1561-1627.
Don Luis de Gongora y Argote was born at Cordova on the 11th July 1561.
His father was don Francisco de Argote, corregidor of Cordova, his
mother was donna Leonor de Gongora, both of ancient and distinguished
noble families; and, as the name of his father was equally patrician
with that of his mother, his having given preference to the latter has
excited surprise among his Spanish biographers. At the age of fifteen he
entered the university of Salamanca, and studied the law; but his
inclination led him rather to the cultivation of poetry and general
literature; and while at Salamanca, he wrote many amatory, satirical,
and burlesque poems. At this time he had so severe an illness, that for
three days he was believed to be dead, and his resuscitation was
regarded almost as a miracle.
He passed his early life at Cordova, known and esteemed as a poet and a
man of talent. His spirit was high, his character ardent and
penetrating, and his pen ready, so that he was induced to indulge in
personal satire, a circumstance which in after years he deeply
regretted; and he changed so much that a friend of his writes, "he
became the most ingenuous, candid, and unoffending man in conversation
and writing that Spain ever saw." At the age of forty-five he took holy
orders, and soon after visited Madrid, invited by several nobles who,
esteeming his worth, and regretting his slender means, believed that he
would there be enabled to increase them. But though he frequented the
society of the great, he was but slightly benefited. However, through
the patronage of the duke of Lerma and the marques de Siete Iglesias, he
was named honorary chaplain to Philip III. He was held in much esteem by
those nobles who cultivated literature, on account of his great talents;
and he founded a sort of school of literature whose disciples were
bigoted, zealous, and intolerant.
He thus wasted eleven years at court, not deceived by vain hopes, for
his experienced understanding prevented his entertaining any such
illusions, but forced by necessity. He was then taken suddenly and
dangerously ill, while attending on the king in a journey to Valentia,
away from all his friends; the queen, however, hearing of his illness,
sent a physician to attend him. His head was attacked in a manner not so
much to destroy reason, as to take from him all memory; and in this
manner he continued lost to the end of his life. At one time, during a
short interval of comparative health, he returned to Cordova that he
might be buried in his native place. Not long after he died, on the 24th
May, 1627, at the age of sixty-six.
In person Gongora was tall and robust, his face large, his eyes
penetrating and lively, his whole appearance venerable, though severe
and adust, hearing marks of the causticity and satire of his
disposition, which however softened as he grew older. He was a
disappointed man. His talents, his understanding, the grasp of mind of
which he felt himself capable, nourished an internal ambition, which
being ungratified, turned to discontent. It was some satisfaction to his
imperious disposition to found a school of poetry, and attack the chief
writers of the day, Cervantes and Lope de Vega, the Argensolas and
Quevedo, in reply to their just criticisms on his inflated and tortuous
style; and it was balm to his pride to hear the applause of his
followers. But it is greatly to his discredit that, while heretofore the
disputes of the Spanish poets with regard to literature were conducted
with temper, and for the most part with urbanity, Gongora indulged in
scurrility and abuse. His excuse, Sedano tells us, is, that this sort of
insolence was the fruit of youthful arrogance: yet, as he was a year
older than Lope, and contemporary with most of the others, he could not
have been so very young when he entered the lists against them. However,
as he grew older, visited Madrid, went to court, and took orders, he
threw off the presumption he nourished in his native town, and became
gentle, humane, and modest, and regretted his former excesses of temper.
The terms in which his friends speak of him, prove that the honesty and
integrity of his disposition, and his great understanding, inspired them
with love and veneration; for, though their language be exaggerated,
still it bears marks of sincerity. A friend and disciple writing his
life, soon after his death, speaks of him as "the greatest man that not
only Spain, but the world ever saw." He laments his brief career, as he
names sixty-six years; but his praises being written in the excess of
the _culto_ style, it is impossible almost to understand--quite
impossible to translate them. In this style the literal translation only
offers nonsense: there is a hidden meaning which is to be guessed at,
and that, so metaphoric and obscure, that it very much resembles a
Chinese puzzle--difficult to put together, and, when, discovered and
arranged, not worth the trouble. The _cultoristos_ themselves nourished
unbounded contempt for any thing that was at all explicable to common
understandings in a common manner.
It is remarkable that in the early poetry of Gongora there is no trace
of this style which he afterwards invented (as his followers called it),
and insisted upon as a prodigy of good taste and poetic genius. His
early poetry is peculiarly simple and plain. He wrote redondillas or
seguidillas in the old Spanish style, on the most common-place topics,
which yet he treats with spirit and power; others of his poems are
softly pathetic; but all are written without inflation--without
conceits, but with all that fire and brilliancy--that gaiety and
poignancy which characterised his vivid imagination. Of the first
mentioned, those that even verge on the common-place, we may mention the
"Child's Address to his Sister," as to how they should amuse themselves
on a holiday; in which he describes the pleasures of Spanish children,
with infinite vivacity and nature. The subject of another, is the story
of Hero and Leander. He transforms the hero and heroine of this romantic
love story, into two poor peasants--she too poor to buy a lantern, he to
hire a boat. The catastrophe, the last swimming of Leander, his coming
to the dreary, stormy sea beach, and his throwing himself in--though
tarnished by vulgarisms, is lively and picturesque. In all that he wrote
there was fire and spirit, facility and a diction truly poetic. One of
his sweetest lyrics is the "Song of Catherine of Arragon," lamenting her
sad destiny; it will prepossess the reader in favour of Gongora's pure
style, and we therefore quote the translation of Dr. Bowring:--
"THE SONG OF CATHERINE OF ARRAGON.
"O take a lesson, flowers! from me,
How in a dawn all charms decay--
Less than my shadow doomed to be,
Who was a wonder yesterday.
I, with the early twilight born,
Found ere the evening shades, a bier,
And I should die in darkness lorn,
But that the moon is shining here.
So must _ye_ die--though ye appear
So fair--and night your curtain be;
O take a lesson, flowers! from me.
My fleeting being was consoled
When the carnation met my view:
One hurrying day my doom has told--
Heaven gave that lovely flower but two.
Ephemeral monarch of the wold--
I clad in gloom--in scarlet he;
O take a lesson, flowers! from me.
The jasmin, sweetest flower of flowers,
The soonest is its radiance fled;
It scarce perfumes as many hours
As there are starbeams round its head.
If living amber fragrance shed,
The jasmine sure its shrine must be:
O take a lesson, flowers! from me.
The bloody-warrior fragrance gives,
It towers unblushing, proud and gay;
More days than other flowers it lives,
It blooms through all the days of May.
I'd rather like a shade decay,
Than such a gaudy being be:
O take a lesson, flowers! from me."
The following song, sent with flowers, and asking from his lady a kiss
for every sting he received while gathering them, is tender and
elegant:--
"From my summer alcove, which the stars this morn
With lucid pearls o'erspread,
I've gathered these jessamines, thus to adorn
With a wreath thy graceful head.
From thy bosom and mouth, they, as flowers, ere death,
Ask a purer white, anti a sweeter breath.
Their blossoms, a host of bees, alarmed
Watched over on jealous wing,
Hoarse trumpeters seemed they all, and armed
Each bee with a diamond sting:
I tore them away, but each flower I tore
Has cost me a wound which smarteth sore.
Now as I these jessamine flowers entwine,
A gift for thy fragrant hair,
I must have, from those honey-sweet lips of thine,
A kiss for each sting I bear:
It is just that the blooms I bring thee home
Be repaid by sweets from the golden comb.[107]"
His poems in Spanish metres, his letrillas and romances, have the same
brilliancy of expression, warmth of emotion, and vivid colouring. 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
the diluted interminable poems of Lope, and the unpoetic style of
Cervantes; he might have been displeased with the poverty of ideas and
enervated conceptions of many of his contemporaries; but he might have
been satisfied with his own ease, purity, and strength: he, however,
rejected even these, and instituted a system: a new dialect was
invented, a new construction adopted,--new words, a dislocated
construction, a profusion and exaggeration of figures were introduced.
"He rose," one of his disciples writes, "to the sublime height of
refinement (_cultura_), which ignorance holds in distaste, and
accomplished the greatness off 'Polyphemus,' the 'Soledades,' and other
shorter, but not less, poems." He grew almost frantic in the
dissemination of his system; and in his vehemence against its opponents,
he became lost to poetry, and lives, even to this day, more remembered
as a fantastic and ill-judging innovator, than as one of the most
natural, brilliant, and imaginative poets that Spain ever produced.
Lope de Vega has written a letter, or rather essay, upon Gongora and his
system, and gives the following account of both:
"I have known this gentleman for eight-and-twenty years, and I hold him
to be possessed of the rarest and most excellent talent of any in
Cordova, so that he need not yield even to Seneca or Lucan, who were
natives of the same town. Pedro Linan de Riaza, his contemporary at
Salamanca, told me much of his proficiency in study, so that I
cultivated his acquaintance, and improved it by the intercourse we had
when I visited Andalusia; and it always appeared as if he liked and
esteemed me more than my poor merits deserve. Many other distinguished
men of letters at that time competed with him:--Herrera, Vicente
Espinel, the two Argensolas, and others, among whom this gentleman held
such place, that Fame said the same of him as the Delphic oracle did of
Socrates.
"He wrote in all styles with elegance, and in gay and festive
compositions his wit was not less celebrated than Martial's, while it
was far more decent. We have several of his works composed in a pure
style, which he continued for the greater part of his life. But, not
content with having reached the highest step of fame in sweetness and
softness, he sought (I have always believed with good and sincere
intentions, and not with presumption, as his enemies have asserted), to
enrich the art, and even language, with such ornaments and figures as
were never before imagined nor seen. In my opinion he fulfilled his aim,
if this was his intent; the difficulty rests in receiving his system:
and so many obstacles have arisen, that I doubt they will never cease,
except with their cause; for I think the obscurity and ambiguity of his
expressions must be disagreeable to many. By some he is said to have
raised this new style into a peculiar class of poetry; and they are not
mistaken: for, as in the old manner of writing, it took a life to become
a poet, in this new one it requires but a day: for, with these
transpositions, four rules, and six Latin words or emphatic phrases,
they rise so high that they do not know--far less understand themselves.
Lipsius wrote a new Latin, which those who are learned in such things
say Cicero and Quintilian laugh at in the other world; and those who
have imitated him are so wise that they lose themselves. And I know
others who have invented a language and style so different from Lipsius
that they require a new dictionary. And thus those who imitate this
gentleman produce monstrous births--and fancy that, by imitating his
style, they inherit his genius. Would to God they imitated him in that
part which is worthy of adoption; for every one must be aware that there
is much that is deserving of admiration, while the rest is wrapt in the
darkness of such ambiguity as I have found the cleverest men at fault
when they tried to understand it. The foundation of this edifice is
transposition, rendered the more harsh by the disjoining of substantives
from adjectives, where no parenthesis is possible, so that even to
pronounce it is difficult: tropes and figures are the ornaments, so
little to the purpose, that it is as if a woman, when painting herself,
instead of putting the rouge on her cheeks, should apply it to her nose,
forehead and ears. Transpositions may be allowed, and there are common
examples, but they must be appropriate. Boscan, Garcilaso, and Herrera
use them. Look at the elegance, softness, and beauty of the divine
Herrera, worthy of imitation and admiration! for, it is not to enrich a
language, to reject its natural idiom, and adopt instead phrases
borrowed from a foreign tongue; but, now, they write in the style of the
curate who asked his servant for the "anserine reed," telling her that
"the Ethiopian licour was wanting in the cornelian vase." These people
do not attend to clearness or dignity of style, but to the novelty of
these exquisite modes of expression, in which there is neither truth nor
propriety, nor enlargement of the powers of language; but an odious
invention that renders it barbarous, imitated from one who might have
been an object of just admiration to us all."[108]
In addition to these grave and reasonable arguments, Lope attacked the
culto style with ridicule, better suited to explode the would-be
invention of the unintelligible. In several plays he alludes to it with
good humoured raillery. In one of them, a cavalier desirous of making
use of the talents of a poet to write for him, asks--
_Cav._ A plain or polished bard?[109]
_Poet._ Refined my style.
_Cav._ My secrets then remain with me to write.
_Poet._ Your secrets? Why?
_Cav._ For, with refinement penned.
Their meaning sure no soul shall comprehend.[110]
In another play, a lady describing her rival, ridicules her as,
"She who writes in that high polished style,
That language so charmingly Greek,
Which never was heard in Castile,
And her mother ne'er taught her to speak."[111]
In addition to these quotations, there are many more chance arrows let
fly at the absurdity, in his volume of burlesque poetry, written under
the name of Tomé de Burguillos, in the shape of parodies on this style.
We select one which however ridiculous it reads, is a very moderate
representation of the bombast Gongora brought into fashion.
"TO A COMB, THE POET NOT KNOWING WHETHER IT
WAS OF BOX OR IVORY.
"Sail through the red waves of the sea of love,
O, bark of Barcelona, and between
The billows of those ringlets proudly move,
And now be hidden there, and now be seen!
What golden surges, Love, who lurks beneath,
Weaves with the windings of that splendid hair!
Be grateful for thy bliss, and leave him there,
In joyance unmolested by thy teeth.
O tusk of elephant, or limb of box,
Gently unravel thou her tangled locks,
Gently the windings of those curls unfold,
Like the sun's rays, in parallels arrange them,
And through the labyrinth shape thy paths of gold,
Ere yet to silver envious time shall change them."[112]
While Lope on these occasions, and on many others, takes occasion to
reprehend and satirise this new system, his disciples held it up as the
wonder of the world; they called it the _estilo culto_, or refined
style, and themselves _cultoristos_: each phrase was to be twisted, each
word to receive a new and deeper meaning, while mythology, and all sorts
of phantastic imagery, gave a bombastic gilding to the whole; and when
they had written verses high in sound, but obscure and simple in
meaning, they fancied they had arrived at sublimity. Thus, a petty hill
assumes the proportions of a mountain in the evening mist. We may look
at it with wonder, we may lose our way or tumble into a ditch in
endeavouring to reach it; but; once at its summit, and we find ourselves
scarcely elevated above the plain.
The "Polyphemus" and the "Solitudes" of Gongora, are, as has been
mentioned, the poems written in his most exaggerated style. The
"Polyphemus" begins with a description of the giant, who "was a mountain
of members eminent." His dark hair was a "knotty imitation of the turbid
waves of Lethe; and, as the wind combs them stormily, they fly
dishevelled, or hang down disordered: his beard is a torrent, the
dried-up offspring of this Pyrenees! Trinacria has no wild beast in its
mountains armed with such cruelty, shod with such wind, whose ferocity
can defend, nor whose speed may save! Their skins, spotted with a
hundred colours, are his cloak; and thus he drives in his oxen to their
stall, treading the doubtful light of morn." His "Soledades" or
"Solitudes," commence even more in the _estilo culto_, and with such
very refined phrases and images that no one can make any thing of it. We
give a short passage with Sismondi's translation, and the Spanish, that
the reader may judge in what a jungle of interminable words, and
heterogeneous ideas, this mistaken poet lost himself:--
"'T was in the flowery season of the year,
When fair Europa's ravisher disguised,
(A crescent moon, the arms upon his brow,
And strewed with sunbeams all his glitt'ring skin),
Shines out the glowing honour of the sky,
And the stars pastures in the azure fields,
When he who well the cup of Jove might fill
Mure gracefully than Ida's shepherd boy,
Was wrecked--and scorned as well as far away,
The tears of love and amorous complaints
Gave to the sea, which he then pitying
Imparts to rustling leaves, that to the wind
Repeats the saddest sighs,
Soft as Arion's softest instrument--
And from the mountain top a pine which aye
Struggled with its fierce enemy the North,
There rent a pitying limb--and the brief plank
Became a no small dolphin to the youth
Who wand'ring heedlessly, was forced t'intrust
His way unto a Libyan waste of sea,
And his existence to an ocean-skiff,
At first sucked in, and afterwards thrown forth,
Where not far off a rock there stood, whose top
Was crowned with bulrushes, and feathers warm
With seaweed dank and foam besprent all o'er,
And rest and safety found there where a nest
The bird of Jove had built.
He kissed the sands, and of the broken skiff,
The portion that was thrown upon the beach
He gave the rock--and let the rugged cliffs
Behold his loveliness, for naked stood
The youth.--The ocean first had drunk, and then
Restored his vestments to the yellow sands,
And in the sunshine he extended them,
And the sun licking them with his sweet tongue
Of tempered fire, slowly invests them round,
And sucks the moisture from the smallest thread."[113]
Sismondi only gives half this sentence, but the latter part is the most
intelligible; and besides it was difficult to refrain from presenting
the reader with the refined image (_culta figura_) of the manner in
which the shipwrecked boy's clothes were dried. In a hurried translation
of this sort, the harmony of verse is not preserved; and that, it must
be remarked, is great, and one of Gongora's chief beauties. There is,
indeed, a sort of dusky gorgeousness throughout; but it makes the reader
smile, to be told that this style of poetry was new and unknown, and
"superior to aught that man ever before imagined or composed:" that it
was to supersede Garcilaso, Herrera, and Gongora himself in his better
days. Such was the faith of the _cultoristos_, such their hope in the
_estilo culto._
Sismondi's translation of the first part of this sentence runs
thus:--"C'était la saison fleurie de l'année dans laquelle le
ravisseur déguisé d'Europe, portant sur son front pour armes une
demie-lune, et tous les rayons du soleil disséminés sur son front,
devenu un honneur brillant du ciel, menait paître des étoiles dans des
champs de saphir; lorsque celui qui était bien plus fait pour
présenter la coupe à Jupiter que le jeune homme d'Ida, fit naufrage,
et confia à la mer de douces plaintes et des larmes d'amour; celle-ci
pleine de compassion les transmit aux feuilles qui répétant le triste
gémissement du vent comme le doux instrument d'Arion----" Here Sismondi
breaks off, for here Gongora becomes particularly obscure. We guess (it
is all guessing with the _cultoristos_), that the poet intends to say,
that the pitying waves repeated to the winds the complaints of the
wrecked youth, which in compassion tore from the pine the limb that
served him as a skiff to save him. Whether the instrument, soft as
Arion's, typifies the voice of the youth, or the waves, or the wind, or
the pine tree, is an enigma beyond our solving.
[Footnote 107: This translation is from Mr. Wiffen, to show how simply
and beautifully Gongora wrote in his young and unspoiled style, and we
give the Spanish of this last song:
"A UNA DAMA PRESENTANDOLA UNAS FLORES.
"De la florida falda
que oy de perlas bordó la Alba luciente,
tegidos en guirnalda,
traslado estos jazmines a tu frente,
que piden con ser flores
blanca a tus sienes, y a tu boca olores.
Guarda destos jazmines
de avejas era un esquadron volante,
ronco, si, de clarines,
mas de puntas armado de diamante,
puselas en huida
y cada flor mi cuestra una herida.
Mas Clori que he texido
jazmines al cabello desatado,
y mas besos te pido
que avejas tuvo el esquadron armado,
lisonjas son iguales,
servir yo en flores, pagar tu en panales."
_Obras de Gongora_, 1633.]
[Footnote 108: Discurso sobre la Nueva Poesia por Lope de Vega.]
[Footnote 109: Lord Holland's Life of Lope de Vega.]
[Footnote 110: _Lop._ Sois vulgar o culterano?
_Sev._ Culto soy.
_Lop._ Quedaos en casa
Y escribireis mis secretos.
_Sev._ Sus secretos! por que cansa?
_Lop._ Porque nadie los entienda.]
[Footnote 111: "Aquella que escribe en culto
por a quel Griego lenguage;
que no lo supo Castilla,
ni se enseñóle su madre."]
[Footnote 112: "A UN PEYNE, QUE NO SABIA EL POETA SI ERA DE BOX
O DE MARFIL.
"Sulca del mar de amor las rubias ondas,
barco de Barcelona, y por los bellos
lazos navega altivo, aunque por ellos
tal vez te muestres, y tal vez te escondas.
Ya no flechas, Amor, dorados ondas
teje de sus esplendidos cabellos;
tu con los dientes no lo quites dellos,
para que a tanta dicha correspondas.
Desenvuelve los rizos con decoro,
los paralelos de mi sol desata,
box o colmillo de elephante Moro,
y en tanto que esparcidos los dilata
forma por la madeja sendas de ora
antes que el tiempo los convierta en plata."]
[Footnote 113: "Era del año la estacion florida,
en que el mentido robador de Europa
(media Luna las armas de su frente,
y el Sol todos los rayos de su pelo)
luziente honor del cielo
en campos de zafiro pace las estrellas,
quando el que ministrar podia la copa
a Jupiter, mejor que el garçon de Ida
naufragò, y desdeñado sobre ausente
lagrimosas de Amor, dulces querellas
Dá al mar, que condolido
fue a las ondas, que al viento
el misero gemido,
segundo de Arion dulce instrumento
del siempre en la montaña opuesto pino,
al enemigo Noto
piadoso miembro roto,
breve tabla, Delfin no fue pequeño
al inconsiderado peregrino,
que a una Libia de ondas su camino
fio, y su vida a un leño
del oceano, pues antes sorvido
y luego vomitado,
no lexos de un escollo coronado
de secos juncos, de calientes plumas,
(Alga todo, y espumas)
hallò hospitalidad donde hallò nido
de Jupiter el ave,
besa la arena, y de la reta nave
aquella parte poca
que lo expuso en la playa, dio a la roca,
que aun se dexan las peñas
lisongear de agradecidas señas,
desnudo el joven, quanto ya el vestido
oceano ha bevido
restituir le haze a las arenas,
y al sol lo estiende luego,
que lamiendolo apenas
su dulce lengua de templado fuego
lento lo embiste, y con suave estilo
la menor honda chupa al menor hilo."]