Spanish literature

“ SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH LITERATURE THERE is not a literature in Europe more individual than that of Spain. It has been influenced greatly at various times by other countries, especially Italy and France, but in its many masterpieces it has a flavour of the soil, a local colouring that is all its own. Even when Spanish authors have borrowed most freely they have usually succeeded in casting their own individuality over their “honourable kind of thieving.” Who has a more individual genius than Juan Ruiz, the merry Archpriest of Hita? ”

“ The ripest glories of the Spanish drama belong to an age of national decay—mindful, it is true, of the ideas of a greater past. The chivalrous enthusiasm pervading so many of the masterpieces of its literature is indeed a distinctive feature of the Spanish nation in all, even in the least hopeful, periods of its later history ”

“ Turning now to the proper Didactic prose of Spanish literature, the first instance we find—after those formerly noticed as imitating the Italian philosophical discussions of the sixteenth century—is one that comes near to the borders of fiction. ”

“ Spanish prose sheds much of its uncouthness, and takes its definitive form in such a passage as that upon the Joys of Spain: "More than all, Spain is subtle,—ay! and terrible, right skilled in conflict, mirthful in labour, stanch to her lord, in letters studious, in speech courtly, fulfilled of gifts; never a land the earth overlong to match her excellence, to rival her bravery; few in the world as mighty as she." ”

“ Living nearly in an insular situation, Spaniards have slept through the eighteenth century, and how in the main could they have applied their time better? Should the Spanish poetry ever again awake in old Europe, or in the New World, it would certainly have a step to make, from instinct to consciousness. What the Spaniards have hitherto loved from innate inclination, they must learn to reverence on clear principles, and, undismayed at the criticism to which it has in the mean time been exposed, proceed to fresh creations in the spirit of their greatest poets. ”

“ CHAPTER II. SPANISH LITERATURE. The golden age of Spanish literature embraces the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, in Spain as in other European countries, a period of special literary activity. The impulses at work were the same as those to be noted in contemporary France, England, and Germany, and the work produced of the same general types. The chief phases of Spanish mediaeval literature are these:
1. Epic and heroic poetry. Here, as elsewhere, heroic ballads grew up about the national heroes. ”

“ Differing entirely from those writers who suppose that the best days of Spanish literature have gone by, and believing, on the contrary, that it never has been more truly original and flourishing than during the present and preceding ages, it might be justly considered presumptuous in any new author to present such opinions to the world without showing the grounds on which they were founded. ”

“ Perhaps no chapter in the world’s literature is so rich in colour, or displays such a variety of mood and sentiment. Still the key-note is one of noble and dignified beauty, of chivalrous distinction, of exquisite propriety, courteous, immaculate, and unspotted by vulgarity or sordid meanness. The wine-cup of Spanish romance is filled with the heart’s blood of a nation august, knightly, imaginative, a people who have preferred ideals to gross realities, and the heights of national aristocracy to the deserts of false democracy. “Poor Spain!” ”

“ Spanish literature, like our own, takes its root in French and in Italian soil; in the anonymous epics, in the fableaux, as in Dante, Petrarch, and the Cinque Cento poets. Excessive patriotism leads men of all lands to magnify their literary history; yet it may be claimed for Spain, as for England, that she has used her models without compromising her originality, absorbing here, annexing there, and finally dominating her first masters. ”

“ The charm of the Spanish poetry consists, generally speaking, in the union of a sublime and enthusiastic earnestness of feeling, which peculiarly descends from the North, with the lovely breath of the South, and the dazzling pomp of the East. ”

“ In the absence of high original genius the Spanish dramatists began to turn to foreign models, though little supported in such attempts by popular sympathy; and it is only in more recent times that the Spanish drama has sought to reproduce the ancient forms from whose masterpieces the nation had never become estranged, while accommodating them to tastes and tendencies shared by later Spanish literature with that of Europe at large. ”

“ The development of Romance in Spain, its evolution and the phases through which it passed, has not, as a theme, met with that painstaking treatment at the hands of English writers on Spanish literature that might have been expected at this late day, when the literary specialist has to search diligently into the remotest corners of the earth if he seek new treasures to assay. ”

“ His general taste is for the strong and daring in action and meditation; his field, the region of great ideas and universal sentiments; but at the same time he has a capacity for embodying the delicacies and refinements of thought and emotion, and in pure pathos and beauty he has few American superiors. All these qualities are displayed in this volume in their most genial action, and the result is a book of equal fineness and power.
History of Spanish Literature. ”

“ The great achievements of Spanish genius in the era of its intellectual efflorescence have compelled the intellectual world to study its language and familiarize itself with its literature. And not only have the great works of Cervantes and Calderon and Lope de Yega been studied and criticised, and reproduced in all the cultivated languages of Europe, but the treasures of popular Spanish poetry, with their rich elements of chivalry and romantic passion, have been carefully studied and exemplified by foreign scholars, and been the inspiration of foreign poets and translators. ”

“ This depression of literature, however, could not be expected to continue long, among a people of such imaginative and deep passioned character as the Spanish, whose native genius was by far too buoyant, to be affected for any length of time by inferior models, even under dynastic influences. Accordingly, towards the end of the eighteenth century, it might have become apparent to an attentive observer, that another order of writers was about to be called forth, and that the nation was prepared to welcome the advent of true genius whenever it was to be recognized. ”

“ He has the unique power of creating the daintiest heroines in the world—beautiful, appealing, tender and brave. He has the secret of communicating emotion, of inventing dialogue, always appropriate, and he is ever prompt to enliven it with a delicate humour, humane and debonair. He has not merely enriched Spain: in some degree not yet precisely known—for the history of comparative literature is in its infancy—he has contributed to almost every theatre in Europe. ”

“ Spanish literature has of late given us a variety of novels and romances, all of which are in their way so good that we must believe that there is a new generation of writers in Spain who are discarding the worn-out forms and traditions, and are putting fresh life and energy into works which will give pleasure to the whole world of readers.”—Philadelphia American, March 5, 1887. ”

“ In the present day when popular literature is [Pg 522] running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking, and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Spain, as in all countries where it is possible to observe the origin and the development of letters, the earliest literature bears the stamp of influences which are either epic or religious. These primitive pieces are characterised by a vein of popular, unconscious poetry, with scarce a touch of personal artistry; and the ascription which refers one or other of them to an individual writer is, for the most part, arbitrary. Insufficiency of data makes it impossible to identify the oldest literary performance in Spanish Romance. ”

“ Even the Italians, in their poetical works, have indulged in strange absurdities, the more remarkable from the good taste that has pervaded their other works of genius. It is only in English literature that we can find writers imbued with the same vigour of thought and depth of poetic feeling as the Spanish, and it is therefore only with them that the latter can be classed in considering the relative merits of the poetry of different modern nations. ”

“ A period of very stiff Classicism in the eighteenth century, and of extravagant Romanticism in the beginning of the nineteenth, followed, constituting the omitted "yesterday"; and then arrived the vigorous literature of the present time, here in question. The qualities of truth to nature, practical good sense, genuine humor, and play of imagination, have nearly always characterized Spanish fiction, and these qualities seem possessed by the contemporary novelists in a higher degree than ever before. ”

“ His selection of native themes, his vigorous appeal to those primitive sentiments which are at least as strong in Spain as elsewhere—courage, patriotism, religion—have ensured him a vogue so wide and lasting that it almost approaches immortality. ”

“ Capmany, probably our best living philologist and prose writer, insists upon our borrowing every word and phrase from the authors of the sixteenth century, the golden age (as it is called) of our literature; while the Madrid translators seem determined to make the Spanish language a dialect of the French—a sort of Patois, unintelligible to either nation. The true path certainly lies between [Pg 343] both. The greatest part of our language has been allowed to become vulgar or obsolete. ”

“ The first great Spanish work is the poem of the Cid. It is the only epic Spain has ever produced, and is the most ancient of any in the Romance language. It is also valuable as a faithful picture of the manners and characters of the eleventh century. Indeed, the chief characteristic of Spanish song and poetry is its delineation of the national life. It is said that the Cid is the foremost poem produced in Europe from the thousand years that marked the decline of Greek and Roman civilization, to the appearance of the Divine Comedy. ”

“ Yet the very same causes made the Spanish language itself familiar to far more Englishmen than are familiar with it now, though the direct filiation of euphuism on Spanish originals is no doubt erroneous, and though the English and Spanish dramas evolved themselves in lines rather parallel than connected. ”

“ What has been taken from the most celebrated Spanish poets might be easily pointed out; but the writers of the second and third rank have been equally laid under contribution, and their works are not easily met with out of Spain. Ingenious boldness, joined to easy clearness of intrigue, is so exclusively peculiar to the Spanish dramatists, that whenever I find these in a work, I consider myself justified in suspecting a Spanish origin, even though the circumstance may have been unknown to the author himself, who drew his plagiarism from a nearer source. ”

“ For such a work there can be little merit claimed, except that for patient industry. But as a naturalist or collector of works of art patriotically endeavours to bring home the most valuable productions or treasures of other countries, so I trust that this work may also be favourably accepted, as a praiseworthy attempt to enrich our English literature with what was most interesting in the Spanish. ”

“ In burlesque poetry the Spaniards have been more successful: La Gatomaquia of Lope de Vega, and La Moschea of Villaviciosa (d. 1658) are agreeable examples of witty invention.
The departments of imaginative literature in which the genius of the new Spanish nation revealed itself with most vigour and originality are the novela and the drama. By novela must be understood the novel of manners, called picaresca (from pīcaro, a rogue or “picaroon”) Fiction. because of the social status of the heroes of those fictions; and this type of novel is a Spanish invention. ”

“ During this contest, and especially during the two or three dark centuries when the earliest Spanish poetry appeared, nothing but an invincible religious faith, and a no less invincible loyalty to their own princes, could have sustained the Christian Spaniards in their disheartening struggle against their infidel oppressors. ”

“ The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. ”

“ A taste for the best reading is not cultivated in Spanish girls, even where the treasures of that great Castilian literature are accessible to them. ”

“ Our style, in fact, is, at present, quite unsettled—fluctuating between the wordy pomposity of our old writers, without their ease, and the epigrammatic conciseness of second-rate French writers, stripped of their sprightliness and graces. As long, however, as we are condemned to the dead silence in which the nation has been kept for centuries, there is little chance of fixing any standard of taste for Spanish eloquence. ”