Gongorism

“ Splendid as Calderón’s diction often is, it lapses into gongorism too easily. Rojas Zorrilla’s natural mode of expression is direct and energetic; his dialogue is both natural and brilliant in Don Diego de Noche and Lo que son mugeres; he knew the difference between a good style and a bad one, and he pauses now and then to satirise Góngora and the cultos. But he must be in the fashion, and as Calderón has dabbled in culteranismo, he will do the same. And he bursts into gongorism with all the crude exaggeration of one who is deliberately sinning against the light. ”

“ Villamediana’s works, first published at Saragossa in 1629, contain not only the nervous, blighting verses which made him widely feared and hated, but a number of more serious poems embodying the most exaggerated conceits of gongorism. But, even when adopting the perverse conventions of the hour, he remains a poet of high distinction, and his satirical verses, more perfect in form, are instinct with a cold, concentrated scorn which has never been surpassed. ”

“ At the very outset of the seventeenth century there manifested itself in Spanish poetry the vitiating influence of Góngora, a writer whose bombastic and obscure style, termed Gongorism after its originator, wrought the same harm in Spanish letters that Marinism wrought in Italy and Euphuism in England. The mannerisms of Góngora were imitated by later poets, so that his school persisted throughout the century, despite the reaction to sanity attempted by the Argensolas, and the satirist Quevedo. ”

“ Cf. vol. II, pp. 18 ff. of the Líricos del siglo XVI in the Biblioteca de autores españoles; Ticknor, III, 33 ff.
FRANCISCO GÓMEZ DE QUEVEDO. Quevedo played an important part in the public life of his time, but is famous mainly for his picaresque novel, El gran tacaño, and for his mordant satirical poems. At first he sought to stem the tide of Gongorism, but in his later works he let himself float with the current. See his poems in the Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 69, and cf. Ticknor II, 274 ff; E. Mérimée, Essai sur la vie et les œuvres de Francisco de Quevedo, Paris, 1886. ”

“ Seen through the nerves, in this conscious abandonment to the tricks of the eyesight, the world becomes a thing of broken patterns and conflicting colours, and uneasy movement. A novel of the Goncourts is made up of an infinite number of details, set side by side, every detail equally prominent. While a novel of Flaubert, for all its detail, gives above all things an impression of unity, a novel of the Goncourts deliberately dispenses with unity in order to give the sense of the passing of life, the heat and form of its moments as they pass. ”

“ No doubt the Goncourts, in their passion for the inédit, leave out certain things because they are obvious, even if they are obviously true and obviously important; that is the defect of their quality. To represent life by a series of moments, and to choose these moments for a certain subtlety and rarity in them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these the only perils which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There are others, essential to their natures, to their preferences. ”

“ Not satisfied with this patch-work kind of phraseology, he affected to attach an extraordinary depth of meaning to each word, and to diffuse an air of superior dignity over his whole style. In Gongora’s poetry the most common words received a totally new signification; and in order to impart perfection to his estilo culto, he summoned all his mythological learning to his aid.” [468] “Gongora,” says an English writer, “was the founder of a [Pg 573] sect in literature. The style called in Castilian cultismo owes its origin to him. ”

“ The Goncourts' vision of reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening the acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one derives from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrant way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion of time, the notion of space. What the Goncourts paint is the subtler poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it, fleetingly, like Whistler ”

“ Germinie's was not one of those fortunate natures that do wrong and leave the memory of it behind them, and never feel a twinge of regret. She had not, like Adèle, one of those vulgar material organizations, which never allow themselves to be affected by any but animal impulses. She was not blessed with one of those consciences which escape suffering by virtue of mere brutishness, or of that dense stupidity in which a woman vegetates, sinning because she knows no better. ”

“ Night and day she was possessed by the same fever of malediction, and even in her dreams her attenuated limbs were convulsed with wrath.
Was it possible! Germinie! her Germinie! She could think of nothing else. Debts!—a child!—all sorts of shame! The degraded creature! She abhorred her, she detested her. If she had lived she would have denounced her to the police. She would have liked to believe in hell so that she might be consigned to the torments that await the dead. Her maid was such a creature as that! A girl who had been in her service twenty years! ”

“ Long habit, the weakening will- [193] power, the horror of change, the dread of new faces,—everything disposes them to weakness and cowardly concessions. Notwithstanding her quick temper, her promptness to lose her head, to fly into a rage, to breathe fire and flame, mademoiselle said nothing. She acted as if she saw nothing. She pretended to be reading when Germinie entered the room. She waited, curled up in her easy-chair, until the maid's ill-humor had blown over or burst. ”

“ Such a man is constantly spying on reality, and every evening he bears home a handful of fresh curios.... But look at the result!—a mass of daubs, at best a piece of mosaic, in any case something heaped together, restless and garish. The Goncourts are the greatest sinners in this respect: they cannot put three sentences together which are not absolutely painful to the eye—the eye of the psychologist. From an artistic standpoint, nature is no model. ”

“ They believed that they had founded the naturalistic school in Germinie Lacerteux, the psychological in Madame Gervaisais, the symbolic in Les Frères Zemganno, and the satanic in La Faustin. It is unnecessary to recognise all these claims in full: to discuss them at all, even if we deny them, is to admit that the Goncourts were men of striking intellectual force, of singular ambition, of exceptionally rich and diverse gifts amounting, at times, to unquestionable genius. ”

“ To the Goncourts humanity is as pictorial a thing as the world it moves in; they do not search further than “the physical basis of life,” and they find everything that can be known of that unknown force written visibly upon the sudden faces of little incidents, little expressive moments. ”

“ At rare intervals a breath of air from the south passed lazily along, sweeping the ground, one of those enervating, lifeless winds that blow upon the senses and fan the breath of desire into a flame. With no knowledge whence it came, Germinie felt over her whole body a sensation like the tickling of the down on a ripe peach against the skin. ”

“ If Góngora, to the excellent qualities he possessed, had joined the judgment and good taste he wanted; if he had made the same profound study of the language as Herrera, both meditating on the resources which the idiom presented, and attending to its character, richness, and harmony, then would have followed the result he desired, and he would, perhaps, have gained the glory of being the restorer, and not the opprobrium of having been the corrupter of the art. But the same circumstance befel him which befals all who seek to erect a building without foundations ”

“ I can understand, surprising as at first it may be, how Verlaine, who seems at every point so remote from Goncourt, yet counted him as the first prose-writer of his time; Verlaine had penetrated to the simplicité cachée (to use Poincaré's phrase) behind the seemingly tortured expressions of Goncourt's art. Goncourt makes us feel that whatever is fit to occur in the world is fit to be spoken of by him who knows how to speak of it. If we wish to face the manifold interest of the world, in its poignancy and its beauty, as well as in its triviality, there is no other way. ”

“ The miraculous part of this disorderly, abandoned [223] life, this life of shame and misery, was that it did not become known. Germinie allowed no trace of anything to appear outside; she allowed nothing to rise to her lips, nothing to be seen in her face, nothing to be noticed in her manner, and the accursed background of her existence remained hidden from her mistress.
It had, indeed, sometimes occurred to mademoiselle in a vague way that her maid had some secret, something that she was concealing from her, something that was obscure in her life. ”

“ DESMOULINS. Gonchon—merely Gonchon! You are a jeweler, usurer, vendor of lemonade, and keeper of a brothel. You are everything: Gonchon, king of the gambling-den keepers.
GONCHON. What do you mean by your "gambling-dens"? I have merely founded clubs where, under the pretext of enjoying themselves by honest and natural means, men may gather and discuss methods of reforming the State. They are assemblies of free citizens, patriots—
DESMOULINS. Where does the Patrie come in?
GONCHON. The Society of the Men of Nature—
DESMOULINS. Women of Nature! ”

“ After this rupture Germinie fell where she was sure to [317] fall, below shame, below nature itself. Lower and lower the unhappy, passionate creature fell, until she wallowed in the gutter. She took up the lovers whose passions are exhausted in one night, those whom she passed or met on the street, those whom chance throws in the way of a wandering woman. ”

“ The "Ballad of Angelica and Medora" is particularly airy and fresh, but rich and strong as a deep clear inland river that reflects the gorgeous tints of the sky. Gongora surpasses every other Spanish lyrist, in the brilliant colouring of his poetry, and the vivacity of his expression.
But all this he voluntarily set at nought. Instead of writing as a poet, he adopted the crabbed critic's art, and, extreme in all things, gave no quarter even to the beauties of his own compositions. He might reprove {Pg 247} the diluted interminable poems of Lope, and the unpoetic style of Cervantes ”

“ Gonch was quick to see the change in the youth’s feelings toward him but he was growing careless with rising fortune and felt no need of making further effort to mask his true nature. “Flesh is flesh,” he leered in the boy’s face when the horrible orgie was over. “You will soon learn that man’s flesh is as good or better than any other.” ”

“ The soul, to them, is a series of moods, which succeed one another, certainly without any of the too arbitrary logic of the novelist who has conceived of character as a solid or consistent thing. Their novels are hardly stories at all, but picture-galleries, hung with pictures of the momentary aspects of the world. French critics have complained that the language of the Goncourts is no longer French, no longer the French of the past ”

“ Their bewilderment changed to fury. Germinie recovered consciousness under their blows, their insults, the wounds inflicted by their hands, the harsh words that came from their mouths. Her brother-in-law was there, who had never forgiven her the cost of her journey; he glanced at her with a bantering expression, with the cunning, ferocious joy of an Auvergnat, with a sneering laugh that dyed the girl's cheeks a deeper red than her sisters' blows.
She received the blows, she did not repel the insults. She sought neither to defend nor to excuse herself. ”

“ Its inhabitants—men and beasts—were strange too and looked askance at the intruder—a lone man armed with a flint-ax and wooden spear. However, Gonch led a charmed life. He met occasional bands of roving hunters, some of which he fled from and others avoided by concealing himself.
Animals were far more numerous than human beings. Gonch encountered them everywhere and at all times, singly and in groups, packs and herds: horse, bison and long-horned ox of the meadow lands; moose, boar and stag of the forests ”

“ Desmoulins.⁠The front and the back! [The bystanders laugh. Gonchon, with his associates, advances upon Desmoulins.] Very well! I advise you not to drive me to crush you with my Pretorian Guard! Do you want a certificate of citizenship? Oh, Janus Gonchon, I make you a present of it. You give bread to every sneak in Paris, and take it from the honest people, so that they have only one desire: to go and fight. Audax et edax. Long live the Revolution!
Gonchon.⁠I forgive you, because it wouldn't do to duel with the enemy at our gates, but I'll meet you soon before the men of Versailles. ”

“ These are wild, whirling words: the politics of literary men are on a level with the literature of politicians. On their own showing, it does not appear that the Goncourts were in any way fettered. The sum of their achievement, as they saw it, is recorded in a celebrated passage of the preface to Chérie: "La recherche du vrai en littérature, la résurrection de l'art du XVIIIe siècle, la victoire du japonisme." These words are the words of Jules de Goncourt, but Edmond makes them his own. ”

“ Gonch was not dead although a few moments more of Kutnar’s throttling grip would have made him so beyond question. Some men are hard to kill. Gonch was of that kind. Even as he lay, to all appearances, stiff and stark, the life-blaze flickered feebly, gathered fresh strength and flared up. His chest heaved, he uttered a deep sigh, then groaned and opened his eyes. ”