James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

“ But while a score of writers cared more for accuracy than did Mariana, his work survives not as a chronicle, but as a brilliant exercise in literature. His learning is more than enough to save him from radical blunders; his impartiality and his patriotism go hand in hand; his character-drawing is firm and convincing; and his style, with its faint savour of archaism, is of unsurpassed dignity and clearness in his narrative. He cared more for the spirit than for the letter, and time has justified him. ”

“ His dialogue is swift and strong and appropriate, whether he personifies the blind [263] passion of the King, the incorruptibility of Busto, the feudal ideal of Sancho Ortiz, or the strength and sweetness of Estrella. Of dialogue he is the first and best master on the Spanish stage: more choice, if less powerful, than Tirso; more natural, if less altisonant, than Calderón. The dramatic use of certain metrical forms persisted as he sanctioned it: the décimas for laments, the romance for exposition, the lira for heroic declamation, the sonnet to mark time, the redondilla for love-passages. ”

“ Valera, like the rest of the world, is entitled to be judged at his best, and his best will be read as long as Spanish literature endures; for he is [389] not simply a dexterous craftsman using one of the noblest of languages with an exquisite delicacy and illimitable variety of means, nor a clever novelist exercising a superficial talent, nor even (though he is that in a very special sense) the leader of a national revival. He is something far rarer and more potent than an accomplished man of letters: a great creative artist, and the embodiment of a people's genius. ”

“ García has lied all his life, lies to his father, his friends, his betrothed, lies to himself, and defeats his own purpose by his ingenuity. He would speak the truth if he could, but he has no talent that way. Why trouble with truth when lying comes easier? His father, Beltrán, perceives that the miser enjoys money, that murder slakes vengeance, that the drunkard grows glorious with wine; but his son's failing is beyond him. The noble Philistine has not the artist's soul, and cannot understand why García should lie for lying's sake, against his own interest. ”

“ But it is not as a master of artistic detail that Lope's countrymen place him beside Cervantes. First, and last, and always, he is a great creative genius. He incarnates the national spirit, adapts popular poetry to dramatic effects, substitutes characters for abstractions, and, in a word, expresses the genius of a people. It is true that he rarely finds a perfect form for his utterance, that he constantly approaches perfection without quite attaining unto it, that his dramatic instinct exceeds his literary execution. Yet he survives as the creator of an original form. ”

“ That he was an imitative artist was his highest glory: by imitating foreign models he attained his measure of originality, enriching Spain, with not merely a number of technical forms but a new poetic language. Without him Boscán must have failed in his emprise, as Santillana failed before him. Besides his technical perfection, Garcilaso owned the poetic temperament—a temperament too effeminately delicate for the vulgarities of life. As he tells us in his third eclogue, he lived, "now using the sword, now the pen:"—
"Tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma." ”

“ It took Spain a hundred years to rid her veins of the Gongoristic poison, and Gongorism has now become, in Spain itself, a synonym for all that is bad in literature. Undoubtedly Góngora did an infinite deal of mischief: his tricks of transposition were too easily learned by those hordes of imitators who see nothing but the obvious, and his verbal audacities were reproduced by men without a tithe of his taste and execution. And yet, though it be an unpopular thing to confess, one has a secret sympathy with him in his campaign. Lope de Vega and Cervantes are as unlike as two men may be ”

“ He was ever the handiwork of the last comer: a shadow of insincerity, of pose, is over all his verse. Yet, like his countryman Lucan, Meléndez demonstrates the truth that a worthless creature may be, within limits, a genuine poet. He has neither morals nor ideas; he has fancy, ductility, clearness, music, charm, and a picturesque vision of natural detail that have no counterpart in his period. ”

“ When Palafox (and Byron's Maid) held Zaragoza, during the War of Independence, against the batteries of Mortier, Junot, and Lannes, the Numancia was played within the besieged walls, so that Spaniards of the nineteenth century might see that their fathers had known how to die for freedom. The tragedy was received with enthusiasm; the marshals of the world's Greatest Captain were repulsed and beaten; and Cervantes' inspiriting lines helped on the victory. In life, he had never met with such a triumph, and in death no other could have pleased him better. ”

“ Thus, where Gautier needs 1350 lines to tell the legend of St. Ildefonsus, or 2090 to give the miracle of Theophilus, Berceo confines himself to 108 and to 657 lines. Gautier will spare you no detail; he will have you know the why, the when, the how, the paltriest circumstance of his pious story. Beside him Berceo shines by his power of selection, by his finer instinct for the essential, by his relative sobriety of tone, by his realistic eye, by his variety of resource in pure Castilian expression, by his richer melody, and by the fleeter movement of his action. ”

“ Time and unanimity settle many questions: and, after all, on a matter concerning Castilian poetry, the unbroken verdict of the Castilian-speaking race must be accepted as weighty, if not final. Garcilaso may not be a supreme singer; he is at least one of the greatest of the Spanish poets. Choosing to reproduce the almost inimitable cadences of the Virgilian eclogue, he achieves his end with a dexterity that approaches genius. Others before him had hit upon what seemed "pretty i' the Mantuan": he alone suggests the secret of Virgil's brooding, incommunicable, and melancholy charm. ”

“ A master of invention, a humourist beyond compare, an expert in ironic observation, a fellow meet for Shakespeare's self: all that suffices not for these fanatical dullards. Their deity must be accepted also as a poet, a philosophic thinker, a Puritan tub-thumper, a political reformer, a finished scholar, a purist in language, and—not least amazing—an ascetic in private morals. A whole shelf might be filled with works upon Cervantes the doctor, Cervantes the lawyer, the sailor, the geographer, and who knows what else? ”

“ He could create character, and his women, if less noble, are more real than Lope's own in their frank emotion and seductive abandonment. At whiles his diction tends to Gongorism, as when—in El Amor y la Amistad—a personage, at sight of a mountain, babbles of "the lofty daring of the snow, the pyramid of diamond"; but this is exceptional, and his hostility to culteranismo inspired Góngora to write more than one stinging epigram. Tirso had not Lope's matchless facility, and, considering the maturity of the Spanish genius, it is strange that he should have written no play before 1606 or 1608. ”

“ Selgas' verse in the Primavera is so charged with the conventional sentiment and with the amiable pessimism dear to ordinary readers, that his popularity was inevitable. Yet even Spanish indulgence has stopped short of proclaiming him a great poet, and now that his day has gone by, he is almost as unjustly decried as he was formerly overpraised. Though not a great original genius, he was an accomplished versifier whose innocent prettiness was never banal, whose simplicity was unaffected, whose faint music and caressing melancholy are not lacking in individuality and fascination. ”

“ He makes no claim whatever, he seeks for no applause—the shy, taciturn experimentalist who published never a line of verse, and piped for his own delight. Equipped with the ambition, though not with the accomplishment, of the artist, Boscán has a prouder place than he ever dreamed of, since he is confessedly the earliest representative of a new poetic dynasty, the victorious leader of a desperately forlorn hope. ”

“ His is, indeed, a depressing performance, overcharged with misanthropy; yet for unflinching courage, insight, and sombre humour, Larra has no equal in modern Spanish literature, and scarcely any superior in the past. In his twenty-eighth year he blew out his brains in consequence of an amour in which he was concerned, leaving a vacancy which has never been filled by any successor. It is gloomy work to learn that all men are scoundrels, and that all evils are irremediable: these are the hopeless doctrines which have brought Spain to her present pass. ”

“ John of the Cross has absorbed the mystic essence of the Song of Solomon, and he introduces infinite new harmonies in his re-setting of the ancient melody. The worst that criticism can allege against him is that he dwells on the very frontier line of sense, in a twilight where music takes the place of meaning, and words are but vague symbols of inexpressible thoughts, intolerable raptures, too subtly sensuous for transcription. ”

“ He had it in him to be a poet, or a theologian, or a stoic philosopher, or a critic, or a satirist, or a statesman: he insisted on being all of these together, and he has paid the penalty. Though he never fails ignominiously, he rarely achieves a genuine success, and the bulk of his writing is now neglected because of its local and ephemeral interest. Yet he deserves honour as the most widely-gifted Spaniard of his time, as a strong and honest man in a corrupt age, and as a brilliant writer whose hatred of the commonplace beguiled him into adopting a dull innovation. ”

“ The poet is whisked by the dragons in Bellona's chariot to Fortune's palace, and there begins the inevitable imitation of Dante, with its machinery of seven planetary circles, and its grandiose vision of past, present, and future. The work of a learned poet taking himself too seriously and straining after effects beyond his reach, the Laberinto is tedious as a whole; yet, though Mena's imagination fails to realise his abstractions, though he be riddled with purposeless conceits, he touches a high level in isolated episodes. ”

“ But for all his profession of indifference to form, he is—at his best—a most accomplished craftsman, an admirable artist in miniature, an expert in the art of concise expression, and, in so much, a healthy influence—though not without a concealed germ of evil. For if in his own hands the ingenious antithesis often reaches the utmost point of condensation, in the hands of imitators it is degraded to an obscure conceit, a rhymed conundrum. His vogue has always been considerable, and he is one of the few Spanish poets whose reputation extends beyond the Pyrenees ”

“ Time has failed to wither its variety or to lessen its force, and posterity accepts it as a masterpiece of humoristic fancy, of complete observation and unsurpassed invention. It ceases, in effect, to belong to Spain as a mere local possession, though nothing can deprive her of the glory of producing it. Cervantes ranks with Shakespeare and with Homer as a citizen of the world, a man of all times and countries, [233] and Don Quixote, with Hamlet and the Iliad, belongs to universal literature, and is become an eternal pleasaunce of the mind for all the nations. ”

“ His antechambers were thronged with men of genius. Lope de Vega still survived, his glory waxing daily, though the best part of his life's work was finished. Vélez de Guevara was the royal chamberlain; Góngora, the court chaplain, hated, envied, and admired, was the dreaded chief of a combative poetic school; his disciple, Villamediana, struck terror with his vitriolic epigrams, his rancorous tongue; the aged Mariana represented the best tradition of Spanish history; Bartolomé de Argensola was official chronicler of Aragón ”

“ Santa Teresa is not only a glorious saint and a splendid figure in the annals of religious thought: she ranks as a miracle of genius, as, perhaps, the greatest woman who ever handled pen, the single one of all her sex who stands beside the world's most perfect masters. Macaulay has noted, in a famous essay, that Protestantism has gained not an inch of ground since the middle of the sixteenth century. Ignacio Loyola and Santa Teresa are the life and brain of the Catholic reaction: the former is a great party chief, the latter belongs to mankind. ”

“ As it is, Alfonso the Learned ranks with any Portuguese of them all; and it is reasonable to think that he had fellows whose achievement and names have not reached us. For Spanish literature and ourselves the loss is grave; and yet we cannot conceive that there existed in early Castilian any examples comparable in elaborate lyrical beauty to the cantars d'amigo which the Galician-Portuguese singers borrowed from the French ballettes. In the first place, if they had existed, it is next to incredible that no example and no tradition of them should survive. ”