Luis de León

“ It is not strange that the self-expression of a personality so fine, so complex, so rich, so rare, should produce the series of compositions which {232}entitle Luis de Leon to rank among the very greatest of Spanish poets, and beside the most glorious figures in the history of any literature. He stands a little apart from the rest of Spanish poets in a splendid solitude which befits him; he must perforce be solitary, dwelling as he most often does at altitudes inaccessible to ordinary mortals. ”

“ By his contemporaries Luis de Leon was perhaps more esteemed as a theologian or a scholar than as a man of letters. This judgement has been reversed by posterity mainly on the strength of the Spanish poems which were little known during the author's lifetime beyond a small circle of his personal friends. [263] Experts tell us that as a theologian he ranks below his master Melchor Cano; and in the annals of scholarship Luis de Leon is less conspicuous than Benito Arias Montano and than Francisco Sanchez (el Brocense) . ”

“ The mystic poet proved to be a formidable fighting-man. Before very long it must have dawned upon the Inquisitionary deputies at Valladolid that they had caught a Tartar. Unversed in the ways of the world, Luis de Leon came of a legal stock, and was thoroughly at home in a law-court. A master of dialectics, he was always alert, always prompt to criticize the evidence, always ready to deal with every point as it arose, always prepared to furnish elaborate written or verbal explanations as to every detail concerning which the tribunal could harbour a reasonable doubt. ”

“ Pacheco, indeed, regarded Luis de Leon as something of a universal genius: an expert in mathematics, in jurisprudence, in medicine—and, though self-taught as a painter—an artist of considerable skill. ”

“ His titles to remembrance are that he was learned, and that he may rank with Miguel Sanchez, with Alonso de Espinosa, and with Benito Arias Montano as among the least unsuccessful of Luis de Leon's followers. They often follow his lead with undeniable adroitness. ”

“ Himself an Augustinian, he was something of a cosmopolitan. Though Flemish by blood, Cruesen was technically a Spanish subject; he was in full sympathy with the politico-religious aims of Spain in the Low Countries, and during the Spanish occupation he must have had opportunities of meeting and questioning men who were Spanish by race. Moreover, it seems to be established that, though the story concerning Luis de Leon's remark did not appear in print till 1623, the chapter containing it was written previous to 1612. ”

“ Luis de Leon was not in a position to counteract the manœuvres of his opponents. It is not certain that he could have done so, had he been continuously in Salamanca at this time: as it happened, he was absent at Belmonte from the beginning of 1571 till the month of March, and on his return he fell ill. All this while, Medina and Castro were free to go about sowing tares, making damaging suggestions, and collecting such corroborative evidence as could be gleaned from ill-disposed colleagues and garrulous or slow-witted students. ”

“ Miguel Sanchez is the author of a beautiful Cancion de Cristo Crucificado, a poem which, though not published till 1605 with the real writer's name attached to it, has constantly been ascribed to Luis de Leon. [274] The Cancion is no doubt a composition of great charm and mystic unction; but it lacks the concentrated force of Luis de Leon. Luis de Leon has a lofty dignity of his own; he outstrips all rivalry by virtue of his nobility, by virtue of his intellectual vigour, by virtue of sheer excellence rather than by curious refinements of technique. ”

“ Memories of Luis de León, traces of Dante and Leopardi, are encountered on his best page; and yet he brings with him into modern verse qualities which, in the actual stage of Spanish literature, are of singular worth—repose and refinement and dignity and metrical mastery.
As a critic his diplomatic training has been a hindrance [387] to him. He rarely writes without establishing some ingenious and suggestive parallel or pronouncing some luminous judgment ”

“ To all who saw Luis de Leon at this time it must have occurred that his career was drawing to a close. He had never been robust; his sedentary habits, his ascetic practices, and his prolonged imprisonment combined to wear him down. His last years were packed with troubles. The Inquisition {179}watched him with suspicious eyes; he had always regarded the Dominicans and Jeromites as his enemies; he had contrived to increase the forces hostile to him by alienating the Carmelites. Doria was not without the power to make his resentment felt ”

“ Luis de Leon, though a churchman of undoubted piety, wrote amatory poems. The coplas in the old Spanish metres called A una Desdeñosa—to a scornful lady—are on exactly the same subject as the already named Flor de Gnido of Garcilaso. Whether he was following the classics and learned poets of his own country, or paraphrasing the Psalms, Luis de Leon was always a master of the very purest Castilian; while his reflective poems—the Noche Serena, for instance, or the ode which imitates the Beatus Ille of Horace—are something more [47] than mere exercises of ingenuity. ”

“ An attempt is made here to picture the man as he was, full of fortitude, yet not exempt from human weakness. I trust that I have avoided the temptation to go to the opposite extreme, and lay the blame—as{vii} has been done—for the irregularities of the trial at Luis de Leon's own door.
In dealing with his Spanish poems, I have tried not to put his claims to consideration too high. Laboulaye, in La Liberté religieuse, calls Luis de Leon 'le premier lyrique de l'Europe moderne'. ”

“ As a Jeromite, he bore a grudge against Luis de Leon for his overt opposition to the candidature of Hector Pinto at Salamanca University and, as Francisco de Palacios deposed at Valladolid on February 5, 1573, Santa Cruz had been somewhat excited by the news of Grajal's arrest and was anxious to know if Luis de Leon had been apprehended at the same time. ”

“ Luis de Leon renounced all claim, present or future, to his former chair—que la daba por bien empleada—so long as it was held by Castillo. He besought the Claustro to bear in mind his past services, pointed {147}out that his acquittal implied a general approval of his teaching, and then left the meeting. [193] Finally the Claustro of Salamanca agreed to create a new chair for Luis de Leon, with a salary of two hundred ducats a year, his duty being to lecture on theology. ”

“ Neither Luis de Leon nor Ortiz de Funes seemed to have guessed that the Valladolid judges were acting on instructions from the Supreme Inquisition at Madrid. [133] For a moment the step taken by Ortiz de Funes and his client appeared to have some slight effect. Luis de Leon was informed that he would be allowed to appoint Perez as his patrono but on two conditions: (1) he must undertake to pay all the travelling expenses of his patrono, and (2) an inquiry must be held to establish the limpieza of Perez. ”

“ He returned to Salamanca as professor of Biblical exegesis, and was again reported to the Inquisition in 1582, but without result. In 1583–1585 he published the three books of a celebrated mystic treatise, Los Nombres de Cristo, which he had written in prison. In 1583 also appeared the most popular of his prose works, a treatise entitled La Perfecta Casada, for the use of a lady newly married. Ten days before his death, which occurred at Madrigal on the 23rd of August 1591, he was elected vicar general of the Augustinian order. Luis de León is not only the greatest of Spanish mystics ”

“ In the ensuing discussion his vanquished opponent, Domingo de Guzman, intervened, and with unnecessary acerbity declared that Montemayor's views were heretical. Nothing would have been easier than for Luis de Leon to keep out of the fray, especially as he himself held, and had always taught, opinions opposed to those advanced by Montemayor. If, as Pacheco reports, Luis de Leon was the most taciturn of men, he was chivalrous to the point of quixotism. ”

“ These positive qualities defy reproduction by even the most accomplished of imitators. It has been said that Luis de Leon's verse, as well as his prose, has noticeable roughnesses; but let us not derive a wrong impression from this assertion. Luis de Leon is not 'finicking'. Withal he is a master of his art. ”

“ The name of Luis de Leon's maternal grandmother was Mencía Alvarez Osorio. From these circumstances, it appears possible that some relationship existed between the dedicatee of La Perfecta Casada and the author of that treatise. Luis de Leon had four maternal uncles, three of whom were laymen—Francisco de Valera, Bernardino de Valera, and Cristóbal de Alarcon, 'capitan que fué en Italia'. All three had died before April 15, 1572 (Documentos inéditos, vol. X, p. 181) . ”

“ Somewhat later, while still suffering from fever, Luis de Leon begged that, on his providing satisfactory bail, he might be transferred from his prison-cell to some neighbouring monastery, where he could be detained till the end of his trial. So depressed was he at{50} this moment that he even welcomed the idea of being placed in a Dominican monastery; it was true that the Dominicans were hostile to him, yet if he died among them, he should be dying like a Christian, surrounded by religious—not like a heathen with a blackamoor at his bedside. ”

“ He was by no means the earliest of devout writers to use Spanish as a literary medium. There is a long and illustrious bead-roll of authors from Bernardino de Laredo to Saint Theresa to prove the contrary. Much less was Luis de Leon the first post-Renaissance scholar to recognize that Spanish had a great future before it. Yet, if we take leave to assume that Luis de Granada was an ascetic rather than an extatic, we may account Luis de Leon as perhaps the first professional scholar to perceive that Spanish was adequate to convey the subtleties of theology and the ravishments of mysticism. ”

“ Great in prose, Luis de León is no less great in verse. With San Juan de la Cruz he heads the list of Spain's lyrico-mystical poets. Yet he set no value on his poems, which he regarded as mere toys of childhood: so that their preservation is due to the accident of his collecting them late in life to amuse the leisure [183] of the Bishop of Córdoba. We owe their publication to Quevedo, who issued them in 1631 as a counterblast to culteranismo. Of the three books into which they are divided, two consist of translations—from Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Euripides, and Pindar ”

“ It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, as the case developed, the attitude of the Valladolid judges became less and less favourable to Luis de Leon. Judges are mortals and liable to error. The very pertinacity of the prisoner may have impressed them badly. ”

“ Meanwhile Luis de Leon (who, like Domingo de Guzman, was perfectly innocent of any share in these clandestine manœuvres) had taken possession of the Biblical Chair at Salamanca by reading himself in on December 7, 1579. Hitherto his reputation, great as it was, had been more or less local: that is to say, it depended mainly on his University lectures, which were exploited by certain unscrupulous persons. It was not till 1580 that, at the express command of his superior, Fray Pedro Suarez, [215] he issued his first book: a Latin commentary on the Song of Songs. ”

“ Whatever his motive may have been, Castro gave place to a younger and far abler man, the well-known Dominican, Bartolomé de Medina, whose relations with Luis de Leon, never cordial, had grown strained, owing to various checks and disappointments. Medina honestly differed from Luis de Leon's views as regards Scriptural interpretation; he would have been a good deal more (or less) than human if he had not been galled by a series of small personal mortifications. ”

“ Mysticism, ever a prominent characteristic of the Spanish temperament, finds most pleasing expression, during the sixteenth century, in the lyrics of a number of clerical writers. The most attractive of them all is Luis de León, deservedly ranked among the greatest Spanish lyric poets. In him an Italian influence, and the humanizing impress of the Renaissance are also visible.
The Italian manner is henceforth, and throughout the seventeenth century, the dominant one in Spanish verse. It is unnecessary to mention the numerous lyrists who adopted it. ”

“ Even in his lifetime Luis de Leon was recognized by men of exceptional genius as one of themselves. His poems, which were not published till forty years after his death, must have been handed about in manuscript long before. In 1585 Cervantes in his Galatea introduced Luis de Leon into the Canto de Caliope. It cannot well be maintained that Cervantes had been impressed by Luis de Leon's Latin treatises, by De los nombres de Cristo, and by La perfecta casada. ”

“ Annoyed at this piece of fussiness, Luis de Leon is stated to have left the room, remarking: 'No order of His Holiness can be carried out in Spain' [251] . This report, which comes down to us on the dubious authority of the Carmelite chronicler, Fray Francisco de Santa Maria, may, or may not, be correct. The impetuous Luis de{177} Leon was no doubt extremely capable of showing that he resented Philip II's interference in church matters. On the other hand, Santa Maria cannot have written with any personal knowledge of the facts, as he belonged to a much later generation. ”