George Ticknor

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The revolution in France, first resisted, as it was elsewhere, and then corruptly conciliated, struck the same terror at Madrid that it did at Rome and Naples; and, while its open defiance of every thing Christian filled the hearts of a large majority of the Spanish people with a horror greater than it inspired even in Italy, not a few were led away by it from their time-honored feelings of religion and loyalty, and prepared for changes like those that were already overturning the thrones of half Europe. ”

“ Nor, I trust, will such a people—still proud and faithful in its less favored masses, if not in those portions whose names dimly shadow forth the glory they have inherited—fail to create a literature appropriate to a character in its nature so poetical. The old ballads will not indeed return; for the feelings that produced them are with by-gone things. The old drama will not be revived;—society, even in Spain, would not now endure its excesses. ”

“ The Diana, however, better merits the name of a romance than the Arcadia, which served for its model. Its principal fiction is ampler and more ingeniously constructed. Its episodes are more interesting. Much of it is warm with the tenderness of a disappointed attachment, which, no doubt, caused the whole to be written. Some of the poetry is beautiful, especially the lyric poetry; and if its prose style is not so pure as that of Sannazaro, it is still to be remarked for its grace and richness. ”

“ Mariana shows much manly firmness, Solís much fervor, Zurita much conscientious diligence, while Mendoza, Moncada, Coloma, and Melo, who confined themselves to subjects embracing shorter periods and less wide interests, have given us some of the most striking sketches to be found in the historical literature of any country. All of them are rich and dignified, abounding rather in feeling than philosophy, and written in a tone and style that mark, not so much, perhaps, the peculiar genius of their respective authors, as that of the country that gave them birth ”

“ The well-known character of the hero, who chose rather to have his son sacrificed by the Moors than to surrender the fortress of Tarifa, if it is not drawn with the vigor of the old Castilian chronicles or of the drama of Guevara, is exhibited, at least, with a well-sustained consistency, that gives token of more poetical power than any thing else produced by its author for the theatre. But this is its only real merit; and the last tragedy of Moratin was, on the whole, no more successful, and no more deserving of success, than the first. ”

“ But the “Virginia” is no less cold than it is regular, and, like the waters of the Alps, its very purity betrays the frozen region from which it has descended. Its versification, which consists of unrhymed iambics, is as far as possible removed from the warmth and freedom of the ballad style in the elder drama; its whole movement is languid; and the catastrophe, from the fear of shocking the spectator by a show of blood on the stage, turns out, in fact, to be no catastrophe at all. ”

“ In this state of opinion in Spain, some ingenious scholar—perhaps Vera y Zuñiga—as clear-sighted as they were and only a little less scrupulous, may well have been encouraged to imitate Father Higuera in a matter which, instead of being an attempt, like his, to bring false records concerning important affairs into the history of the kingdom, may have been regarded merely as a literary jeu d’esprit, intended to mislead nobody on any point except merely that of the genuineness of the correspondence. ”

“ But Quevedo is often free and indecorous, as well as harsh, and offends that sensibility to virtue which a satirist ought carefully to cultivate. It should, however, be remembered in his favor, that, though living under the despotism of the Philips, and crushed by it, no Spanish poet stands before him in the spirit of an independent and vigorous satire. Góngora approaches him on some occasions, but Góngora rarely dealt with grave subjects, and confined his satire almost entirely to burlesque ballads and sonnets, which he wrote in the fervor of his youth. ”

“ Thus, Spanish didactic prose, which, from its original elements and tendencies, seemed destined to wear the attractions of an elevated and eloquent style, gradually became so formal, awkward, and pedantic, that, with a few striking exceptions, it can only be said to have maintained a doubtful and difficult existence during the long period when the less suspected and less oppressed portions of the literature of the country—its drama and its lyric poetry—were in the meridian of their success. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But there was yet another body of persons in Spain, nearly akin to the last in spirit, though differing from them in their original position, who figure no less in this peculiar form of fiction. They were the active, the shrewd, and the unscrupulous of the lower portions of society;—men who were able to perceive that the resources and power of the country, with all the advantages they desired to reach, were already in possession of an aristocratic caste, who looked to them for nothing but a sincere and faithful loyalty. ”

“ The eleven “Lamentations,” as he calls them, of Silvestre, are elegiac epistles to his lady-love, written in the old Castilian measures, and not without the old Castilian poetical spirit. Cantorál fails; nor can the Argensolas and Borja be said to have succeeded, though they wrote in different manners, some of which were scarcely elegiac. Herrera is too lyric—too lofty, perhaps, from the very nature of his genius—to write good elegies; but some of those on his love, and one in which he mourns over the passions that survive the decay of his youth, have certainly both beauty and tenderness. ”

“ Nearly all the didactic satires and nearly all the satirical epistles of the best age of Spanish literature are Horatian in their tone, and written in the Italian terza rima. In general, their spirit is light, though philosophical,—sometimes it is courtly,—and, taken together, they have less poetical force and a less decided coloring than we might claim from the class to which they belong. But they are frequently graceful and agreeable, and some of them will be oftener read, for the mere pleasure they bestow, than many in other languages which are distinguished for greater wit and severity. ”

“ The magnificent successes of Charles the Fifth had already filled the minds [p. 39] of men with a spirit of adventure very different from that of Amadis and his descendants, though sometimes hardly less wild and extravagant. The cruel wars unceasingly kept up with the Barbary powers, and the miseries of the thousands of captives who returned from Africa, to amaze their countrymen with tragical stories of their own trials and those of their fellow-sufferers, were full of that bitter romance of real life which outruns all fiction. ”

“ Still, a general, thorough, and critical collection of Spanish ballads is wanting;—one embracing those of the known authors, like Cueva, Padilla, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Góngora, as well as the untold wealth that remains, and must always remain, anonymous in the elder Romanceros. When we possess such a work, and not before, we can understand and honor, as they deserve to be understood and honored, the poetry and the nationality of the old Spanish ballads, upon which, as upon its true foundations, rests the old Spanish drama. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Pastoral romance, after all, has its foundation in one of the truest and deepest principles of our common nature,—that love of rural beauty, of rural peace, in short, of whatever goes to constitute a country life, as distinguished from the constrained life of a city, which few are too dull to feel, and fewer still so artificial as wholly to reject. ”

“ But, in the mean time, another tremendous invasion had burst upon Spain; violent, unforeseen, and for a time threatening to sweep away all the civilization and refinement, that had been preserved from the old institutions of the country, or were springing up under the new. This was the remarkable invasion of the Arabs, which compels us now to seek some of the materials of the Spanish character, language, and [p. 373] literature in the heart of Asia, as we have already been obliged to seek for some of them in the extreme North of Europe. ”

“ There is no need of authorities to prove the universal prevalence of ballads in the seventeenth century; for the literature of that century often reads like a mere monument of it. But if I wished to name any thing, it would be the Don Quixote, where Sancho is made to cite them so often; and the Novelas of Cervantes, especially “The Little Gypsy,” who sings her ballads in the houses of the nobles and the church of Santa María; and “Rinconete and Cortadillo,” where they make the coarse merriment of the thieves of Seville. ”

“ What, therefore, the Novellieri had been doing in Italy for above two hundred years, Timoneda now undertook to do for Spain. The twenty-two tales of his “Patrañuelo” are not, indeed, connected, like those of the “Decamerone,” but he has given them a uniform character by investing them all with his own easy, if not very pure, style; and thus, without anticipating it, sent them out anew to constitute a part of the settled literature of his country, and to draw after them a long train of similar fictions, some of which bear the most eminent names known among those of Spanish prose-writers. ”

“ Amidst such violence and confusion,—when men slept in armour, as they had during the Moorish contest, and knew not whether they should be waked amidst their households or amidst their enemies,—elegant letters, of course, could hardly hope to find shelter or resting-place. The grave political questions, that agitated the country and shook the foundations of society, were precisely those in which it might be foreseen, that intellectual men would take the deepest interest and expose themselves to sufferings and ruin, like the less favored masses around them. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ In this confusion of the old and the new,—of what was stiff, formal, and foreign with what was rudest and most lawless in the national drama at home,—a single writer appeared, who, from the mere force of natural talent, fell instinctively into a tone not unworthy of the theatre, and yet one that obtained for him a degree of favor long denied to persons of more poetical accomplishments. ”

“ It is, in fact, a collection of whatever strange and extravagant stories a learned man could make, beginning with such as he found in Aristotle, Pliny, Solinus, Olaus Magnus, and Albertus Magnus, and including those told by the most credulous of his own time. Being put into a form then popular, and related in a pleasing style, they had no little success. They were several times printed in the original, and, beside being translated into Italian and French, are well known to those who are curious in the literature of Queen Elizabeth’s time, under the much-abused name of “The Spanish Mandeville.” ”

“ The characters he has drawn of the prominent personages that, from time to time, come to the front of the stage, are almost always short, sketched with a few touches, and struck off with the hand of a master. Such are those of Alvaro de Luna, Alfonso the Wise, and the unhappy Prince of Viana, in which so few words could hardly be made to express more.
As a general remark, a certain nobleness of air and carriage, not, perhaps, without something of the old Castilian sturdiness, but never without its dignity, is the characteristic that most prevails throughout the whole work ”

“ 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 [p. 209] 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 ”

“ Lope de Vega and Quevedo, after resisting the innovations of cultismo for a time, had long before yielded, and Calderon was now alternately assailing the depraved taste of his audiences and gratifying it by running into extravagances almost as great as those he ridiculed. The language of the most affected poetry passed into the prose of the age, and took from it the power and dignity which, even in its more declamatory portions, had constituted its prominent merit. ”

“ 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 [p. 215] 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. ”