishonestly diminished. Men, everywhere, began to be alarmed at the signs of the times. The timid took shelter in celibacy and the institutions of the Church. The bolder emigrated. At last, the universal pressure began to be visible in the state of the population. Whole towns and villages were deserted. Seville, the ancient capital of the monarchy, lost three quarters of its inhabitants; Toledo one third; Segovia, Medina del Campo, and others of the large cities, fell off still more, not only in their numbers and opulence, but in whatever goes to make up the great aggregate of civilization. The whole land, in fact, was impoverished, and was falling into a premature decay.
The necessary results of such a deplorable state of things are yet more apparent in the next reign,--the unhappy reign of Charles the Second,--which began with the troubles incident to a long minority, and ended with a failure in the regular line of succession, and a contest for the throne. It was a dreary period, with marks of dilapidation and ruin on all sides. Beginning at the southern borders of France, and following the coast by Barcelona and Gibraltar round to Cadiz, not one of the great fortresses, which were the keys of the kingdom, was in a state to defend itself against the most moderate force by which it might be assailed. On the Atlantic, the old arsenals, from which the Armada had gone forth, were empty; and the art of ship-building had been so long neglected, that it was almost, or quite lost.[264] And, in the capital and at court, the revenues of the country, which had long been exhausted and anticipated, were at last unable to provide for the common wants of the government, and sometimes even failed to furnish forth the royal table with its accustomed propriety; so that the envoy of Austria expressed his regret at having accepted the place of ambassador at a court where he was compelled to witness a misery so discreditable.[265]
[264] Comentario de la Guerra de España, por el Marques de San Phelipe, Genova, s. a., 4to, Tom. I. Lib. II., año 1701.
[265] Tapia, Hist. de la Civilizacion Española, Madrid, 1840, 12mo, Tom. III. p. 167.
It was a new lesson to the world in the vicissitudes of empire. No country in Christendom had, from such a height of power as that which Spain occupied in the time of Charles the Fifth, fallen into such an abyss of degradation as that in which every proud Spaniard felt Spain to be sunk, when the last of the great House of Austria approached the grave, believing himself to be under the influence of sorcery, and seeking relief by exorcisms which would have disgraced the credulity of the Middle Ages;--all, too, at the time when France was jubilant with the victories of Condé, and England preparing for the age of Marlborough.[266]
[266] The details--disgusting enough--are given by L. F. Moratin, in the notes to his edition of the “Auto da Fé de Logroño, del Año 1610,” a work originally published for general edification, by one of the persons concerned in the auto itself, and certified to be true by others; but reprinted (Cadiz, 1812, 12mo) by Moratin, the comic poet, to show the ignorance and brutality of all who had a hand in it. There is a play on the subject by Gil y Zarate, 1837; but it does not respect the truth of history.
In any country, such a decay in the national character and power would be accompanied by a corresponding, if not an equal, decay in its literature; but in Spain, where both had always been so intimately connected, and where both had rested, in such a remarkable degree, on the same foundations, the wise who looked on from a distance could not fail to anticipate a rapid and disastrous decline of all that was intellectual and elegant. And so, in fact, it proved. The old religion of the country,--the most prominent of all the national characteristics,--the mighty impulse which, in the days of the Moors, had done every thing but work miracles,--was now so perverted from its true character by the enormous growth of the intolerance which sprang up originally almost as a virtue, that it had become a means of oppression such as Europe had never before witnessed. Through the whole period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which we have just gone over,--from the fall of Granada to the extinction of the Austrian dynasty,--the Inquisition, as the grand exponent of the power of religion in Spain, had maintained, not only an uninterrupted authority, but, by constantly increasing its relations to the state, and lending itself more and more freely to the punishment of whatever was obnoxious to the government, had effectually broken down all that remained, from earlier days, of intellectual independence and manly freedom. But this was not done, and could not be done, without the assent of the great body of the people, or without such an active coöperation on the part of the government and the higher classes as brought degradation and ruin to all who shared in its spirit.
Unhappily, this spirit, mistaken for the religion that had sustained them through their long-protracted contest with their infidel invaders, was all but universal in Spain during this whole period. The first and the last of the House of Austria,--Charles the Fifth and the feeblest of his descendants,--if alike in nothing else, were alike in the zeal with which they sustained the Holy Office while they lived, and with which, by their testaments, they commended it to the support and veneration of their respective successors.[267] Nor did the intervening kings show less deference to its authority. The first royal act of Philip the Second, when he came from the Low Countries to assume the crown of Spain, was to celebrate an auto da fé at Valladolid.[268] When the young and gay daughter of Henry the Second of France arrived at Toledo, in 1560, that city offered an auto da fé as part of the rejoicings deemed appropriate to her wedding; and the same thing was done by Madrid, in 1632, for another French princess, when she gave birth to an heir to the crown;[269]--odious proofs of the degree to which bigotry had stifled both the dictates of an enlightened reason and the common feelings of humanity.
[267] Tapia, Hist. de la Civilizacion, Tom. III. p. 77 and p. 168. Sandoval, Hist., Tom. II. p. 657.
[268] Llorente, Hist., Tom. II., 1817, p. 239.
[269] Ibid., Tom. II. p. 385, Tom. IV. p. 3.
But in all this the people and their leaders rejoiced. When a nobleman, about to die for adherence to the Protestant faith, passed the balcony where Philip the Second sat in state, and appealed to him not to see his innocent subjects thus cruelly put to death, the monarch replied, that, if it were his own son, he would gladly carry the fagots for his execution; and the answer was received at the time, and recorded afterwards, as one worthy of the head of the mightiest empire in the world.[270] And again, in 1680, when Charles the Second was induced to signify his desire to enjoy, with his young bride, the spectacle of an auto da fé, the artisans of Madrid volunteered in a body to erect the needful amphitheatre, and labored with such enthusiasm, that they completed the vast structure in an incredibly short space of time; cheering one another at their work with devout exhortations, and declaring that, if the materials furnished them should fail, they would pull down their own houses in order to obtain what might be wanting to complete the holy task.[271]
[270] Tapia, Hist., Tom. III. p. 88.
[271] One of the most remarkable books that can be consulted, to illustrate the character and feelings of all classes of society in Spain at the end of the seventeenth century, is the “Relacion,” etc., of this “Auto General” of 1680, published immediately afterwards at Madrid, by Joseph del Olmo, one of the persons who had been most busy in its arrangements. It is a small quarto of 308 pages, and gives, as if describing a magnificent theatrical pageant, the details of the scene, which began at seven o’clock in the morning of June 30th, and was not over till nine o’clock of the following morning, the king and queen sitting in their box or balcony, to witness it, fourteen hours of that time. Eighty-five grandees entered themselves as especial familiares, or servants, of the Holy Office, to do honor to the occasion; and the king sent from his own hand the first faggot to the accursed pile. The whole number of victims exhibited was one hundred and twenty, of whom twenty-one were burnt alive; but it does not appear that the royal party actually witnessed this portion of the atrocities. From the whole account, however, there can be no doubt that devout Spaniards generally regarded the exhibition with favor, and most of them with a much stronger feeling. Madame d’Aulnoy (Voyage, Tom. III. p. 154) had a description of the ceremonies intended for this auto da fé given to her, as if it were to be an honor to the monarchy, by one of the Counsellors of the Inquisition; but I think she left Madrid before it occurred.
Nor had the principle of loyalty, always so prominent in the Spanish character, become less perverted and mischievous than the religious principle. It offered its sincere homage alike to the cold severity of Philip the Second, to the weak bigotry of Philip the Third, to the luxurious selfishness of Philip the Fourth, and to the miserable imbecility of Charles the Second. The waste and profligacy of such royal favorites as the Duke of Lerma and the Count Duke Olivares, which ended in national bankruptcy and disgrace, failed seriously to affect the sentiments of the people towards the person of the monarch, or to change their persuasions that their earthly sovereign was to be addressed in words and with feelings similar to those with which they approached the Majesty of Heaven.[272] The king--merely because he was the king--was looked upon substantially as he had been in the days of Saint Ferdinand and the “Partidas,” when he was accounted the direct vicegerent of Heaven, and the personal proprietor of all those portions of the globe which he had inherited with his crown.[273] The Duc de Vendôme, therefore, showed his thorough knowledge of the Spanish character, when, in the War of the Succession,--Madrid being in possession of the enemy, and every thing seeming to be lost,--he still declared, that, if the persons of the king, the queen, and the prince were but safe, he would himself answer for final success.[274] In fact, the old principle of loyalty, sunk into a submission--voluntary, it is true, and not without grace, but still an unhesitating submission--to the mere authority of the king, seemed to have become the only efficient bond of connection between the crown and its subjects, and the main resource of the state for the preservation of social order. The nation ceased to claim its most important rights, if they came in conflict with the rights claimed by the royal prerogative; so that the resistance of Aragon in the case of Perez, and that of Catalonia against the oppressive administration of the Count Duke Olivares, were easily put down by the zeal of the very descendants of the Comuneros of Castile.
[272] See the first of Doblado’s remarkable Letters, where he says, “You hear from the pulpit the duties that men owe to ‘both their Majesties’; and a foreigner is often surprised at the hopes expressed by Spaniards, that ‘his Majesty’ will be pleased to grant them life and health for some years more.” The Dict. of the Academy, 1736, verb. Magestad, illustrates this still further.
[273] Partida Segunda, Tit. XIII.
[274] Tapia, Hist., Tom. IV. p. 19.
It is this degradation of the loyalty and religion of the country, infecting as it did every part of the national character, which we have felt to be undermining the general culture of Spain during the seventeenth century; its workings being sometimes visible on the surface, and sometimes hidden by the vast and showy apparatus of despotism and superstition under which it was often concealed even from its victims. But it is a most melancholy fact in the case, that whatever of Spanish literature survived at the end of this period found its nourishment in such feelings of religion and loyalty as still sustained the forms of the monarchy,--an imperfect and unhealthy life, wasting away in an atmosphere of death. At last, as we approach the conclusion of the century, the Inquisition and the despotism seem to be everywhere present, and to have cast their blight over every thing. All the writers of the time yield to their influences, but none in a manner more painful to witness, than Calderon and Solís; the two whose names close up the period, and leave so little to hope for the future. For the “Autos” of Calderon and the “History” of Solís were undoubtedly regarded, both by their authors and by the public, as works eminently religious in their nature; and the respect, and even reverence, with which each of these great men treated the wretched and imbecile Charles the Second, were as undoubtedly accounted to them by their contemporaries for religious loyalty and patriotism. At the present day, we cannot doubt that a literature which rests in any considerable degree on such foundations must be near to its fall.[275]
[275] See the end of “El Segundo Scipion,” and that of “El Segundo Blason de Austria,” by Calderon; and the Dedication of his History to Charles II., by Solís, in which, with a slight touch of the affectations of cultismo, which Solís did not always avoid, he tells this “king of shreds and patches”: “I find, in the shadow of your Majesty, the splendor that is wanting in my own works.” In the same spirit, Lupercio de Argensola made the canonization of San Diego a sort of prophetical canonization of Philip II., in a cancion of no mean merit as a poem, but one that shocks all religious feeling, by recalling the apotheosis of the Roman emperors.
HISTORY OF SPANISH LITERATURE.
THIRD PERIOD.
THE LITERATURE THAT EXISTED IN SPAIN BETWEEN THE ACCESSION OF THE BOURBON FAMILY AND THE INVASION OF BONAPARTE; OR FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY TO THE EARLY PART OF THE NINETEENTH.
HISTORY OF SPANISH LITERATURE
THIRD PERIOD.
Chapter I
WAR OF THE SUCCESSION.--BOURBON FAMILY.--PHILIP THE FIFTH.--ACADEMY OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE: ITS DICTIONARY, ORTHOGRAPHY, GRAMMAR, AND OTHER WORKS.--ACADEMY OF BARCELONA.--ACADEMY OF HISTORY.--STATE OF LETTERS.--POETRY: MORAES, BARNUEVO, REYNOSA, ZEVALLOS, LOBO, BENEGASI, PITILLAS.
Charles the Second was gathered to his fathers on the first day of November, in the year 1700. How low he left the intellectual culture of his country, and how completely the old national literature had died out in his reign, we have already seen. But, before there could be any serious thought of a revival from this disastrous state of things, a civil war was destined to sweep over the land, and still further exhaust its resources. Austria and France, it had been long understood, would make pretensions to the throne of Spain, so soon as it should be left vacant by the extinction of the reigning dynasty; and the partisans of each of these great powers were numerous and confident of success, not only in Spain, but throughout Europe. At this moment, while standing on the verge of the grave,--and knowing that he stood there,--the last, unhappy descendant of the House of Austria, with many misgivings and a heart-felt reluctance, finally announced his preference; and, by a secret political testament, declared the Duke of Anjou, second son of the Dauphin and grandson of Louis the Fourteenth of France, to be sole heir to his throne and dominions.
The decision was not unexpected, and was, perhaps, as wise as a wiser king would have made under similar circumstances. But it was not the more likely, on either account, to be acquiesced in. Austria declared war against the new dynasty, as soon as the will of the deceased monarch was divulged; and England and Holland, outraged by the bad faith of Louis the Fourteenth, who, hardly two years before, had made an arrangement with them for a wholly different settlement of the Spanish question, soon joined her. The war, known as “the War of the Succession,” became general in its character; Spain was invaded by the allied powers; and the contest for its throne was kept up on the soil of that unfortunate country, partly by foreign troops, and partly by divisions among its own people, until 1713, when the treaty of Utrecht confirmed the claims of the Bourbon family, and gave peace to Europe, wearied with blood.
As far as Spain was concerned, the results of this war were most important. On the one hand, she lost by it nearly half of her European dominions, and fell, if not in proportion to such a loss, yet very greatly, in the scale of nations. But, on the other hand, the vast resources of her American colonies still remained untouched; her people had been roused to new energy by their exertions in defence of their homes; and their ancient loyalty had been, to an extraordinary degree, concentrated on a young and adventurous prince, who, though himself a foreigner, stood before them as their defender against foreign invasion. It seemed, therefore, as if still there were life in Spain, and as if something remained of the old national character, on which to build a new culture.[276]
[276] Lord Mahon’s excellent “History of the War of the Succession in Spain” (London, 1832, 8vo) leaves the same general impression on the mind of the reader, as to the effect of that war on the Spanish character, that is left by the contemporary accounts of it. It is, no doubt, the true one.
That Philip the Fifth should desire to restore the intellectual dignity of the country, that had so generously adopted him, was natural. But while the war lasted, it demanded all the care of his government; and when it was over, and he turned himself to the task, it was plain that, in his personal relations and dispositions, he was but imperfectly fitted for it. Notwithstanding the sincerest efforts to assimilate himself to the people he governed, he was still a foreigner, little acquainted with their condition, and unable to sympathize with their peculiar nationality. He had been educated at the court of Louis the Fourteenth; the most brilliant court in Europe, and that in which, more than in any other, letters were regarded as a part of the pageant of empire. His character was not strongly marked; and he expressed no decided love for any definite form of intellectual cultivation, though he had good taste enough to enjoy the elegance to which he had always been accustomed, and which had been an important part of his breeding. He was, in fact, a Frenchman; and never could forget,--what his grandfather had unwisely told him always to remember,--that he was such. When, therefore, he desired to encourage elegant literature, it was natural that he should first recur to the means by which he had seen it encouraged where, more than in any other country, it had been successfully fostered by royal patronage; and if, in some respects, his position was little favorable to such a use of his power, in one, at least, it was eminently fortunate; for the earlier literature of Spain had so nearly disappeared, that it could offer little resistance to any attempt that might be made to introduce new forms or to infuse a new character into the old.
At this moment, the idea of patronizing and controlling the literature of a country by academies, established under the authority of its government, and composed of the principal men of letters of the time, was generally favored;--the French Academy, founded by Cardinal Richelieu, and always the model of its class, being now at the height of its success and fame. To establish a Spanish Academy, which should have similar objects and reach similar results, was, therefore, naturally the great literary project of the reign of Philip the Fifth.[277] Probably the king himself had early entertained it. Certainly it was formally brought to his notice, in 1713, by the Marquis of Villena, a nobleman, who, amidst the cares of five successive viceroyalties, had found leisure to devote himself, not only to letters, but to some of the more severe branches of the physical and exact sciences. His first purpose seems to have been, to form an academy whose empire should extend, on all sides, to the limits of human knowledge, and whose subdivisions should be substantially made according to the system of Lord Bacon. This, however, was soon abandoned as too vast an undertaking; and it was determined to begin by confining the duties of the new association principally to “the cultivation and establishment of the purity of the Castilian language.” An Academy for this object went into operation, by virtue of a royal decree dated the 3d of November, 1714.[278]
[277] The Royal Library, now the National Library, at Madrid, which was strictly the earliest literary project of the reign of Philip V., was founded in 1711; but for several years it was an institution of little importance. El Bibliotecario y el Trovador, Madrid, 1841, folio, p. 3.
[278] “Historia de la Academia,” in the Preface to the “Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana, por la Real Academia Española,” Madrid, Tom. I. 1726, folio. Sempere y Guarinos, Biblioteca, 1785, Discurso Preliminar, and Tom. I. p. 55.
As it was modelled almost exactly after the form of the French Academy, the first project of its members was that of making a Dictionary. The work was much needed. From the time of Fernando de Herrera the language had not received large additions, but it had received some that were of value. Mendoza and Coloma had introduced a few military terms, that have since passed into common use; and both of them, with Ercilla, Urrea, and many others, had been so familiar with the Italian, as to seize some of its wealth for their own. Cervantes, however, had, perhaps, done more than any body else. That he was insensible neither to the danger of a too free intermixture of foreign words, nor to the true principles that should govern their introduction when needed, he has shown in the conversations of Don Quixote with the printers at Barcelona, and with Sancho at the Duke’s castle; but still he felt the rights of genius within him, and exercised them in this respect as boldly as he did in most others. His new compounds, his Latinisms, his restoration of old and neglected phrases, and his occasional recourse to the Italian, have all been noted; and, in nearly every instance, the words he adopted now enter into the recognized vocabulary of the language. Other writers ventured in the same direction, with less success; but still, from the glossaries added to the poems of Blasco in 1584, and of Lopez Pinciano in 1605, there can be no doubt that many words, which were then thought to need explanation, have long since become familiar, and that the old Castilian stock, during the reigns of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, was receiving additions, which ought, in some way, to be recognized as an important part of its permanent resources.[279]
[279] Garcés, Vigor y Elegancia de la Lengua Castellana, Madrid, 1791, 2 tom. 8vo, Prólogo to each volume. Mendoza used reluctantly such words as centinela, and Coloma introduced dique, etc., from his Dutch experience. Navarrete (Vida de Cervantes, pp. 163-169) and Garcés (loc. cit.) show the value of what Cervantes did, and Clemencin (ed. D. Quixote, Tom. V. pp. 99, 292, and 357) gives a list of the Latin, Italian, and other words used by Cervantes, but not always naturalized, on which, in various notes elsewhere, he seems to look with less favor than Garcés does. Quite as curious as either are the words, which Blasco (Universal Redencion, 1584) and Lopez Pinciano (El Pelayo, 1605) thought it necessary to put into vocabularies at the end of their respective poems, and to define for their readers, among which are fatal, natal, fugaz, gruta, abandonar, adular, anhelo, aplauso, arrojarse, assedio, etc.,--all now familiar Castilian.
But, on the other hand, during the seventeenth century, the old language had been much abused. From the appearance of Góngora no proper regard had been paid to the preservation of its purity or of its original characteristics, by many of the most popular authors that employed it. The Latiniparla, as Quevedo called the affectation of his time, had brought in many Latin words and many strange phrases, wholly repugnant to the genius of the Spanish. Such words and constructions, too, had enjoyed much favor; and Lope de Vega, Calderon, and the other leading spirits, who pronounced them to be affectations and refused directly to countenance them, yet occasionally yielded to the fashion of their time, in order to obtain the applause which was sure to follow.[280]
[280] It is impossible to open the works of Count Villamediana, and the other followers of Góngora, without finding proofs of their willingness to change the language of Spanish literature; but there is a small and very imperfect list of the words and phrases these innovators favored, to be found in the “Declamacion contra los Abusos de la Lengua Castellana,” by Vargas y Ponce, p. 150, which will at once illustrate their general purpose.
Both to receive the words that had been rightfully naturalized in the language, and to place a mark of disapprobation on those that were unworthy to be adopted, a Dictionary resting on authority was wanted. None such had been attempted in Spain. Indeed, during the whole of the preceding century, only one Spanish Dictionary of any kind had been produced that received, or deserved, the notice of the Academy. This was the work of Covarrubias, whose “Tesoro,” first printed in 1611, is a curious book, full of learning, and, in the etymological part, valuable, but often conceited, and rarely showing philosophical acuteness in its definitions.[281] The new Academy, therefore, could obtain little help from the labors of their predecessors, and, for such as was worth having, were obliged to go back to Lebrixa and his editors. But they were in earnest. They labored diligently, and between 1726 and 1739 produced their grand work, in six folio volumes. On the whole, it did them honor. No doubt, it shows, in several parts, a want of mature consideration and good judgment. Many words were omitted, that should have been inserted; many were inserted, which were afterwards stricken out; and many were given on unsatisfactory authorities. But its definitions are generally good; its etymologies--though this part of the work was little regarded by its authors--are respectable; and its citations are ample and pertinent. In fact, all that had been done for the language, in the way of dictionaries, since its origin, was not equal to what was now done in this single work.
[281] There is an edition of the Tesoro of Covarrubias, by Benito Remigio Noydens, (Madrid, 1674, folio,) which is better and ampler than the original work.
But the Academicians were not slow to perceive, that a Dictionary so large could exercise little popular influence. They began, therefore, soon afterwards, to prepare an abridgment, in a single folio volume, for more general use, and published the first edition of it in 1780. The project was judicious, and its execution skilful. It omitted the discussions, citations, and formal etymologies of the larger work; but it established a better vocabulary, and improved many of the old definitions. It had, therefore, from its first appearance, a decided authority; and, by the persevering labors of the Academy, has continued, in its successive editions, to be the proper standard of the language,--labors which, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, have been always heavy, and sometimes disagreeable, from the constant tendency of even the better writers, like Melendez and his school, to fall into Gallicisms, which the increasing intercourse with France had rendered fashionable in the society of their time.
Another difficulty, however, soon presented itself to the Academy, quite as serious as the size of their Dictionary. It was that of the orthography they had adopted. The spelling of the Castilian--partly, perhaps, from the very various elements of which it was composed, and partly from the popular character of its literature--had always been more unsettled than that of the other modern languages. Lebrixa, the great scholar of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, first attempted to reduce it to order, and the simplicity of his system, which appeared in 1517, seemed at first likely to secure general favor and acceptance. But thirty treatises, that at different times followed, had--with the exception of the acute and pleasant one printed by Aleman when he was in Mexico, in 1609--served rather to unsettle and confuse the whole matter, than to determine any thing in relation to it.[282]
[282] The “Ortografía de la Lengua Castellana,” (Mexico, 1609, 4to, ff. 83) is a pleasant and important treatise, which, as the novelist intimates, he began to write in Castile and finished in Mexico. It proposes to reverse the letter ↄ in order to express the soft ch as in mucho, to be printed muↄo; uses two forms of the letter r; writes the conjunction y always i, as Salvá now insists it should be; and claims j, ll, and ñ to be separate letters, as they have long been admitted to be.
In speaking of Aleman, I am reminded of his “San Antonio de Padua,” printed in 12mo, at Valencia, in 1607, ff. 309. It belongs to the same class of books with the “San Patricio” of Montalvan, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 298,) but is more elaborate and more devout. The number of the Saint’s miracles that it records is very great. Whether he invented any of them for the occasion, I do not know; but they sometimes read as much like novelas as some of his stories in the “Guzman” do, and are always written in the same idiomatic and unadulterated Castilian. It is introduced by a cancion in honor of it by Lope de Vega; but I cannot find that it was ever reprinted;--why, it is difficult to say, for it is an uncommonly attractive book of its class.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the first attempt of the Academy, made in the form of a short discourse, prefixed to its larger Dictionary, produced little effect. A separate work, which appeared in 1742, did something more, but not much; and the successive editions of it which were called for by the public rather showed the uneasy state of opinion in relation to the points under discussion, than any thing else. At last, in 1815, the Academy, in the eighth recension of its treatise on Orthography, and in 1817, in the fifth of its smaller Dictionary, began a series of important changes, which have been generally adopted by subsequent writers of authority, and appear to have nearly settled the spelling of the Castilian, though still it seems open to a few further modifications, and even to invite them.[283]
[283] The difficulties in Castilian orthography are set forth in the “Diálogo de las Lenguas” (Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. II. pp. 47-65); but the ingenious author of that discussion is more severe than was necessary on Lebrixa. An anonymous writer of an excellent essay on the same subject, in the first volume of the Repertorio Americano, (Tom. I. p. 27,) is a great deal more judicious. But how unsettled much still remains in practice may be seen in the “Manual del Cajista, por José María Palacios,” Madrid, 1845, 18mo, where (pp. 134-154) is a “Prontuario de las Voces de dudosa Ortografía,” containing above 1800 words.
A Grammar, like a Dictionary, was provided for in the statutes of the Academy. But the original members of that body, few of whom were men of note and authority, showed a marked unwillingness to approach the difficult discussions involved in such a work, and did not undertake them at all till 1740. Even then, they went on slowly and with anxiety; so that the result of their labors did not appear till 1771. For this delay they were not wholly in fault. They had little to guide them, except the rival Grammars of Gayoso and San Pedro, which were published while the Academy was preparing its own, and the original attempt of Lebrixa, which had long been forgotten. But, after so protracted a labor, the Academicians should have produced something more worthy of their claims; for what they gave to the world, at last, was an unphilosophical and unpractical work, which, though subjected to frequent revision since, is hardly an outline of what it ought to be, and quite inferior to the Grammar of Salvá.[284]
[284] Of Lebrixa’s Grammar I have already spoken, (Vol. I. p. 549,) and the memory of it was now so much revived that a counterfeit edition of it was published, about 1775, in small folio, hardly, I should judge from its appearance, with the intention of deceiving. But such things were not uncommon about that time, as Mendez says, who thinks the edition in question had been printed about twenty years when he published his work in 1796. (See Typog., p. 242.) It is, however, already so rare, that I obtained a copy of it with difficulty.
That of Gayoso was first printed at Madrid, in 1745, 12mo, and that of San Pedro in Valencia, 1769, 12mo, which last Gayoso, disguising himself under a sort of anagram, attacked, in his “Conversaciones Críticas, por Don Antonio Gobeyos,” (Madrid, 1780, 12mo,) where he shows that San Pedro was not so original as he ought to have been, but treats his Grammar with more harshness than it deserved. Salvá’s “Gramática de la Lengua Castellana como ahora se halla” was first printed in 1831, and the sixth edition appeared at Madrid in 1844, 12mo; a striking proof of the want of such a book.
A History of the Castilian Language, and an Art of Poetry, which were also expressly prescribed by the statutes of the Academy, have never been prepared under their authority; but, instead of these tasks, they have sometimes performed duties not originally imposed upon them. Thus they have published careful editions of different works of recognized authority, particularly a magnificent one of “Don Quixote,” in 1780-84. Since 1777, they have, from time to time, offered prizes for poetical compositions, though, as is usual in such cases, with less important results than had been hoped. And occasionally they have printed, with funds granted to them by the government, works deemed of sufficient merit to deserve such patronage, and, among others, the excellent treatise of Garcés on “The Vigor and Beauty of the Spanish Language,” which appeared under their auspices in 1791.[285] During the whole century, therefore, the Spanish Academy, occupied in these various ways, continued to be a useful institution, carefully abstaining from such claims to control the public taste as were at first made by its model in France, and, though not always very active and efficient, still never deserving the reproach of neglecting the duties and tasks for which it was originally instituted.
[285] Gregorio Garcés, whose “Fundamento del Vigor y Elegancia de la Lengua Castellana” was printed at Madrid, 1791, 2 tom. 8vo, was a Jesuit, and prepared this excellent work in exile at Ferrara, in which city he lived above thirty years, and from which he returned home in 1798, under the decree of Charles IV. abrogating that of his father for the expulsion of the Order from Spain, in 1767.
One good effect that followed from the foundation of the Spanish Academy was the establishment of other academies for kindred purposes. These academies were entirely different from the social meetings, under the same name, that were imitated from the Italian academies in the time of Charles the Fifth,--one of the earliest of which was held in the house of Cortés,[286] the conqueror of Mexico;--though still the elder associations seem sometimes to have furnished materials, out of which the institutions that succeeded them were constructed. At least, this was the case with the Academy of Barcelona, which has rendered good service to the cause of letters since 1751, after having long existed as an idle affectation, under the title of the “Academy of the Diffident.” The only one, however, of any consequence to the general literature of the country, was established during the reign of Philip the Fifth,--the Academy for Spanish History, founded in 1738; the character and amount of whose labors, both published and unpublished, do its members much honor.[287]
[286] See, ante, Part II. c. 5, and note, Vol. I. p. 537.
[287] For an account of these Academies, see Guarinos, “Biblioteca”; and for a notice of the origin of the Royal Academy of History, see the first volume of its Memoirs. The old Academias, in imitation of the Italian,--such as are ridiculed in the “Diablo Cojuelo,” Tranco IX.,--had much gone out of fashion and been displaced by the modern Tertulias, where both sexes meet, and which in their turn have been ridiculed in the Saynetes of Ramon de la Cruz and Castillo.
But such associations everywhere, though they may be useful and even important in their proper relations, can neither create a new literature for a country, nor, where the old literature is seriously decayed, do much to revive it. The Spanish academies were no exceptions to this remark. All elegant culture had so nearly disappeared before the accession of the Bourbons, and there was such an insensibility to its value in those classes of society where it should have been most cherished, that it was plain the resuscitation must be the work of time, and that the land must long lie fallow before another harvest could be gathered in. During the entire reign of Philip the Fifth, therefore,--a reign which, including the few months of his nominal abdication in favor of his son, extends to forty-six years,--we shall find undeniable traces of this unhappy state of things; few authors appearing who deserve to be named at all, and still fewer who demand a careful notice.
Poetry, indeed, or what passed under that name, continued to be written; and some of it, though little encouraged by the general regard of the nation, was printed. Moraes, a Portuguese gentleman of rank, who had lived in Spain from his youth, wrote two heroic poems in Spanish; the first on the discovery of “The New World,” which he published in 1701, and the other on the foundation of the kingdom of Portugal, which was printed in 1712; both appearing originally in an unfinished state, in consequence of the author’s impatience for fame, and the earlier of them still remaining so. But they have been long forgotten. Indeed, the first, which is full of extravagant allegories, soon found the fate which its author felt it deserved; and the other, though written with great deference for the rules of art, and more than once reprinted, has not at last enjoyed a better fortune.
The most amusing work of Moraes is a prose satire, printed in 1734, called “The Caves of Salamanca,” where, in certain grottos, which a popular tradition supposed to exist, sealed up by magic, within the banks of the Tórmes, he finds Amadis of Gaul, Oriana, and Celestina, and discourses with them and other fanciful personages on such subjects as his humor happens to suggest. Parts of it are very wild; parts of it are both amusing and wise, especially what is said about the Spanish language and academies, and about the “Telemachus” of Fénelon, then at the height of its fame. The whole shows few of the affectations of style that still deformed and degraded whatever there was of literature in the country, and which, though ridiculed in “The Caves of Salamanca,” are abundant in the other works of the same author.[288]
[288] There is an edition of the “Nuevo Mundo,” printed at Barcelona, 1701, 4to, containing many blanks, which the author announces his intention to fill up. Of the “Alfonso, ó la Fundacion del Reyno de Portugal,” there are editions of 1712, 1716, 1731, and 1737. There is a notice of the author--Francisco Botelho Moraes e Vasconcellos--in Barbosa, (Tom. II. p. 119,) and at the end of the edition of the Alfonso, Salamanca, 1731, 4to, is a defence of a few peculiarities in its orthography. “Las Cuevas de Salamanca” (s. l. 1734) is a small volume, divided into seven books, written, perhaps, at Salamanca itself, which Moraes loved, and where he retired in his old age. He published one or two works in Spanish, besides those already mentioned, and one or two in Latin, but no others of consequence.
A long heroic poem, in two parts, in honor of the conquest of Peru by the Pizarros, was printed at Lima in 1732. It is founded principally on the prose History of the Inca Garcilasso, but is rarely so interesting as the gossip out of which it was constructed. The author, Pedro de Barnuevo, was an officer of the Spanish government in South America; and he gives in the Preface a long list of his works, published and unpublished. He was, undoubtedly, a man of learning, but not a poet. Like Moraes, he has arranged a mystical interpretation to his story; some parts of which, such as that where America comes before God, and prays to be conquered that she may be converted, are really allegorical; while, in general, the interpretation he gives is merely an after-thought, forced and unnatural. But his work is dull and in bad taste, and the octave stanzas in which it is written are managed with less skill than usual.[289]
[289] “Lima Fundada, Poema Heróico de Don Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo,” Lima, 1732, 4to, about 700 pages; but so ill paged that it is not easy to determine.
Several religious poems belong to the same period. One by Pedro de Reynosa, printed in 1727, is on “Santa Casilda,” the converted daughter of a Moorish king of Toledo, who figures in the history of Spain during the eleventh century. Another, called “The Eloquence of Silence,” by Miguel de Zevallos, in 1738, is devoted to the honor of Saint John of Nepomuck, who, in the fourteenth century, was thrown into the Moldau, by order of a king of Bohemia, because the holy man would not reveal to the jealous monarch what the queen had intrusted to him under the seal of the confessional. Both are in the octave stanzas common to such poems, and are full of the faults of their times. Two mock-heroic poems, that naturally followed such attempts, are not better than the serious poems which provoked them.[290]
[290] “Santa Casilda, Poema en Octavas Reales, por el R. P. Fr. Pedro de Reynosa,” Madrid, 1727, 4to. It is in seven cantos, and each canto has a sort of codicil to it, affectedly called a Contrapunto.--“La Eloquencia del Silencio, Poema Heróico, por Miguel de la Reyna Zevallos,” Madrid, 1738, 4to. Of the mock-heroic poems mentioned in the text, one is “La Prosérpina, Poema Heróico, por D. Pedro Silvestre,” Madrid, 1721, 4to,--twelve mortal cantos. The other is “La Burromaquia,” which is better, but still not amusing. It is unfinished, and is found in the “Obras Póstumas de Gabriel Alvarez de Toledo.” The divisions are not called “Cantos,” but “Brayings.” I have seen very ridiculous extracts from a poem by Father Butron on Santa Teresa, printed in 1722, and from one on St. Jerome, by P. M. Lara, 1726, but I have never happened to fall in with the poems themselves, which seem to be as bad as any of their class.
No account more favorable can be given of the lyric and miscellaneous poetry of the period, than of the narrative. The best that appeared, or at least what was thought to be the best at the time, is to be found in the poetical works of Eugenio Lobo, first printed in 1738. He was a soldier, who wrote verses only for his amusement; but his friends, who admired them much beyond their merit, printed portions of them, from time to time, until, at last, he himself thought it better to permit a religious congregation to publish the whole in a volume. They are very various in form, from fragments of two epics down to sonnets, and equally various in tone, from that appropriate to religious villancicos to that of the freest satire. But they are in very bad taste; and, if any thing like poetry appears in them, it is at rare intervals. Benegasi y Luxan, who, in 1743, published a volume of such light verses as were called for by the gay society in which he lived, wrote in a simpler style than Lobo, though, on the whole, he succeeded no better. But, except these two, and a few who imitated them, such as Alvarez de Toledo and Antonio Muñoz, we have nothing from the reign of the first of the Bourbons, that can claim notice in either of the forms of poetry we have thus far examined.[291]
[291] “Obras Poéticas Lýricas, por el Coronel D. Eugenio Gerardo Lobo,” Madrid, 1738, 4to.--“Poesías Lýricas, y Joco-Serias, su Autor D. Joseph Joachim Benegasi y Luxan,” Madrid, 1743, 4to.--Gab. Alvarez de Toledo, ut ante.--Antonio Muñoz, “Aventuras en Verso y en Prossa,” (sic,) no date, but licensed 1739.
More characteristic than either, however, were two collections of verse, written, as their titles profess, by the poets of most note at the time, in honor of the king and queen, who, in 1722, meeting the Host, as it was passing to a dying man, gave their own carriage to the priest who bore it, and then, according to the fashion of the country, followed reverently on foot. The names of Zamora the dramatist, of Diego de Torres, well known for his various accomplishments in science and letters, and of a few other poets, who are still remembered, occur in the first collection; but, in general, the obscurity of the authors who contributed to it is such as we might anticipate from reading their poetry; while, at the same time, the occasion of the whole shows how low was the culture which could attribute any value to such publications.[292]
[292] “Sagradas Flores del Parnaso, Consonancias Métricas de la bien Templada Lyra de Apolo, que á la reverente Católica Accion de haver ido accompañando sus Magestades el Ssmo Sacramento que iba á Darse por viatico á una Enferma el Dia 28 de Novembre, 1722, cantaron los mejores Cisnes de España,” 4to. I give the title of the first collection in full, as an indication of the bad taste of its contents. Both collections, taken together, make about 200 pages, and contain poems by about fifty authors, generally in the worst and most affected style,--the very dregs of Gongorism.
A single bright spot in the poetical history of this period is only the more remarkable from the gloom that surrounds it. It is a satire attributed to Herbas, a person otherwise unknown, who disguised himself under the name of Jorge de Pitillas, and printed it in a literary journal. It was singularly successful for the time when it appeared; a circumstance the more to be noticed, as this success seems not to have inspired any similar attempt, or even to have encouraged the author to venture again before the public. The subject he chose was fortunate,--the bad writers of his age,--and in discussing it he has spoken out boldly and manfully; sometimes calling by name those whom he ridicules, and at other times indicating them so that they cannot be mistaken. His chief merits are the ease and simplicity of his style, the pungency and justness of his satire, and his agreeable imitations of the old masters, especially Persius and Juvenal, whom he further resembled in the commendable qualities of brevity and sententiousness.[293]
[293] The “Sátira contra los Malos Escritores de su Tiempo” is commonly attributed to José Gerardo de Herbas; but Tapia (Civilisacion, Tom. IV. p. 266) says it was written by José Cobo de la Torre, besides which it is inserted in the “Rebusco de las Obras Literarias de J. F. de Isla,” (Madrid, 1790, 12mo,) as if it were unquestionably Isla’s. It first appeared in the second edition of the sixth volume of the “Diario de los Literatos”;--the earliest periodical work in the spirit of modern criticism that was published in Spain, and one so much in advance of the age that it did not survive its second year, having been begun in 1737, and gone on one year and nine months, till it made seven small volumes. It was in vain that it was countenanced by the king, and favored by the leading persons at court. It was too large a work; it was a new thing, which Spaniards rarely like; and it was severe in its criticisms, so that the authors of the time generally took the field against it, and broke it down.
To the same period with the Satire of Pitillas belongs the poem on “Deucalion,” by Alonso Verdugo de Castilla, Count of Torrepalma. It is an imitation of Ovid, in about sixty octave stanzas, somewhat remarkable for its versification. But in a better period it would not be noticed.
Chapter II
MARQUIS OF SAN PHELIPE.--INFLUENCE OF FRANCE ON SPANISH LITERATURE.--LUZAN.--HIS PREDECESSORS AND HIS DOCTRINES.--LOW STATE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL CULTURE IN SPAIN.--FEYJOÓ.
One historical work of some consequence belongs entirely to the reign of Philip the Fifth,--the commentaries on the War of the Succession, and the history of the country from 1701 to 1725, by the Marquis of San Phelipe. Its author, a gentleman of Spanish descent, was born in Sardinia, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and early filled several offices of consequence under the government of Spain; but, when his native island was conquered by the Austrian party, he remained faithful to the French family, under whom he had thus far served, and made his escape to Madrid. There Philip the Fifth received him with great favor. He was created Marquis of San Phelipe,--a title chosen by himself in compliment to the king,--and, besides being much employed during the war in military affairs, he was sent afterwards as ambassador, first to Genoa, and then to the Hague, where he died, on the 1st of July, 1726.
In his youth the Marquis of San Phelipe had been educated with care, and therefore, during the active portions of his life, found an agreeable resource in intellectual occupations. He wrote a poem in octave stanzas on the story in the “Book of Tobit,” which was printed in 1709, and a history of “The Hebrew Monarchy,” taken from the Bible and Josephus, which did not appear till 1727, the year after his death. But his chief work was on the War of the Succession. The great interest he took in the Bourbon cause induced him to write it, and the position he had occupied in the affairs of his time gave him ample materials, quite beyond the reach of others less favored. He called it “Commentaries on the War of Spain, and History of its King, Philip the Fifth, the Courageous, from the Beginning of his Reign to the Year 1725”; but, although the compliment to his sovereign implied on the title-page is faithfully carried through the whole narrative, the book was not published without difficulty. The first volume, in folio, after being printed at Madrid, was suppressed by order of the king, out of regard to the honor of certain Spanish families that show to little advantage in the troublesome times it records; so that the earliest complete edition appeared at Genoa without date, but probably in 1729.
It is a spirited book, earnest in the cause of Castile against Catalonia; but still, notwithstanding its partisan character, it is, the most valuable of the contemporary accounts of the events to which it relates; and, notwithstanding it has a good deal of the lively air of the French memoirs, then so much in fashion, it is strongly marked with the old Spanish feelings of religion and loyalty,--feelings which this very book proves to have partly survived the general decay of the national character during the seventeenth century, and the convulsions that had shaken it at the opening of the eighteenth. In style it is not perfectly pure. Perhaps tokens of its author’s Sardinian education are seen in his choice of words; and certainly his pointed epigrammatic phrases and sentences often show, that he leaned to the rhetorical doctrines of Gracian, of whom, in his narrative poem, we see that he had once been a thorough disciple. But the Commentaries are, after all, a pleasant book, and abound in details, given with much modesty where their author is personally concerned, and with a picturesqueness which belongs only to the narrative of one who has been an actor in the scenes he describes.[294]
[294] “Los Tobias, su Vida escrita en Octavas, por D. Vicente Bacallar y Sanna, Marques de San Phelipe,” etc., 4to, pp. 178, without date, but licensed 1709.--“Monarchia Hebrea,” Madrid, 1727, 2 tom. 4to.--“Comentarios de la Guerra de España hasta el Año 1725,” Genoa, no date, 2 tom. 4to. Of the last there is a poor continuation, bringing the history down to 1742, entitled, “Continuacion á los Comentarios, etc., por D. Joséph del Campo Raso,” Madrid, 1756-63, 2 tom. 4to.
But, when we speak of Spanish literature in the reign of Philip the Fifth, we must never forget that the influence of France was gradually becoming felt in all the culture of the country. The mass of the people, it is true, either took no cognizance of the coming change, or resisted it; and the new government willingly avoided whatever might seem to offend or undervalue the old Castilian spirit. But Paris was then, as it had long been, the most refined capital in Europe; and the courts of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth, necessarily in intimate relations with that of Philip the Fifth, could not fail to carry to Madrid a tone which was already spreading of itself into Germany and the extreme North.
French, in fact, soon began to be spoken in the elegant society of the capital and the court;--a thing before unknown in Spain, though French princesses had more than once sat on the Spanish throne. But now it was a compliment to the reigning monarch himself, and courtiers strove to indulge in it. Pitillas, under pretence of laughing at himself for following the fashion, ridicules the awkwardness of those who did so, when he says,
And French I talk; at least enough to know That neither I nor other men more shrewd Can comprehend my words, though still endued With power to raise my heavy Spanish dough.
And Father Isla makes himself merry with the idea of a man who fancies he has married an Andalusian or Castilian wife, and finds out that she proves little better than a Frenchwoman after all.[295]
[295] Pitillas, Sátira. Isla, Á los que degenerando del Carácter Español, afectan ser Estrangeros. Rebusco, p. 178.
Translations from the French followed this state of things; and, at last, an attempt was made to introduce formally into Spain a poetical system founded on the critical doctrines prevalent in France. Its author, Ignacio de Luzan, a gentleman of Aragon, was born in 1702; and, while still a child, went to Italy and received a learned education in the schools of Milan, Palermo, and Naples; remaining abroad eighteen years, and enjoying the society of several of the most distinguished Italian poets of the time, among whom were Maffei and Metastasio. At last, in 1733, he returned to Spain, a well-bred scholar, according to the ideas of scholarship then prevalent in Italy, and with a singular facility in writing and speaking French and Italian.
His personal affairs and his native modesty kept him for some time in retirement on the estates of his family in Aragon. But, in the condition to which Spanish literature was then reduced, a man of so many accomplishments could hardly fail, in any position, to make his influence felt. That of Luzan soon became perceptible, because he loved to write, and wrote a great deal. In Italy and Sicily he had published, not only Italian poetry of his own, but French. In his native language and at home, he naturally went further. He translated from Anacreon, Sappho, and Musæus; he fitted dramas of Maffei, La Chaussée, and Metastasio to the Spanish stage; and he wrote a considerable number of short poems, and one original drama, “Virtue Honored,” which was privately represented in Saragossa.
Whatever he did was well received, but little of it was published at the time, and not much has appeared since. His “Odes on the Conquest of Oran” were particularly admired by his friends, and, though somewhat cold, may still be read with pleasure. These and other compositions made him known to the government at Madrid, and procured for him, in 1747, the appointment of Secretary to the Spanish embassy at Paris. There he remained three years, and, from the absence of the ambassador, acted, for a large part of the time, as the only representative of his country at the French court. On his return home, he continued to enjoy the confidence of the king; and when he died suddenly, in 1754, he was in great favor, and about to receive a place of more consequence than any he had yet held.[296]
[296] Latassa, Bib. Nueva, Tom. V. p. 12, and Preface to the edition of Luzan’s Poética, by his son, 1789. His poetry has never been collected and published, but portions of it are found in Sedano, Quintana, etc. The octaves he recited at the opening of the Academy of Fine Arts, in 1752, and published at p. 21 of the “Abertura Solemne,” etc., printed in honor of the occasion (Madrid, folio); and the similar poems recited by him at a distribution of prizes by the same Academy, in 1754, and published in their “Relacion,” etc., (Madrid, folio, pp. 51-61,) prove rather the dignity of his social position than any thing else. Latassa gives a long account of his unpublished works.
The circumstances of the country, and those of his own education, position, and tastes, opened to Luzan, as a critic, a career of almost assured success. Every thing was so enfeebled and degraded, that it could offer no effectual resistance to what he might teach. The political importance of his country among the nations of Europe had been crushed. Its moral dignity was impaired. Its school of poetry had disappeared. The old system of things in Spain, as far as poetical culture was concerned, had passed away, no less than the Austrian dynasty, with which it had come in; and no attempt deserving the name had yet been made to determine what should be the intellectual character of the system that should follow it. A small effort, under such circumstances, would go far towards imparting a decisive movement; and, in literary taste and criticism, Luzan was certainly well fitted to give the guiding impulse. He had been educated with great thoroughness in the principles of the classical French school, and he possessed all the learning necessary to make known and support its peculiar doctrines. In 1728, he had offered to the Academy at Palermo, of which he was a member, six critical discussions on poetry, written in Italian; so that, when he returned to Spain, he had only to take these papers and work them into a formal treatise, suited to what he deemed the pressing wants of the country. He did so;--and the result was his “Art of Poetry,” the first edition of which appeared in 1737.
The attempt was by no means a new one. The rules and doctrines of the ancients, in matters of taste and rhetoric, had frequently before been announced and defended in Spain. Even Enzina, the oldest of those who regarded Castilian poetry as an art, was not ignorant of Quintilian and Cicero, though, in his short treatise, which shows more good sense and good taste than can be claimed from the age, he takes substantially the same view of his subject that the Marquis of Villena and the Provençals had taken before him,--considering all poetry chiefly with reference to its mechanical forms.[297] Rengifo, a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, whose “Spanish Art of Poetry” dates from 1592, confines himself almost entirely to the structure of the verse and the technical forms known both to the elder Castilian style of composition and to the Italian introduced by Boscan;--a curious discussion, in which the authority of the ancients is by no means forgotten, but one whose chief value consists in what it contains relating to the national school and its peculiar measures.[298]
[297] It is prefixed to the edition of Enzina’s Cancionero, 1496, folio, and, I suppose, to the other editions; and fills nine short chapters.
[298] “Arte Poética Española, su Autor Juan Diaz Rengifo,” Salamanca, 1592, 4to, enlarged, but not improved, in the editions of 1700, 1737, etc., by Joseph Vicens.
Alonso Lopez, commonly called El Pinciano,--the same person who wrote the dull epic on Pelayo,--went further, and in 1596 published his “Ancient Poetical Philosophy,” in which, under the disguise of a friendly correspondence, he gives, with much learning and some acuteness, his own views of the opinions of the ancient masters on all the modes of poetical composition.[299] Cascales followed him, in 1616, with a series of dialogues, somewhat more familiar than the grave letters of Lopez, and resting more on the doctrines of Horace, whose epistle to the Pisos he afterwards published, with a well-written Latin commentary.[300] Salas, on the contrary, in his “New Idea of Ancient Tragedy,” which appeared in 1633, followed Aristotle rather than any other authority, and illustrated his discussion--which is the ablest in Spanish literature on the side it sustains--by a translation of the “Trojanæ” of Seneca, and an address of the theatre of all ages to its various audiences.[301]
[299] “Philosophía Antigua Poética del Doctor Alonso Lopez Pinciano, Médico Cesareo,” Madrid, 1596, 4to.
[300] “Tablas Poéticas del Licenciado Francisco Cascales,” 1616. An edition of Madrid, 1779, 8vo, contains a Life of the author by Mayans y Siscar. Cascales is presumptuous enough to rearrange Horace’s “Ars Poetica” in what he regards as a better order.
[301] “Nueva Idea de la Tragedia Antigua, ó Illustracion Ultima al libro Singular de Poética de Aristóteles, por Don Jusepe Ant. Gonçalez de Salas,” Madrid, 1633, 4to.
All these works, however, and three or four others of less consequence, assumed, so far as they attempted to lay their foundations in philosophy, to be built on the rules laid down by Aristotle or the Roman rhetoricians.[302] In this they committed a serious error. Ancient rhetoric can be applied, in all its strictness, to no modern poetry, and least of all to the poetry of Spain. The school of Lope de Vega, therefore, passed over them like an irresistible flood, leaving behind it hardly a trace of the structures that had been raised to oppose its progress. But Luzan took a different ground. His more immediate predecessors had been Gracian, who defended the Gongorism of the preceding period, and Artiga, who, in a long treatise “On Spanish Eloquence,” written in the ballad measures, had seemed willing to encourage all the bad taste that prevailed in the beginning of the eighteenth century.[303]
[302] Of the treatise of Argote de Molina, prefixed to his edition of the “Conde Lucanor,” 1575, and of the poem of Cueva, I have spoken (I. 507, II. 569). A small tract, called “Libro de Erudicion Poética,” published in the works of Luis Carrillo, 1611, and several of the epistles of Christóval de Mesa, 1618, might be added; but the last are of little consequence, and the tract of Carrillo is in very bad taste.
[303] Gracian has been noticed in this volume (p. 192). The “Epítome de la Eloquencia Española, por D. Francisco Joseph Artiga, olim Artieda,” was licensed in 1725, and contains above thirteen thousand lines;--a truly ridiculous book, but of some consequence as showing the taste of the age, especially in pulpit oratory.
Luzan took no notice of either of them. He followed the poetical system of Boileau and Lebossu, not, indeed, forgetting the masters of antiquity, but everywhere accommodating his doctrines to the demands of modern poetry, as Muratori had done just before him, and enforcing them by the example of the French school, then more admired than any other in Europe.[304] His object, as he afterwards explained it, was “to bring Spanish poetry under the control of those precepts which are observed among polished nations”; and his work is arranged with judgment to effect his purpose. The first book treats of the origin and nature of poetry, and the second, of the pleasure and advantage poetry brings with it. These two books constitute one half of the work, and having gone through in them what he thinks it necessary to say of the less important divisions of the art,--such as lyric poetry, satire, and pastorals,--he devotes the two remaining books entirely to a discussion of the drama and of epic poetry,--the forms in which Spanish genius had long been more ambitious of excellence than in any other. A strict method reigns through the whole; and the style, if less rich than is found in the older prose-writers, and less so than the genius of the language demands, is clear, simple, and effective. In explaining and defending his system of opinions, he shows judgment, and a temperate philosophy; and his abundant illustrations, drawn not only from the Castilian, the French, the Greek, and the Latin, but from the Italian and the Portuguese, are selected with excellent taste, and applied skilfully to strengthen his general argument and design. For its purpose, a better treatise could hardly have been produced.
[304] Blanco White (Life by Thom, 1845, 8vo, Vol. I. p. 21) says Luzan borrowed so freely from Muratori, “Della Perfetta Poesia,” that the Spanish treatise helped him (Mr. White) materially in learning to read the Italian one. But Luzan has not in fact copied from Muratori with the unjustifiable freedom this remark implies, though he has adopted Muratori’s general system, with abundant acknowledgment and references.
The effect was immediate and great. It seemed to offer a remedy for the bad taste which had accompanied, and in no small degree hastened, the decline of the national literature from the time of Góngora. It was seized on, therefore, with eagerness, as the book that was wanted; and when to this we add that the literature of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, which it held up as the model literature of Christendom, was then regarded throughout Europe with almost unmingled admiration, we shall not be surprised that the “Poética” of Luzan exercised, from its first appearance, a controlling authority over opinion at the court of Spain, and over the few writers of reputation then to be found in the country.[305]
[305] The first edition of the “Poética” of Luzan was printed in folio at Saragossa, in 1737, with long and extraordinary certificates of approbation by Navarro and Gallinero, two of the author’s friends. The second edition, materially improved by additions from the manuscripts of Luzan, after his death, was printed at Madrid, in 2 tom. 8vo, in 1789. When the first edition appeared, it was much praised in the “Diario de los Literatos” (Tom. VII., 1738); but, as one of the reviewers, Juan de Iriarte, who wrote the latter part of the article, made a few exceptions to his general commendations, Luzan, who was more sensitive than he needed to be, replied in a small bitter tract, under the name of Iñigo de Lanuza, Pamplona, [1740,] 12mo, pp. 144, with cumbrous and learned notes by Colmenares, to whom the tract is dedicated.
Something more, however, than a reformation in taste was wanted in Spain before a sufficient foundation could be laid for advancement in elegant literature. The commonest forms of truth had been so long excluded from the country, that the human mind there seemed to have pined away, and to have become dwarfed, for want of its appropriate nourishment. All the great sciences, both moral and physical, that had been for a hundred years advancing with an accelerated speed everywhere else throughout Europe, had been unable to force their way through the jealous guard which ecclesiastical and political despotism had joined to keep for ever watching the passes of the Pyrenees. From the days of the Comuneros and the Reformation of Luther, when religious sects began to discuss the authority of princes and the rights of the people, and when the punishment of opinion became the settled policy of the Spanish state, every thing in the shape of instruction that was not approved by the Church was treated as dangerous. At the universities, which from their foundation had been entirely ecclesiastical corporations, and were used constantly to build up ecclesiastical influences, no elegant learning was fostered, and very little tolerated, except such as furnished means to form scholastic Churchmen and faithful Catholics; the physical and exact sciences were carefully excluded and forbidden, except so far as they could be taught on the authority of Aristotle; and, as Jovellanos said boldly in a memorial on the subject to Charles the Fourth, “even medicine and jurisprudence would have been neglected, if the instincts of men had permitted them to forget the means by which life and property are protected.”[306]
[306] Cean Bermudez, Memorias de Jovellanos, Madrid, 1814, 12mo, cap. x. p. 221.
The Spanish universities, in fact, still taught from the same books they had used in the time of Cardinal Ximenes, and by the same methods. The scholastic philosophy was still regarded as the highest form of merely intellectual culture. Diego de Torres, afterwards distinguished for his knowledge in the physical sciences,--a man born and educated at Salamanca in the first half of the century,--says, that, after he had been five years in one of the schools of the University there, it was by accident he learned the existence of the mathematical sciences.[307] And, fifty years later, Blanco White declares, that, like most of his countrymen, he should have completed his studies in theology at the University of Seville without so much as hearing of elegant literature, if he had not chanced to make the acquaintance of a person who introduced him to a partial knowledge of Spanish poetry.[308]
[307] Vida, Ascendencia, etc., del Doctor Diego de Torres Villaroel, Madrid, 1789, 4to;--an autobiography, written in the worst taste of the time, i. e. about 1743. He says of a treatise on the Sphere, by Padre Clavio: “Creo que fue la primera noticia que habia llegado á mis oidos de que habia ciencias matemáticas en el mundo.” (p. 34.)
[308] Doblado’s Letters, 1822, p. 113.
Thus far, therefore, the old system of things was triumphant, and the common forms of advancing knowledge were, to an extraordinary and almost incredible degree, kept out of the country. On the other hand, errors, follies, and absurdities sprang up and abounded, just as surely as darkness follows the exclusion of light. Few persons in Spain in the beginning of the eighteenth century were so well informed as not to believe in astrology, and fewer still doubted the disastrous influence of comets and eclipses. The system of Copernicus was not only discouraged, but forbidden to be taught, on the ground that it was contrary to Scripture. The philosophy of Bacon, with all the consequences that had followed it, was unknown. It was not, perhaps, true, that the healing waters of knowledge had been rolled backward to their fountain, but no spirit of power had descended to trouble them, and they had now been kept stagnant till life was no longer in them and life could no longer be supported by them. It seemed as if the faculties of thinking and reasoning, in the better sense of these words, were either about to be entirely lost in Spain, or to be partly preserved only in a few scattered individuals, who, by the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny that oppressed them, would be prevented from diffusing even the imperfect light which they themselves enjoyed.
But it could not be so. The human mind cannot be permanently imprisoned; and it is an obvious proof of this consoling fact, that the intellectual emancipation of Spain was begun by a man of no extraordinary gifts, and one whose position gave him no extraordinary advantages for the undertaking to which he devoted his life,--the quiet monk, Benito Feyjoó. He was born in 1676, the eldest son of respectable parents in the northwestern part of Spain, who, contrary to the opinions of their time, did not think the law of primogeniture required them to devote their first-born wholly to the duty of sustaining the honors of his family and enjoying the income of the estates he was to inherit. At the age of fourteen, his destination to the Church was determined upon; but he loved study of all kinds, and applied himself, not only to theology, but to the physical sciences and to medicine, so far as means were allowed him in the low state to which all intellectual culture was then sunk. As early as 1717, he established himself in a Benedictine convent at Oviedo, and lived there forty-seven years in as strict a retirement as his duties permitted, occupied only with his studies, and relying almost entirely on the press as the means of enlightening his countrymen.
His personal character and resources, in some respects, fitted him well for the great task he had undertaken. He was a sincere Catholic, and therefore felt no disposition to interfere even with abuses that were protected by the authority of his Church; a circumstance without which he would have been stopped at the very threshold of his enterprise. His mind was strong and patient of labor; and if, on the one hand, his researches were restrained by the embarrassments of his ecclesiastical position, he had, on the other, obtained, what few Spaniards then enjoyed, the means of knowing much of what had been done in Italy, in France, and even in England, for the advancement of science during the century preceding that in which he was educated. Above all, he was honest, and seriously devoted to his work. But, as he advanced, he was shocked to find how wide a gulf separated his own country from the rest of Europe. Truth, he saw, had, on many important subjects, been so completely excluded from Spain, that its very existence was hardly suspected; and that, while Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Calderon and Quevedo, had been rioting unrestrained in the world of imagination, the solemn world of reality,--the world of moral and physical truth,--had been as much closed against inquiry as if his country had been no part of civilized Europe.
At times he seems to have been anxious concerning the result of his labors; but, on the whole, his courage did not fail him. He was not, indeed, a man of genius. He was not a man to invent new systems of metaphysics or philosophy. But he was a learned man, with a cautious judgment, somewhat obscured, but not really impaired, by religious prejudices, from which he could not be expected to emancipate himself; he was a man who understood the real importance of the labors of Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, of Leibnitz, Pascal, and Gassendi; and, what was of vastly more consequence, he was determined that his own countrymen should no longer remain ignorant of the advancement already made by the rest of Christendom under the influence of master-spirits like these.
So far as the War of the Succession had served to rouse the national character from its lethargy, and to direct the thoughts of Spaniards to what had been done beyond the Pyrenees, it was favorable to his purpose. But in other respects, as we have seen, it had effected nothing for the national culture. Still, when, in 1726, Feyjoó printed a volume of essays connected with his main purpose, he was able to command public attention, and was encouraged to go on. He called it “The Critical Theatre”; and in its different dissertations,--as separate as the papers in “The Spectator,” but longer and on graver subjects,--he boldly attacked the dialectics and metaphysics then taught everywhere in Spain; maintained Bacon’s system of induction in the physical sciences; ridiculed the general opinion in relation to comets, eclipses, and the arts of magic and divination; laid down rules for historical faith, which would exclude most of the early traditions of the country; showed a greater deference for woman, and claimed for her a higher place in society, than the influence of the Spanish Church willingly permitted her to occupy; and, in all respects, came forth to his countrymen as one urging earnestly the pursuit of truth and the improvement of social life. Eight volumes of this stirring work were published before 1739, and then it stopped, without any apparent reason. But in 1742 Feyjoó began a similar series of discussions, under the name of “Learned and Inquiring Letters,” which he finished in 1760, with the fifth volume, thus closing up the long series of his truly philanthropical, as well as philosophical, labors.
Of course he was assailed. A work, called the “Antiteatro Crítico,” appeared early, and was soon followed by another, with nearly the same title, and by not a few scattered tracts and volumes, directed against different portions of what he had published. But he was quite able to defend himself. He wrote with clearness and good taste in an age when the prevailing style was obscure and affected; and, if he fell occasionally into Gallicisms, from relying much on French writers for his materials, his mistakes of this sort were rare; and, in general, he presented himself in a Castilian costume, that was respectable and attractive. Nor was he without wit, which his prudence taught him to use sparingly, and he had always the energy which belongs to good sense and practical wisdom; a union of qualities not often found anywhere, and certainly of most rare occurrence in cloisters like those in which Feyjoó passed his long life.
The attacks made on him, therefore, served chiefly to draw to his works the attention he solicited, and in the end advanced his cause, instead of retarding it. Even the Inquisition, to which he was more than once denounced, summoned him in vain before its tribunals.[309] His faith could not be questioned, and his cause was stronger than they were. Fifteen editions of his principal work, large as it was, were printed in half a century. The excitement it produced went on increasing as long as he lived; and when he died, in 1764, he could look back and see that he had imparted a movement to the human mind in Spain, which, though it was far from raising Spanish philosophy to a level with that of France and England, had yet given it a right direction, and done more for the intellectual life of his country than had been done for a century.[310]
[309] Llorente, Hist. de l’Inq., Tom. II. p. 446. It may be deemed worthy of notice, that Oliver Goldsmith pays an appropriate tribute to the merits of Father Feyjoó, and relates an anecdote of his showing the people of a village through which he happened to pass that what they esteemed a miracle was, in truth, only a natural effect of reflected light; thus exposing himself to a summons from the Inquisition. (“The Bee,” No. III., Oct. 20, 1759, Miscellaneous Works, London, 1812, 8vo, Vol. IV. p. 193.) But after Feyjoó’s death, the Inquisition ordered only a trifling expurgation of his “Teatro Crítico,” in one passage. Index, 1790.
[310] The “Teatro Crítico” and “Cartas Eruditas y Curiosas,” with the discussions they provoked, fill fifteen and sometimes sixteen volumes. The edition of 1778 has a Life of Feyjoó prefixed to it, written by Campomanes, the distinguished minister of state under Charles III.; the same person who, on the nomination of Franklin, was made a member of the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. Clemencin says truly of Feyjoó, that “to his enlightened and religious mind is due the overthrow of many vulgar errors, and a great part of the progress in civilization made by Spain in the eighteenth century.” Note to Don Quixote, Tom. V., 1836, p. 35.
Chapter III
INTOLERANCE, CREDULITY, AND BIGOTRY.--REIGN OF FERDINAND THE SIXTH.--SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT.--LITERATURE.--SALADUEÑA.--MORALEJA.-- ACADEMY OF GOOD TASTE.--VELAZQUEZ.--MAYANS.--NASARRE.
It can hardly be said, that, during the forty-six years of the reign of Philip the Fifth, the intolerance which had so long blighted the land relaxed its grasp. The progress of knowledge might, indeed, be gradually and silently accumulating means to resist it, but its power was still unbroken, and its activity as formidable as ever. Louis the Fourteenth, in whom an old age of bigotry naturally ended a life of selfish indulgence, had counselled his grandson to sustain the Inquisition, as one of the means for insuring tranquillity to the political government of the country; and this advice, not given without a knowledge of the Spanish character, was, on the whole, acted upon with success, if not with entire consistency.
At first, indeed, the personal dispositions of the king in relation to this mighty engine of state seemed somewhat unsettled. When it was proposed to him to celebrate an auto da fé, as a part of the pageant suitable to the coming in of a new dynasty, the young monarch, fresh from the elegance of the court of Versailles, refused to sanction its barbarities by his presence. Even later he encouraged Macanaz, a person high in office, to publish a work in defence of the crown against the overgrown pretensions of the Church, and at one time he went so far as to entertain a project for suspending the Holy Office, or suppressing it altogether.[311]
[311] Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition, Tom. IV., 1818, pp. 29, 43. The “Papel” of Macanaz is on the Index of the Inquisition, 1790.
But these dispositions were transient. The Spanish priesthood early obtained control of the king’s mind. In one of the sieges of Barcelona, during the War of the Succession, he was induced to consult an image of the Virgin, and to avow afterwards, very solemnly, that she had given him a miraculous promise of the fidelity of the Catalonians,--a promise, it should be added, such as would be likely to insure its own fulfilment. The death of the queen, in 1714, which plunged him into a deep melancholy, further contributed to give power to the clergy who surrounded him; and, a year afterwards, when the Inquisition took firm ground against Macanaz and the royal prerogative, the king yielded, and Macanaz fled to France. And finally, when, in 1724, after a few months of abdication, Philip resumed the reins of government, which he should never have laid down, no small part of the increased energy, with which he fulfilled the duties of his high place, was inspired by the influence of the Church. As he grew older, he grew more bigoted; and in his last years, when the accumulated power placed in his hands by the destruction of the few remaining privileges of Aragon and Catalonia had made him a more absolute monarch than ever before sat on the Spanish throne, he seemed to rejoice, as much as any of his predecessors, in devoting the whole of his prerogatives to advance the interests of the priesthood.[312]
[312] Mahon, War of the Succession, 1832, p. 180. Tapia, Historia, Tom. IV. p. 32. San Phelipe, Comentarios, Lib. XIV.
But, from first to last, there was no real relaxation in the intolerance of the Church. The fires of the Inquisition had burnt as if Philip the Second were on the throne. At least one auto da fé was celebrated annually in each of the seventeen tribunals into which the country was divided; so that the entire number of these atrocious popular exhibitions of bigotry during the reign of Philip the Fifth exceeded seven hundred and eighty. How many persons were burnt alive in them is not exactly known; but it is believed, that there were more than a thousand, and that at least twelve times that number were, in different ways, subjected to public punishments and disgrace. Judaism, which had penetrated anew into Spain, from the period of the conquest of Portugal, was the great crime, to be hunted down with all the ingenuity of persecution; and undoubtedly all that could be found of the Hebrew nation or faith was now for the second time extirpated, as nearly as it is possible to extirpate what conscience refuses to give up, and fear and hatred have so many ways to hide. But some men of letters--like Belando, who wrote a civil history of part of the reign of Philip the Fifth, which he dedicated to that monarch, and which bore on its pages all the regular permissions to be printed--were punished without the pretence of being guilty of heresy or unbelief; and many more disappeared from society, who, like Macanaz, were known to entertain political opinions offensive to the Church or the government, but of whom nothing else was known that could render them obnoxious to censure. On the whole, therefore, down to the death of Philip the Fifth, the old alliance between the government of the state and the power of the Church--an alliance supported by the general assent of the people--must still be assumed to have continued unbroken, and its authority must still be felt to have been sufficient to control all freedom of discussion, and effectually to check and silence such intellectual activity as it deemed dangerous.[313]
[313] Llorente, Hist., Tom. II. pp. 420, 424, Tom. IV. p. 31. The data of Llorente are not so precise as they ought to be, but any thing approaching his results is of most fearful import. In a pamphlet, however, printed in 1817, (as he declares in his Autobiography, p. 170,) he asserts that, between 1680 and 1808, there perished in the fires of the Inquisition fifteen hundred and seventy-eight persons, and that eleven thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight more were subjected to degrading punishments, making a grand total of fourteen thousand three hundred and sixty-four victims, of which the fifteen hundred and seventy-eight burnt alive must all have perished between 1680 and 1781, when, as we shall see in the next chapter, the last victim was immolated.
In the reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, which lasted thirteen years, and ended in 1759, there is evidently an improvement in this state of things. The seeds sown in the time of his father, if less cared for and cultivated than they should have been, were beginning to germinate and disencumber themselves from the cold and hard soil into which they had been cast. Foreign intercourse, especially that with France, brought in new ideas. Ferreras, the careful, but dull, annalist of his country’s history; Juan de Yriarte, the active head of the Royal Library; Bayer, his learned successor; Mayans, who had a passion for collecting and editing books; and, above all, the wise and modest Father Feyjoó, had not labored in vain, and still survived to see the results of their toils.
The Church itself began slowly to acknowledge the irresistible power of advancing intelligence, and the Inquisition, without acknowledging it, felt its influence. Not more than ten persons were burnt alive in the time of Ferdinand the Sixth, and these were obscure relapsed Jews;--men whose fate is as heavy a reproach to the Inquisition as if they had been more intelligent and distinguished, but the example of whose punishment did not strike a terror such as that of the dying Protestants and patriots of Aragon had once done. The persecutions of the Holy Office, in fact, not only grew less frequent and cruel, but became more than ever subservient to the political authority of the country, and were now chiefly exercised in relation to Freemasonry, which was known at this period in Spain for the first time, and caused much uneasiness to the government. But the policy of the state, during the reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, was in the main peaceful and healing. Efforts, not without success, were made to collect materials for a history of the country from the earliest times. Spaniards were sent abroad to be educated at the public expense, and foreigners were encouraged to establish themselves in Spain, and to diffuse the knowledge they had acquired in their own more favored homes. Every thing, in short, indicated a spirit of change, if it did not give proof of much absolute progress.[314]
[314] Noticia del Viage de España hecha de Orden del Rey, por L. J. Velazquez, Madrid, 1765, 4to, passim. Llorente, Tom. IV. p. 51. Tapia, Tom. IV. p. 73.
The direction of the literature of the country, however, was the same it had taken from the beginning of the century. Slight, but unsatisfactory, attempts continued to be made to adhere to the forms of the elder time;--such attempts as are to be seen in a long narrative poem by the Count Saldueña on the subject of Pelayo, and two very poor imitations of the “Para Todos” of Montalvan, one of which was by Moraleja, and the other by Ortiz. But the amount of what was undertaken in this way was very small, and the impulse was constantly diminishing; for the French school enjoyed now all the favor that was given to any form of elegant literature.[315]
[315] “El Pelayo, Poema de D. Alonso de Solís Folch de Cardona Rodriguez de las Varillas, Conde de Saldueña,” etc., (Madrid, 1754, 4to,) twelve cantos in octave stanzas, written in the most affected style.--Joseph Moraleja, “El Entretenido, Segunda Parte” (Madrid, 1741, 4to); a continuation of the Entretenido of Sanchez Tortoles, containing the amusements of a society of friends for four days; entremeses, stories, odds and ends of poetry, astronomical calculations, etc., a strange and absurd mixture. Baena (Hijos de Madrid, Tom. III. p. 81) has a life of the author. The “Noches Alegres” of Isidro Fr. Ortiz Gallardo de Villaroel, (Salamanca, 1758, 4to,) is a shorter book, and nearly all in verse. Both are worthless.
In this respect, a fashionable society, called The Academy of Good Taste, and connected with the court of Madrid, exercised some influence. It dates from 1749, and was intended, perhaps, to resemble those French coteries, which began in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth, at the Hotel de Rambouillet, and were long so important both in the literary and political history of France. The Countess of Lemos, at whose house it met, was its founder, and it gradually ranked among its members several of the more cultivated nobility and most of the leading men of letters, such as Luzan, Montiano, Blas Nasarre, and Velazquez, each of whom was known, either at that time or soon afterwards, by his published works.[316]
[316] Luzan, Arte Poética, ed. 1789, Tom. I. pp. xix., etc.
Except Luzan, of whom we have already spoken, Velazquez was the most distinguished of their number. He was descended from an old and noble family, in the South of Spain, and was born in 1722; but, from his position in society, he passed most of his life at court. There he became involved in the political troubles of the reign of Charles the Third, in consequence of which he suffered a long imprisonment from 1766 to 1772, and died of apoplexy the same year he was released.
Velazquez was a man of talent and industry, rather than a man of genius. He was a member, not only of the principal Spanish academies, but of the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, and wrote several works of learning relating to the literature and antiquities of his country. The only one of them now much valued was published in 1754, under the title of “Sources of Castilian Poetry,” of which it is, in fact, a history, coming down to his own times, or near to them. It is a slight work, confused in its arrangement, and too short to develope its subject satisfactorily; but it is written in a good style, and occasionally shows acuteness in its criticism of individual authors. Its chief fault is, that it is devoted to the French school, and is an attempt to carry out, by means of an historical discussion, the doctrines laid down nearly twenty years before by Luzan, in his theory of poetical composition.[317]
[317] Luis Joseph Velazquez, “Orígenes de la Poesía Castellana,” Málaga, 1754, 4to, pp. 175. J. A. Dieze, who was a Professor at Göttingen, and died in 1785, published a German translation of it in 1769, with copious and excellent notes, which more than double, not only the size of the original work, but its value. The Life of Velazquez, who was Marquis of Valdeflores, though he does not generally allude to his title in his printed works, is to be found in Sempere y Guarinos, Bib., Tom. VI. p. 139.
Mayans, a Valencian gentleman of learning, and another of those who had a considerable influence on Spanish literature at this period, followed a similar course in his “Retórica,” which appeared in 1757, and is founded rather on the philosophical opinions of the Roman rhetoricians than on the modification of those opinions by Boileau and his followers. It is a long and very cumbrous work, less fitted to the wants of the times than that of Luzan, and even more opposed to the old Castilian spirit, which submitted so unwillingly to rules of any sort. But it is a storehouse of curious extracts from authors belonging to the best period of Spanish literature, almost always selected with good judgment, if not always skilfully applied to the matter under discussion.[318]
[318] Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, who wrote and edited a great many books in Latin and Spanish, was born in 1699, and died in 1782. His life and a list of his works may be made out from the united accounts of Ximeno, Tom. II. p. 324, and Fuster, Tom. II. p. 98.
To these works of Mayans, Velazquez, and Luzan should be added the Preface by Nasarre to the plays of Cervantes, in 1749, where an attempt is made to take the authority of his great name from the school that prevailed in his time, by showing that these unsuccessful efforts of the author of “Don Quixote” were only caricatures ridiculing Lope de Vega; not dramatic compositions intended for serious success in the extravagant career which Lope’s versatile genius had opened to his contemporaries. But this attempt was a failure, and was only one of a long series of efforts made to discountenance the old theatre, that must be noticed hereafter.[319]
[319] There was a severe answer made at once to Blas Nasarre, by Don Joseph Carrillo, entitled “Sin Razon impugnada,” 4to, 1750, pp. 25; besides which, his Preface was attacked by Don T. Zabaleta, in his “Discurso Crítico,” etc., (4to, 1750, pp. 258,) which is a general, loose defence of Lope and his school. But neither was needed. The theory of Nasarre was too absurd to win adherents.
Chapter IV
SLOW PROGRESS OF CULTURE.--CHARLES THE THIRD AND HIS POLICY.--ISLA.--HIS FRIAR GERUND.--HIS CICERO.--HIS GIL BLAS.--EFFORTS TO RESTORE THE OLD SCHOOL OF POETRY.--HUERTA.--SEDANO.--SANCHEZ.--SARMIENTO.--EFFORTS TO INTRODUCE THE FRENCH SCHOOL.--MORATIN THE ELDER AND HIS CLUB.--CADAHALSO, YRIARTE, SAMANIEGO, ARROYAL, MONTENGON, SALAS, MERAS, NOROÑA.
The reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, which had been marked with little political energy during its continuance, was saddened, at its close, by the death of the monarch from grief at the loss of his queen. But it had not been without beneficial influences on the country. A wise economy had been introduced, for the first time since the discovery of America, into the administration of the state; the abused powers of the Church had been diminished by a concordat with the Pope; the progress of knowledge had been furthered; and Father Feyjoó, vigorous, though old, was still permitted, if not encouraged, to go on with his great task, and create a school that should rest on the broad principles of philosophy recognized in England and in France.
We must not, however, be misled by such general statements. Spain, notwithstanding half a century of advancement, was still deplorably behind the other countries of Western Europe in that intellectual cultivation, without which no nation in modern times can be prosperous, strong, or honored. “There is not,” says the Marquis of Enseñada, in a report made to the king, as minister of state,--“there is not a professorship of public law, of experimental science, of anatomy, or of botany, in the kingdom. We have no exact geographical maps of the country or its provinces, nor any body who can make them; so that we depend on the very imperfect maps we receive from France and Holland, and are shamefully ignorant of the true relations and distances of our own towns.”[320]
[320] Tapia, Historia, Tom. IV. c. 15.
Many of the best materials for the state of culture in Spain, during the reign of Charles III., are to be found in the “Biblioteca de los Mejores Escritores del Reynado de Carlos III., por Juan Sempere y Guarinos,” Madrid, 1785-89, 6 tom. 8vo. When the author published it, he was about thirty-five years old, having been born in 1754; but he was afterwards much more distinguished as a political writer, by his “Observaciones sobre las Cortes,” (1810,) his “Historia de las Cortes,” (1815,) and other labors of the same kind. His first acknowledged work was a free translation, from Muratori, of an essay, with additions, which he printed at Madrid, in 1782, in 12mo, with the title, “Sobre el Buen Gusto,” and which he accompanied by an original tract, “Sobre el Buen Gusto actual de los Españoles en la Literatura,”--the last being afterwards prefixed, with alterations, to his “Biblioteca.” He was a diligent and useful writer, and died, I believe, in 1824. A small volume, containing notices of his life to the time when it appeared, probably derived from materials furnished by himself, was printed at Madrid, by Amarita, in 1821, 12mo.
Under these circumstances, the accession of a prince like Charles the Third was eminently fortunate for the country. He was a man of energy and discernment, a Spaniard by birth and character, but one whom political connections had placed early on the throne of Naples, where, during a reign of twenty-four years, he had done much to restore the dignity of a decayed monarchy, and had learned much of the condition of Europe outside of the Pyrenees. When, therefore, the death of his half-brother called him to the throne of Spain, he came with a kind and degree of experience in affairs which fitted him well for his duties in the more important and more unfortunate kingdom, whose destinies he was to control for above a quarter of a century. Happily, he seems to have comprehended his position from the first, and to have understood that he was called to a great work of reform and regeneration, where his chief contest was to be with ecclesiastical abuses.
In some respects he was successful. His ministers, Roda, Florida-Blanca, Aranda, and Campomanes, were men of ability. By their suggestions and assistance, he abridged the Papal power so far, that no rescript or edict from Rome could have force in Spain without the expressed assent of the throne; he restrained the Inquisition from exercising any authority whatever, except in cases of obstinate heresy or apostasy; he forbade the condemnation of any book, till its author, or those interested in it, had had an opportunity to be heard in its defence; and, finally, deeming the Jesuits the most active opponents of the reforms he endeavoured to introduce, he, in one day, expelled their whole body from his dominions all over the world, breaking up their schools and confiscating their great revenues.[321] At the same time, he caused improved plans of study to be suggested; he made arrangements for popular education, such as were before unknown in Spain; and he raised the tone of instruction and the modes of teaching in the few higher institutions over which he could lawfully extend his control.
[321] Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition, Tom. IV. Doblado’s Letters, 1822, Appendix to Letters III. and VII.
But many abuses were beyond his reach. When he appealed to the Universities, urging them to change their ancient habits, and teach the truths of the physical and exact sciences, Salamanca answered, in 1771, “Newton teaches nothing that would make a good logician or metaphysician, and Gassendi and Descartes do not agree so well with revealed truth as Aristotle does.” And the other Universities showed little more of the spirit of advancement.
With the Inquisition his success was far from being complete. His authority was resisted, as far as resistance was possible; but the progress of intelligence made all bigotry every year less active and formidable; and, whether it be an honor to his reign, or whether it be a disgrace, it is to be recorded, that the last person who perished at the stake in Spain, by ecclesiastical authority, was an unfortunate woman, who was burnt at Seville for witchcraft in 1781.[322]
[322] Sempere y Guarinos, Bibliot., Tom. IV., Art. Planes de Estudios. Tapia, Tom. IV. c. 16. Llorente, Tom. IV. p. 270. The Marquis de Langle, in his “Voyage d’Espagne,” (s. l. 1785, 12mo, p. 45,) says the poor woman burnt at Seville was “jeune et belle.”
Under the influence of a spirit like that of Charles the Third, during a reign protracted to twenty-nine years, there was a new and considerable advancement in whatever tends to make life desirable, of which the country on all sides gave token. The population, which had fled or died away, seemed to spring up afresh in places that oppression had made desert, and having regained something under the first of the Bourbons, it now, under the third, recovered rapidly the numbers it had lost in the days of the House of Austria, by wars all over the world, by emigration, by the persecution of the Jews and the expulsion of the Moriscos, by bad legislation, and by the cruel spirit of religious intolerance. The revenues in the same period were increased threefold, without adding to the burdens of the people; and the country seemed to be brought from a state of absolute bankruptcy to one of comparative ease and prosperity. It was certain, therefore, that Spain was not falling to ruin, as it had been in the time of Charles the Second.[323]
[323] Tapia, Tom. IV. pp. 124, etc. When the Emperor Charles V. came to the throne, Spain counted ten and a half millions of souls; at the time of the treaty of Utrecht, it counted but seven millions and a half; a monstrous falling off, if we consider the advancement of the rest of Europe during the same period.
But all intellectual cultivation is slow of growth, and all intellectual reform still slower. The life and health infused into the country were, no doubt, felt in every part of its physical system, reviving and renewing the powers that had been so long wasted away, and that at one period had seemed near to speedy dissolution. But it was obvious, that much time must still elapse before such healthful circulations could reach the national culture generally, and a still longer time before they could revive that elegant literature, which is the bright, consummate flower of all true civilization. Yet life was beginning to be seen. It was a dawn, if it was nothing more.
The first striking effect produced by this movement in the reigns of Ferdinand the Sixth and Charles the Third was one quite in sympathy with the spirit of the nation, then resisting the ecclesiastical abuses that had so long oppressed it. It was an attack on the style of popular preaching, which, originally corrupted by Paravicino, the distinguished follower of Góngora, had been constantly falling lower and lower, until, at last, it seemed to have reached the lowest point of degradation and vulgarity. The assailant was Father Isla, who was born in 1703 and died in 1781, at Bologna, where, being a Jesuit, he had retired, on the general expulsion of his Order from Spain.[324] His earliest published work is his “Triumph of Youth,” printed in 1727, to give the nation an account of a festival, celebrated that year during eleven days at Salamanca, in honor of two very youthful saints who had been Jesuits, and who had just been canonized by Benedict the Thirteenth; a gay tract, full of poems, farces, and accounts of the maskings and bull-fights to which the occasion had given rise, and coming as near as possible to open satire of the whole matter, but yet with great adroitness avoiding it.
[324] Vida de J. F. de Isla, por J. I. de Salas, Madrid, 1803, 12mo.
In a work somewhat similar, he afterwards went further. It was a description of the proclamation made in 1746, at Pamplona, on the accession of Ferdinand the Sixth, which was attended with such extravagant and idle ceremonies, that, being required to give some account of them to the public, he could not refrain from indulging in his love of ridicule. But he did it with a satire so delicate and so crafty, that those who were its subjects failed at first to apprehend his real purpose. On the contrary, the Council of the proud capital of Navarre thanked him for the honor he had done them; the Bishop and Archbishop complimented him for it; several persons whom he had particularly noticed sent him presents; and, when the irony began to be suspected, it became a subject of public controversy, as in the case of De Foe’s “Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” whether the praise bestowed were in jest or in earnest;--Isla all the time defending himself with admirable ingenuity and wit, as if he were personally aggrieved at the unfavorable construction put upon his compliments. The discussion ended with his retreat or exile from Pamplona.[325]
[325] Juventud Triunfante, Salamanca, 1727, 4to. Dia Grande de Navarra, 2a ed., Madrid, 1746, 4to. Semanario Pintoresco, 1840, p. 130.
He was, however, at this period of his life occupied with more serious duties, and soon found among them a higher mark for his wit. From the age of twenty-four he had been a successful preacher, and continued such until he was cruelly expelled from his own country. But he perceived how little worthy of its great subjects was the prevalent style of Spanish pulpit oratory,--how much it was degraded by bad taste, by tricks of composition, by conceits and puns, and even by a low buffoonery, in which the vulgar monks, sent to preach in the churches or in the public streets and squares, indulged themselves merely to win applause from equally vulgar audiences, and increase the contributions they solicited by arts so discreditable. It is said that at first Father Isla was swept away by the current of his times, which ran with extraordinary force, and that he wrote, in some degree, as others did. But he soon recognized his mistake, and his numerous published sermons, written between 1729 and 1754, are marked with a purity and directness of style which had long been unknown, and which, though wanting the richness and fervor of the exhortations of Luis de Leon and Luis de Granada, would not have dishonored the Spanish pulpit even in their days.[326]
[326] Vida de Isla, § 3. Sermones, Madrid, 1792-93, 6 tom. 8vo. Vulgar preaching in the streets was common as early as 1680, when Madame d’Aulnoy was in Spain. Voyage, ed. 1693, Tom. II. p. 168.
Isla, however, was not satisfied with merely setting a good example. He determined to make a direct attack on the abuse itself. For this purpose, he wrote what he called “The History of the Famous Preacher, Friar Gerund”; a satirical romance, in which he describes the life of one of these popular orators, from his birth in an obscure village, through his education in a fashionable convent, and his adventures as a missionary about the country; the fiction ending abruptly with his preparation to deliver a course of sermons in a city that seems intended to represent Madrid. It is written throughout with great spirit; and not only are the national manners and character everywhere present, but, in the episodes and in the occasional sketches Isla has given of conventual and religious life in his time, there is an air of reality which leaves no doubt that the author drew freely on the resources of his personal experience. Its plan resembles slightly that of “Don Quixote,” but its execution reminds us oftener of Rabelais and his discursive and redundant reflections, though of Rabelais without his coarseness. It is serious, as becomes the Spanish character, and conceals under its gravity a spirit of sarcasm, which, in other countries, seems inconsistent with the idea of dignity, but which, in Spain, has been more than once happily united with it, and made more effective by the union.
The sketches of character and specimens of fashionable pulpit oratory given in the “Friar Gerund” are the best parts of it, and are agreeable illustrations for the literary history of the eighteenth century. Of the preacher whom the Friar took for his model we have the following carefully drawn portrait:--
“He was in the full perfection of his strength, just about three-and-thirty years old; tall, robust, and stout; his limbs well set and well proportioned; manly in gait, inclining to corpulence, with an erect carriage of his head, and the circle of hair round his tonsure studiously and exactly combed and shaven. His clerical dress was always neat, and fell round his person in ample and regular folds. His shoes fitted him with the greatest nicety, and, above all, his silken cap was adorned with much curious embroidery and a fanciful tassel,--the work of certain female devotees who were dying with admiration of their favorite preacher. In short, he had a very youthful, gallant look; and, adding to this a clear, rich voice, a slight fashionable lisp, a peculiar grace in telling a story, a talent at mimicry, an easy action, a taking manner, a high-sounding style, and not a little effrontery,--never forgetting to sprinkle jests, proverbs, and homely phrases along his discourses with a most agreeable aptness,--he won golden opinions in his public discourses, and carried every thing before him in the drawing-rooms he frequented.”[327]
[327] “Historia del Famoso Predicador, Fray Gerundio de Campazas,” Madrid, 1813, 4 tom. 12mo, Tom. I. p. 307. In the first edition, as well as in several other editions, it is said to be written by Francisco Lobon de Salazar, a name which has generally been supposed to be a fictitious one; but which is, in fact, that of a friend, who was a parish priest at Villagarcia, where Father Isla, who mentions him often in his letters, wrote his Friar Gerund.
The style of eloquence of this vulgar ecclesiastical fop, a specimen of which follows, is no less faithfully and characteristically given; and was taken, as Father Isla intimates was his custom, from a discourse that had really been preached.[328]
[328] Cartas Familiares, 1790, Tom. VI. p. 313.
“It was well known, that he always began his sermons with some proverb, some jest, some pot-house witticism, or some strange fragment, which, taken from its proper connections and relations, would seem, at first blush, to be an inconsequence, a blasphemy, or an impiety; until, at last, having kept his audience waiting a moment in wonder, he finished the clause, or came out with an explanation which reduced the whole to a sort of miserable trifling. Thus, preaching one day on the mystery of the Trinity, he began his sermon by saying, ‘I deny that God exists a Unity in essence and a Trinity in person,’ and then stopped short for an instant. The hearers, of course, looked round on one another, scandalized, or, at least, wondering what would be the end of this heretical blasphemy. At length, when the preacher thought he had fairly caught them, he went on,--‘Thus says the Ebionite, the Marcionite, the Arian, the Manichean, the Socinian; but I prove it against them all from the Scriptures, the Councils, and the Fathers.’
“In another sermon, which was on the Incarnation, he began by crying out, ‘Your health, cavaliers!’ and, as the audience burst into a broad laugh at the free manner in which he had said it, he went on:--‘This is no joking matter, however; for it was for your health and for mine, and for that of all men, that Christ descended from heaven and became incarnate in the Virgin Mary. It is an article of faith, and I prove it thus: “Propter nos, homines, et nostram salutem descendit de cœlo et incarnatus est,”’--whereat they all remained in delighted astonishment, and such a murmur of applause ran round the church, that it wanted little of breaking out into open acclamation.”[329]
[329] Fray Gerundio, Tom. I. p. 309.
The first volume of the “Friar Gerund” was printed in 1758, without the knowledge of the author, and in twenty-four hours eight hundred copies of it were sold.[330] Such an extraordinary popularity, however, proved any thing but a benefit. The priests, and especially the preaching friars, assailed it from all quarters, as the most formidable attack yet made in Spain on their peculiar craft. The consequence was, that, though the king and the court expressed their delight in its satire, the license to publish it further was withdrawn, its author was summoned before the Inquisition, and his book was condemned in 1760. But Isla was too strong in public favor and in the respect of the Jesuits to be personally punished, and the Friar Gerund was too true and too widely scattered to be more than nominally suppressed.[331]
[330] Cartas Familiares, Tom. II. p. 170.
[331] Vida de Isla, p. 63. Llorente, Hist., Tom. II. p. 450. Cartas Familiares de Isla, Tom. II. pp. 168, etc., and Tom. III. p. 213. There are several amusing letters about Fray Gerundio in the second volume of the Cartas Familiares. The Inquisition (Index, 1790) not only forbade the work itself, but forbade any body to publish any thing for or against it.
The second volume did not fare so well. After the censure passed on the first, it could not, of course, be licensed, and so remained for a long time in manuscript, a forbidden book. In fact, it first appeared in England, and in the English language, in 1772, through the agency of Baretti, to whom the original had been sent after its author had gone to Italy. But an edition of the whole work in Spanish soon appeared at Bayonne, followed by other editions in other places; and, though it was never licensed at home till 1813,--and then only to be forbidden anew the next year, on the return of Ferdinand the Seventh,--still few books have been better known, all over Spain, to the more intelligent classes of the Spanish people, than Friar Gerund, from the day of its first publication to the present time. What is of more consequence, it was, from the first, successful in its main purpose. The sobriquet of Friar Gerund was given at once to those who indulged in the vulgar style of preaching it was intended to discountenance, and any one who was admitted to deserve the appellation could no longer collect an audience, except such as was gathered from the populace of the public squares.[332]
[332] Watt, Bibliotheca, art. Isla. Wieland, Teutsche Merkur, 1773, Tom. III. p. 196. Baretti’s Proposals for Printing the Translation of Friar Gerund, prefixed to that work, London, 1772, 2 tom. 8vo.
In consequence of the alarm and anxieties that accompanied his sudden and violent expulsion from Spain, in 1767, Father Isla suffered on the road an attack of paralysis, which made his health uncertain for the remaining fourteen years of his life. Still, after his death, it was found that in these sad years he had not been idle. Among his papers was a poem in sixteen cantos, containing above twelve thousand lines in octave stanzas. It is called “Cicero,” and claims to be a life of the great Roman orator. But it is no such thing. It is a satire on the vices and follies of the author’s own time, begun in Spain, but chiefly written during his exile in Italy; and, though it contains occasional sketches of an imaginary life of Cicero’s mother, they are very inconsiderable, and, as for Cicero himself, the poem leaves him in his cradle, only eighteen months old.
One of the subjects of its satire is the whole class of Spanish narrative poems, of which, and especially of those devoted to the lives of the saints, it may be regarded as a sort of parody; but its main purpose is to ridicule the lives of modern fine ladies, and the modes of early education then prevalent. The whole, however, is mingled with inappropriate discussions about Italy, poetry, and a country life, and hardly less inappropriate satire of professed musicians, theatres, and poets who praise one another; in short, with whatever occurred to Father Isla’s wayward humor as he was writing. From internal evidence, it seems to have been read, from time to time as it was written, to a society of friends,--probably some of the numerous exiles who, like himself, had resorted to Bologna, and subsisted there on the miserable pittance the Spanish government promised them, but often failed to pay. For such a purpose it was not ill adapted by its clear, flowing style, and occasionally by its pungent satire; but its cumbrous length and endless digressions, often trifling both in matter and manner, render it quite unfit for publication. It was, however, offered to the public censor, and permission to print it was refused, though for reasons so frivolous, that it seems certain the real objection was not to the poem, but to the author.[333]
[333] The autograph manuscript of “El Ciceron,” neatly written out in 219 folio pages, double columns, with the corrections of the author and the erasures of the censor, is in the Boston Athenæum. It is accompanied by three autograph letters of Father Isla; by the opinion of the censor, that the poem ought not to be published; and by an answer to that opinion;--the last two being anonymous. These curious and valuable manuscripts were procured in Madrid by E. Weston, Esq., and presented by him to the Library of the Athenæum, in 1844.
Others of Father Isla’s works were more fortunate. Six volumes of his sermons were collected and published, and six volumes of his letters, chiefly addressed to his sister and her husband, and written in a very affectionate and gay spirit. To these, at different times, were added a few minor works of a trifling character, and one or two that are religious.[334]
[334] The works alluded to are,--“El Mercurio General,” (Madrid, 1784, 18mo,) being extracts from accounts claimed to have been written by Father Isla for that journal, in 1758, of the European events of the year, but not certainly his;--“Cartas de Juan de la Enzina,” (Madrid, 1784, 18mo,) a satirical work on the follies of Spanish medicine;--“Cartas Familiares,” written between 1744 and 1781; published, 1785-86, also in a second edition, Madrid, 1790, 6 tom. 12mo;--“Coleccion de Papeles Crítico-Apologéticos,” (1788, 2 tom. 18mo,) in defence of Feyjoó;--“Sermones,” Madrid, 1792, 6 tom. 8vo;--“Rebusco,” etc., (Madrid, 1790, 18mo,) a collection of miscellanies, some of which are probably not by Father Isla;--“Los Aldeanos Críticos”; again in defence of Feyjoó;--and various papers in the Seminario Erudito, Tom. XVI., XX., and XXXIV., and in the supplementary volume of the “Fray Gerundio.” A poem, entitled “Sueño Político,” (Madrid, 1785, 18mo,) on the accession of Charles III., is also attributed to him; and so are “Cartas atrasadas del Parnaso,” a satire which is not supposed to have been written by him, though it reminds one sometimes of the “Ciceron.”
But what most surprised the world was his translation of “Gil Blas,” printed in 1787, claiming the work, on which the fame of Le Sage must always principally rest, as “stolen from the Spanish, and now,” in the words of Father Isla’s title-page, “restored to its country and native language by a Spaniard, who does not choose to have his nation trifled with.”[335] The external grounds for this extraordinary charge are slight. The first suggestion occurs in 1752, and is made by Voltaire, who, in his “Age of Louis the Fourteenth,” declares the Gil Blas “to be entirely taken from Espinel’s ‘Marcos de Obregon.’” This charge, as we have seen, is not true, and we have reason to believe that it was the result of personal ill-will on the part of Voltaire, who had himself been attacked in the Gil Blas, and who had, in some way or other, heard that Le Sage was indebted to Espinel. Afterwards, similar declarations are made in two or three books of no authority, and especially in a Biographical Dictionary printed at Amsterdam in 1771. But this is all.
[335] “Aventuras de Gil Blas de Santillana, robadas á España, adoptadas en Francia por Mons. Le Sage, restituidas á su Patria y á su Lengua nativa, por un Español zeloso, que no sufre que se burlen de su Nacion,” Madrid, 1787, 6 tom. 8vo, and often since. Though in great poverty himself, Isla gave any profit that might come from his version of the Gil Blas to assist a poor Spanish knight.
Roused by such suggestions, however, Father Isla amused himself with making a translation of Gil Blas, adding to it a long and not successful continuation,[336] and declaring, without ceremony or proof, that it was the work of an Andalusian advocate, who gave his manuscript to Le Sage, when Le Sage was in Spain, either as a secretary of the French embassy, or as a friend of the French ambassador. But all this seems to be without any foundation, for the manuscript has never been produced; the advocate has never been named; and Le Sage was never in Spain. Still, the Spanish claim has not been abandoned. On the contrary, Llorente, in two ingenious and learned works on the subject, one in French and the other in Spanish, but both printed in 1822, reasserts it, with great earnestness, resting his proofs on internal evidence, and insisting that Gil Blas is certainly of Spanish origin, and that it is probably the work, not indeed of Father Isla’s Andalusian advocate, but of Solís, the historian;--a suggestion, for which Llorente produces no better reason, than that nobody else of the period to which he assigns the Gil Blas was able, in his judgment, to write such a romance.[337]
[336] Another continuation of Gil Blas, less happy even than that of Father Isla, appeared, in 2 tom. 8vo, at Madrid, in 1792, entitled “Genealogia de Gil Blas, Continuacion de la Vida de este famoso Sujeto, por su Hijo Don Alfonso Blas de Liria.” Its author was Don Bernardo Maria de Calzada, a person who, a little earlier, had translated much from the French. (Sempere, Biblioteca, Tom. VI. p. 231.) This work, too, the author declared to be a translation, and, like Isla, set forth on his title-page that it was “restored to the language in which it was originally written.” But the whole is a worthless fiction, title-page and all, though the attempt to make out for Gil Blas a clear and noble genealogy on the side of his mother must be admitted to be a truly Spanish fancy. (See Libros III. y IV.) The story is unfinished.
[337] Voltaire, Œuvres, ed. Beaumarchais, Tom. XX. p. 155. Le Sage, Œuvres, Paris, 1810, 8vo, Tom. I. p. xxxix., where Voltaire is said to have been attacked by Le Sage, in one of his dramas; besides which it is supposed Le Sage ridiculed him under the name of Triaquero, in Gil Blas, Lib. X. c. 5. But the most important and curious discussion concerning the authorship of Gil Blas is the one that was carried on, between 1818 and 1822, by François de Neufchâteau and Antonio de Llorente, the author of the History of the Inquisition. It began with a memoir, by the first, read to the French Academy, (1818,) and an edition of Gil Blas, (Paris, 1820, 3 tom. 8vo,) in both of which he maintains Le Sage to be the true author of that romance. To both Llorente replied by a counter memoir, addressed to the French Academy, and by his “Observations sur Gil Blas,” (Paris, 1822, 12mo,) and his “Observaciones sobre Gil Blas” (Madrid, 1822, 12mo); two works not exactly alike, but substantially so, and equally maintaining that Gil Blas is Spanish in its origin, and probably the work of Solís, the historian, who, as Llorente conjectures, wrote a romance in Spanish, entitled, “El Bachiller de Salamanca,” the manuscript of which coming into the possession of Le Sage, he first plundered from it the materials for his Gil Blas, which he published in 1715-35, and then gave the world the remainder as the “Bachelier de Salamanque,” in 1738. This theory of Llorente is explained, with more skill than is shown in its original framing, by the late accomplished scholar, Mr. A. H. Everett, in an article which first appeared in the North American Review, for October, 1827, when its author was Minister of the United States in Spain, and afterwards in his pleasant “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,” published in Boston, 1845, 12mo.
But there is a ready answer to all such merely conjectural criticism. Le Sage proceeded, as an author in romantic fiction, just as he had done when he wrote for the public theatre; and the results at which he arrived in both cases are remarkably similar. In the drama, he began with translations and imitations from the Spanish, such as his “Point of Honor,” which is taken from Roxas, and his “Don Cesar Ursino,” which is from Calderon; but afterwards, when he better understood his own talent and had acquired confidence from success, he came out with his “Turcaret,” a wholly original comedy, which, far surpassed all he had before attempted, and showed how much he had been wasting his strength as an imitator. Just so he did in romance-writing. He began with translating the “Don Quixote” of Avellaneda, and remodelling and enlarging the “Diablo Cojuelo” of Guevara. But the “Gil Blas,” the greatest of all his works of prose fiction, is the result of his confirmed strength; and, in its characteristic merits, is as much his own as the “Turcaret.”
On this point, the internal evidence is as decisive as the external. The frequent errors of this remarkable romance in Spanish geography and history show, that it could hardly have been the work of a Spaniard, and certainly not of a Spaniard so well informed as Solís; its private anecdotes of society in the time of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth prove it to have been almost necessarily written by a Frenchman; while, at the same time, the freedom with which, as we go on, we find that every thing Spanish is plundered,--now a tale taken from “Marcos de Obregon,” now an intrigue or a story from a play of Mendoza, of Roxas, or of Figueroa,--points directly to Le Sage’s old habits, and to his practised skill in turning to account every thing that he deemed fitted to his purpose. The result is, that he has, by the force of his genius, produced a work of great brilliancy; in which, from his entire familiarity with Spanish literature and his unscrupulous use of it, he has preserved the national character with such fidelity, that a Spaniard is almost always unwilling to believe that the Gil Blas, especially now that he has it in the excellent version of Father Isla, could have been written by any body but one of his own countrymen.[338]
[338] “Le Point d’Honneur” is from “No hay Amigo para Amigo,” which is the first play in the Comedias de Roxas, 1680;--and “Don Cesar Ursino” is from “Peor esta que estaba,” in Calderon, Comedias, 1763, Tom. III. The errors of Gil Blas in Spanish geography and history are constantly pointed out by Llorente as blunders of Le Sage in the careless use of his original; while, on the other hand, Fr. de Neufchâteau points out its allusions to Parisian society in the time of Le Sage. But of his free use of Spanish fictions, which he took no pains to conceal, the proof is abundant. I have already noticed, when speaking of Espinel, (ante, pp. 67-70,) how much Le Sage took from “Marcos de Obregon”; but, besides this, the adventures of Don Rafael with the Seigneur de Moyadas in Gil Blas (Lib. V. c. 1) are taken from “Los Empeños del Mentir” of Mendoza (Fenix Castellano, 1690, p. 254);--the story of the Marriage de Vengeance in Gil Blas (Lib. IV. c. 4) is from the play of Roxas, “Casarse por Vengarse”;--the story of Aurora de Guzman in Gil Blas (Lib. IV. c. 5 and 6) is from “Todo es enredos Amor,” by Diego de Córdoba y Figueroa;--and so on. See Tieck’s Vorrede to his translation of Marcos de Obregon (1827); Adolfo de Castro’s Poesías de Calderon y Plagios de Le Sage, (Cadiz, 1845, 18mo, a curious little pamphlet); and the fourth book of the same author’s “Conde Duque de Olivares” (Cadiz, 1846, 8vo). In his “Bachelier de Salamanque,” Le Sage goes one step further. On the title-page of this romance, first printed three years after the last volume of Gil Blas appeared, he says expressly, that “it is translated from a Spanish manuscript,” and yet the story of Doña Cintia de la Carrera, in the fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth chapters, is taken from Moreto’s “Desden con el Desden”; a play as well known as any in Spanish literature.
The chief talent of Father Isla was in satire, and the great service he performed for his country was that of driving from its respectable churches the low and vulgar style of preaching with which they had long been infested;--a work which the “Friar Gerund” achieved almost as completely as the “Don Quixote” did that of destroying the insane passion for books of chivalry which prevailed in the seventeenth century.
But, meanwhile, other attempts were making in other directions to revive the literature of the country; some by restoring a taste for the old national poetry, some by attempting to accommodate every thing to the French doctrines of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, and some by an ill-defined and often, perhaps, unconscious struggle to unite the two opinions, and to form a school whose character should be unlike that of either and yet in advance of both.
In the direction of the earlier national poetry little was done by original efforts, but something was attempted in other ways. Huerta, a fierce, but inconsistent, adversary of the French innovations, printed, in 1778, a volume of poems almost entirely in the old manner; but it was too much marked with the bad taste of the preceding century to enjoy even a temporary success, and its author, therefore, could boast of no follower of any note in a path which was constantly less and less trodden.[339]
[339] “Poesías de Don Vicente Garcia de la Huerta,” Madrid, 1778, 12mo, and a second edition, 1786. “La Perromachia,” a mock-heroic on the loves and quarrels of sundry dogs, by Francisco Nieto Molina, (Madrid, 1765, 12mo,) is too poor to deserve notice, though it is an attempt to give greater currency to the earlier national verse,--the redondillas.
On the other hand, more was done with effect to recall the memory of the old masters themselves. Lopez de Sedano, between 1768 and 1778, published his “Spanish Parnassus,” in nine volumes; a work which, though ill digested and not always showing good taste in its selections and criticisms, is still a rich mine of the poetry of the country in its best days, and contains important materials for the history of Spanish literature from the period of Boscan and Garcilasso.[340] Sanchez went further back, and in 1779 offered, to his countrymen, for the first time, the greater legendary treasures of their heroic ages, beginning with the noble old poem of the Cid, but unhappily leaving incomplete a task for which he had proved himself so well fitted by his learning and zeal, if not by his acuteness.[341] And finally, Sarmiento, a friend of Feyjoó, and one of his ablest public defenders, undertook an elaborate history of Spanish poetry, which contains important discussions relating to the period embraced by the inquiries of Sanchez, but which was broken off by the death of its venerable author in 1770, and remained unpublished till five years later.[342] These three works, though they excited too little attention at first, were still works of importance, and have served as the foundation for a better state of things since.
[340] J. J. Lopez de Sedano, “Parnaso Español,” (Madrid, Sancha, 1768-78, 9 tom. 12mo,) was the subject, of a good deal of criticism soon after it appeared. The club of the elder Moratin--to be noticed immediately--was much dissatisfied with it (Obras Póstumas de N. F. Moratin, Londres, 1825, 12mo, p. xxv.);--Yriarte in 1778 printed a dialogue on it, “Donde las dan las toman,” full of severity (Obras, 1805, Tom. VI.);--and in 1785 Sedano replied, under the name of Juan Maria Chavero y Eslava de Ronda, in four volumes, 12mo, published at Málaga and called the “Colóquios de Espina.”
[341] T. A. Sanchez (born 1732, died 1798) published his “Poesías Anteriores al Siglo XV.” at Madrid, in 4 tom. 8vo, 1779-90, but printed very little else.
[342] Martin Sarmiento, “Memorias para la Historia de la Poesía y Poetas Españoles,” Madrid, 1775, 4to. He was born in 1692, and wrote a great deal, but published little. His defence of his master, Feyjoó, (1732,) generally goes with the “Teatro Crítico”; and some of his tracts are to be found in the Seminario Erudito, Tom. V., VI., XIX., and XX. His “Historia de la Poesía,” printed as the first volume of his Works, which were not further continued, is the more valuable, because, making his inquiries quite independently of Sanchez, he often comes to the same results.
The doctrines of the French school, somewhat modified, perhaps, by the reproduction of the elder Spanish literature, but still substantially unchanged, found followers more numerous and active. During the reign of Charles the Third, Moratin the elder, a gentleman of an old Biscayan family, who was born in 1737, and died in 1780, succeeded, in a great degree, to the inheritance of Luzan’s opinions, and devoted himself to the reform of the taste of his countrymen. He was the friend of Montiano, who had himself endeavoured to introduce classical tragedy upon the Spanish stage, and who had, probably, some share in forming the literary character of the young poet. But the court, as usual, was an element in the movement. Moratin was received with flattering regard by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the head of the great house of the Guzmans; by the Duke of Ossuna, long ambassador in France; by Aranda, the wise minister of state, who rarely forgot the cause of intellectual culture; and by the Infante Don Gabriel de Bourbon, the accomplished translator of Sallust; and each of these persons was thus able, through Moratin, to exercise an influence on the state of letters in Spain.
His first public effort of any consequence, except a drama that will be noticed hereafter, was his “Poeta,” which appeared in 1764. It consists entirely of his own shorter poems, and is among the many proofs how small was the interest then felt in literature, since, though the whole collection fills only a hundred and sixty pages, it was found expedient to publish it in ten successive numbers, in order to give it a fair opportunity to be circulated and read. This was followed, the next year, by the “Diana,” a short didactic poem, in six books, on the Chase, and in 1765 by a narrative poem on the Destruction of his Ships by Cortés, to which if we add a volume published by the piety of his son in 1821, and containing, with a modest and beautiful life of their author, a collection of poems, most of which had not before been published, we shall have all of the elder Moratin that can now interest us.
Its value is not great; and yet portions of it are not likely to be soon forgotten. The “Epic Canto,” as he calls it, on the bold adventure of Cortés in burning his ships, is the noblest poem of its class produced in Spain during the eighteenth century, and gives more pleasure than almost any of the historical epics that preceded it in such large numbers. Some of his shorter pieces, like his ballads on Moorish subjects, and an ode to a champion in the bull-fights,--which Moratin constantly frequented, and of which he printed a pleasant historical sketch,--are full of spirit. All he wrote, indeed, is marked by purity and exactness of language and harmony of versification; showing that, though he possessed to an extraordinary degree the power of an improvisator, he composed carefully and finished with patience. But his chief success was as a public teacher; laboring faithfully in the chair of the Imperial College, where he took the place of his friend Ayala, and rebuking the bad taste of his times by the strength of his own modest example.[343]
[343] Besides the poems noted in the text, I have, by Moratin the elder, an Ode on account of an act of mercy and pardon by Charles III., in 1762, and the “Egloga á Velasco y Gonzalez,” printed on occasion of their portraits being placed in the Academy, in 1770; both of little consequence, but not, I believe, noticed elsewhere. His “Obras Póstumas” were printed at Barcelona, in 1821, 4to, and reprinted at London, in 1825, 12mo. Moratin’s “Carta Sobre las Fiestas de Toros,” (Madrid, 1777, 12mo,) which is a slight prose tract, is intended to prove historically that the amusement of bull-fighting is Spanish in its origin and character;--a point concerning which those who have read the Chronicles of Muntaner and the Cid can have little doubt. Moratin had the power of improvisating with great effect. Obras, 1825, pp. xxxiv.-xxxix.
Moratin was an amiable man, and gathered the men of letters of the Spanish capital in a friendly circle about him. They met in one of the better class of taverns,--the Fonda de San Sebastian,--where they maintained a club-room that was always open and ready to receive them. Ayala, the tragic writer; Cerdá, the literary antiquarian; Rios, who wrote the analysis of “Don Quixote” prefixed to the magnificent edition of the Academy; Ortega, the botanist and scholar; Pizzi, the Professor of Arabic Literature; Cadahalso, the poet and essayist; Muñoz, the historian of the New World; Yriarte, the fabulist; Conti, the Italian translator of a collection of Spanish poetry; Signorelli, the author of the general history of theatres; and others,--were members of this pleasant association, and resorted continually to its cheerful saloon.
How truly Spanish was the tone of their intercourse may be gathered from the fact, that they had but one law to govern all their proceedings, and that was, never to speak on any subject except the Theatre, Bull-fights, Love, and Poetry. But in every thing they undertook they were much in earnest. They read their works to each other for mutual, friendly criticism, and discussed freely whatever was written at the time, and whatever they thought would tend to revive the decayed spirit of their country. They read, too, and examined the literature of other nations; and, if their tendencies were more towards the school of Boileau and the great masters of Italy, than might have been anticipated from the spirit of their association, it should be borne in mind, that two of their most active members were Italian men of letters, that the court had recently come from Naples, and that the spirit of the times much favored all that was French, and especially the French theatre.[344]
[344] N. F. Moratin, Obras Póstumas, 1821, pp. xxiv.-xxxi.
Among the most interesting members of this agreeable society was José de Cadahalso, a gentleman descended from one of the old mountain families of the North of Spain, but born at Cadiz in 1741. His education was conducted from early youth in Paris, but before he was twenty years old he had visited Italy, Germany, England, and Portugal, and obtained a knowledge of the language and literature of each, and especially of England, sufficient to emancipate him from many national prejudices, and make him more useful to the cause of letters at home than he would otherwise have been.
On his return to Spain he took the military dress of Santiago, and entered the army. There he rose rapidly, till he reached the rank of colonel; but, in all the different places to which his own choice or the service of his regiment carried him,--Saragossa, Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, and Salamanca,--he sought occasion to continue his earlier pursuits, and succeeded in connecting himself with the leading spirits of the time, such as Moratin, Iglesias, Yriarte, the wise Jovellanos, and the young and promising Melendez Valdes. But his career, though successful, was short. He perished at the siege of Gibraltar, struck by a bomb, on the 27th of February, 1782, and the governor of the besieged fortress joined in the general sorrow over the grave of an honorable enemy who had been distinguished alike in letters and in arms.[345]
[345] Sempere, Biblioteca, Tom. II. p. 21. Puybusque, Tom. II. p. 493. His name, I believe, was originally spelt Cadalso; but as that is a recognized word, meaning “scaffold,” it is softened in the recent Madrid editions of his Works into Cadahalso, which means “cottage” or “shanty.” Both these words, however, are regarded as one and the same, in the first edition of the Dictionary of the Academy, so that perhaps not much is gained by the change.
In 1772 Cadahalso published his “Eruditos á la Violeta,” or Fashionable Learning, to which, from its considerable success, he added a supplement the same year. The original work is a pleasant satire on the superficial scholarship of his times, and is thrown into the form of directions how to teach the whole circle of human knowledge in a course of lectures, that shall just fill the seven days of the week; the supplement giving a few further illustrations of the same subject, and some of the results of such teachings on the unhappy scholars who had been its victims. This, with a volume of poems printed the next year, and containing several careful translations from the ancients, a few satirical trifles after the manner of Quevedo, and a good many Anacreontic songs and tales in the manner of Villegas, are all of his works that were published during his lifetime.
But after his death there was found among his papers a collection of letters, supposed to have been written by a person connected with an embassy to Spain from Morocco, and addressed to his friends at home. They belong to the large family of works of fiction, begun by Marana’s “Turkish Spy,” and are commonly set down as imitations of Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters,” but, in fact, show a nearer relationship with Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World.” The whole work, however, is more occupied with literary discussions and temporary satire, than either of those just referred to; and therefore, though it is written in a pure and pleasant style, with wit and good sense, it has been far from obtaining a place, like theirs, in the general regard of the world. Still, like the rest of his posthumous works, which comprise a few more compositions in prose satire and a few more poems, the best of which are in the old short verses always so popular in Spain, “The Moorish Letters” of Cadahalso have been often reprinted, and probably are not destined to be forgotten.[346]
[346] His “Eruditos á la Violeta,” and his poetry, “Ocios de mi Juventud,” were printed at Madrid, 1772 and 1773, 4to, under the assumed name of Joseph Vasquez. An edition of his Works, with an excellent Life by Navarrete, appeared at Madrid, in 1818, in 3 tom. 12mo, and has been reprinted more than once since. For the contemporary opinion of Cadahalso, see Sempere, loc. cit.
Another member of the society founded by Moratin, and one of the most prominent of them, was Thomas de Yriarte, a gentleman who was born on the island of Teneriffe in 1750, but received that part of his education which decided the course of his life at Madrid, under the auspices of his uncle, Don Juan de Yriarte, the learned head of the King’s Library. The young man was known as a dramatic writer, and as a translator of French plays for the royal theatres, from the age of eighteen; and from the age of twenty-one, when he printed some good Latin verses on the birth of the Infante, afterwards Charles the Fourth, he was distinguished at court for his accomplishments both in ancient and modern literature. Soon after this period he received a place under the government; and, though his employments, both in the Office of Foreign Affairs and in that of the Department of War, were of an intellectual nature, still his time was much occupied by them, and his opportunities for the indulgence of a poetical taste were much diminished. Besides this, he had rivalries and troubles with Sedano, Melendez, Forner, and some others of his contemporaries, and was summoned before the Inquisition in 1786, as one tainted with the new French philosophy. The result of all these trials and interruptions was, that when, after his death, which occurred in 1791, his works were collected and published, more than half of the eight small volumes through which they were spread was found to consist of translations and personal controversies; the translations made with skill, and the quarrels managed with spirit and wit, but neither of them important enough to be now remembered.
His original poetry is better. It is marked by purity of style, regularity, and elegance, but not by power or elevation. The best of what is merely miscellaneous is to be found in eleven Epistles, with one of which, addressed to his friend Cadahalso, he dedicates to him a translation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry.” But in two departments, where his natural taste led him to labor with a decided preference, he apparently made more effort than in any other, and had greater success.
The first of these was didactic poetry. His poem “On Music,”--a subject which he chose from his considerable proficiency in that art,--appeared in 1780, and was soon favorably known, not only at home, but in Italy and France. It consists of five books, in which he discusses with philosophical precision the elements of music; musical expression of different kinds, but especially martial and sacred; the music of the theatre; that of society; and that of man in solitude. The poem is written in the free, national silva, irregular, but flowing, and no want of skill is shown in its management. But, as a whole, it has too little richness and vigor to give life to the cold forms of instruction, in which it is throughout rigorously cast.[347]
[347] As a sort of counterpart to the poem on Music, by Yriarte, may be mentioned one of less merit, published soon afterwards by Don Diego Antonio Rejon de Silva, “La Pintura, Poema Didáctico en Tres Cantos,” (Segovia, 1786, 8vo,) the first canto being on Design, the second on Composition, and the third on Coloring, with notes and a defence of Spanish artists. He was a gentleman of Murcia, who indulged himself in poetry and painting as an amateur, but whose serious occupations were in the Office of Foreign Affairs at Madrid. He died about 1796. Sempere y Guarinos (Biblioteca, Tom. V. pp. 1-6) gives an account of his few and unimportant works, and Cean Bermudez (Diccionario, Tom. IV. p. 164) has a short notice of his life.
The other department, in which Yriarte was more successful, was that of fables. Here he, in some degree, struck out a new path; for he not only invented all his fictions, which no other fabulist in modern times had done, but restricted them all, in their moral purpose, to the correction of the faults and follies of men of learning,--an application which had not before been thought of. Their whole number, including a few that are posthumous, is nearly eighty, above sixty of which appeared in 1782. They are written with great care, in no less than forty different measures, and show an extraordinary degree of ingenuity in adapting the attributes and instincts of animals to the instruction, not of mankind at large, as had always been done before, but to that of a separate and small class, between whom and the inferior creation the resemblance is rarely obvious. The task was certainly a difficult one. Perhaps, on this account, they are too narrative in their structure, and fail somewhat in the genial spirit which distinguishes Æsop and La Fontaine, the greatest masters of Apologue and Fable. But their influence was so much needed in the age of bad writing when they appeared, and they are besides so graceful in their versification, that they were not only received with great favor at first, but have never lost it since. Their author’s reputation, in fact, now rests on them almost exclusively.[348]
[348] Obras de Thomas de Yriarte, Madrid, 1805, 8 tom. 12mo. Villanueva, Memorias, Londres, 1825, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 27. Sempere, Biblioteca, Tom. VI. p. 190. Llorente, Histoire, Tom. II. p. 449.
Yriarte, however, had a rival, who shared these honors with him, and in some respects obtained them even earlier. This was Samaniego, a Biscayan gentleman of rank and fortune, who was born in 1745, and died in 1801; having devoted his life, in the most disinterested manner, to the welfare of his native province. He was one of the earliest and most active members of the first of those societies sometimes called “Friends of the Country,” and sometimes “Societies for Public Improvement,” which began in the reign of Charles the Third, and soon spread through Spain, exercising an important influence on the education and public economy of the kingdom, and laboring to raise the arts of life from the degraded condition into which they had fallen during the latter period of the dominion of the House of Austria.
The Biscayan Society, founded in 1765, devoted itself much to the education of the people; and, to favor this great cause, Samaniego undertook to write fables suited to the capacity of the children taught in the Society’s seminary. How early he began to prepare them is not known; but in the first portion, published in 1781, and therefore one year before those of Yriarte appeared, he speaks of Yriarte as his model, and leaves no doubt that the fables of that poet had been seen by him. The second part of Samaniego’s collection was published in 1784, when that of his rival had been admired by the public long enough to change the relations of the two authors, and bring up a quarrel of pamphlets between them, little creditable to either. Both parts, taken together, contain a hundred and fifty-seven fables, the last nineteen of which and a few others are original, while the rest are taken, partly from Æsop, Phædrus, and the Oriental fabulists, but chiefly from La Fontaine and Gay. They succeeded at once. The children learned them by heart, and the teachers of the children found in them subjects for pleasant reading and reflection. They were, no doubt, less carefully written than the fables of Yriarte, less original and less exactly adapted to their purpose; but they were more free-hearted, more natural, and adapted to a larger class of readers; in short, there is a more easy poetical genius about them, and therefore, even if they cannot claim a higher merit than those of Yriarte, they have taken a stronger hold on the national regard.[349]
[349] Felix María de Samaniego, “Fábulas en Verso Castellano para el Uso del Real Seminario Vascongado,” Nueva York, 1826, 18mo. There is a Life of the author, by Navarrete, in the fourth volume of Quintana’s “Coleccion,” and a reply to his attack on Yriarte in the sixth volume of Yriarte’s Works. For an account of the “patriotic societies,” see Sempere, Biblioteca, Tom. V. p. 135, and Tom. VI. p. 1.
The best of them are the shortest and simplest, like the following, entitled “The Scrupulous Cats,” which was well suited to the time when it appeared, and can hardly be amiss at any other.
Two cats, old Tortoise-back and Kate, Once from its spit a capon ate. It was a giddy thing, be sure, And one they could not hide or cure. They licked themselves, however, clean, And then sat down behind a screen, And talked it over. Quite precise, They took each other’s best advice, Whether to eat the spit or no? “And did they eat it?” “Sir, I trow, They did not! They were honest things, Who had a conscience, and knew how it stings.”[350]
[350] Parte II. Lib. II. Fab. 9. He gives, also, an expanded version of the same fable, but the shortest is much the best, Πλέον ἥμισυ παντός.
Samaniego was not the only person who, without belonging to the society of Moratin and his friends, coöperated with them in their efforts to encourage a better tone in the literature of their country. Among those who, from a similar impulse, but with less success, took the same direction, were Arroyal, who, in 1784, published a collection of poems, which he calls Odes, but which are oftener epigrams; and Montengon, a Jesuit, who, after the expulsion of his Order from Spain, began, in 1786, with his “Eusebio,” a work on education, partly in imitation of the “Télémaque,” and then went on rapidly with a prose epic called “Rodrigo,” a volume of Odes, and several other works, written with little talent, and showing by their inaccuracies of style that their author had been an exile in Italy till his mother tongue had become strange to him. To these should be added Gregorio de Salas, a quiet ecclesiastic, who wrote odes, fables, and other trifles, that were several times printed after 1790; Ignacio de Meras, a courtier of the worst days of Charles the Fourth, whose worthless dramas and miscellaneous poetry appeared in 1792; and the Count de Noroña, a soldier and diplomatist, who, besides a dull epic on the separation of the Arabian empire in Spain from that of the East, printed, in 1799-1800, two volumes of verse so light, that they procured for him sometimes the title of the Spanish Dorat. But all these writers only showed a constantly increasing disposition to fall more and more into the feebler French school of the eighteenth century; and while none of them had the talent of the few active spirits collected at the Fonda de San Sebastian in Madrid, none certainly exercised the sort of influence they did on the poetry of their time.[351]
[351] A few words should be added, on each of these last five authors.
1. “Las Odas de Leon de Arroyal,” Madrid, 1784, 12mo. At the end are a few worthless Anacreontics by a lady, whose name is not given; and at the beginning is a truly Spanish definition of lyrical poetry, namely, that “whose verses can be properly played, sung, or danced.”
2. Pedro de Montengon, “Eusebio,” Madrid, 1786-87, 4 tom. 8vo. The first two volumes gave great offence by the absence of all injunctions to make religious instruction a part of education; and, though the remaining two made up for this deficiency, there is reason to believe that Montengon intended originally to follow the theory of the “Emile.” “El Antenor” (Madrid, 1788, 2 tom. 8vo) is a prose poem on the tradition of the founding of Padua by the Trojans. “El Rodrigo” (Madrid, 1793, 8vo) is another prose epic, in one volume and twelve books, on the “Last of the Goths.” “Eudoxia,” Madrid, 1793, 8vo; again, a work on education; but on the education of women. “Odas,” Madrid, 1794, 8vo; very poor. Montengon, of whom these are not all the works, was born at Alicante, in 1745, and was alive in 1815. He was very young when he entered the Church, and lived chiefly at Naples, where he threw off his ecclesiastical robes and devoted himself to secular occupations.
3. Francisco Gregorio de Salas, “Coleccion de Epigramas,” etc., 1792, 4th edition, Madrid, 1797, 2 tom. 12mo. His “Observatorio Rústico” (1770, tenth edition 1830) is a long dull eclogue, divided into six parts, which has enjoyed an unreasonable popularity. L. F. Moratin (Obras, 1830, Tom. IV. pp. 287 and 351) gives an epitaph for Salas, with a pleasing prose account of his personal character, which he well says was much more interesting than his poetry; and Sempere (Biblioteca, Tom. V. pp. 69, etc.) gives a list of his works, all of which, I believe, are in the collection printed at Madrid in 1797, ut sup. A small volume entitled “Parabolas Morales,” etc., (Madrid, 1803, 12mo,) consisting of prose apologues, somewhat better than any thing of Salas that preceded it, is, I suppose, later, and probably the last of his works.
4. Ignacio de Meras, “Obras Poéticas,” (Madrid, 1797, 2 tom. 12mo,) contain a stiff tragedy, called “Teonea,” in blank verse, and within the rules; a comedy called “The Ward of Madrid,” in the old figuron style, but burlesque and dull; an epic canto on “The Conquest of Minorca,” in 1782, to imitate Moratin’s “Ships of Cortés”; a poem “On the Death of Barbarossa, in 1518”; and a number of sonnets and odes, some of the last of which should rather be called ballads, and some of them satires;--the whole very meagre.
5. Gaspar de Noroña, whose family was of Portuguese origin, was bred a soldier and served at the siege of Gibraltar, where he wrote an elegy on the death of Cadahalso (Poesías de Noroña, Madrid, 1799-1800, 2 tom. 12mo, Tom. II. p. 190). He rose in the army to be a lieutenant-general, and, while holding that rank, published his Ode on the Peace of 1795, (Tom. I. p. 172,) by which he was first publicly known as a poet, and which, except, perhaps, a few of his shorter and lighter poems, is the best of his works. Afterwards he was sent as ambassador to Russia, but returned to defend his country when it was invaded by the French, and was made governor of Cadiz. He died in 1815, (Fuster, Biblioteca, Tom. II. p. 381,) and in 1816 his epic, entitled “Ommiada,” was published at Madrid, in two volumes, 12mo, containing above fifteen thousand verses; as dull, perhaps, as any of the similar poems that abound in Spanish literature, but less offensive to good taste than most of them. In 1833, there appeared at Paris his “Poesías Asiáticas puestas en Verso Castellano,” translations from the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, made, as he says in the Preface, to give him poetical materials for his epic. His “Quicaida,” a heroi-comic poem, in eight cantos, filled with parodies, is very tedious. It is in his Poesías, printed in 1800.
Chapter V
SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA.--MELENDEZ VALDES.--GONZALEZ.--FORNER.--IGLESIAS.-- CIENFUEGOS.--JOVELLANOS.--MUÑOZ.--ESCOIQUIZ.--MORATIN THE YOUNGER.--QUINTANA.
Both the parties, into which Spanish literature was divided about the middle of the eighteenth century, erred by running into those extremes of opinion which are rarely right in any thing and never in matters of taste. Moratin was wrong in speaking with contempt of such poetry as the fine old ballad of “Calaynos,” and Huerta was equally wrong when he said, that the “Athalie” of Racine might be fit to be represented by boarding-school misses, but was fit for nothing else. It was natural, therefore, that another party, or school, should be formed, which should endeavour to avoid the excesses of both its predecessors, and unite their merits; one that should not be insensible to the power and richness of the old writers of the time of the Philips, and yet, escaping from their extravagances and bad taste, should mould itself in some degree according to the severe state of literary opinion then prevailing on the Continent. Such a school in fact appeared at Salamanca in the latter part of the reign of Charles the Third and the beginning of that of Charles the Fourth.
Its proper founder was Melendez Valdes, who was born in Estremadura, in 1754, and at the age of eighteen was sent to study at Salamanca, where, if he did not pass the larger remaining portion of his life, he passed at least its happiest and best years.[352] As a versifier, he began early, and in a bad school; writing at first in the manner of Lobo, who was still read and admired. But he soon fell indirectly under the influence of Moratin and his friends at Madrid, who were in every way opposed to the bad taste of their time. By a fortunate accident Cadahalso was carried fresh from the meetings of the club of the Fonda de San Sebastian to Salamanca. His discerning kindness detected at once the talent its possessor had not yet discovered. He took Melendez into his house; showed him the merit of the elder literature of his country, as well as that of the other cultivated nations of Europe; and devoted himself so earnestly and so affectionately to the development of his young friend’s genius, that it was afterwards said, with some truth, that, among all the works of Cadahalso, the best was Melendez. At the same period, too, Melendez became acquainted with Iglesias and Gonzalez; and through the latter was placed in relations of friendship with the commanding mind of Jovellanos, who exercised from the first moment of their intercourse an obvious and salutary influence over him.
[352] Considerable improvement took place at Salamanca in some departments of study while Melendez was there. But still things remained in a very torpid state.
His earliest public success was in 1780, when he obtained a prize offered by the Spanish Academy for the best eclogue. Yriarte, who was some years older, and had already become favorably known at court and in the capital, was his most formidable rival. But the poem Yriarte offered, which is on the pleasures of a country life, as set forth by one disgusted with that of the city, is somewhat in the formal, declamatory style of the less fortunate portions of the older Spanish pastorals; while that of Melendez is fresh from the fields, and as one of the judges said, in the discussion that followed its reading, seems absolutely to smell of their wild flowers. It was, indeed, in sweetness and gentleness, if not in originality and strength, such a return to the tones of Garcilasso, as had not been heard in Spain for above a century. Yriarte received the second honors of the contest, but was not satisfied with such a decision, and made known his feelings by an ill-judged attack upon the successful eclogue of his rival. The popular favor, however, fully sustained the Academy, and its vote on that occasion has never been reversed.
The next year Melendez came to Madrid. He was received with great kindness by Jovellanos and his friends; and obtained new honors at the Academy of San Fernando, by an ode “On the Glory of the Arts,” which that Academy had been founded to foster. But his preference was still for his old poetical haunts on the banks of the Tórmes, and, having obtained the chair of Professor of the Humanities or Philology, at Salamanca, he gladly returned thither, and devoted himself to its unostentatious duties.
In 1784, at the suggestion of Jovellanos, he became a competitor for the prize offered by the city of Madrid for a comedy, and wrote “The Marriage of Camacho.” But his talent was not dramatic; and therefore, though he obtained the votes of the judges, he did not, to the great disappointment of his patron, obtain those of the public when his drama was brought to the test of a free representation.
This failure, however, he retrieved a year afterwards, by publishing a small volume of poetry, chiefly lyric and pastoral. Most of it is in the short, national verse, and nearly all is marked with a great gentleness of spirit and a truly poetical sensibility. The Anacreontics which it contains remind us of Villegas, but have more philosophy and more tenderness than his. The ballads, for which his talent was no less happily fitted, if they lack the abrupt vigor of the elder times, have a grace, a lightness, and a finish which belong to that more advanced period of a nation’s poetry, when the popular lyre has ceased to give forth new and original tones. But everywhere this little volume shows traces of an active fancy and powers of nice observation, which break forth in rich and faithful descriptions of natural scenery, and in glimpses of what is tenderest and truest in the human heart. It was, in fact, a volume of poetry more worthy of the country than any that had been produced in Spain since the disappearance of the great lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and it was received, in consequence, with general enthusiasm, not only for its own sake, but as the long-looked-for dawn of a brighter day.
But his success was not altogether wisely used by Melendez. He had been in the habit for some years of spending his vacations at court, where he was a favorite with many persons of distinction; and, now that he had risen so much in general consideration, he employed his influence in soliciting for himself a place under the government,--an old weakness in the Castilian character, which, however it might be disguised by the loyalty of public service, has broken down the independence and happiness of multitudes of high-minded men who have yielded to it. Melendez, unfortunately, succeeded in his aspirations. In 1789 he was made a judge in one of the courts of Saragossa, and in 1791 was raised to a dignified position in the Chancery of Valladolid; thus involving himself more or less with the political government of the country, to which, during the administration of the Prince of the Peace, every officer it employed was in some way made subservient.
He did not, however, neglect his favorite pursuits. He fulfilled with faithfulness and ability the duties of his place; but poetry was still his first love, for whose service he rescued many hours of secret and fond devotion. In 1797, he published a new edition of his works, more than doubling their original amount, and dedicating them to the reigning favorite,--the master of all fortunes in the country he governed so ill. It was successful. The new portions wore a somewhat graver and more philosophical air than his earliest lyrics and pastorals had done, and showed more the influence of studies in English and German literature. But this was not, on the whole, an improvement. He felt, undoubtedly, that the tremendous revolutions he witnessed on all sides, in the fall of kingdoms and the convulsions of society, prescribed to poetry subjects more lofty and solemn than he had been wont to seek; and he made an effort to rise to a requisition so severe. Once or twice he intimates a consciousness that he was not equal to the undertaking; and yet his “Ode to Winter,” as a season for reflection, which shows how much he had read Thomson, his “Ode to Truth,” and his “Ode on the Presence of God in his Works,” are not unworthy of their lofty subjects. Several of his philosophical epistles, too, are good; especially those to Jovellanos and the Prince of the Peace. But, in his longer canzones, where he sometimes imitates Petrarch, and in his epic canto on “The Fall of Lucifer,” which was evidently suggested by Milton, he failed.[353] On the whole, therefore, the attempt to introduce a new tone into Spanish poetry,--a tone of moral and, in some degree, of metaphysical discussion, to which he was urged by Jovellanos,--if it did not diminish the permanent fame of Melendez, did not add to it. The concise energy and philosophical precision such a tone requires are, in fact, foreign from the fervent genius of the old Castilian verse, and hardly consistent with that submissive religious faith which is one of the most important elements of the national character. In this direction, therefore, Melendez has been little followed.
[353] Whether the “Caida de Luzbel” was written because a prize was offered by the Spanish Academy, in 1785, for a poem on that subject, which was to consist of not more than one hundred octave stanzas, I do not know; but I have a poor attempt with the same title, professing to be the work of Manuel Perez Valderrabano, (Palencia, 1786, 12mo,) and to have been written for such a prize, to all the conditions of which the poem of Melendez seems conformed. No adjudication of the prize, however, took place.
As, however, we have intimated, this new publication of his works was successful. The Prince of the Peace was flattered by his share in it; and Melendez received, in consequence, an important employment about the court, which brought him to Madrid, where, his friend Jovellanos having been made a minister of state, his position became, for a moment, most agreeable and happy; while, for the future, a long vista of preferment and fame seemed opening before him. But the very next year, the virtuous and wise man on whom rested so many hopes, besides those of Melendez, fell from power; and, according to the old custom of the Spanish monarchy, his political friends were involved in his ruin. At first, Melendez was exiled to Medina del Campo, and afterwards to Zamora; but in 1802 the rigor of his persecution was mitigated, and he was permitted to return to Salamanca, the scene of his earliest and happiest fame.
But he returned there a saddened and disappointed man; little inclined to poetical studies, and with little of the tranquillity of spirit necessary to pursue them successfully. At the end of six weary years came the revolution of Aranjuez, and he was again free. He hastened at once to Madrid. But he was too late. The king was already at Bayonne, and the French power was in the ascendant in the capital. Unfortunately, he attached himself to the new government of Joseph, and shared first its disasters and then its fate. Once he was absolutely led out to be shot by the excited population of Oviedo, where he had been sent as a commissioner. On another occasion, his house at Salamanca was sacked, and his precious library destroyed, by the very French party whose interests he served. At last, when all was lost, he fled. But, before he crossed the frontier, he knelt down and kissed the last spot of earth that he could call Spain; and then, as the Bidassoa received his tears, cried out in anguish that “he should never again tread the soil of his country.” His prophecy was fulfilled as sadly as it was made. Four miserable years he lived as an exile in the South of France, and then died at Montpellier, on the 24th of May, 1817, in poverty and suffering.[354]
[354] The death of Melendez was supposed by his physician to have been occasioned by the vegetable diet to which he was driven, for want of means to purchase food more substantial; and, from the same poverty, his burial was so obscure that the Duke of Frias and the poet Juan Nicasio Gallego with difficulty discovered his remains, in 1828, and caused them to be respectfully interred, in one of the principal cemeteries of Montpellier, with an appropriate monument to mark the spot. Semanario Pintoresco, 1839, pp. 331-333; a striking and sad history.
To solace the heavy hours of his exile, he occupied himself with preparing the materials for a final publication of all he had written, embracing many new poems and many changes in those already published;--all which appeared in 1820, and have constituted the basis of the different editions of his works that have been given to the world since. Like the previous collections, it shows, not, indeed, a poetical genius of the first order, nor one with very flexible or very various attributes, but certainly a genius of great sweetness; always winning and graceful whenever the subject implies tenderness, and sometimes vigorous and imposing when it demands power. What Melendez wrote with success was a great advance upon the poetry of Montiano, and even upon that of the elder Moratin. It was more Castilian, and more full of feeling, than theirs. In style, too, it was more free, and it has done much to settle the poetical manner that has since prevailed. Gallicisms occasionally occur that might have been avoided, though many of them have now become a part of the recognized resources of Spanish poetry; but more often Melendez has revived old and neglected words and phrases, which have thus been restored to their place in the language, and have increased its wealth. As a general remark, his verse is not only flowing, but well suited to his subjects; and whether we consider what he has done himself, or what influence he has exercised over others,--especially when we read the little volume he published in the freshness of his youth, while he was still unknown at court and still careless of the convulsions that were at last to overwhelm him,--there can be no doubt that he was better fitted to form a new school and give a guiding impulse to the national poetry than any writer that had appeared in Spain for above a century.[355]
[355] Juan Melendez Valdes, “Poesías,” Madrid, 1785, 12mo; 1797, 3 tom. 18mo; 1820, 4 tom. 8vo; the last with a Life, by Quintana. (Puybusque, Tom. II. p. 496.) I have seen it stated, that three counterfeit editions of the first small volume, printed in 1785, appeared almost at the same time with the true one; so great was the first outbreak of his popularity. The first volume of Hermosilla (Juicio Crítico de los Principales Poetas Españoles de la Ultima Era, Paris, 1840, 2 tom. 12mo) contains a criticism of the poems of Melendez, so severe that I find it difficult to explain its motive. The judgment of Martinez de la Rosa, in the notes to his didactic poem on Poetry, is much more faithful and true. Melendez corrected his verse with great care; sometimes with too much, as may be seen by comparing some of the poems as he first published them, in 1785, with their last revision, in the edition of his Works, 1820.
Older than Melendez, but somewhat influenced by him and by Cadahalso, who had an effect on the taste of both, was the excellent Father Diego Gonzalez, a modest Augustinian monk, a part of whose life was spent in active religious duties at Salamanca, where he became intimate with the poets of the new school; a part of it at Seville, where he was the friend of Jovellanos; and a part of it at Madrid, where he died in 1794, about sixty years old, sincerely lamented by some of the noblest spirits of his time. As a poet, Gonzalez adhered more to the old Castilian school than Melendez did. But his model was the best. He imitated Luis de Leon; and did it with such happy success, that, in some of his odes and in some of his versions of the Psalms, we might almost think we were listening to the solemn tones of his great master. His most popular poems, however, were light and gay; such as his verses “To a Perfidious Bat,” which have been very often printed; his verses “To a Lady who had burned her Finger”; and similar trifles, in which he showed that all the secret idiomatic graces of the old Castilian were at his command. A didactic poem on “The Four Ages of Man,” which he began, and in the first book of which there is a fine dedication of the whole to Jovellanos, was never finished. Indeed, his poetry, though much known and circulated during his lifetime, was an object of little interest or care to himself, and was collected with difficulty after his death, and published by his faithful friend, Juan Fernandez.[356]
[356] “Poesías de M. T. Diego de Gonzalez,” Madrid, 1812, 12mo. He was a native of Ciudad Rodrigo, and was born in 1733. If he had been a little less modest, and a little less connected with Jovellanos and Melendez, we might have had a modern school of Seville as well as of Salamanca.
Other poets, among whom were Forner, Iglesias, and Cienfuegos, were more under the influence of the Salamanca school than Gonzalez was. Forner, like Melendez, was born in Estremadura, and the two young friends were educated together at Salamanca. In his critical opinions,--partly shown in a satire “On the Faults introduced into Castilian Poetry,” which gained an academic prize in 1782, and partly in his controversies with Huerta on the subject of the Spanish theatre,--he inclines much to the stricter French school. But his poetry is more free than such opinions would imply; and in his latter years, when he lived as a magistrate at Seville, and studied Herrera, Rioja, and the other old masters who were natives of its soil, he attached himself yet more decidedly to the national manner, and approached nearer to the serene severity of Gonzalez. Unhappily, his life, besides being much crowded with business, was short. He died in 1797, only forty-one years old; and, except his prose works, the best of which is a well-written defence of the literary reputation of his country against the injurious imputations of foreigners, he left little to give the world proof of the merits he possessed, or the influence he really exercised.[357]
[357] Juan Pablo Forner, “Oracion Apologética por la España y su Mérito Literario,” Madrid, 1786, 12mo. His critical controversies and discussions were chiefly under assumed names,--Tomé Cecial, Varas, Bartolo, etc. His poetry is best found in the “Biblioteca” of Mendibil y Silvela, (Burdeos, 1819, 4 tom. 8vo,) and in the fourth volume of Quintana’s “Poesías Selectas”;--an attempt to publish a collection of all his works, edited by Luis Villanueva, having stopped after issuing the first volume, Madrid, 1843, 8vo.
Iglesias, though his life was even shorter, was, in some respects, more fortunate. He was born in Salamanca, and educated there under the most favorable auspices. Offended at the low state of morals in his native city, he indulged himself at first in the free forms of Castilian satire;--ballads, apologues, epigrams, and especially the half-simple, half-malicious letrillas, in which he was eminently successful. But, when he became a parish priest, he thought such lightness unbecoming the example he wished to set before his flock. He devoted himself, therefore, to serious composition; wrote serious ballads, eclogues, and silvas in the manner of Melendez; and published a didactic poem on theology;--all a result of a most worthy purpose, and all written in the pure style which is one of his prominent merits; but none of it giving token of the instinctive promptings of his genius, and none of it fitted to increase his final reputation. After his death, which occurred in 1791, when he was thirty-eight years old, this became at once apparent. His works were collected and published in two volumes; the first being filled with the graver class of his poems, and the second with the satirical. The decision of the public was instant. His lighter poems were too free, but they were better imitations of Quevedo than had yet been seen, and became favorites at once; the serious poems were dull, and soon ceased to be read.[358]
[358] “Poesías de Don Josef Iglesias de la Casa,” Salamanca, 1798, 2 tom. 18mo, Segunda Edicion; forbidden by the Inquisition, Index Expurg., 1805, p. 27. The best editions are those of Barcelona, 1820, and Paris, 1821; but there are several others, and among them one in four small volumes, 1840, the last of which contains a considerable number of poems not before published, some of which, and perhaps all, are not by Iglesias.
Cienfuegos, who was ten years younger than Melendez, was more strictly his follower than either of the two poets last mentioned. But he had fallen on evil times, and his career, which promised to be brilliant, was cut short by the troubles they brought upon him. In 1798 he published his poetical works; the miscellaneous portion consisting of Anacreontics, odes, ballads, epistles, and elegies, which, while they give proof of much real talent and passion, show sometimes an excess of sentimental feeling, and sometimes a desire to imitate the metaphysical and philosophical manner supposed to be demanded by the spirit of the age. Both were defects, to which he had been partly led by the example of his friend and master, Melendez, at whose feet he long sat in the cloisters of Salamanca; and both were affectations, from which a character so manly and decided as that of Cienfuegos might in time have emancipated itself.
But the favor with which this publication was received procured for him the place of editor of the government gazette, at Madrid; and, when the French occupied that capital, in 1808, he was found firm at his post, determined to do his duty to his country. Murat, who had the command of the invading forces, endeavoured, at first, to seduce or drive him into submission, but, failing in this, condemned him to death; a sentence which would infallibly have been carried into execution,--since Cienfuegos refused to make the smallest concession to the French authority,--if his friends had not interfered and procured a commutation of it into transportation to France. The change, however, was hardly a mercy. The sufferings of the journey, in which he travelled as a prisoner; the grief he felt at leaving his friends in hands which had hardly spared his own life; and the anticipation of a long exile in the midst of his own and his country’s enemies, were too much for his patriotic and generous spirit; and he died in July, 1809, at the age of forty-five, only a few days after he had reached the spot assigned for his punishment.[359]
[359] “Obras Poéticas de Nicasio Alvarez de Cienfuegos,” Madrid, 1816, 2 tom. 12mo. His style is complained of, both for neologisms and archaisms, the last of which have been made, though without sufficient reason, a ground of complaint against Melendez.
One other person, already referred to with honor, must now be particularly noticed, who, if his life belonged to the state, still wrote poetry with success, and exercised over the school formed at Salamanca an influence which belongs to the history of letters. This person was Jovellanos, the wise magistrate and minister of Charles the Fourth, and the victim of his master’s unworthy weakness and of the still more unworthy vengeance of the reigning favorite. He was born in Gijon, in Asturias, in 1744, and from his earliest youth seems to have shown that love of intellectual cultivation, and that moral elevation of character, which distinguished the whole of the more mature portions of his life.
The position of his family was such, that all the means for a careful education to be found in Spain were open to him; and, as he was originally destined to the higher dignities of the Church, he was sent to study philosophy and the canon and civil law at Oviedo, Avila, Alcalá de Henares, and Madrid. But, just as he was about to take the irrevocable step that would have bound him to an ecclesiastical life, some of his friends, and especially the distinguished statesman, Juan Arias de Saavedra, who was like a second father to him, interfered, and changed his destination. The consequence of this intervention was, that, in 1767, he was sent as a judicial magistrate to Seville, where, by his humane spirit, and his disinterested and earnest devotion to the duties of a difficult and disagreeable place, he made himself generally loved and respected; while, at the same time, by his study of political economy and the foundations of all just legislation, he prepared the way for his own future eminence in the affairs of his country.
But the spirit of Jovellanos was of kindred with whatever was noble and elevated. At Seville, he early discovered the merit of Diego Gonzalez, and through him was led into a correspondence with Melendez. One result of this is still to be found in the poetical Epistle of Jovellanos to his friends in Salamanca, exhorting them to rise to the highest strains of poetry. Another was the establishment of a connection between himself and Melendez, which, while it was important to the young school at Salamanca, led Jovellanos to give more of his leisure to the elegant literature he had always loved, but from which the serious business of life had, for some time, much separated him.
In consequence of an accidental conversation, he wrote at Seville his prose comedy of “The Honored Criminal,” which had a remarkable success; and in 1769 he prepared a poetical tragedy on the subject of Pelayo, which was not printed till several years afterward. Shorter poetical compositions, sometimes grave and sometimes gay, served to divert his mind in the intervals of severe labor; and when, after a period of ten years, he left the brilliant capital of Andalusia, his poetical Epistle to his friends there shows how deeply he felt that he was leaving behind him the happiest period of his life.
This was in 1778, when he was called to Madrid, as one of the principal magistrates of the capital and court; a place that brought him again into the administration of criminal justice, from which, during his stay at Seville, he had been relieved. His duties were distasteful to his nature, but he fulfilled them faithfully, and consoled himself by intercourse with such men as Campomanes and Cabarrus, who devoted themselves, as he did, to the great task of raising the condition of their country. Of course, he had now little leisure for poetry. But, being accidentally employed on affairs of consequence at the Paular convent, he was so struck by the solemn scenery in which it stood, and the tranquil lives of its recluse inhabitants, that his poetical spirit broke out afresh in an address to Mariano Colon, one of the family of the great discoverer of America, and afterwards its head;--a beautiful epistle, full of the severe genius of the place that inspired it, and of its author’s longing for a repose his spirit was so well fitted to enjoy.
In 1780, he was raised to a place in the Council of Orders, where he had more leisure, and was able to give his time to higher objects;--some of the results of which are to be seen in his report to the government on the military and religious Orders of Knighthood; in his system of instruction for the Imperial College of Calatrava; in his Discourse on the Study of History, as a necessary part of the wise study of jurisprudence; and in other similar labors, which proved him to be incontestably an excellent prose-writer, and the first philosophical statesman in the kingdom.
At the same time, however, he amused himself with elegant literature, and took great solace in collecting around him the poets and men of letters whom he loved. In 1785, he wrote several burlesque ballads on the quarrels of Huerta, Yriarte, and Forner about the theatre; and the next year published two satires in blank verse and in the style of Juvenal, rebuking the corrupted manners of his times. All of them were received with favor; and the ballads, though not printed till long afterwards, were perhaps only the more effective because they were circulated in manuscript, and so became matters of great interest.
Persons who held the tone implied in such a course of public labors might be sustained at the court of Charles the Third, but were little likely to enjoy regard at that of his son. In 1790, two years after Charles the Fourth ascended the throne, Count Cabarrus not only fell from power, but was thrown into prison; and Jovellanos, who did not hesitate to defend him, was sent to Asturias in a sort of honorable exile, that lasted eight years. But he served his fellow-men as gladly in disgrace as he did in power. Hardly, therefore, had he reached his native city, when he set about urging forward all public improvements that he deemed useful; laboring in whatever related to the mines and roads, and especially in whatever related to the general education of the people, with the most disinterested zeal. During this period of enforced retirement, he made many reports to the government on different subjects connected with the general welfare, and wrote his excellent tract “On Public Amusements,” afterwards published by the Academy of History, and his elaborate treatise on Legislation in Relation to Agriculture, which extended his reputation throughout Europe, and has been the basis of all that has been wisely undertaken in Spain on that difficult subject ever since.
In 1797, Count Cabarrus was restored to the favor of Godoy, Prince of the Peace, and Jovellanos was recalled to court and made Minister of Justice. But his season of favor was short. Godoy still hated the elevated views of the man to whom he had reluctantly delegated a small portion of his own power; and in 1798, under the pretext of devoting him to his old employments, he was again exiled to the mountains of Asturias, which, like so many other distinguished men that have sprung from them, he loved with a fond prejudice that he did not care to disguise.
This exile, however, did not satisfy the jealous favorite. In 1801, partly through a movement of the Inquisition, and still more through a political intrigue, Jovellanos was suddenly seized in his bed, and, in violation both of law and decency, carried, like a common felon, across the whole kingdom, and embarked at Barcelona for Majorca. There he was confined, first in a convent and afterwards in a fortress, with such rigor, that all communication with his friends and with the affairs of the world was nearly cut off; and there he remained, for seven long years, exposed to privations and trials that undermined his health and broke down his constitution. At last came the abdication and fall of his weak and ungrateful sovereign. “And then,” says Southey, in his “History of the Peninsular War,” “next to the punishment of Godoy, what all men most desired was the release of Jovellanos.” He was, therefore, at once brought back, and everywhere welcomed with the affection and respect, that he had earned by so many services and through such unjust sufferings.
His infirmities, however, were very oppressive to him. He declined, therefore, all public employments, even among his friends who adhered to the cause of their country; he indignantly rejected the proposal of the French invaders to become one of the principal ministers of state in the new order of things they hoped to establish; and then slowly and sadly retired, to seek among his native mountains the repose he needed. But he was not permitted long to remain there. As soon as the first central Junta was organized at Seville, he was sent to it to represent his native province, and stood forth in its councils the leading spirit in the darkest and most disheartening moments of the great contest of his country for existence. On the dissolution of that body,--which was dissolved at his earnest desire,--he again returned home, broken down with years, labors, and sufferings; trusting that he should now be permitted to end his days in peace.
But no man with influence such as his could then have peace in Spain. Like others, in those days of revolution, he was assailed by the fierce spirit of faction, and in 1811 replied triumphantly to his accusers in a defence of what may be considered his administration of Spain in the two preceding years, written with the purity, elegance, and gravity of manner which marked his best days, and with a moral fervor even more eloquent than he had shown before. As he approaches the conclusion of this personal vindication, admirable alike for its modesty and its power, he says, with a sorrow he does not strive to conceal:--
“And now that I am about to lay down my pen, I feel a secret trouble at my heart, which will disturb the rest of my life. It has been impossible for me to defend myself without offending others; and I fear, that, for the first time, I shall begin to feel I have enemies whom I have myself made such. But, wounded in that honor which is my life, and asking in vain for an authority that would protect and rescue me, I have been compelled to attempt my own defence by my own pen; the only weapon left in my hands. To use it with absolute moderation, when I was driven on by an anguish so sharp, was a hard task. One more dexterous in such contests might, by the cunning of his art, have oftener inflicted wounds, and received them more rarely; but, feeling myself to be fiercely attacked, and coming to the contest unskilled and alone, I threw my unprotected person into it, and, in order to free myself from the more imminent danger before me, took no thought of any that might follow. Indeed, such was the impulse by which I was driven on, that I lost sight, at once, of considerations which, at another time, might well have prevailed with me. Veneration for public authority, respect for official station, the private affections of friendship and personal attachment,--every thing within me yielded to the love of justice, and to the earnest desire that truth and innocence should triumph over calumny and falsehood. And can I, after this, be pardoned, either by those who have assailed me, or by those who have refused me their protection? Surely it matters little. The time has come in which all disapprobation, except that of honorable men and the friends of justice, must be indifferent to me. For now that I find myself fast approaching the final limits of human life, now that I am alone and in poverty, without a home or a shelter, what remains for me to ask, beyond the glory and liberty of my country, but leave to die with the good name I have labored to earn in its service?”
At the moment when this eloquent defence of himself was published, the French, by a sudden incursion, took military possession of his native city; and he hurried for safety on board a slight vessel, hardly knowing whither his course should be directed. After suffering severely from a storm of eight days’ continuance in the Bay of Biscay, he disembarked to obtain relief at the obscure port of Vega. But his strength was gone; and on the 27th of November, within forty-eight hours from the time of his landing, he died. He was nearly sixty-eight years old.
Jovellanos left behind him few men, in any country, of a greater elevation of mind, and fewer still of a purer or more irreproachable character. Whatever he did was for Spain and his fellow-men, to whose service he devoted himself alike in the days of his happiness and of his suffering;--in his influence over the school of Salamanca, when he exhorted them to raise the tone of their poetry, no less than in the war-cry of his odes to cheer on his countrymen in their conflict for national independence;--in his patient counsels for the cause of education, when he was an exile in Asturias or a prisoner in Majorca, no less than in the exercise of his authority as a magistrate and a minister of state to Charles the Fourth, and as the head of the government at Seville. He lived, indeed, in times of great trouble, but his virtues were equal to the trials that were laid upon them, and when he died, in a wretched and comfortless inn, he had the consolation of believing that Spain would be successful in the struggle he had assisted to lead on, and of knowing, in his own heart, what the Cortes afterwards declared to the world, that he was “a man well deserving of his country.”[360]
[360] “Coleccion de las Obras de Don Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos,” Madrid, 1830-32, 7 tom. 8vo. A declamatory prose satire on the state of Spain in the time of Charles IV., supposed to have been delivered in the Amphitheatre of Madrid, in 1796, has been attributed to Jovellanos. It is entitled “Pan y Toros,” or Bread and Bull-fights, from the old Roman cry of “Panem et Circenses,” and was suppressed as soon as it was published, but has often been printed since. Among other distinctions, it enjoyed the singular one of being translated and privately printed, in 1813, on board a British man-of-war, stationed in the Mediterranean. But it is not the work of Jovellanos, though it has almost always borne his name on the successive editions. Jovellanos was familiar with English literature, and translated the first book of the “Paradise Lost,” but not very successfully. For notices of him, see Memorias de Jovellanos, por Don Agustin Cean Bermudez, Madrid, 1814, 12mo; the Life at the end of his collected Works; Lord Holland’s Life of Lope de Vega, 1817, Tom. II., where is a beautiful tribute to him, worthy of Mr. Fox’s nephew; and Llorente, Tom. II. p. 540, and Tom. IV. p. 122, where are recorded some of his shameful persecutions. The name of Jovellanos is sometimes written Jove Llanos; and, I believe, was always so written by his ancestors.
One historical work of the reign of Charles the Fourth should not be forgotten. It was by Juan Bautista Muñoz, and was undertaken by the especial order of Charles the Third, who demanded of its author a complete history of the Spanish discoveries and conquests in America. This was in 1779. But Muñoz encountered many obstacles. The members of the Academy of History were not well disposed towards an undertaking, which seemed to fall within their own jurisdiction; and when he had finished the first portion, they subjected it, by the royal permission, to an examination, which, from its length even more than its rigor, threatened to prevent the work from being printed at all. This, however, was stopped by a summary order from the king; and the first volume, bringing down the history to the year 1500, was published in 1793. But no other followed it; and since the death of Muñoz, which occurred in 1799, when he was fifty-four years old, no attempt has been made to resume the work. It therefore remains just as he then left it,--a fragment, written, indeed, in a philosophical spirit and with a severe simplicity of style, but of small value, because it embraces so inconsiderable a portion of the subject to which it is devoted.[361]
[361] “Historia del Nuevo Mundo, por Don Juan Bautista Muñoz,” Madrid, 1793, small folio. Fuster, Bib., Tom. II. p. 191. Memorias de la Acad. de la Historia, Tom. I. p. lxv. The eulogy of Lebrixa, by Muñoz, in the third volume of the Memoirs of the Academy, a defence of his History, and two or three Latin treatises, are all that I know of his works, except the History.
An epic attempt of the same period is of still less importance. It is “Mexico Conquered,” an heroic poem in twenty-six books, and about twenty-five thousand lines, beginning with the demand of Cortés, at Tlascala, to be received in person by Montezuma, and ending with the fall of Mexico and the capture of Guatimozin. Its author was Escoiquiz, who, as the tutor of Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias, and his adviser in the troubles of the Escurial, of Aranjuez, and of Bayonne, showed an honorable character, which at different times brought upon him the vengeance of the Prince of the Peace, of Charles the Fourth, of Bonaparte, and, at last, of Ferdinand himself.
The literary ambition of Escoiquiz, however, is of both an earlier and later date than this unhappy interval, when his upright spirit was so tried by political persecutions. In 1797 he published a translation of Young’s “Night Thoughts”; and, while he was a prisoner in France, from 1808 to 1814, he prepared a Spanish version of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which showed, at least, with what pleasure he gave himself up to letters, and what a solace they were to him under his privations and misfortunes. His “Mexico” was first printed in 1798. It is cast more carefully into an epic form than were the heroic poems that abounded in the days of the Philips, and is sustained more than they generally were by such supernatural Christian machinery as was first used with effect by Tasso. But, like them, it is not without cold, allegorical personages, who play parts too important in the action; while, on the other hand, its faithful history of events, its unity of design, and its regular proportions, are no sufficient compensation for its ill-constructed stanzas and its chronicling dulness. The history of Solís is much more interesting and poetical than this wearisome romantic epic, which owes to that historian nearly all its facts.[362]
[362] “Mexico Conquistada, Poema Heróico, por Don Juan de Escoiquiz,” Madrid, 1798, 3 tom. 8vo. A still more unhappy epic attempt on the subject of the Conquest of Mexico preceded that of Escoiquiz by about forty years. It was by Francisco Ruiz de Leon, and is entitled “La Hernandia, Triunfos de la Fé” (Madrid, 1755, 4to); a poem making nearly four hundred pages, and sixteen hundred octave stanzas.
Leandro Moratin, son of the poet who flourished in the reign of Charles the Third, was, in some respects, a greater sufferer from the convulsions of the times in which he lived than Escoiquiz, and in all respects more distinguished in the world of letters. His principal success, however, was in the drama, where he must hereafter be more fully noticed. Here, therefore, it is only necessary to say, that, in his lyric and miscellaneous poetry, he was a follower of his father, modifying his manner so far under the influence of Conti, an Italian man of letters who lived long at Madrid, that, in his shorter pieces, the Italian terseness is quite apparent and gives a finish to the surface, though the material beneath may be quite Castilian. This is particularly true of his odes and sonnets, and of a striking Chorus of the Spirits of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament awaiting the Appearance of the Saviour; a solemn composition, breathing the fervent spirit of Luis of Granada. His ballads, on the other hand, though finished with great care, are more national in their tone than any thing else he has left us. But the poems that please us best and interest us most are those that show his own temper and affections; such as his “Epistle to Jovellanos,” and his “Ode on the Death of Conde,” the historian.
In none of his personal relations, however, does Moratin appear to such obvious advantage as in the difficult ones in which he stood at different times with the Prince of the Peace. To that profligate minister he owed, not only all his means for training himself as a dramatic writer, but the position in society which insured his success; and when the day of retribution came, and his patron fell, as he deserved to fall, Moratin, though he suffered in every way from his changed condition and the persecution of the enemies of the Prince, refused to join their cry against the crushed favorite. He said truly and nobly, “I was neither his friend, nor his counsellor, nor his servant; but all that I was I owed to him; and, although we have now-a-days a convenient philosophy, which teaches men to receive benefits without gratitude, and, when circumstances alter, to pay with reproach favors asked and received, I value my own good opinion too much to seek such infamy.” A person who acted under the impulse of principles so generous was not made for success in the reign of Ferdinand the Seventh. It is not remarkable, therefore, that nearly all the latter part of Moratin’s life was spent, either voluntarily or involuntarily, in foreign countries, and that he died at last in want and exile.[363]
[363] “Obras de L. F. Moratin,” Madrid, 1830-31, four vols. 8vo, divided into six, prepared by himself, and published by the Academy of History after his death. His Life is in Vol. I., and his miscellaneous poems are in the last volume, where the remarks on the Prince of the Peace occur, at p. 335, and a notice of his relations with Conti at p. 342. An unreasonably laudatory criticism of his works is to be found in the first volume of Hermosilla’s “Juicio.”
The last of these miscellaneous writers of the reign of Charles the Fourth that should be mentioned is Quintana, who, like Jovellanos, Moratin, and Escoiquiz, suffered much from the violence of the revolutions through which they all passed, but, unlike them, has survived to enjoy a serene and honored old age. He was born at Madrid in 1772, but received the most effective part of his literary education at Salamanca, where he acknowledged the influence of Melendez and Cienfuegos. His profession was the law; and he began the serious business of life in the capital, kindly encouraged by Jovellanos. But he preferred letters; and a small society of intellectual friends, that assembled every evening at his house, soon stimulated his preference into a passion. In 1801 he ventured to print his tragedy of “The Duke of Viseo,” imitated from “The Castle Spectre” of Lewis; and in 1805 he produced on the stage his “Pelayo,” intended to rouse his countrymen to a resistance of foreign oppression, by a striking example from their own history. The former had little success; but the latter, though written according to the doctrines of the severer school, struck a chord to which the hearts of the audience gladly answered.
Meantime, between these two attempts, he published, in 1802, a small volume of poetry, almost entirely lyric, taking the same noble and patriotic tone he had taken in his successful tragedy, and showing a spirit more deep and earnest than was to be found in any of the school of Salamanca, to which, in his address to Melendez, he leaves no doubt that he now gladly associated himself. In a similar spirit he published, in 1807, a single volume containing five lives of distinguished Spaniards, who, like the Cid and the Great Captain, had successfully fought the enemies of their country at home and abroad; and almost simultaneously he prepared three volumes of selections from the best Spanish poets, accompanying them with critical notices, which, if more slight than might have been claimed from one like Quintana, and less generous in the praise they bestow than they ought to have been, are yet national in their temper, and better than any thing else of their kind in the language. Both show a too willing imitation of the French manner, and contain occasional Gallicisms; but both are written in a clear and graceful prose, both were well received, as they deserved to be, and both were, long afterwards, further continued by their accomplished author; the first by the addition of four important lives, and the last by extracts from the miscellaneous poets of a later period, and from several of the best of the elder epics.
But though the taste of Quintana was somewhat inclined to the literature of France, he was a Spaniard at heart, and a faithful one. Even before the French invasion he had so carefully kept himself aloof from the influence and patronage of the Prince of the Peace, that, though belonging almost strictly to the same school of poetry with Moratin, these two distinguished men lived at Madrid, imperfectly known to each other, and in fact as heads of different literary societies, whose intercourse was not so kindly as it should have been. But the moment the revolution of 1808 broke out, Quintana sprang to the place for which he felt himself called. He published at once his effective “Odes to Emancipated Spain”; he threw out, in the journals of the time, whatever he thought would excite his countrymen to resist their invaders; he became the secretary to the Cortes and to the regency; and he wrote many of the powerful proclamations, manifestos, and addresses that distinguished so honorably the career of the different administrations to which he belonged during their struggle for national independence. In short, he devoted all that he possessed of talent or fortune to the service of his country in the day of its sorest trial.
But he was ill rewarded for it. Much of what had been done by the representatives of the Spanish people in the name of Ferdinand the Seventh, during his forced detention in France, was unwelcome to that shortsighted monarch; and, as soon as he returned to Madrid, in 1814, a persecution was begun of those who had most contributed to the adoption of these unwelcome measures. Among the more obnoxious persons was Quintana, who was thrown into prison in the fortress of Pamplona, and remained there six miserable years, interdicted from the use of writing-materials, and cut off from all intercourse with his friends. The changes of 1820 unexpectedly released him, and raised him for a time to greater distinction than he had enjoyed before. But, three years later, another political revolution took from him all his employments and influence; and he retired to Estremadura, where he occupied himself with letters till new changes and the death of the king restored him to the old public offices he had filled so well, adding to his former honors that of a peer of the realm. But from the days when he first attracted public regard by his noble Odes on the Ocean, and on the beneficent expedition sent to America with the great charity of Vaccination, letters have been his chosen employment;--his pride, when he cheered on his countrymen to resist oppression; his consolation in prison and in exile; his crown of honor in an honored old age.[364]
[364] “Poesías de M. J. Quintana,” Madrid, 1821, 2 tom. 8vo. The lyrical portion has been often reprinted since 1802, when the first collection of his Poems appeared at Madrid, in a thin beautiful volume of only 170 pages, 12mo. His life is in Wolf’s excellent Floresta, in Ochoa, Ferrer del Rio, etc.