a small volume of poetry, chiefly lyric and pastoral. Most of it is
in the short, national verse, and nearly all is marked with a great
gentleness of spirit and a truly poetical sensibility. The Anacreontics
which it contains remind us of Villegas, but have more philosophy and
more tenderness than his. The ballads, for which his talent was no less
happily fitted, if they lack the abrupt vigor of the elder times, have
a grace, a lightness, and a finish which belong to that more advanced
period of a nation’s poetry, when the popular lyre has ceased to give
forth new and original tones. But everywhere this little volume shows
traces of an active fancy and powers of nice observation, which break
forth in rich and faithful descriptions of natural scenery, and in
glimpses of what is tenderest and truest in the human heart. It was,
in fact, a volume of poetry more worthy of the country than any that
had been produced in Spain since the disappearance of the great lights
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and it was received, in
consequence, with general enthusiasm, not only for its own sake, but as
the long-looked-for dawn of a brighter day.
But his success was not altogether wisely used by Melendez. He had
been in the habit for some years of spending his vacations at court,
where he was a favorite with many persons of distinction; and, now
that he had risen so much in general consideration, he employed his
influence in soliciting for himself a place under the government,--an
old weakness in the Castilian character, which, however it might
be disguised by the loyalty of public service, has broken down the
independence and happiness of multitudes of high-minded men who have
yielded to it. Melendez, unfortunately, succeeded in his aspirations.
In 1789 he was made a judge in one of the courts of Saragossa, and in
1791 was raised to a dignified position in the Chancery of Valladolid;
thus involving himself more or less with the political government of
the country, to which, during the administration of the Prince of the
Peace, every officer it employed was in some way made subservient.
He did not, however, neglect his favorite pursuits. He fulfilled
with faithfulness and ability the duties of his place; but poetry
was still his first love, for whose service he rescued many hours
of secret and fond devotion. In 1797, he published a new edition of
his works, more than doubling their original amount, and dedicating
them to the reigning favorite,--the master of all fortunes in the
country he governed so ill. It was successful. The new portions wore a
somewhat graver and more philosophical air than his earliest lyrics and
pastorals had done, and showed more the influence of studies in English
and German literature. But this was not, on the whole, an improvement.
He felt, undoubtedly, that the tremendous revolutions he witnessed on
all sides, in the fall of kingdoms and the convulsions of society,
prescribed to poetry subjects more lofty and solemn than he had been
wont to seek; and he made an effort to rise to a requisition so severe.
Once or twice he intimates a consciousness that he was not equal to the
undertaking; and yet his “Ode to Winter,” as a season for reflection,
which shows how much he had read Thomson, his “Ode to Truth,” and his
“Ode on the Presence of God in his Works,” are not unworthy of their
lofty subjects. Several of his philosophical epistles, too, are good;
especially those to Jovellanos and the Prince of the Peace. But, in his
longer _canzones_, where he sometimes imitates Petrarch, and in his
epic canto on “The Fall of Lucifer,” which was evidently suggested
by Milton, he failed.[353] On the whole, therefore, the attempt to
introduce a new tone into Spanish poetry,--a tone of moral and, in
some degree, of metaphysical discussion, to which he was urged by
Jovellanos,--if it did not diminish the permanent fame of Melendez, did
not add to it. The concise energy and philosophical precision such a
tone requires are, in fact, foreign from the fervent genius of the old
Castilian verse, and hardly consistent with that submissive religious
faith which is one of the most important elements of the national
character. In this direction, therefore, Melendez has been little
followed.
[353] Whether the “Caida de Luzbel” was written because a prize
was offered by the Spanish Academy, in 1785, for a poem on that
subject, which was to consist of not more than one hundred octave
stanzas, I do not know; but I have a poor attempt with the same
title, professing to be the work of Manuel Perez Valderrabano,
(Palencia, 1786, 12mo,) and to have been written for such a
prize, to all the conditions of which the poem of Melendez seems
conformed. No adjudication of the prize, however, took place.
As, however, we have intimated, this new publication of his works was
successful. The Prince of the Peace was flattered by his share in it;
and Melendez received, in consequence, an important employment about
the court, which brought him to Madrid, where, his friend Jovellanos
having been made a minister of state, his position became, for a
moment, most agreeable and happy; while, for the future, a long vista
of preferment and fame seemed opening before him. But the very next
year, the virtuous and wise man on whom rested so many hopes, besides
those of Melendez, fell from power; and, according to the old custom of
the Spanish monarchy, his political friends were involved in his ruin.
At first, Melendez was exiled to Medina del Campo, and afterwards to
Zamora; but in 1802 the rigor of his persecution was mitigated, and he
was permitted to return to Salamanca, the scene of his earliest and
happiest fame.
But he returned there a saddened and disappointed man; little inclined
to poetical studies, and with little of the tranquillity of spirit
necessary to pursue them successfully. At the end of six weary years
came the revolution of Aranjuez, and he was again free. He hastened
at once to Madrid. But he was too late. The king was already at
Bayonne, and the French power was in the ascendant in the capital.
Unfortunately, he attached himself to the new government of Joseph, and
shared first its disasters and then its fate. Once he was absolutely
led out to be shot by the excited population of Oviedo, where he
had been sent as a commissioner. On another occasion, his house at
Salamanca was sacked, and his precious library destroyed, by the very
French party whose interests he served. At last, when all was lost, he
fled. But, before he crossed the frontier, he knelt down and kissed the
last spot of earth that he could call Spain; and then, as the Bidassoa
received his tears, cried out in anguish that “he should never again
tread the soil of his country.” His prophecy was fulfilled as sadly as
it was made. Four miserable years he lived as an exile in the South
of France, and then died at Montpellier, on the 24th of May, 1817, in
poverty and suffering.[354]
[354] The death of Melendez was supposed by his physician to have
been occasioned by the vegetable diet to which he was driven, for
want of means to purchase food more substantial; and, from the
same poverty, his burial was so obscure that the Duke of Frias
and the poet Juan Nicasio Gallego with difficulty discovered his
remains, in 1828, and caused them to be respectfully interred,
in one of the principal cemeteries of Montpellier, with an
appropriate monument to mark the spot. Semanario Pintoresco,
1839, pp. 331-333; a striking and sad history.
To solace the heavy hours of his exile, he occupied himself with
preparing the materials for a final publication of all he had
written, embracing many new poems and many changes in those already
published;--all which appeared in 1820, and have constituted the basis
of the different editions of his works that have been given to the
world since. Like the previous collections, it shows, not, indeed, a
poetical genius of the first order, nor one with very flexible or very
various attributes, but certainly a genius of great sweetness; always
winning and graceful whenever the subject implies tenderness, and
sometimes vigorous and imposing when it demands power. What Melendez
wrote with success was a great advance upon the poetry of Montiano, and
even upon that of the elder Moratin. It was more Castilian, and more
full of feeling, than theirs. In style, too, it was more free, and it
has done much to settle the poetical manner that has since prevailed.
Gallicisms occasionally occur that might have been avoided, though many
of them have now become a part of the recognized resources of Spanish
poetry; but more often Melendez has revived old and neglected words and
phrases, which have thus been restored to their place in the language,
and have increased its wealth. As a general remark, his verse is not
only flowing, but well suited to his subjects; and whether we consider
what he has done himself, or what influence he has exercised over
others,--especially when we read the little volume he published in the
freshness of his youth, while he was still unknown at court and still
careless of the convulsions that were at last to overwhelm him,--there
can be no doubt that he was better fitted to form a new school and
give a guiding impulse to the national poetry than any writer that had
appeared in Spain for above a century.[355]
[355] Juan Melendez Valdes, “Poesías,” Madrid, 1785, 12mo; 1797,
3 tom. 18mo; 1820, 4 tom. 8vo; the last with a Life, by Quintana.
(Puybusque, Tom. II. p. 496.) I have seen it stated, that three
counterfeit editions of the first small volume, printed in 1785,
appeared almost at the same time with the true one; so great
was the first outbreak of his popularity. The first volume of
Hermosilla (Juicio Crítico de los Principales Poetas Españoles
de la Ultima Era, Paris, 1840, 2 tom. 12mo) contains a criticism
of the poems of Melendez, so severe that I find it difficult to
explain its motive. The judgment of Martinez de la Rosa, in the
notes to his didactic poem on Poetry, is much more faithful and
true. Melendez corrected his verse with great care; sometimes
with too much, as may be seen by comparing some of the poems as
he first published them, in 1785, with their last revision, in
the edition of his Works, 1820.
Older than Melendez, but somewhat influenced by him and by Cadahalso,
who had an effect on the taste of both, was the excellent Father Diego
Gonzalez, a modest Augustinian monk, a part of whose life was spent in
active religious duties at Salamanca, where he became intimate with
the poets of the new school; a part of it at Seville, where he was
the friend of Jovellanos; and a part of it at Madrid, where he died
in 1794, about sixty years old, sincerely lamented by some of the
noblest spirits of his time. As a poet, Gonzalez adhered more to the
old Castilian school than Melendez did. But his model was the best. He
imitated Luis de Leon; and did it with such happy success, that, in
some of his odes and in some of his versions of the Psalms, we might
almost think we were listening to the solemn tones of his great master.
His most popular poems, however, were light and gay; such as his verses
“To a Perfidious Bat,” which have been very often printed; his verses
“To a Lady who had burned her Finger”; and similar trifles, in which
he showed that all the secret idiomatic graces of the old Castilian
were at his command. A didactic poem on “The Four Ages of Man,” which
he began, and in the first book of which there is a fine dedication of
the whole to Jovellanos, was never finished. Indeed, his poetry, though
much known and circulated during his lifetime, was an object of little
interest or care to himself, and was collected with difficulty after
his death, and published by his faithful friend, Juan Fernandez.[356]
[356] “Poesías de M. T. Diego de Gonzalez,” Madrid, 1812, 12mo.
He was a native of Ciudad Rodrigo, and was born in 1733. If he
had been a little less modest, and a little less connected with
Jovellanos and Melendez, we might have had a modern school of
Seville as well as of Salamanca.
Other poets, among whom were Forner, Iglesias, and Cienfuegos, were
more under the influence of the Salamanca school than Gonzalez
was. Forner, like Melendez, was born in Estremadura, and the two
young friends were educated together at Salamanca. In his critical
opinions,--partly shown in a satire “On the Faults introduced into
Castilian Poetry,” which gained an academic prize in 1782, and partly
in his controversies with Huerta on the subject of the Spanish
theatre,--he inclines much to the stricter French school. But his
poetry is more free than such opinions would imply; and in his latter
years, when he lived as a magistrate at Seville, and studied Herrera,
Rioja, and the other old masters who were natives of its soil, he
attached himself yet more decidedly to the national manner, and
approached nearer to the serene severity of Gonzalez. Unhappily, his
life, besides being much crowded with business, was short. He died in
1797, only forty-one years old; and, except his prose works, the best
of which is a well-written defence of the literary reputation of his
country against the injurious imputations of foreigners, he left little
to give the world proof of the merits he possessed, or the influence he
really exercised.[357]
[357] Juan Pablo Forner, “Oracion Apologética por la España y su
Mérito Literario,” Madrid, 1786, 12mo. His critical controversies
and discussions were chiefly under assumed names,--Tomé Cecial,
Varas, Bartolo, etc. His poetry is best found in the “Biblioteca”
of Mendibil y Silvela, (Burdeos, 1819, 4 tom. 8vo,) and in the
fourth volume of Quintana’s “Poesías Selectas”;--an attempt to
publish a collection of all his works, edited by Luis Villanueva,
having stopped after issuing the first volume, Madrid, 1843, 8vo.
Iglesias, though his life was even shorter, was, in some respects, more
fortunate. He was born in Salamanca, and educated there under the most
favorable auspices. Offended at the low state of morals in his native
city, he indulged himself at first in the free forms of Castilian
satire;--ballads, apologues, epigrams, and especially the half-simple,
half-malicious _letrillas_, in which he was eminently successful. But,
when he became a parish priest, he thought such lightness unbecoming
the example he wished to set before his flock. He devoted himself,
therefore, to serious composition; wrote serious ballads, eclogues,
and _silvas_ in the manner of Melendez; and published a didactic poem
on theology;--all a result of a most worthy purpose, and all written
in the pure style which is one of his prominent merits; but none of
it giving token of the instinctive promptings of his genius, and none
of it fitted to increase his final reputation. After his death, which
occurred in 1791, when he was thirty-eight years old, this became at
once apparent. His works were collected and published in two volumes;
the first being filled with the graver class of his poems, and the
second with the satirical. The decision of the public was instant. His
lighter poems were too free, but they were better imitations of Quevedo
than had yet been seen, and became favorites at once; the serious poems
were dull, and soon ceased to be read.[358]
[358] “Poesías de Don Josef Iglesias de la Casa,” Salamanca,
1798, 2 tom. 18mo, Segunda Edicion; forbidden by the Inquisition,
Index Expurg., 1805, p. 27. The best editions are those of
Barcelona, 1820, and Paris, 1821; but there are several others,
and among them one in four small volumes, 1840, the last of which
contains a considerable number of poems not before published,
some of which, and perhaps all, are not by Iglesias.
Cienfuegos, who was ten years younger than Melendez, was more strictly
his follower than either of the two poets last mentioned. But he had
fallen on evil times, and his career, which promised to be brilliant,
was cut short by the troubles they brought upon him. In 1798 he
published his poetical works; the miscellaneous portion consisting of
Anacreontics, odes, ballads, epistles, and elegies, which, while they
give proof of much real talent and passion, show sometimes an excess of
sentimental feeling, and sometimes a desire to imitate the metaphysical
and philosophical manner supposed to be demanded by the spirit of the
age. Both were defects, to which he had been partly led by the example
of his friend and master, Melendez, at whose feet he long sat in the
cloisters of Salamanca; and both were affectations, from which a
character so manly and decided as that of Cienfuegos might in time have
emancipated itself.
But the favor with which this publication was received procured for
him the place of editor of the government gazette, at Madrid; and,
when the French occupied that capital, in 1808, he was found firm at
his post, determined to do his duty to his country. Murat, who had
the command of the invading forces, endeavoured, at first, to seduce
or drive him into submission, but, failing in this, condemned him
to death; a sentence which would infallibly have been carried into
execution,--since Cienfuegos refused to make the smallest concession
to the French authority,--if his friends had not interfered and
procured a commutation of it into transportation to France. The change,
however, was hardly a mercy. The sufferings of the journey, in which he
travelled as a prisoner; the grief he felt at leaving his friends in
hands which had hardly spared his own life; and the anticipation of a
long exile in the midst of his own and his country’s enemies, were too
much for his patriotic and generous spirit; and he died in July, 1809,
at the age of forty-five, only a few days after he had reached the
spot assigned for his punishment.[359]
[359] “Obras Poéticas de Nicasio Alvarez de Cienfuegos,”
Madrid, 1816, 2 tom. 12mo. His style is complained of, both for
neologisms and archaisms, the last of which have been made,
though without sufficient reason, a ground of complaint against
Melendez.
One other person, already referred to with honor, must now be
particularly noticed, who, if his life belonged to the state, still
wrote poetry with success, and exercised over the school formed at
Salamanca an influence which belongs to the history of letters. This
person was Jovellanos, the wise magistrate and minister of Charles the
Fourth, and the victim of his master’s unworthy weakness and of the
still more unworthy vengeance of the reigning favorite. He was born in
Gijon, in Asturias, in 1744, and from his earliest youth seems to have
shown that love of intellectual cultivation, and that moral elevation
of character, which distinguished the whole of the more mature portions
of his life.
The position of his family was such, that all the means for a careful
education to be found in Spain were open to him; and, as he was
originally destined to the higher dignities of the Church, he was sent
to study philosophy and the canon and civil law at Oviedo, Avila,
Alcalá de Henares, and Madrid. But, just as he was about to take the
irrevocable step that would have bound him to an ecclesiastical life,
some of his friends, and especially the distinguished statesman, Juan
Arias de Saavedra, who was like a second father to him, interfered,
and changed his destination. The consequence of this intervention was,
that, in 1767, he was sent as a judicial magistrate to Seville, where,
by his humane spirit, and his disinterested and earnest devotion to
the duties of a difficult and disagreeable place, he made himself
generally loved and respected; while, at the same time, by his study
of political economy and the foundations of all just legislation, he
prepared the way for his own future eminence in the affairs of his
country.
But the spirit of Jovellanos was of kindred with whatever was noble and
elevated. At Seville, he early discovered the merit of Diego Gonzalez,
and through him was led into a correspondence with Melendez. One result
of this is still to be found in the poetical Epistle of Jovellanos to
his friends in Salamanca, exhorting them to rise to the highest strains
of poetry. Another was the establishment of a connection between
himself and Melendez, which, while it was important to the young school
at Salamanca, led Jovellanos to give more of his leisure to the elegant
literature he had always loved, but from which the serious business of
life had, for some time, much separated him.
In consequence of an accidental conversation, he wrote at Seville his
prose comedy of “The Honored Criminal,” which had a remarkable success;
and in 1769 he prepared a poetical tragedy on the subject of Pelayo,
which was not printed till several years afterward. Shorter poetical
compositions, sometimes grave and sometimes gay, served to divert his
mind in the intervals of severe labor; and when, after a period of ten
years, he left the brilliant capital of Andalusia, his poetical Epistle
to his friends there shows how deeply he felt that he was leaving
behind him the happiest period of his life.
This was in 1778, when he was called to Madrid, as one of the principal
magistrates of the capital and court; a place that brought him again
into the administration of criminal justice, from which, during his
stay at Seville, he had been relieved. His duties were distasteful
to his nature, but he fulfilled them faithfully, and consoled himself
by intercourse with such men as Campomanes and Cabarrus, who devoted
themselves, as he did, to the great task of raising the condition of
their country. Of course, he had now little leisure for poetry. But,
being accidentally employed on affairs of consequence at the Paular
convent, he was so struck by the solemn scenery in which it stood, and
the tranquil lives of its recluse inhabitants, that his poetical spirit
broke out afresh in an address to Mariano Colon, one of the family of
the great discoverer of America, and afterwards its head;--a beautiful
epistle, full of the severe genius of the place that inspired it, and
of its author’s longing for a repose his spirit was so well fitted to
enjoy.
In 1780, he was raised to a place in the Council of Orders, where
he had more leisure, and was able to give his time to higher
objects;--some of the results of which are to be seen in his report
to the government on the military and religious Orders of Knighthood;
in his system of instruction for the Imperial College of Calatrava;
in his Discourse on the Study of History, as a necessary part of the
wise study of jurisprudence; and in other similar labors, which proved
him to be incontestably an excellent prose-writer, and the first
philosophical statesman in the kingdom.
At the same time, however, he amused himself with elegant literature,
and took great solace in collecting around him the poets and men of
letters whom he loved. In 1785, he wrote several burlesque ballads on
the quarrels of Huerta, Yriarte, and Forner about the theatre; and
the next year published two satires in blank verse and in the style
of Juvenal, rebuking the corrupted manners of his times. All of them
were received with favor; and the ballads, though not printed till
long afterwards, were perhaps only the more effective because they were
circulated in manuscript, and so became matters of great interest.
Persons who held the tone implied in such a course of public labors
might be sustained at the court of Charles the Third, but were little
likely to enjoy regard at that of his son. In 1790, two years after
Charles the Fourth ascended the throne, Count Cabarrus not only fell
from power, but was thrown into prison; and Jovellanos, who did not
hesitate to defend him, was sent to Asturias in a sort of honorable
exile, that lasted eight years. But he served his fellow-men as gladly
in disgrace as he did in power. Hardly, therefore, had he reached his
native city, when he set about urging forward all public improvements
that he deemed useful; laboring in whatever related to the mines and
roads, and especially in whatever related to the general education
of the people, with the most disinterested zeal. During this period
of enforced retirement, he made many reports to the government on
different subjects connected with the general welfare, and wrote his
excellent tract “On Public Amusements,” afterwards published by the
Academy of History, and his elaborate treatise on Legislation in
Relation to Agriculture, which extended his reputation throughout
Europe, and has been the basis of all that has been wisely undertaken
in Spain on that difficult subject ever since.
In 1797, Count Cabarrus was restored to the favor of Godoy, Prince
of the Peace, and Jovellanos was recalled to court and made Minister
of Justice. But his season of favor was short. Godoy still hated the
elevated views of the man to whom he had reluctantly delegated a small
portion of his own power; and in 1798, under the pretext of devoting
him to his old employments, he was again exiled to the mountains of
Asturias, which, like so many other distinguished men that have sprung
from them, he loved with a fond prejudice that he did not care to
disguise.
This exile, however, did not satisfy the jealous favorite. In 1801,
partly through a movement of the Inquisition, and still more through a
political intrigue, Jovellanos was suddenly seized in his bed, and, in
violation both of law and decency, carried, like a common felon, across
the whole kingdom, and embarked at Barcelona for Majorca. There he was
confined, first in a convent and afterwards in a fortress, with such
rigor, that all communication with his friends and with the affairs of
the world was nearly cut off; and there he remained, for seven long
years, exposed to privations and trials that undermined his health and
broke down his constitution. At last came the abdication and fall of
his weak and ungrateful sovereign. “And then,” says Southey, in his
“History of the Peninsular War,” “next to the punishment of Godoy, what
all men most desired was the release of Jovellanos.” He was, therefore,
at once brought back, and everywhere welcomed with the affection and
respect, that he had earned by so many services and through such unjust
sufferings.
His infirmities, however, were very oppressive to him. He declined,
therefore, all public employments, even among his friends who adhered
to the cause of their country; he indignantly rejected the proposal of
the French invaders to become one of the principal ministers of state
in the new order of things they hoped to establish; and then slowly and
sadly retired, to seek among his native mountains the repose he needed.
But he was not permitted long to remain there. As soon as the first
central Junta was organized at Seville, he was sent to it to represent
his native province, and stood forth in its councils the leading spirit
in the darkest and most disheartening moments of the great contest of
his country for existence. On the dissolution of that body,--which was
dissolved at his earnest desire,--he again returned home, broken down
with years, labors, and sufferings; trusting that he should now be
permitted to end his days in peace.
But no man with influence such as his could then have peace in Spain.
Like others, in those days of revolution, he was assailed by the fierce
spirit of faction, and in 1811 replied triumphantly to his accusers in
a defence of what may be considered his administration of Spain in the
two preceding years, written with the purity, elegance, and gravity of
manner which marked his best days, and with a moral fervor even more
eloquent than he had shown before. As he approaches the conclusion of
this personal vindication, admirable alike for its modesty and its
power, he says, with a sorrow he does not strive to conceal:--
“And now that I am about to lay down my pen, I feel a secret trouble
at my heart, which will disturb the rest of my life. It has been
impossible for me to defend myself without offending others; and I
fear, that, for the first time, I shall begin to feel I have enemies
whom I have myself made such. But, wounded in that honor which is my
life, and asking in vain for an authority that would protect and rescue
me, I have been compelled to attempt my own defence by my own pen;
the only weapon left in my hands. To use it with absolute moderation,
when I was driven on by an anguish so sharp, was a hard task. One more
dexterous in such contests might, by the cunning of his art, have
oftener inflicted wounds, and received them more rarely; but, feeling
myself to be fiercely attacked, and coming to the contest unskilled
and alone, I threw my unprotected person into it, and, in order to
free myself from the more imminent danger before me, took no thought
of any that might follow. Indeed, such was the impulse by which I was
driven on, that I lost sight, at once, of considerations which, at
another time, might well have prevailed with me. Veneration for public
authority, respect for official station, the private affections of
friendship and personal attachment,--every thing within me yielded to
the love of justice, and to the earnest desire that truth and innocence
should triumph over calumny and falsehood. And can I, after this, be
pardoned, either by those who have assailed me, or by those who have
refused me their protection? Surely it matters little. The time has
come in which all disapprobation, except that of honorable men and the
friends of justice, must be indifferent to me. For now that I find
myself fast approaching the final limits of human life, now that I am
alone and in poverty, without a home or a shelter, what remains for me
to ask, beyond the glory and liberty of my country, but leave to die
with the good name I have labored to earn in its service?”
At the moment when this eloquent defence of himself was published,
the French, by a sudden incursion, took military possession of his
native city; and he hurried for safety on board a slight vessel,
hardly knowing whither his course should be directed. After suffering
severely from a storm of eight days’ continuance in the Bay of Biscay,
he disembarked to obtain relief at the obscure port of Vega. But his
strength was gone; and on the 27th of November, within forty-eight
hours from the time of his landing, he died. He was nearly sixty-eight
years old.
Jovellanos left behind him few men, in any country, of a greater
elevation of mind, and fewer still of a purer or more irreproachable
character. Whatever he did was for Spain and his fellow-men, to whose
service he devoted himself alike in the days of his happiness and of
his suffering;--in his influence over the school of Salamanca, when
he exhorted them to raise the tone of their poetry, no less than in
the war-cry of his odes to cheer on his countrymen in their conflict
for national independence;--in his patient counsels for the cause of
education, when he was an exile in Asturias or a prisoner in Majorca,
no less than in the exercise of his authority as a magistrate and
a minister of state to Charles the Fourth, and as the head of the
government at Seville. He lived, indeed, in times of great trouble,
but his virtues were equal to the trials that were laid upon them, and
when he died, in a wretched and comfortless inn, he had the consolation
of believing that Spain would be successful in the struggle he had
assisted to lead on, and of knowing, in his own heart, what the Cortes
afterwards declared to the world, that he was “a man well deserving of
his country.”[360]
[360] “Coleccion de las Obras de Don Gaspar Melchior de
Jovellanos,” Madrid, 1830-32, 7 tom. 8vo. A declamatory prose
satire on the state of Spain in the time of Charles IV., supposed
to have been delivered in the Amphitheatre of Madrid, in 1796,
has been attributed to Jovellanos. It is entitled “Pan y Toros,”
or Bread and Bull-fights, from the old Roman cry of “Panem et
Circenses,” and was suppressed as soon as it was published,
but has often been printed since. Among other distinctions,
it enjoyed the singular one of being translated and privately
printed, in 1813, on board a British man-of-war, stationed in
the Mediterranean. But it is not the work of Jovellanos, though
it has almost always borne his name on the successive editions.
Jovellanos was familiar with English literature, and translated
the first book of the “Paradise Lost,” but not very successfully.
For notices of him, see Memorias de Jovellanos, por Don Agustin
Cean Bermudez, Madrid, 1814, 12mo; the Life at the end of his
collected Works; Lord Holland’s Life of Lope de Vega, 1817, Tom.
II., where is a beautiful tribute to him, worthy of Mr. Fox’s
nephew; and Llorente, Tom. II. p. 540, and Tom. IV. p. 122, where
are recorded some of his shameful persecutions. The name of
Jovellanos is sometimes written Jove Llanos; and, I believe, was
always so written by his ancestors.
One historical work of the reign of Charles the Fourth should not be
forgotten. It was by Juan Bautista Muñoz, and was undertaken by the
especial order of Charles the Third, who demanded of its author a
complete history of the Spanish discoveries and conquests in America.
This was in 1779. But Muñoz encountered many obstacles. The members of
the Academy of History were not well disposed towards an undertaking,
which seemed to fall within their own jurisdiction; and when he had
finished the first portion, they subjected it, by the royal permission,
to an examination, which, from its length even more than its rigor,
threatened to prevent the work from being printed at all. This,
however, was stopped by a summary order from the king; and the first
volume, bringing down the history to the year 1500, was published in
1793. But no other followed it; and since the death of Muñoz, which
occurred in 1799, when he was fifty-four years old, no attempt has been
made to resume the work. It therefore remains just as he then left
it,--a fragment, written, indeed, in a philosophical spirit and with a
severe simplicity of style, but of small value, because it embraces so
inconsiderable a portion of the subject to which it is devoted.[361]
[361] “Historia del Nuevo Mundo, por Don Juan Bautista Muñoz,”
Madrid, 1793, small folio. Fuster, Bib., Tom. II. p. 191.
Memorias de la Acad. de la Historia, Tom. I. p. lxv. The eulogy
of Lebrixa, by Muñoz, in the third volume of the Memoirs of
the Academy, a defence of his History, and two or three Latin
treatises, are all that I know of his works, except the History.
An epic attempt of the same period is of still less importance. It
is “Mexico Conquered,” an heroic poem in twenty-six books, and about
twenty-five thousand lines, beginning with the demand of Cortés, at
Tlascala, to be received in person by Montezuma, and ending with the
fall of Mexico and the capture of Guatimozin. Its author was Escoiquiz,
who, as the tutor of Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias, and his adviser
in the troubles of the Escurial, of Aranjuez, and of Bayonne, showed
an honorable character, which at different times brought upon him
the vengeance of the Prince of the Peace, of Charles the Fourth, of
Bonaparte, and, at last, of Ferdinand himself.
The literary ambition of Escoiquiz, however, is of both an earlier and
later date than this unhappy interval, when his upright spirit was so
tried by political persecutions. In 1797 he published a translation
of Young’s “Night Thoughts”; and, while he was a prisoner in France,
from 1808 to 1814, he prepared a Spanish version of Milton’s “Paradise
Lost,” which showed, at least, with what pleasure he gave himself up to
letters, and what a solace they were to him under his privations and
misfortunes. His “Mexico” was first printed in 1798. It is cast more
carefully into an epic form than were the heroic poems that abounded
in the days of the Philips, and is sustained more than they generally
were by such supernatural Christian machinery as was first used with
effect by Tasso. But, like them, it is not without cold, allegorical
personages, who play parts too important in the action; while, on
the other hand, its faithful history of events, its unity of design,
and its regular proportions, are no sufficient compensation for its
ill-constructed stanzas and its chronicling dulness. The history
of Solís is much more interesting and poetical than this wearisome
romantic epic, which owes to that historian nearly all its facts.[362]
[362] “Mexico Conquistada, Poema Heróico, por Don Juan de
Escoiquiz,” Madrid, 1798, 3 tom. 8vo. A still more unhappy epic
attempt on the subject of the Conquest of Mexico preceded that
of Escoiquiz by about forty years. It was by Francisco Ruiz de
Leon, and is entitled “La Hernandia, Triunfos de la Fé” (Madrid,
1755, 4to); a poem making nearly four hundred pages, and sixteen
hundred octave stanzas.
Leandro Moratin, son of the poet who flourished in the reign of
Charles the Third, was, in some respects, a greater sufferer from the
convulsions of the times in which he lived than Escoiquiz, and in all
respects more distinguished in the world of letters. His principal
success, however, was in the drama, where he must hereafter be more
fully noticed. Here, therefore, it is only necessary to say, that,
in his lyric and miscellaneous poetry, he was a follower of his
father, modifying his manner so far under the influence of Conti, an
Italian man of letters who lived long at Madrid, that, in his shorter
pieces, the Italian terseness is quite apparent and gives a finish
to the surface, though the material beneath may be quite Castilian.
This is particularly true of his odes and sonnets, and of a striking
Chorus of the Spirits of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament awaiting
the Appearance of the Saviour; a solemn composition, breathing the
fervent spirit of Luis of Granada. His ballads, on the other hand,
though finished with great care, are more national in their tone than
any thing else he has left us. But the poems that please us best and
interest us most are those that show his own temper and affections;
such as his “Epistle to Jovellanos,” and his “Ode on the Death of
Conde,” the historian.
In none of his personal relations, however, does Moratin appear to
such obvious advantage as in the difficult ones in which he stood
at different times with the Prince of the Peace. To that profligate
minister he owed, not only all his means for training himself as
a dramatic writer, but the position in society which insured his
success; and when the day of retribution came, and his patron fell,
as he deserved to fall, Moratin, though he suffered in every way
from his changed condition and the persecution of the enemies of the
Prince, refused to join their cry against the crushed favorite. He
said truly and nobly, “I was neither his friend, nor his counsellor,
nor his servant; but all that I was I owed to him; and, although we
have now-a-days a convenient philosophy, which teaches men to receive
benefits without gratitude, and, when circumstances alter, to pay
with reproach favors asked and received, I value my own good opinion
too much to seek such infamy.” A person who acted under the impulse
of principles so generous was not made for success in the reign of
Ferdinand the Seventh. It is not remarkable, therefore, that nearly
all the latter part of Moratin’s life was spent, either voluntarily or
involuntarily, in foreign countries, and that he died at last in want
and exile.[363]
[363] “Obras de L. F. Moratin,” Madrid, 1830-31, four vols. 8vo,
divided into six, prepared by himself, and published by the
Academy of History after his death. His Life is in Vol. I., and
his miscellaneous poems are in the last volume, where the remarks
on the Prince of the Peace occur, at p. 335, and a notice of
his relations with Conti at p. 342. An unreasonably laudatory
criticism of his works is to be found in the first volume of
Hermosilla’s “Juicio.”
The last of these miscellaneous writers of the reign of Charles the
Fourth that should be mentioned is Quintana, who, like Jovellanos,
Moratin, and Escoiquiz, suffered much from the violence of the
revolutions through which they all passed, but, unlike them, has
survived to enjoy a serene and honored old age. He was born at Madrid
in 1772, but received the most effective part of his literary education
at Salamanca, where he acknowledged the influence of Melendez and
Cienfuegos. His profession was the law; and he began the serious
business of life in the capital, kindly encouraged by Jovellanos. But
he preferred letters; and a small society of intellectual friends, that
assembled every evening at his house, soon stimulated his preference
into a passion. In 1801 he ventured to print his tragedy of “The Duke
of Viseo,” imitated from “The Castle Spectre” of Lewis; and in 1805 he
produced on the stage his “Pelayo,” intended to rouse his countrymen to
a resistance of foreign oppression, by a striking example from their
own history. The former had little success; but the latter, though
written according to the doctrines of the severer school, struck a
chord to which the hearts of the audience gladly answered.
Meantime, between these two attempts, he published, in 1802, a small
volume of poetry, almost entirely lyric, taking the same noble and
patriotic tone he had taken in his successful tragedy, and showing
a spirit more deep and earnest than was to be found in any of the
school of Salamanca, to which, in his address to Melendez, he leaves
no doubt that he now gladly associated himself. In a similar spirit
he published, in 1807, a single volume containing five lives of
distinguished Spaniards, who, like the Cid and the Great Captain, had
successfully fought the enemies of their country at home and abroad;
and almost simultaneously he prepared three volumes of selections from
the best Spanish poets, accompanying them with critical notices, which,
if more slight than might have been claimed from one like Quintana, and
less generous in the praise they bestow than they ought to have been,
are yet national in their temper, and better than any thing else of
their kind in the language. Both show a too willing imitation of the
French manner, and contain occasional Gallicisms; but both are written
in a clear and graceful prose, both were well received, as they
deserved to be, and both were, long afterwards, further continued by
their accomplished author; the first by the addition of four important
lives, and the last by extracts from the miscellaneous poets of a later
period, and from several of the best of the elder epics.
But though the taste of Quintana was somewhat inclined to the
literature of France, he was a Spaniard at heart, and a faithful one.
Even before the French invasion he had so carefully kept himself aloof
from the influence and patronage of the Prince of the Peace, that,
though belonging almost strictly to the same school of poetry with
Moratin, these two distinguished men lived at Madrid, imperfectly known
to each other, and in fact as heads of different literary societies,
whose intercourse was not so kindly as it should have been. But the
moment the revolution of 1808 broke out, Quintana sprang to the place
for which he felt himself called. He published at once his effective
“Odes to Emancipated Spain”; he threw out, in the journals of the
time, whatever he thought would excite his countrymen to resist their
invaders; he became the secretary to the Cortes and to the regency;
and he wrote many of the powerful proclamations, manifestos, and
addresses that distinguished so honorably the career of the different
administrations to which he belonged during their struggle for national
independence. In short, he devoted all that he possessed of talent or
fortune to the service of his country in the day of its sorest trial.
But he was ill rewarded for it. Much of what had been done by the
representatives of the Spanish people in the name of Ferdinand the
Seventh, during his forced detention in France, was unwelcome to
that shortsighted monarch; and, as soon as he returned to Madrid, in
1814, a persecution was begun of those who had most contributed to
the adoption of these unwelcome measures. Among the more obnoxious
persons was Quintana, who was thrown into prison in the fortress of
Pamplona, and remained there six miserable years, interdicted from the
use of writing-materials, and cut off from all intercourse with his
friends. The changes of 1820 unexpectedly released him, and raised him
for a time to greater distinction than he had enjoyed before. But,
three years later, another political revolution took from him all his
employments and influence; and he retired to Estremadura, where he
occupied himself with letters till new changes and the death of the
king restored him to the old public offices he had filled so well,
adding to his former honors that of a peer of the realm. But from the
days when he first attracted public regard by his noble Odes on the
Ocean, and on the beneficent expedition sent to America with the great
charity of Vaccination, letters have been his chosen employment;--his
pride, when he cheered on his countrymen to resist oppression; his
consolation in prison and in exile; his crown of honor in an honored
old age.[364]
[364] “Poesías de M. J. Quintana,” Madrid, 1821, 2 tom. 8vo.
The lyrical portion has been often reprinted since 1802, when
the first collection of his Poems appeared at Madrid, in a thin
beautiful volume of only 170 pages, 12mo. His life is in Wolf’s
excellent Floresta, in Ochoa, Ferrer del Rio, etc.
CHAPTER VI.
THEATRE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.--TRANSLATIONS
FROM THE FRENCH.--ORIGINAL PLAYS.--OPERAS.--NATIONAL
THEATRE.--CASTRO.--AÑORBE.--IMITATIONS OF THE FRENCH
THEATRE.--MONTIANO.--MORATIN THE ELDER.--CADAHALSO.--SEBASTIAN Y
LATRE.--TRIGUEROS.--YRIARTE.--AYALA.--HUERTA.--JOVELLANOS.--AUTOS
FORBIDDEN.--PUBLIC THEATRES AND THEIR PARTIES.--RAMON DE LA CRUZ,
SEDANO, CORTÉS, CIENFUEGOS, AND OTHERS.--HUERTA’S COLLECTION OF OLD
PLAYS.--DISCUSSIONS.--VALLADARES.--ZAVALA.--COMELLA.--MORATIN THE
YOUNGER.--STATE OF THE DRAMA AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The most considerable literary movement of the eighteenth century
in Spain, and the one that best marks the poetical character of the
entire period, is that relating to the theatre, which it was earnestly
attempted to subject to the rules then prevailing on the French stage.
Intimations of such a design are found in the reign of Philip the
Fifth, as soon as the War of the Succession was closed. The Marquis
of San Juan began, in 1713, with a translation of the “Cinna” of
Corneille;--the first tragedy under the French rules that appeared
in the Spanish language, and one that was probably selected for this
distinction, because it was well suited to the condition of a country,
that had so much reason to seek the clemency of its prince in favor
of many distinguished persons, whom the civil war had led to resist
his power.[365] But it was never represented, and was soon forgotten.
Cañizares, the last of the elder race of dramatists that showed any
of the old spirit, yielded more than once to the new school of taste,
and regarded his “Sacrifice of Iphigenia”--an absurd play, for which
the “Iphigénie” of Racine is very little responsible--as an imitation
of the French school.[366] Neither these, however, nor plays of an
irregular and often vulgar cast, like those written by Diego de Torres,
professor of natural philosophy, by Lobo, the military officer, and
by Salvo, the tailor, obtained any permanent favor, or were able to
constitute foundations on which to reconstruct a national drama. As far
as any thing was heard on the public stage worthy of its pretensions,
it was the works of the old masters and of their poor imitators,
Cañizares and Zamora.[367]
[365] Montiano y Luyando, Discurso de la Tragedia, Madrid, 1750,
12mo, p. 66.
[366] He says, near the end, that his purpose was “to show how
plays are written in the French style.” Plays arising from the
circumstances of the times, and more in the forms and character
of the preceding century, were sometimes represented, but soon
forgotten. Of these, two may be mentioned as curious. The first
is called, like one of Lope’s, “Sueños hay que son Verdades,”
an anonymous drama, beginning with a dream of the king of
Portugal and ending with its partial fulfilment in the capture of
Monsanto, by the forces of Philip V., in 1704. The other is by
Rodrigo Pero de Urrutia, entitled “Rey decretado en Cielo,” and
covers a space of above six years, from the annunciation by Louis
XIV. to the Duke of Anjou, in the first scene, that the will of
Charles II. had made him king of Spain, down to the victory of
Almansa, in 1707, which is its catastrophe. Both are of no value,
and represent fairly, I believe, the merit of the few historical
plays produced in the beginning of the eighteenth century, in
Spain.
[367] Accounts of the theatre during this sort of interregnum,
from about 1700 to about 1790, are found in Signorelli (Storia
Critica dei Teatri, Napoli, 1813, 8vo, Tom IX. pp. 56-236); L.
F. Moratin (Obras, 1830, Tom. II. Parte I., Prólogo); and four
papers by Blanco White (in Vols. X. and XI. of the New Monthly
Magazine, London, 1824). The facts and opinions in Signorelli are
important, because from 1765 to 1783 he lived in Madrid, (Storia,
Tom. IX. p. 189,) and belonged to the club of the Fonda de San
Sebastian, noticed, _ante_, p. 274, several of whose members were
dramatic writers, and one of the standing subjects for whose
discussions was the theatre. Obras Póstumas de N. F. Moratin,
Londres, 1825, p. xxiv.
The Spanish theatre, in fact, was now at its lowest ebb, and wholly in
the hands of the populace, from whom it had always received much of
its character, and who had been its faithful friends in the days of
its trial and adversity. Nor could its present condition fairly claim
a higher patronage. All Spanish plays acted for public amusement in
Madrid were still represented, as they had been in the seventeenth
century, in open court-yards, with galleries or corridors that
surrounded them. To these court-yards there was no covering except
in case of a shower, and then the awning stretched over them was so
imperfect, that, if the rain continued, and those of the spectators
who were always compelled to stand during the performance were too
numerous to find shelter under the projecting seats of the corridors,
the exhibition was broken up for the day, and the crowd driven home.
There was hardly any pretence of scenery; the performance always took
place in the day-time; and the price of admission, which was collected
in money at the door, did not exceed a few farthings for each spectator.
The second queen of Philip the Fifth, Isabel Farnese, who had been
used to the enjoyment of all kinds of scenic exhibitions in Italy,
was not satisfied with this state of things. Finding an ill-arranged
theatre, in which an Italian company had sometimes acted, she caused
material additions to be made to it, and required regular operas to be
brought out for her amusement from 1737. The change was an important
one. The two old court-yards took the alarm. First one and then the
other began to erect a new and more commodious structure for theatrical
entertainments; and as they had been each other’s rivals for a century
and a half in the awkwardness of their arrangements, no less than in
their claims for public patronage, so now they became rivals in a
struggle for improvement. Under such impulses, the new “Theatre of the
Cross” was finished in 1743, and that of “The Prince,” in 1745.
But, in most respects, there was little change. True to the traditions
of their origin, the new structures were still called court-yards, and
their boxes, rooms;--the _cazuela_, or “stewpan,” was still kept for
the women, who sat there veiled like nuns, but acting very little as if
they were such;--the Alcalde de Corte, or Judge of the Municipality,
still appeared in the proscenium, with his two clerks behind him, to
keep the peace or bear record to its breach;--Semiramis wore a hooped
petticoat and high-heeled shoes, and Julius Cæsar was assassinated
in a curled periwig and velvet court coat, with a feathered Spanish
hat under his arm. The old spirit, therefore, it is plain, prevailed,
however great might be the improvements made in the external
arrangements and architecture of the theatres.
One cause of this was the exclusive favor shown to the opera by two
Italian queens, and encouraged by the new political relations of Spain
with Italy. The theatre of the Buen Retiro, where Calderon had so often
triumphed, was fitted up with unwonted magnificence, by Farinelli,
the first singer of his time, who had been brought to the Spanish
court in order to soothe the melancholy of Philip the Fifth, and who
still continued there, enjoying the especial protection of Ferdinand
the Sixth. Luzan translated Metastasio’s “Clemency of Titus” for the
opening of the new and gorgeous saloon in 1747; and both then, and
for a considerable period afterwards, all that the resources of the
court could command in poetry and music, or in the show and pomp of
theatrical machinery, was lavished on an exotic, which at last failed
to take healthy root in the soil of the country.[368]
[368] L. F. Moratin, Prólogo, _ut sup._; and Pellicer, Orígen del
Teatro, 1802, Tom. I. p. 264.
Meantime the national theatre, neglected by the court and the higher
classes, was given up to such writers as Francisco de Castro, an actor
who sought the applause of the lowest part of his audience by vulgar
farces,[369] and Thomas de Añorbe, the chaplain of a nunnery at Madrid,
whose “Paolino,” announced as “in the French fashion,” provoked the
just ridicule of Luzan, and whose “Virtue conquers Fate,” if no less
extravagant, has the merit of being an attack on astrology and a belief
in planetary influences.[370] With the success of such absurdities,
however, scholars and men of taste seem to have grown desperate.
Montiano, a Biscayan gentleman, high in office at court, and a member
of the Academy of Good Taste, that met at the house of the Countess
of Lemos, led the way in an attack upon them. He began, in 1750, with
a tragedy on the Roman story of Virginia, which he intended should
be a model for Spanish serious theatrical compositions, and which he
accompanied with a long and well-written discourse, showing how far
Bermudez, Cueva, Virues, and a few more of the old masters, had been
willing to be governed by doctrines similar to his own.
[369] “Alegría Cómica,” (Zaragoza, Tom. I., 1700, Tom. II.,
1702,) and “Cómico Festejo,” (Madrid, 1742,) are three small
volumes of _entremeses_, by Francisco de Castro; the last being
published after the author’s death. They are not entirely without
wit, regarded as caricatures; but they are coarse, and, in
general, worthless.
[370] Thomas de Añorbe y Corregel published his “Virtud vence al
Destino” in Madrid, 1735, and his “Paolino” in 1740. He calls
himself “Capellan del Real Monasterio de la Incarnacion” on
the title of the first of these plays, and inserts two absurd
_entremeses_ of his own composition between its acts.
The tragedy itself, which comes like a sort of appendix to this
discussion, and seems intended to illustrate and enforce its opinions,
is entirely after the model of the French school, and especially after
Racine;--all the rules, as they are technically called, including
that which requires the stage never to be left vacant during the
continuance of an act, being rigorously observed. But the “Virginia”
is no less cold than it is regular, and, like the waters of the Alps,
its very purity betrays the frozen region from which it has descended.
Its versification, which consists of unrhymed iambics, is as far as
possible removed from the warmth and freedom of the ballad style in the
elder drama; its whole movement is languid; and the catastrophe, from
the fear of shocking the spectator by a show of blood on the stage,
turns out, in fact, to be no catastrophe at all. No effort, it is
believed, was made to bring it upon the stage, and as a printed poem it
produced no real effect on public opinion.
Montiano, however, was not discouraged. In 1753 he published another
critical discourse and another tragedy, with similar merits and similar
defects, taking for its subject the reign and death of Athaulpho, the
Goth, as they are found in the old chronicles. But this, too, like its
predecessor, was never acted, and both are now rarely read.[371]
[371] “Discurso sobre las Comedias Españolas de Don Agustin
de Montiano y Luyando,” Madrid, 1750, 12mo; Discurso Segundo,
Madrid, 1753, 12mo. They were translated into French by Hermilly,
and an account of them and their author is given in Lessing’s
Werke, (Berlin, 1794, 18mo, Band XXIII. p. 95,) where we learn,
that Montiano was born in 1697, and that he published, in 1729,
“El Robo de Dina,” which seems to have been so much in the tone
of a play with the same title, in the seventeenth volume of Lope
de Vega’s “Comedias,” that I cannot help thinking Montiano,
following the fashion of Cañizares and the other plunderers of
the time, was indebted largely to his great predecessor, the
enemy of whose reputation he afterwards became. The story of
Athaulpho is from the Corónica General, Parte II. c. 22. The
“Virginia,” both in its attempt to exhibit Roman manners and in
its poetical power, suffers severely when compared with Alfieri’s
tragedy on the same subject. But the truth is, Montiano was a
slavish imitator of the French school, which he admired so much
as to be unable to comprehend and feel what was best in his own
Castilian. In the “Aprobacion,” which he prefixed to the edition
of Avellaneda, published in 1732, he says, comparing the second
part of Don Quixote, by this pretender, with the true one by
Cervantes,--“I think no man of judgment will give an opinion in
favor of Cervantes, if he compares the two parts together.”
The earliest comedy within the French rules that appeared in the
Spanish language was the translation of Lachaussée’s “Préjugé à
la Mode” by Luzan, which was printed in 1751.[372] It judiciously
preserved the national _asonantes_, or imperfect rhymes, throughout,
and was followed, in 1754, by the “Athalie” of Racine, rendered with
much taste, principally into blank verse, by Llaguno y Amirola,
Secretary of the Academy of History. But the first _original_ Spanish
comedy formed on French models was the “Petimetra,” or the Female
Fribble, by Moratin the elder. It was printed in 1762, and was preceded
by a dissertation, in which, while the merits of the schools of Lope
and Calderon are imperfectly acknowledged, their defects are exhibited
in the strongest relief, and the impression left, in relation to the
old masters, is of the most unfavorable character.
[372] “La Razon contra la Moda” (Madrid, 12mo, 1751) appeared
without the name of the translator, and contains a modest
defence of the French rules, in the form of a Dedication to
the Marchioness of Sarria. Utility is much insisted upon; and
the immorality of the elder drama is vigorously, but covertly,
attacked.
In the play itself, a similar kind of deference is shown to the popular
prejudices and feelings, which adhered faithfully to the old drama and
to the miserable imitations of it that continued to be produced. It
is divided into the three _jornadas_ to which the public had so long
been wonted, and is written in the national manner, sometimes with full
rhymes, and sometimes only with _asonantes_. But the compromise was
not accepted by those to whom it was offered. The principal character,
Doña Gerónima, is feebly drawn; and, though the versification and style
are always easy, and sometimes beautiful, the attempt to reconcile
the irregular genius of the elder comedy with what Moratin, on his
title-page, calls “the rigor of art” was a failure. A corresponding
effort which he made the next year in tragedy, taking the story of
Lucretia for his subject, and adopting even more fully the French
conventions, was not more successful. Neither of them obtained the
distinction of being publicly represented.
That honor, however, was gained in 1770, with much difficulty, by
Moratin’s “Hormesinda,” the first original drama, under the canons that
governed Corneille and Racine, which ever appeared in a public theatre
in Spain. It is founded on events connected with the Arab invasion and
the achievements of Pelayo, and is written, like the “Lucretia,” in
that irregular verse, partly rhymed and partly not, which in Spanish
poetry is called _silva_, and is intended to have, more than any other,
the air of improvisation.
The partial success of this drama, which, notwithstanding an improbable
plot, deserved all the favor it received, induced its author, in 1777,
to write his third tragedy, “Guzman the True,” dedicating it to his
patron, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, who was a descendant of that famous
nobleman, and who, a few years before, had himself translated the
“Iphigénie” of Racine into Spanish. The well-known character of the
hero, who chose rather to have his son sacrificed by the Moors than to
surrender the fortress of Tarifa, if it is not drawn with the vigor of
the old Castilian chronicles or of the drama of Guevara, is exhibited,
at least, with a well-sustained consistency, that gives token of more
poetical power than any thing else produced by its author for the
theatre. But this is its only real merit; and the last tragedy of
Moratin was, on the whole, no more successful, and no more deserving of
success, than the first.
Cadahalso, the friend whom we have already noticed as much under the
influence of Moratin, went one step further in his imitation of
the French masters. His “Don Sancho Garcia,” a regular, but feeble,
tragedy, printed in 1771 and afterwards acted, is written in long
lines and rhymed couplets; an innovation which could hardly fail to
be accounted monotonous on a stage, one of whose chief luxuries had
so long been a wild variety of measures. Nor did more favor follow an
attempt of Sebastian y Latre to adjust to the theories of the time two
old dramas, still often represented,--the one by Roxas and the other
by Moreto,--which he forced within the pale of the three unities, and
for the public representations of one of which, Aranda, the minister
of state, paid the charges. Like the subsequent attempts of Trigueros
to accommodate some of Lope de Vega’s plays to the same system of
opinions, it was entirely unsuccessful. The difference between the two
different schools was so great, and the effort to force them together
so violent, that enough of the spirit and grace of the originals could
not be found in these modernized imitations to satisfy the demands of
any audience that could be collected to listen to them.[373]
[373] I know the plays of Moratin, the elder, only in the
pamphlets in which they were originally published, and I believe
they have never been collected. The “Don Sancho Garcia” was
first printed in 1771, with the name of Juan del Valle, and in
1804 with the name of its author, accompanied the last time by
some unfortunate prose imitations of Young’s “Night Thoughts,”
and other miscellanies, which follow it into the third volume of
their author’s works, 1818. Latre’s _rifacimenti_ are printed in
a somewhat showy style, probably at the expense of the minister
of state, Aranda, under the title of “Ensayo sobre el Teatro
Español,” Madrid, 1773, small folio. Latassa (Bib. Nueva, Tom.
V. p. 513) gives some account of their author, who died in 1792.
The “Anzuelo de Fenisa” and the “Estrella de Sevilla,” as set
to the three unities by Trigueros, were printed both in Madrid
and London. Of the last person, Candido M. Trigueros, it may
be added, that he enjoyed a transient reputation in the latter
part of the eighteenth century, and that his principal work, “La
Riada,” in four cantos of irregular verse, (Sevilla, 1784, 8vo,)
on a disastrous inundation of Seville that had just occurred, was
demolished by a letter of Vargas, and a satirical tract which
Forner published under the name of Antonio Varas. I do not know
when he died, but an account of most of his life and many of his
works may be found in the Biblioteca of Sempere y Guarinos, Tom.
VI.
Yriarte, better known as a didactic poet and fabulist, enjoys the
distinction of having produced the first regular original _comedy_ that
was publicly represented in Spain. He began very young, with a play
which he did not afterwards think fit to place among his collected
works; and, beside translations from Voltaire and Destouches, and
three or four attempts of less consequence, he wrote two full-length
original comedies, which were better than any thing previously produced
by the school to which he belonged. One of them, called “The Flattered
Youth,” appeared in 1778, and the other, “The Ill-bred Miss,” ten years
later;--the first being on the subject of a son spoiled by a foolishly
indulgent mother, and the second on the daughter of a rich man equally
spoiled by the carelessness and neglect of her father. Both are
divided into three acts, and written in the imperfect rhyme and short
verses always grateful to Castilian ears; and both are marked by good
character-drawing and a pleasant, easy manner, not abounding in wit
nor sensibly deficient in it. But, except these plays of Yriarte and
Moratin, and an unfortunate one by Melendez Valdes in 1784,--founded on
Camacho’s wedding, in “Don Quixote,” and containing occasionally gentle
and pleasing pastoral poetry which ill agrees with the rude jesting of
Sancho,--nothing that deserves notice was done for comedy in the latter
part of the reign of Charles the Third.[374]
[374] The “Obras de Yriarte” (Madrid, 1805, 8 tom. 12mo) contain
all his plays, except the first one, written when he was only
eighteen years old, and called “Hacer que Hacemos,” or Much Cry
and Little Wool. The play of Melendez Valdes is in the second
volume of his Works, 1797.
Tragedy fared still worse. The “Numantia Destroyed,” written by Ayala,
a man of learning and the regular censor of the public theatres of
Madrid, was acted in 1775. Its subject is the same with that of the
“Numantia” by Cervantes; but the horrors of the siege it describes
are not brought home to the sympathies of the reader by instances
of individual suffering, as they are in the elder dramatist, and
therefore produce much less effect. As an acting drama, however, it
is not without merit. Its versification, which is, again, an attempt
at a compromise with the public by giving alternate _asonantes_, but
attaching them to the long-drawn lines of the French theatre, is not,
indeed, fortunate; but the style is otherwise rich and vigorous, and
the tone elevated. Perhaps its ardent expressions of patriotic feeling,
and its fierce denunciations of foreign oppression, have done as much
to keep it on the stage as its intrinsic poetical merits.
The “Raquel” of Huerta, printed in 1778, three years after the
“Numantia,” is not so creditable to the author, and produced a less
lasting impression on the public. The story--that of the Jewess of
Toledo, which has been so often treated by Spanish poets--is taken
too freely from a play of Diamante; and though Huerta has, in some
respects, given the materials he found there a better arrangement,
and a more grave and sonorous versification, he has diminished the
spirit and naturalness of the action by constraining it within the hard
conventions he prescribed to himself, and has rendered the whole drama
so uninteresting, that, notwithstanding its considerable reputation at
first, it was soon forgotten.[375]
[375] Ayala’s tragedy has been often printed. The “Raquel” is in
Huerta’s Works, (Tom. I., 1786,) with his translations of the
“Electra” of Sophocles, and the “Zaïre” of Voltaire. The original
edition of the Raquel is anonymous, and without date or place of
publication.
The first real success of any thing in the French style on the Spanish
stage, though not in the classical forms prescribed by Boileau and
Racine, was obtained by Jovellanos. Early in life he had ventured
a tragedy, entitled “Pelayo,” in the same measure with Ayala’s
“Numantia,” and on nearly the same subject with the “Hormesinda” of
the elder Moratin. But the philosophical statesman, though he wrote
good lyric verse, was not a tragic poet. He was, however, something
better;--he was a really good man, and his philanthropy led him, in
1773, to write his “Honored Culprit,” a play, intended to rebuke the
cruel and unavailing severity of the laws of his country against
duelling, as they then existed. It is a sentimental comedy in the
manner of Diderot’s “Natural Son”; and, beside that it has the honor of
being the first attempt of the kind on the Spanish stage, it has that
of being more fortunate than any of its successors. The story on which
it is founded is that of a gentleman, who, after repeatedly refusing a
challenge, kills, in a secret duel, the infamous husband of the lady he
afterwards marries; and, being subsequently led to confess his crime
in order to save a friend, who is arrested as the guilty party, he is
condemned to death by a rigorous judge, who unexpectedly turns out to
be his own father, and is saved from execution, but not from severe
punishment, only by the royal clemency.
How many opportunities for scenes of the most painful interest such
a story affords is obvious at the first glance. Jovellanos has used
them skilfully, because he has done it in the simplest and most direct
manner, with great warmth of kindly feeling, and in a style whose
idiomatic purity is not the least of its attractions. “The Honored
Culprit,” therefore, was at once successful, and when well acted,
though its poetical power is small, it can hardly be listened to
without tears. It was first produced in one of the royal theatres,
without the knowledge of its author; then, spreading throughout Spain,
it was acted at Cadiz at the same time both in French and Spanish, and,
at last, became familiar on the stages of France and Germany. Such wide
success had long been unknown to any thing in Spanish literature.[376]
[376] I have the eighth edition of the “Delinquente Honrado,”
1803; still printed without its author’s name. It was so popular
that it was several times published surreptitiously, from notes
taken in the theatre, and was once turned into bad verse, before
Jovellanos permitted it to appear from his own manuscript.
(See Vol. VII. of his Works, edited by Cañedo.) It is somewhat
singular, that, just about the time the “Delinquente Honrado”
appeared in Spain, Fenouillet published in France a play,
yet found in the “Théatre du Second Ordre,” with the exactly
corresponding title of “L’Honnête Criminel.” But there is no
resemblance in the plots of the two pieces.
But from the time when the first attempt was made to introduce regular
plays in the French manner upon the Spanish stage, an active contest
had been going on, which, though the advantage had of late been on the
side of the innovators, did not seem likely to be soon determined. In
1762, Moratin the elder published what he called “The Truth told about
the Spanish Stage”;--three spirited pamphlets, in which he attacked
the old drama generally, but above all the _autos sacramentales_, not
denying the poetical merit of those by Calderon, but declaring that
such wild, coarse, and blasphemous exhibitions, as they generally were,
ought not to be tolerated in a civilized and religious community. So
far as the _autos_ were concerned, Moratin was successful. They were
prohibited by a royal edict, June 17, 1765; and though, even in the
nineteenth century, it can hardly be said that they have been entirely
driven out of the villages, where they have been the delight of the
mass of the people from a period before that of Alfonso the Wise, yet
in Madrid and the larger cities of Spain they have never been heard
since they were first forbidden.[377]
[377] “Desengaño al Teatro Español,” three tracts, s. l. 12mo.,
pp. 80. Huerta, Escena Española Defendida, Madrid, 1786, 12mo, p.
xliii. How long _autos_ maintained their place in Spain may be
seen from the fact, that very few are forbidden in the amplest
Index Expurgatorius,--that of 1667, (p. 84,)--and that those few
are, I believe, all Portuguese.
But this was as far as Moratin could prevail. In the public secular
theatre, generally, his poetry and wit produced no effect. There,
two riotous parties in the two audiences of Madrid--distinguishing
themselves by favors worn in their hats and led on by vulgar
friars and rude mechanics, making up in spirit what they wanted in
decency, and readily uniting to urge an open war against all further
innovations--effectually prevented any of the regular dramas that were
written from being represented in their presence, until 1770. The old
masters they partly tolerated; especially Calderon, Moreto, and the
dramatists of the latter part of the seventeenth century; but the
popular favorites were Ibañez, Lobera, Vicente Guerrero, a play-actor,
Julian de Castro, who wrote ballads for the street beggars and died in
a hospital, and others of the same class; all as vulgar as the populace
they delighted.
After Aranda ceased to be minister, in 1773, this state of things
was somewhat modified, without being materially improved. Under his
administration, the theatres in the royal residences had been opened
for tragedy and comedy; and translations from the French had been acted
before the court in a manner suited to their subjects. The two popular
theatres of the capital, too, had not escaped his regard, and under his
influence had been provided with better scenery; and, from 1768, gave
representations in the evening.[378]
[378] Ramon de la Cruz y Cano, Teatro, Madrid, 1786-91, 10 tom.
12mo, Tom. IX. p. 3.
Still, every thing was in a very low state. A blacksmith was the
reigning critic to be consulted by those who sought a hearing on
either stage, and the more regular plays, whether translations that
had been acted with success at court, or tragedies and comedies of the
poets already noticed, made a strange confusion with those of the old
masters, which were still sometimes heard, and those of the favorites
of the mob, whose works prevailed over all others in the theatrical
repertories and in the general regard. But, whatever might be produced
and performed, the intervals between the acts, and much time before
and after the principal piece, were filled up with _tonadillas_,
_seguidillas_, ballads, and all the forms of _entremeses_, _saynetes_,
and dances, that had been common in the last century or invented in the
present one,--an act in a serious and poetical play being sometimes
divided, in order to give place to one or another of them, and gratify
an audience that seemed to grow more and more impatient of every thing
except popular farce.[379]
[379] L. F. Moratin, Obras, Tom. II. Parte I., Prólogo.
In this confusion of the old and the new,--of what was stiff, formal,
and foreign with what was rudest and most lawless in the national drama
at home,--a single writer appeared, who, from the mere force of natural
talent, fell instinctively into a tone not unworthy of the theatre,
and yet one that obtained for him a degree of favor long denied to
persons of more poetical accomplishments. This was Ramon de la Cruz,
a gentleman of family and an officer of the government at Madrid, who
was born in 1731, and from 1765 to the time of his death, at the end
of the century, constantly amused the audiences of the capital with
dramas, written in any form likely to please at the palace, on the
public stages of the city, or in the houses of the nobility, who, like
the Duchess of Ossuna, or Aranda, the minister of state, were able to
indulge in such a luxury at home.
In the whole, he wrote about three hundred dramatic compositions, but
printed less than a third of that number; most of those he published
being farces designed to produce a merely popular effect. They fill
ten volumes, and are all in the short, national measure of the old
drama, mingled occasionally, though rarely, with other forms of verse.
They bear, however, very different names; some of them characteristic
and some of them not. A few he calls “Dramatic Caprices”; apparently
because no more definite title would be suited to their undefined
character. Some he calls “_Saynetes_ to be sung,” and some “Burlesque
Tragedies.” Others have no names at all, not even for their personages,
except those of the actors who represented the different parts. While
yet others pass under the old designations of _loas_, _entremeses_,
and _zarzuelas_, though often with a character which it would have
been impossible for the early representations bearing the same names
to assume. Occasionally, as in the case of the “Clementina,” he takes
pains to observe all the rules of the French drama; but they sit very
uneasily upon him, and he seldom submits to them. His great merit is
almost entirely confined to his short farces; and therefore, when
Duran, to whom the Spanish theatre owes so much, undertook to publish
what was best of the works of La Cruz, he rejected all the rest,
and, taking his materials both from manuscript sources and from what
had been already published, gives us merely a hundred and ten proper
“Saynetes.”
Their subjects are various, and they are very unequal in length; but,
amidst all their varieties, one principle gave them a prevailing
character and insured their success. They are founded on the manners
of the middling and lower classes of the city, which they reflect
freshly and faithfully, whether their materials are sought in the
_tertulias_ or evening parties of persons in a decent condition of
life, where the demure _Abate_ and the authorized lover of the mistress
of the house contend for influence; or in the trim walks of the Prado,
and among the loungers of the Puerta del Sol, where the fashion of the
court is jostled by the humors of the people; or in the _Lavapies_ and
the _Maravillas_, where the lowest classes, with their picturesque
dresses and unchanging manners, reign supreme and unquestioned. But,
under all circumstances and in all situations, Ramon de la Cruz, in
this class of his dramas, is attractive and amusing; and, though there
is seldom any thought of dramatic skill in his combinations, and
often no attempt at a catastrophe,--though his style is any thing but
correct, and he is wholly careless of finish in his versification,--yet
his farces so abound in wit and faithful delineations of character,
they are so true to the manners they intend to represent, and so
entirely national in their tone, that they seem expressly made for a
pleasant and appropriate accompaniment to the longer dramas of Lope
and Calderon, in whose popular spirit they are most successfully
written.[380]
[380] Teatro de Don Ramon de la Cruz. In the Preface, he replies
to Signorelli, who, in the seventh chapter of the ninth book of
his “Storia dei Teatri,” makes a rude attack upon him, chiefly
for sundry translations, which La Cruz does not seem to have
printed. The “Coleccion de Sainetes tanto impresos como inéditos
de Don Ramon de la Cruz, con un Discurso Preliminar de Don
Agustin Duran,” etc., was printed at Madrid in 1843, 2 tom. 8vo.
A notice of the life of the author is in Baena, Hijos, etc., Tom.
IV., p. 280.
At about the same time that Ramon de la Cruz was amusing the
society of Madrid with his popular dramas and farces, Juan
Ignacio Gonzalez del Castillo was equally successful in the same
way at Cadiz. He was, however, little known beyond the limits of
Andalusia till 1845, when Don Adolfo de Castro published, in his
native city, a collection of his “Saynetes,” filling two volumes,
12mo. In the variety of their tone, in their faithfulness to
the national manners, and in the gayety of their satire, they
resemble those of La Cruz; but they are a little more carefully
finished than his, and somewhat less rich and genial.
Meanwhile the press was not so inactive as it had been. Sedano
published his “Jael,” taken from the story in the book of Judges;
Lassala his “Iphigenia”; Trigueros his “Tradesmen of Madrid”; and
Cortés his “Atahualpa”; the last two having been written, and
successful, at the same festivities of 1784 for which Melendez composed
his “Marriage of Camacho,” and failed. Cienfuegos, too, a poet of more
original power than either of them, wrote his “Pitaco,” which opened
for him the doors of the Spanish Academy; his “Idomeneo,” from which,
in imitation of Alfieri, he excluded the passion of love; and his
“Countess of Castile,” and his “Zoraida,” taken from the old traditions
of his country’s wars and feuds; each giving proof of talent, but of
talent rather lyric than dramatic, and each showing too anxious an
adherence to Greek models, which were particularly unsuitable for the
Zoraida, whose scene is laid in the gardens of the Alhambra.[381] But
all of them--so far at least as the public stage is concerned--have
been long since forgotten.
[381] Obras de Cienfuegos, Madrid, 1798, 2 tom. 12mo;--the only
edition published by himself.
On the other hand, La Huerta, in 1785, published fourteen volumes of
the old full-length plays, and one volume of the old “Entremeses”;
a work intended to vindicate the national theatre of Spain in the
preceding century, and to place it as high as that of the rest of
Europe, or higher. But he was ill fitted for his task. A selection,
designed to illustrate the great masters of the Spanish stage, which,
to say nothing of other mistakes, wholly omitted Lope de Vega, began
with a capital defect; and this circumstance, together with the
arrogant tone of the editor in his Prefaces, and the contradiction
to his present opinions afforded by the example of his own “Raquel,”
which is entirely in the French manner, and to his translations of
the “Electra” of Sophocles and the “Zaïre” of Voltaire, which were
obviously made to defend the French school, prevented his “Teatro
Hespañol” from producing the effect that might otherwise have followed
its not ill-timed appearance. Still it was a work of consequence, and
was afterwards acknowledged to be such by the public.[382]
[382] Vicente Garcia de la Huerta was born in 1734, and died in
1787. A notice of his life, which was not without literary and
social success,--though much disturbed by a period of exile and
disgrace,--is to be found in the Semanario Pintoresco, (1842,
p. 305,) and some intimation of the various literary quarrels
in which he was engaged with his contemporaries may be seen
in the next note. His general character is not ill summed up
in the following epitaph on him, said to have been written by
Yriarte, one of his opponents, which should be read, recollecting
that Saragossa was famous for a hospital for the insane,--the
mad-house that figures so largely in Avellaneda’s “Don Quixote.”
De juicio sí; mas no de ingenio escaso,
Aqui Huerta el audaz descanso goza;
Deja un puesto vacante en el Parnaso,
Y una jaula vacia en Zaragoza.
In judgment,--yes,--but not in genius weak,
Here fierce Huerta tranquil sleeps and well;
A vacant post upon Parnassus leaves,
In Saragossa, too, an empty cell.
The discussions it provoked were of more direct importance, and tended
to infuse new life into the theatre itself. Such discussions had
been begun immediately after the publication of the first tragedy by
Montiano, in 1750,--a date which may be regarded as the dividing point
in the history of the Spanish stage during the eighteenth century,--and
they were now resumed with great activity, partly in consequence of
the increasing interest in the national drama generally, and partly in
consequence of the personal temper of La Huerta himself. One immediate
result of this state of things was a great increase in the number of
plays, of which at least ten times more were written in the last half
of the century than in the first; and if there were less improvement
in the condition of the theatre than might have been anticipated from
such competition, still, as we have seen, poets and men of genius,
like Ramon de la Cruz, were stirred by the movement, and far-sighted
spirits, like Jovellanos, augured well for the future.[383]
[383] Don Jaime Doms attacked Montiano in a Letter, without
date or name of place or printer, and was answered by Domingo
Luis de Guevara in three Letters, (Madrid, 1753, 18mo,) to
which a rejoinder by Faustino de Quevedo appeared at Salamanca
in 1754, 18mo;--all the names being pseudonymes, and all the
discussions more angry than wise. The publication of the “Teatro”
of La Huerta excited still more discussion. He himself speaks
(Escena Hespañola Defendida, Madrid, 1786, 12mo, p. cliii.)
of the “enorme número de folletos” that appeared in reply to
his “Prólogo,” many of which were probably only circulated in
manuscript, according to the fashion of the times, while others,
like those of Cosme Damian, Tomé Cecial (i. e. J. P. Forner),
etc., were printed in 1786, and La Huerta replied to them in his
angry “Leccion Crítica” of the same year. (Sempere, Bib., Tom.
III. p. 88.) The whole of this period of Spanish literature is
filled with the quarrels of Sedano, Forner, Huerta, Yriarte, and
their friends and rivals.
The great obstacle to the success of better dramas lay in a number of
writers, who pandered to the bad taste of the low and vulgar audiences
of their time. Among the more prominent and successful of these were
Valladares and Zavala. The first wrote above a hundred dramas on all
kinds of subjects, tragic and comic, prefixing to his “Emperor Albert”
a discourse in the spirit of Huerta, to defend the Spanish drama from
the attacks of its French neighbours. The other, Zavala, wrote about
half as many, some of which, like his “Victims of Love,” are in the
sentimental style, while others, like three on the history of Charles
the Twelfth of Sweden, are as extravagant as any thing in the worst of
the dramatists he sought to imitate. Both used the old versification,
and intended to humor the public taste in its demands for a vulgar and
extravagant drama; though occasionally, as in “The Triumphs of Love
and Friendship,” by Zavala, they wrote in prose; and occasionally, as
in “The Defence of Virtue,” they showed themselves willing to submit
to the rules of the French stage. In fact, they had neither poetical
principles nor poetical talent, and wrote only to amuse a populace more
ignorant and rude than themselves.
Somewhat better than either of these last, and certainly more
successful than either with the better classes of his contemporaries,
was Comella. Like Valladares, his fertility was great; and the ease
with which he wrote, and the ingenuity with which he invented new and
striking situations, seemed to have the same charm for his audiences
which they had had for the audiences of Lope and Calderon. But,
unhappily, Comella had not the genius of the old masters. His plots are
as involved, and sometimes as interesting, as theirs; but, generally,
they are, to a most extravagant degree, wild and absurd. Even when
he deals with subjects as well known as Christina of Sweden, Louis
the Fourteenth, and Frederic the Great, he seems to have no regard
for truth, probability, or consistency. His versification, too, is
unfortunate. In form it is, indeed, such as had always been insisted
on where the popular voice of Castile has borne sway; but it lacks
variety, as well as richness and strength. Still, his romances in
dialogue were found so interesting, and there was so much of tender
and honorable feeling in the tone of his sentiments and the incidents
of his plots, that above a hundred of his wild dramas--some of them in
prose, but more in verse, some on historical subjects, but many made
out of love-stories of his own invention--were received with applause,
and proved more profitable to the theatres of Madrid than any thing
else they could offer to the multitude on whom they depended for their
existence.[384]
[384] The popularity of Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor, of
Gaspar Zavala y Zamora, and of Luciano Francisco Comella, did
not last long enough to cause their works to be collected. But I
have many separate plays of each of them, and of other forgotten
authors of this period, such as Luis Moncin, Vicente Rodriguez de
Arellano, José Concha, etc. Of Comella alone I have thirty, and I
am ashamed to say how many of them I have read for the pleasure
their mere stories gave me.
But while Comella was at the height of his reputation, a formidable
antagonist, both to himself and to the whole class of writers he
represented, appeared in the person of Moratin the younger, son of that
poet who first produced on the Spanish stage an original drama written
according to the French doctrines. He was born in 1760. To insure for
the child a subsistence he had with difficulty earned for himself, his
father placed him as an apprentice to a jeweller, at whose trade the
young man continued to work till he was twenty-three years old,--the
latter part of the time in order to support his mother, who had been
left a widow.
But his natural disposition for poetry was too strong to be controlled
by the hard circumstances of his situation. When seven years old he had
written verses, and at eighteen he obtained the second prize offered
by the Royal Spanish Academy for a poem to commemorate the taking of
Granada,--a circumstance which astonished nobody more than it did his
own family, for he had written it secretly, and presented it under
a feigned name. Another success of the same sort, two years later,
attracted more attention to the poor young jeweller; and at last, in
1787, by the kind intervention of Jovellanos, he was made secretary to
the Spanish embassy at Paris, and accompanied the ambassador, Count
Cabarrus, to that capital. There he remained two years, and, during
that time, became acquainted with Goldoni, and entered into relations
with other men of letters, that determined the direction of his life
and the character of his drama.
On his return to Madrid, he obtained the patronage of Don Manuel Godoy,
afterwards the all-powerful Prince of the Peace; and from this moment
his fortune seemed certain. He was sent, at the public charge, to
study the theatres of Germany and England, as well as those of Italy
and France; he had pensions and places given him at home; and, while
an honorable occupation in the department of Foreign Affairs, which
awaited his return, insured him a distinguished position in society, he
had still leisure left for that cultivation of letters which he prized
above all his prosperity and all his official honors.
This happy state of things continued till the French invasion of 1808.
His public relations then became a misfortune. The flood of events
swept him from his place, as it did his patron; and, without becoming
in any degree false to the interests of his country, he was so far
implicated in those of the new government, that, when Ferdinand the
Seventh was restored to the throne, Moratin was treated for a time with
great rigor. But this, too, passed away, and he was again protected
and favored. Still he suffered. His friends were in exile, and he
felt solitary without them. He went back to France, and, though once
afterwards he returned with a fond longing to the land of his birth, he
found every thing so changed by the triumphant despotism, that it was
no longer Spain to him, and he established himself finally at Paris,
where he died in 1828. He was buried near Molière, whom in life he had
honored and imitated.
When Moratin began his career as a dramatic poet, he found obstacles
to his success on every side. His father’s tragedy of “Hormesinda”
had been produced on the stage only in consequence of the ministerial
protection of the Count of Aranda, and in opposition to the judgment
and fears of the actors.[385] Cienfuegos, who had followed his example,
was able with difficulty to obtain a hearing for two out of his five
dramas;--one of them being listened to with partial favor because it
was on a subject familiar to all Spaniards from the days of the old
ballads, and always welcome to their hearts. Quintana, whose name was
early respected and his influence uniformly great, had failed with “The
Duke of Viseo.” Others were discouraged by such examples, and made no
effort to obtain the public notice where there was so little prospect
of success.
[385] Obras Póstumas de N. F. Moratin, 1825, p. xvi.
This was the condition of the stage, when the younger Moratin appeared
as a candidate before the audiences of Madrid. The new school had
gained some ground, and the living representatives of the old one were
none of them more distinguished than Comella; but the taste of the
public was not changed, and the managers of the theatre were obliged,
as well as inclined, to yield to its authority and humor its fancies.
Moratin determined, however, to tread in the footsteps of his father,
for whose example and memory he always felt the sincerest reverence. He
therefore wrote his first comedy, “The Old Husband and the Young Wife,”
quite within the rules, finishing every part of it with the greatest
exactness, but dividing it, as the old Spanish plays were divided, into
three acts, and using throughout the old short verse which was always
popular. But when, in 1786, he offered his comedy for representation,
the simplicity of the action, so unlike the involved plots on which the
common people still loved to exercise their extraordinary ingenuity,
and the very quietness and decorum that reigned throughout it, made
the actors alarmed for its success. Objections were made, and these,
with other untoward circumstances, prevented it from being brought
out for four years. When it finally appeared, it was received with
a moderate applause, which satisfied neither of the extreme parties
into which the audiences at Madrid were then divided, and yet was
not perhaps unjust to the comedy, whose action is somewhat cold and
languid, though its poetical merits, in other respects, are far from
being inconsiderable.
But, whatever may have been the effect on the public, the effect on its
author was decisive. He had been heard. His merit had been, in part at
least, acknowledged; and he now determined to bring the pretensions
of the popular dramatists, who were disgracing the stage, to the test
of a public trial on the stage itself. For this purpose, he wrote his
“New Play,” as he called it, which is an exposition of the motives
of a penniless author for composing one of the noisy, extravagant
dramas then constantly acted with applause, and an account of its
first representation;--the whole related by the author himself and
his friends, in a coffee-house contiguous to the theatre, at the very
moment the fatal representation is supposed to be going on.
It is in two acts; and the catastrophe--which consists of the confusion
of the author and his family at the failure of his performance--is
brought on with skill, and with an effect much greater than the
simplicity of the action had promised. The piece, therefore, was
received with a favor which even Moratin and his friends had not
anticipated. The poet, who is its victim, was recognized at once to
be Comella. Some of the inferior characters, whether justly or not,
were appropriated to other persons who figured at the time, and the
“New Play” was acknowledged to be a brilliant satire;--severe indeed,
but well merited and happily applied. From this time, therefore, which
was 1792, Moratin, notwithstanding the exasperated opposition of the
adherents of the old school, had secured for himself a permanent place
on the national stage, and, what is more remarkable, this little
drama, almost without a regular action and founded on interests purely
local, was, for the sake of its wit and originality, translated and
successfully represented both in France and Italy.[386]
[386] From a letter of Moratin, published in the Semanario
Pintoresco, (1844, p. 43,) it seems that Comella and his friends
prevented for some time the representation of the “Comedia
Nueva,” and that the permission to act it was not granted till it
had undergone five different examinations, and not till the very
day for which it had been announced was come. The applause of the
public, however, made amends to Moratin for the trouble which the
intrigues of his rivals and enemies had given him.
“The Baron,” which is in two acts and in verse, was at first prepared
to be sung; and, without the permission of the author, was altered
to an acting drama and performed in public during his absence from
Spain. On his return, he improved it by material additions, and
produced it again in 1803. It is the least effective of his theatrical
performances; but it triumphed over a cabal, which supported a drama
written on the same subject and represented at the same time, in order
to interfere with its success.
At the moment Moratin was making arrangements for bringing out “The
Baron,” he was occupied with the careful preparation of another comedy
in verse, that was destined still further to increase his reputation.
This was “The Female Hypocrite,” which was written as early as 1791,
and was soon afterwards represented in private, but which was not
finished and acted publicly till 1804. It is an excellent specimen of
character-drawing; the two principal personages being a girl, made,
by the severity of her family, to assume the appearance of being very
religious, while her cousin, who is well contrasted with her, is
rendered frank and winning by an opposite treatment. The very subject,
however, was one that brought Moratin upon dangerous ground, and his
play was forbidden by the Inquisition. But that once formidable body
was now little more than an engine of state; so that the authority
of the Prince of the Peace was not only sufficient to prevent any
disagreeable consequences to Moratin himself, but was able soon
afterwards to indulge the public in a pleasure for which they were only
the more eager, because it had for a time been interdicted.
Moratin’s last original effort on the stage was a full-length prose
comedy in three acts, which he called the “Little Girl’s Consent,” and
which was acted in 1806. Its general movement is extremely natural, and
yet it is enlivened with a little of the intrigue and bustle that were
always so much liked on the Spanish theatre. A young girl, while in the
course of her education at a convent, becomes attached to a handsome
officer of dragoons. Her mother, ignorant of this, undertakes to bring
her home and marry her to an excellent, benevolent old gentleman,
whom the daughter has never seen, but whom, out of mere weakness, she
has been unable to refuse. At an inn on the road, where the younger
lover falls in with them on purpose to break up this match, they all
meet; and he discovers, to his dismay, that his rival is an uncle to
whom he is sincerely attached, and to whom he owes many obligations.
The mistakes and intrigues of the night they pass together at this
inn give great life to the action, and are full of humor; while the
disinterested attachment of the young lovers to each other, and the
benevolence of the uncle, add to the conflicting claims and relations
of the different parties a charm quite original in itself, and very
effective in its exhibition. The play ends by the discovery of the
real state of the daughter’s heart, and the renunciation of all the
pretensions of the uncle, who makes his nephew his heir.
Nothing on the Spanish stage had been so well received for a long
period. It was acted twenty-six nights successively to audiences who
were in the habit of demanding novelties constantly; and then it was
stopped only because Lent came to shut up the theatres. No criticism
appeared except to praise it. The triumph of Moratin was complete.
But he was not destined long to enjoy it. The troubles of his country
were already begun, and in three years the French were its temporary
masters. He prepared, indeed, afterwards two spirited translations
from Molière, with alterations that made them more attractive to his
countrymen; one from the “École des Maris,” which was acted in 1812,
and the other from the “Médecin Malgré Lui,” which was acted in 1814;
but, except these and an unfortunate prose version of Shakspeare’s
“Hamlet,” which was printed in 1798, but never performed, he wrote
nothing for the theatre except the five comedies already noticed.
These, if they form no very broad foundation for his fame, seem yet to
constitute one on which it may rest safely; and, if they have failed
to educate a school strong enough to drive out the bad imitations of
the old masters that have constantly pressed upon them, have yet been
able to keep their own place, little disturbed by the changes of the
times.[387]
[387] Every thing relating to Moratin the younger is to be found
in the excellent edition of his Works, published by the Academy
of History. Larra (Obras, Madrid, 1843, 12mo, Tom. II. pp.
183-187) intimates that the “Mogigata” had been proscribed anew,
and that the “Sí de las Niñas” had been mutilated, but that both
were brought out again, in their original form, about 1838.
That the Spanish drama, during the century which elapsed between the
establishment of the House of Bourbon on the throne and the temporary
expulsion of that house from Spain by the arms of Bonaparte, had, in
some respects, made progress, cannot be doubted. More convenient and
suitable structures for its exhibitions had been erected, not only in
the capital, but in all the principal cities of the kingdom. New and
various forms of dramatic composition had been introduced, which, if
not always consistent with the demands of the national genius, nor
often encouraged by the general favor, had still been welcome to the
greater part of the more cultivated classes, and served both to excite
attention to the fallen state of the theatre generally, and to stir
the thoughts of men for its restoration. Actors, too, of extraordinary
merit had from time to time appeared, like Damian de Castro, for whom
Zamora and Cañizares wrote parts; Maria L’ Advenant, who delighted
Signorelli in the higher characters of Calderon and Moreto; the Tirana,
whose tragic powers astonished the practised taste of Cumberland,
the English dramatist; and Maiquez, who enjoyed the friendship and
admiration of nearly all the Spanish men of letters in his time.[388]
[388] C. Pellicer, Orígen, Tom. II. p. 41. Signorelli, Storia,
Lib. IX. cap. 8. R. Cumberland (Memoirs of Himself, London, 1807,
8vo, Tom. II. p. 107) speaks of the Tirana as “at the very summit
of her art,” and adds that on one occasion, when he was present,
her tragic powers proved too much for the audience, at whose
cries the curtain was lowered before the piece was ended. Maiquez
was the friend of Blanco White, of Moratin the younger, etc. (New
Monthly Mag., Tom. XI. p. 187, and L. F. Moratin, Obras, Tom. IV.
p. 345). His best character was that of Garcia de Castañar, in
Roxas, which I have seen him play with admirable power and effect.
But still the old spirit and life of the drama of the seventeenth
century were not there. The audiences, who were as unlike those of
the cavalier times of Philip the Fourth as were the rude exhibitions
they preferred to witness, did as much to degrade the theatre as was
done by the poets they patronized and the actors they applauded. The
two schools were in presence of each other continually struggling
for the victory, and the multitude seemed rather to rejoice in the
uproar, than desire so to use it as to promote changes beneficial to
the theatre. On the one side, extravagant and absurd dramas in great
numbers, full of noise, show, and low buffoonery, were offered with
success. On the other, meagre sentimental comedies, and stiff, cold
translations from the French, were forced, in almost equal numbers,
upon the actors by the voices of those from whose authority or support
they could not entirely emancipate themselves. And between the two,
and with the consent of all, the Inquisition and the censors forbade
the representation of hundreds of the dramas of the old masters, and
among them not a few which still give reputation to Calderon and Lope.
The eighteenth century, therefore, so far as the Spanish theatre is
concerned, is entirely a period of revolution and change; and while,
at its conclusion, we perceive that the old national drama can hardly
hope to be restored to its ancient rights, it is equally plain that a
drama founded on the doctrines taught by Luzan, and practised by the
Moratins, is not destined to take its place.[389]
[389] The war between the Church and the theatre was kept up
during the whole of the eighteenth century, and till the end
of the reign of Ferdinand VII., in the nineteenth. Not that
plays were at any time forbidden effectually throughout the
kingdom, or silenced in the capital, except during some short
period of national anxiety or mourning; but that, at different
intervals,--and especially about the year 1748, when, in
consequence of earthquakes at Valencia, and under the influence
of the Archbishop of that city, its theatre was closed, and
remained so for twelve years, (Luis Lamarca, Teatro de Valencia,
Valencia, 1840, 12mo, pp. 32-36,) and about the year 1754, when
Father Calatayud preached as a missionary and published a book
against plays,--there was great excitement on the subject in
the provinces. Ferdinand VI. issued severe decrees for their
regulation, which were little respected, and in different cities
and dioceses, like Lérida, Palencia, Calahorra, Saragossa,
Alicant, Córdova, etc., they were from time to time, and as late
as 1807, under ecclesiastical influence, and, with the assent
of the people, suppressed, and the theatres shut up. In Murcia,
where they seem to have been prohibited from 1734 to 1789, and
then permitted again, the religious authorities openly resisted
their restoration, and not only denied the sacraments to actors,
but endeavoured to deprive them of the enjoyment of some of the
common rights of subjects, such as that of receiving testamentary
legacies. This, however, was an anomalous and absurd state of
things, making what was tolerated as harmless in the capital
of the kingdom a sin or a crime in the provinces. It was a
sort of war of the outposts, carried on after the citadel had
been surrendered. Still it had its effect, and its influence
continued to be felt till a new order of things was introduced
into the state generally. Many singular facts in relation to
it may be found scattered through a very ill-arranged book,
written apparently by an ecclesiastic of Murcia, in two volumes
quarto, at different times between 1789 and 1814, in which last
year it was published there, with the title of “Pantoja, ó
Resolucion Histórica, Teológica de un Caso Prático de Moral sobre
Comédias”;--Pantoja being the name of a lady, real or pretended,
who had asked questions of conscience concerning the lawfulness
of plays, and who received her answers in this clumsy way.
The state of the theatre, at the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century, can be well seen in the
“Teatro Nuevo Español,” (Madrid, 1800-1, 5 tom. 12mo,) filled
with the plays, original and translated, that were then in
fashion. It contains a list of such as were forbidden; imperfect,
but still embracing between five and six hundred, among which
are Calderon’s “Life is a Dream,” Alarcon’s “Weaver of Segovia,”
and many more of the best dramas of the old school. Duran, in
a note to his Preface to Ramon de la Cruz, (Tom. I. p. v.,)
intimates that this ostracism was in some degree the result of
the influence of those who sustained the French doctrines.
The number of plays acted or published between 1700 and 1825,
if not to be compared with that of the corresponding period
preceding 1700, is still large. I think that, in the list given
by Moratin, there are about fourteen hundred; nearly all after
1750.
CHAPTER VII.
REIGN OF CHARLES THE FOURTH.--FRENCH REVOLUTION.--INQUISITION.--PLOT
OF THE ESCURIAL.--FERDINAND THE SEVENTH.--BONAPARTE.--THE
FRENCH INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF THE COUNTRY.--RESTORATION
OF FERDINAND THE SEVENTH.--HIS DESPOTISM.--AN INTERREGNUM IN
LETTERS.--REACTION.--CONCLUSION.
The reign of Charles the Fourth was not one in which a literary contest
could be carried on with the freedom that alone can render such
contests the means of intellectual progress. His profligate favorite,
the Prince of the Peace, during a long administration of the affairs
of the country, overshadowed every thing with an influence hardly less
fatal to what he patronized than to what he oppressed. The revolution
in France, first resisted, as it was elsewhere, and then corruptly
conciliated, struck the same terror at Madrid that it did at Rome
and Naples; and, while its open defiance of every thing Christian
filled the hearts of a large majority of the Spanish people with a
horror greater than it inspired even in Italy, not a few were led
away by it from their time-honored feelings of religion and loyalty,
and prepared for changes like those that were already overturning the
thrones of half Europe. Amidst this confusion, and taking advantage
of it, the Inquisition, grown flexible in the hands of the government
as a political machine, but still renouncing none of its religious
pretensions, came forth with its last “Index Expurgatorius” to meet the
invasion of French philosophy and insubordination.[390] Acting under
express instructions from the powers of the state it received against
men of letters, and especially those connected with the universities,
an immense number of denunciations, which, though rarely prosecuted
to conviction and punishment, were still formidable enough to prevent
the public expression of opinions on any subject that could endanger
the social condition of the individual who ventured to entertain them.
In all its worst forms, therefore, oppression, civil, political, and
religious, appeared to be settling down with a new and portentous
weight on the whole country. All men felt it. It seemed as if the very
principle of life in the atmosphere they breathed had become tainted
and unwholesome. But they felt, too, that the same atmosphere was
charged with the spirit of a great revolution; and the boldest walked
warily and were hushed, while they waited for changes the shock of
whose fierce elements none could willingly encounter.
[390] The last Index Expurgatorius is that of Madrid, 1790, (4to,
pp. 305,) to which should be added a Supplement of 55 pages,
dated 1805; both very meagre, compared with the vast folios of
the two preceding centuries, of which that of 1667 fills, with
its Supplement, above 1200 pages. But the last of the race is as
bitter as its predecessors, and, by the great number of French
books it includes, shows the quarter from which danger was
chiefly apprehended. To prevent any of this class from escaping,
it is ordered that “all papers, tracts, and books, on the
disturbances in France, which can inspire a spirit of seduction,
shall be delivered to some servant of the Holy Office.”
Supplement of 1805, p. 3. Burke’s “Reflections” are forbidden in
the same Index.
At last the convulsion came. In 1807, the heir apparent was brought
into direct collision with the Prince of the Peace, and took measures
to defend his personal rights. The affair of the Escurial followed;
darker than the dark cells in which it was conceived. Ferdinand was
accused, under the influence of the favorite, with a design to dethrone
and murder his own father and mother; and, for a moment, Europe seemed
threatened with a crime which even the unscrupulous despotism of
Philip the Second had not ventured to commit. This was prevented by
the manly boldness and constancy of Escoiquiz. But things could not
long remain in the uneasy and treacherous position in which such a
rash attempt at convulsion had left them. The great revolution broke
out at Aranjuez in March, 1808; Charles the Fourth abdicated in shame
and terror; and Ferdinand the Seventh ascended the tottering throne
of his ancestors amidst the exultation of his people. But Napoleon,
then at the summit of his vast power, interfered in the troubles he
had not been unwilling to foster. Under the pretext, that such fatal
differences as had arisen between the father and son would disturb the
affairs of Europe, he drew the royal family of Spain into his toils at
Bayonne; and there, on the soil of France, the crown of the Bourbon
race in Spain was ignominiously surrendered into his hands, and by him
placed on the head of his brother, already king of Naples.
It was all the work of a few short weeks; and the fate of Spain seemed
to be sealed with a seal that no human power would be permitted to
break. But the people of that land of faith and chivalry were not
forgetful of their ancient honor in this the day of their great trial.
They boldly refused to ratify the treaty to which father and son had
alike put their dishonored names, and sprang to arms to prevent its
provisions from being fulfilled by foreign intervention. It was a
fierce struggle. For nearly six years, the forces of France were spread
over the country, sometimes seeming to cover the whole of it, and
sometimes only small portions, but seldom exerting any real control
beyond the camps they occupied and the cities they from time to
time garrisoned. At last, in 1813, under the leading of England, the
invaders were driven through the gorges of the Pyrenees; and, as a part
of the great European retribution, Ferdinand the Seventh was replaced
on the throne he had so weakly abdicated.
He was received by his people with a loyalty that seemed to belong to
the earliest ages of the monarchy. But it was lost on him. He returned
untaught by the misfortunes he had suffered, and unmoved by a fidelity
which had showed itself ready to sacrifice a whole generation and its
hopes to his honor and rights. As far as was possible, he restored all
the forms and appliances of the old despotism, and thrust from his
confidence the very men who had brought him home on their shields, and
who only claimed for their country the exercise of a salutary freedom,
without which he himself could not be maintained on the throne where
their courage and constancy had seated him.[391] Even the Inquisition,
which it had been one of the most popular acts of the French invaders
to abolish, and one of the wisest acts of the national Cortes to
declare incompatible with the constitution of the monarchy, was
solemnly reinstated; and if, during a reign protracted through twenty
sad and troubled years, any proper freedom was for a moment granted
to thought, to speech, or to the press, it was only in consequence of
changes over which the prince had no control, and of which he felt
himself to be rather the victim than the author.[392]
[391] One of the most odious of the acts that marked the
restoration of Ferdinand VII. related to the war of the
_Comuneros_, nearly three centuries before. After the execution
of Juan de Padilla and the exile of his noble wife, in 1521,
their house was razed to the ground, and an inscription
reproachful to their memory placed on the spot where it had
stood. This the Cortes removed, and erected in its stead a simple
monument in honor of the martyrs. In 1823, Ferdinand ordered
the simple monument of the Cortes to be destroyed, and replaced
the old inscription! But, since that time, Martinez de la Rosa
has erected a nobler monument to their memory in his “Viuda de
Padilla.” See Henri Ternaux, Les Comuneros, Paris, 1834, 8vo, p.
208; an interesting work and a work of authority, relying, in
part, on unpublished materials.
[392] Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition, Tom. IV. pp. 145-154.
Southey’s History of the Peninsular War, London, 1823, 4to, Tom.
I. The Inquisition was again abolished by the revolution or
change of 1820, and when the counterchange came, in 1823, failed
to find its place in the restored order of things. It may be
hoped, therefore, that this most odious of the institutions, that
have sheltered themselves under the abused name of Christianity,
will never again darken the history of Spain.
Amidst such violence and confusion,--when men slept in armour, as
they had during the Moorish contest, and knew not whether they should
be waked amidst their households or amidst their enemies,--elegant
letters, of course, could hardly hope to find shelter or resting-place.
The grave political questions, that agitated the country and shook
the foundations of society, were precisely those in which it might
be foreseen, that intellectual men would take the deepest interest
and expose themselves to sufferings and ruin, like the less favored
masses around them. And so, in fact, it proved. Nearly every poet
and prose-writer, known as such at the end of the reign of Charles
the Fourth, became involved in the fierce political changes of the
time;--changes so various and so opposite, that those who escaped from
the consequences of one were often, on that very account, sure to
suffer in the next that followed.
The young men who, during this disastrous period, were just beginning
to unfold their promise, were checked at the outset of their career.
Martinez de la Rosa, five years a prisoner of state on a rock in Africa
before he had reached the age of thirty; Angel de Rivas, still younger,
left for dead on the bloody field of Ocaña; Galiano, sentenced to the
scaffold while he was earning his daily bread by daily labor as a
teacher in London; Torreno, brought home on his bier, as he returned
from his third exile; Arriaza serving in the armies of Ferdinand;
Arjona and Barbero silenced; Xavier de Burgos plundered; Gallego,
Xerica, Hermosilla, Mauri, Mora, Tapia;--these, and many others, all
young men and full of the hopes that letters inspire in generous
spirits, were seized upon by the passions of party or the demands of
patriotism, and hurried into paths far from the pursuits to which their
talents, their taste, and their social relations would alike have
dedicated them;--pursuits on which, in fact, they had already entered,
and to which they have since owed their most brilliant and enduring
distinctions, as well as their truest happiness.
Those who were older, and had been before marked by success and
public favor, fared still worse. The eyes of men had already been
fastened upon them, and in the conflict and crush of the contending
factions they were sure to suffer, as one or another prevailed in the
long-protracted struggle. Jovellanos and Cienfuegos, as we have seen,
were almost instantly martyrs to their patriotism. Melendez Valdes sunk
a later and more miserable victim. Conde and Escoiquiz were exiled for
opposite reasons. Moratin, after having faced death in the frightful
form of want in his own country, survived to a fate in France hardly
less to be dreaded. Quintana was cast by his ungrateful sovereign into
the Bastile of Pamplona, with an apparent intention that he should
perish there. To all of them the happiness of success in letters,
to which they had been accustomed amidst the encouragement of their
friends and countrymen, was denied;--from all, the hopes of fame seemed
to be cut off. Most of them, and most of the small class to which
they belonged, passed, as voluntary or involuntary exiles, beyond the
limits of a country which they might still be compelled to love, but
which they could no longer respect. The rest were silent. It was an
interregnum in all elegant culture, such as no modern nation had yet
seen,--not even Spain herself during the War of the Succession.
But it was not possible that such a state of things should become
permanent and normal. Even while Ferdinand the Seventh was living, a
movement was begun, the first traces of which are to be found among the
emigrated Spaniards, who cheered with letters their exile in England
and France, and whose subsequent progress, from the time when the death
of that unfaithful monarch permitted them to return home, is distinctly
perceptible in their own country.[393] What precise direction this
movement may hereafter take, or where it may end, it is not given us
to foresee. Perhaps too much of foreign influence, and too great a
tendency to infuse the spirit of the North into a poetry whose nature
is peculiarly Southern, may, for a time, divert it from its true
course. Or perhaps the national genius, springing forward through all
that opposes its instincts, and shaking off whatever encumbers it with
ill-considered help, may press directly onward, and complete the canon
of a literature whose forms, often only sketched by the great masters
of its age of glory, remain yet to be filled out and finished in the
grandeur and grace of their proper proportions.
[393] This movement, so honorable to the Spanish character,
can be seen in the “Ocios de Españoles Emigrados,” a Spanish
periodical work, full of talent and national feeling, published
at London, in 7 vols. 8vo, between April, 1824, and October,
1827, by the exiles, who were then chiefly gathered in the
capitals of France and England.
But, whether a great advancement may soon be hoped for or not, one
thing is certain. The law of progress is on Spain for good or for evil,
as it is on the other nations of the earth, and her destiny, like
theirs, is in the hand of God, and will be fulfilled. The material
resources of her soil and position are as great as those of any people
that now occupies its meted portion of the globe. The mass of her
inhabitants, and especially of her peasantry, has been less changed,
and in many respects less corrupted, by the revolutions of the last
century, than any of the nations who have pressed her borders, or
contended with her power. They are the same race of men, who twice
drove back the crescent from the shores of Europe, and twice saved
from shipwreck the great cause of Christian civilization. They have
shown the same spirit at Saragossa, that they showed two thousand years
before at Saguntum. They are not a ruined people. And, while they
preserve the sense of honor, the sincerity, and the contempt for what
is sordid and base, that have so long distinguished their national
character, they cannot be ruined.
Nor, I trust, will such a people--still proud and faithful in its less
favored masses, if not in those portions whose names dimly shadow forth
the glory they have inherited--fail to create a literature appropriate
to a character in its nature so poetical. The old ballads will not
indeed return; for the feelings that produced them are with by-gone
things. The old drama will not be revived;--society, even in Spain,
would not now endure its excesses. The old chroniclers themselves, if
they should come back, would find no miracles of valor or superstition
to record, and no credulity fond enough to believe them. Their poets
will not again be monks and soldiers, as they were in the days when
the influences of the old religious wars and hatreds gave both their
brightest and darkest colors to the elements of social life; for the
civilization that struck its roots into that soil has died out for
want of nourishment. But the Spanish people--that old Castilian race,
that came from the mountains and filled the whole land with their
spirit--have, I trust, a future before them not unworthy of their
ancient fortunes and fame; a future full of materials for a generous
history, and a poetry still more generous;--happy if they have been
taught, by the experience of the past, that, while reverence for
whatever is noble and worthy is of the essence of poetical inspiration,
and, while religious faith and feeling constitute its true and sure
foundations, there is yet a loyalty to mere rank and place, which
degrades alike its possessor and him it would honor, and a blind
submission to priestly authority, which narrows and debases the nobler
faculties of the soul more than any other, because it sends its poison
deeper. But, if they have failed to learn this solemn lesson, inscribed
everywhere, as by the hand of Heaven, on the crumbling walls of
their ancient institutions, then is their honorable history, both in
civilization and letters, closed for ever.
APPENDIX.
APPENDIX, A.
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE.
(See Vol. I. pp. 11 and 47.)
The country which now passes under the name of Spain has been subjected
to a greater number of revolutions, that have left permanent traces
in its population, language, and literature, than any other of the
principal countries of modern Europe.[394] At different periods, within
the reach of authentic record, it has been invaded and occupied by the
Phœnicians, the Romans, the Goths, and the Arabs; all distinct races
of men with peculiar characteristics, and forming, in their various
combinations with each other or with the earlier masters of the soil,
still new races hardly less separate and remarkable than themselves.
From the intimate union of them all, gradually wrought by the changes
and convulsions of nearly three thousand years, has arisen the present
Spanish people, whose literature, extending back about seven centuries,
has been examined in the preceding volumes.
[394] _Spain_, _Espagne_, _España_, _Hispania_, are evidently
all one word. Its etymology cannot, in the opinion of W. von
Humboldt, (Prüfung der Untersuchungen über die Urbewohner
Hispaniens, 4to, 1821, p. 60,) be determined. The Spanish writers
are full of the most absurd conjectures on the subject. See
Aldrete, Orígen de la Lengua Castellana, ed. 1674, Lib. III. c.
2, f. 68; Mariana, Hist., Lib. I. c. 12; and Mendoza, Guerra de
Granada, ed. 1776, Lib. IV., p. 295.
But it is difficult fully to examine or understand the literature of
any country, without understanding something, at least, of the original
elements and history of the language in which it is contained, and
on which no small portion of its essential character must depend;
while, at the same time, a knowledge of the origin of the language
necessarily implies some knowledge of the nations that, by successive
contributions, have constituted it such as it is found in the final
forms of its poetry and elegant prose. As a needful appendix,
therefore, to the history of Spanish literature, a very brief account
will be here given of the different occupants of the soil of the
country, who, in a greater or less degree, have contributed to form the
present character both of the Spanish people and of their language and
culture.
The oldest of these, and the people who, since we can go back no
farther, must be by us regarded as the original inhabitants of the
Spanish Peninsula, were the Iberians. They appear, at the remotest
period of which tradition affords us any notice, to have been spread
over the whole territory, and to have given to its mountains, rivers,
and cities most of the names they still bear,--a fierce race, whose
power has never been entirely broken by any of the long line of
invaders who, at different times, have occupied the rest of the
country. Even at this moment, a body of their descendants, less
affected than we should have supposed possible by intercourse with
the various nations that have successively pressed their borders, is
believed, with a good degree of probability, to be recognized under
the name of Biscayans, inhabiting the mountains in the northwestern
portion of modern Spain. But, whether this be true or not, the
Biscayans, down to the present day, have been a singular and a separate
race. They have a peculiar language, peculiar local institutions,
and a literature which is carried back to a remoter antiquity than
that of any other people now possessing, not the soil of the Spanish
Peninsula merely, but of any part of Southern Europe. They are, in
fact, a people who seem to have been left as a solitary race, hardly
connected, even by those ties of language which outlive all others,
with any race of men now in existence or on record; some of their
present customs and popular fables claiming to have come down from an
age, of which history and tradition give only doubtful intimations.
The most probable conjecture yet proposed to explain what there
is peculiar and remarkable about the Biscayans and their language
is that which supposes them to be descended from those ancient and
mysterious Iberians, whose language seems to have been, at one period,
spread through the whole Peninsula, and to have left traces which are
recognized even in the present Spanish.[395]
[395] On the subject of the Biscayans and the descent of their
language from the ancient Iberian, two references are sufficient
for the present purpose. First, “Über die Cantabrische oder
Baskische Sprache,” by Wilhelm von Humboldt, published as an
Appendix to Adelung and Vater’s “Mithridates,” Theil IV., 1817,
8vo, pp. 275-360. And, second, “Prüfung der Untersuchungen über
die Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der Vaskischen Sprache,”
etc., von W. von Humboldt, 4to, Berlin, 1821. The admirable
learning, philosophy, and acuteness which this remarkable man
brought to all his philological discussions are apparent in these
treatises, both of which are rendered singularly satisfactory by
the circumstance, that, being for some time Prussian Minister
at Madrid, he visited Biscay and studied its language on the
spot. The oldest fragment of Basque poetry which he found, and
which is given in the “Mithridates,” (Theil IV. pp. 354-356,)
is held by the learned of Biscay to be nearly or quite as old
as the time of Augustus, to whose Cantabrian war it refers; but
this can hardly be admitted, though it is no doubt earlier than
any thing else we have of the Peninsular literature. It is an
important document, and is examined with his accustomed learning
and acuteness by Fauriel, “Hist. de la Gaule Méridionale,” 1836,
8vo, Tom. II. App. iii. I do not speak of a pleasant treatise,
“De la Antiguedad y Universalidad del Bascuense en España,” which
Larramendi published in 1728, nor of the Preface and Appendix
to his “Arte de la Lengua Bascongada,” 1729; nor of Astarloa’s
“Apologia,” 1803; nor of Erro’s “Lengua Primitiva,” 1806, and his
“Mundo Primitivo,” an unfinished work, 1815; for they all lack
judgment and precision. If, however, any person is anxious to
ascertain their contents, a good abstract of the last two books,
with sufficient reference to the first, was published in Boston,
by Mr. G. Waldo Erving, formerly American Minister at Madrid,
with a preface and notes, under the title of “The Alphabet of
the Primitive Language of Spain,” 1829. But Humboldt is to
be considered the safe and sufficient authority on the whole
subject, for though Astarloa’s work is not without learning and
acuteness, yet, as both he and his follower, Erro, labor chiefly
to prove, as Larramendi had done long before, that the Basque is
the original language of the whole human race, they are led into
a great many whimsical absurdities, and must be considered, on
the whole, any thing but safe guides.
The first intruders upon the Iberians were the Celts, who, according
to Doctor Percy’s theory, constituted the foremost wave of the
successive emigrations that broke upon Europe from the overflowing
multitudes of Asia. At what precise period the Celts reached Spain,
or any other of the Western countries they overran, can no longer be
determined. But the contest between the invaders of the soil and its
possessors was, from the few intimations of it that have come down
to us, long and bloody; and, as was generally the case in the early
successful invasions of countries by wandering masses of the human
race, portions of the ancient inhabitants were driven to the fastnesses
of their mountains, and the remainder became gradually incorporated
with the conquerors. The new people, thus formed of two races that,
in antiquity, had the reputation of being warlike and powerful, was
appropriately called the Celtiberian,[396] and constituted the body
of the population which, broken into various tribes, but with similar
manners and institutions, occupied the Peninsula when it first became
known to the civilized nations of Europe. The language of the Celts, as
might be expected, is represented in the present Spanish, as it is in
the French and even in the Italian, though but slightly, of course, in
any of them.[397]
[396] The remarkable passage in Diodorus Siculus, Bib. Hist.,
Lib. V. c. 33, is well known; but the _phraseology_ should
be noted for our purpose when he speaks of the union of the
people as δυοῖν ἐθνῶν ἀλκίμων μιχθέντων. The fortieth section
of Humboldt’s “Prüfung” should also be read; and the beginning
of the Third Book of Strabo, in which he gives, as usual, a
good deal that is curious about history and manners, as well as
geography, and a good deal that is incredible, such as that the
Turdetani had poetry and poetical laws six thousand years old.
Ed. Casaub., 1720, p. 139. C.
[397] In speaking of the two earliest languages of the Spanish
Peninsula, I have confined myself to the known facts of the case,
without entering into the curious speculations to which these
facts have led inquisitive and philosophical minds. But those who
are interested in such inquiries will find abundant materials
for their study in the remarkable “Researches into the Physical
History of Mankind, by Dr. J. C. Prichard,” 5 vols. 8vo, London,
1836-47; and in the acute “Report” of the Chevalier Bunsen to the
Seventeenth Meeting of the British Association, London, 1848, pp.
254-299. If we follow their theories, the Basque may be regarded
as the language of a race that came originally from the northern
parts of Asia and Europe, and to which Prichard gives the name of
Ugro-Tartarian, while the Celtic language is that of the oldest
of the great emigrations from the more southern portions of Asia,
which Bunsen calls the Japhetic.
Thus far, all access to Spain had been by land; for, in the earliest
periods of the world’s history, no other mode of emigration or
invasion was known. But the Phœnicians, the oldest commercial people
of classical antiquity, soon afterwards found their way thither over
the waters of the Mediterranean. At what time they arrived in Spain,
or where they made their first establishment, is not known. A mystery
hangs over this remarkable people, darker than belongs to the age in
which they lived, and connected, no doubt, with the wary spirit in
which they pursued their commercial adventures. Their position at home
made colonization the obvious and almost the only means of commercial
wealth among them, and Spain proved the most tempting of the countries
to which their power could reach. Their chief Spanish colonies were
near the Pillars of Hercules, in the neighbourhood of our present
Cadiz, which they probably founded, and about the mouth and on the
banks of the Guadalquivir. Their great object was the mines of precious
metals with which ancient Spain abounded. For Spain, from the earliest
notices of its history till the fall of the Roman Empire, was the El
Dorado of the rest of the world, and furnished a large proportion of
the materials for its circulating wealth.[398] During a long period,
too, these mines seem to have been known only to the Phœnicians, who
thus reserved to themselves the secret of a great power and influence
over the nations near them, while, at the same time,--establishing
colonies, as was their custom, to secure the sources of their
wealth,--they carried their language and manners through a considerable
part of the South of Spain, and even far round on the shores of the
Atlantic.[399]
[398] The general statement may, perhaps, be taken from Mariana,
(Lib. I. c. 15,) who gives the story as it has come down through
tradition, fable, and history, with no more critical acumen than
is common with the Spanish historians. But such separate facts
as are mentioned by Livy (Lib. XXXIV. c. 10, 46, Lib. XL. c. 43,
with the notes in Drakenborch) bring with them a more distinct
impression of the immense wealth obtained anciently from Spain
than any general statements whatever; even more than those of
Strabo, Diodorus, etc. It has been supposed by Heeren, and by
others before and since, (Ideen, 1824, Band I. Theil ii. p. 68,)
that the Tarshish of the Prophets Ezekiel (xxvii. 12) and Isaiah
(lx. 8, 9) was in Spain, and was, in fact, the ancient Tartessus;
but this is denied, (Memorias de la Academia de la Historia, Tom.
III. p. 320,) and, no doubt, if the Tarshish of the Prophets were
in Spain, there must have been another Tarshish in Cilicia, that
is mentioned in other parts of Scripture.
[399] See Heeren’s Ideen, Band I. Theil ii. pp. 24-71, 4th edit.,
1824, where the whole subject is discussed.
But the Phœnicians had still earlier founded a colony on the northern
coast of Africa, which, under the name of Carthage, was destined to
grow more powerful than the country that sent it forth. Its means
were the same; for the Carthaginians became eminently a commercial
people, and depended, in no small degree, upon the resources of their
colonies. They trod closely and almost constantly in the footsteps
of their mother country, and often supplanted her power. It was, in
fact, through the Phœnician colonies that the Carthaginians entered
Spain, whose tempting territory was divided from them only by the
Mediterranean. But for a long period, though they maintained a large
military force in Cadiz, and stretched their possessions boldly and
successfully along the Spanish shores, they did not seem inclined to
penetrate far into the interior, or to do more than occupy enough of
the country to overawe its population and control its trade. When,
however, the First Punic War had rendered Spain of more consequence
to the Carthaginians than it had ever been before, they undertook its
entire conquest and occupation. Under Hamilcar, the father of Hannibal,
about two hundred and twenty-seven years before the Christian era, they
spread themselves at once over nearly the whole country, as far as the
Iberus, and, building Carthagena and some other strong places, seemed
to have taken final possession of the Peninsula, on which the Romans
had not yet set foot.
The Romans, however, were not slow to perceive the advantage their
dangerous rivals had gained. By the first treaty of peace made between
these great powers, it was stipulated, that the Carthaginians should
advance no farther,--should neither molest Saguntum nor cross the
Iberus. Hannibal violated these conditions, and the Second Punic War
broke out, two hundred and eighteen years before the Christian era.
The Scipios entered Spain in consequence of it; and at its conclusion,
in the year B. C. 201, the Carthaginians had no longer any possessions
in Europe, though, as descendants of the Phœnicians, they left in the
population and language of Spain traces which have never been wholly
obliterated.[400]
[400] A sufficient account of the Carthaginians in Spain may
be found in Heeren’s Ideen, Band II. Theil i. pp. 85-99, and
172-199. But Mariana contains the more national ideas and
traditions, (Lib. I. c. 19, etc.,) and Depping is more ample
(Hist. Générale de l’Espagne, 1811, Tom. I. pp. 64-96).
But,[401] though, by the Second Punic War, the Carthaginians were thus
driven from the Spanish Peninsula, the Romans were far from having
obtained unmolested or secure possession of it. The Carthaginians
themselves, even when engaged in a commerce whose spirit was, on the
whole, peaceful, had never ceased to be in contest with the warlike
Celtiberian tribes of the interior; and the Romans were obliged to
accept the inheritance of a warfare to which, in their character
of intruders, they naturally succeeded. The Roman Senate, indeed,
according to their usual policy, chose to regard Spain, from the end
of the Second Punic War, both as conquered and as a province; and,
in truth, they had really obtained permanent and quiet possession of
a considerable part of it. But, from the time when the Roman armies
first entered the Peninsula until they became masters of the whole of
it,--except the mountains of the Northwest, which never yielded to
their power,--two complete centuries elapsed, filled with bloodshed
and crime. No province cost the Roman people a price so great. The
struggle for Numantia, which lasted fourteen years, the wars against
Viriates, and the war of Sertorius,--to say nothing of that between
Pompey and Cæsar,--all show the formidable character of the protracted
contest by which alone the Roman power could be confirmed in the
Peninsula; so that, though Spain was the first portion of the continent
out of Italy which the Romans began to occupy as a province, it was the
very last of which their possession was peaceful and unquestioned.[402]
[401] Of the Greeks in Spain, it has not been thought necessary
here to speak. Their few establishments were on the southern
coast, and rather on the eastern part of it; but they were of
little consequence, and do not seem to have produced any lasting
effect on the character or language of the country. They were, in
fact, rather a result of the influence of the rich and cultivated
Greek colony in the South of France, whose capital seat was
Marseilles, or of the spirit which in Rhodes and elsewhere sent
out adventurers to the far west. (See Benedictins, Hist. Litt.
de la France, 1733, 4to, Tom. I. pp. 71, etc.) For those who are
curious about the Greeks in Spain, more than they will probably
desire will be found in the elaborate and clumsy work of Masdeu,
Hist. Crit. de España, Tom. I. p. 211, Tom. III. pp. 76, etc.
Aldrete (Orígen de la Lengua Española, 1674, f. 65) has collected
about ninety Spanish words to which he attributes a Greek origin;
but nearly all of them may be easily traced through the Latin, or
else they belong to the Northern invaders or to Italy. Marina, a
good authority on this particular point, says: “I do not deny,
nor can it be doubted, that, in the Spanish language, are found
many words purely Greek, and occasional phrases and turns of
expression that are in Attic taste; but this is because they had
first been adopted by the Latin language, which is the mother
of ours.” Mem. de la Real Acad., Tom. IV., Ensayo, etc., p. 47.
There is a curious inscription in Nunes de Lião, (Origem da
Lingoa Portugesa, Lisboa, 1784, p. 32,) from a temple erected by
Greeks at Ampurias to Diana of Ephesus, which states, that “nec
relicta Græcorum lingua, nec _idiomate_ patriæ Iberæ recepto, in
mores, in _linguam_, in jura, in ditionem cessere _Romanam_, M.
Cathego et L. Apronio Coss.” No doubt, these Greeks came from
Marseilles, or were connected with it; and no doubt they spoke
Latin. But the ancient Iberian language seems to be recognized
as existing, also, among them. Ampurias, however, was generally
in Spain held to be of Greek origin, as we may see in different
ways, and among the rest in the following lines of Espinosa, who,
when Alambron comes there with the Infanta Fenisa, says:--
Juntan á la ciudad, que fué fundada
_De cautos Griegos_, rica y bastecida.
Segunda Parte de Orlando, ed. 1556, Canto xxxi.
[402] Livius, Hist. Rom., Lib. XXVIII. c. 12. The _words_ are
remarkable. “Itaque ergo prima Romanis inita provinciarum, quæ
quidem continentis sint, postrema omnium, nostrâ demum ætate,
ductu auspicioque Augusti Cæsaris, perdomita est.”
From the outset, however, there was a tendency to a union between the
two races, wherever the conquerors were able to establish quietness and
order; for the vast advantages of Roman civilization could be obtained
only by the adoption of Roman manners and the Latin language. This
union, from the great importance of the province, the Romans desired
no less than the natives. Forty-seven years only after they entered
Spain, a colony, consisting of a large body of the descendants from
the mingled blood of Romans and natives, was established by a formal
decree of the Senate, with privileges beyond the usual policy of their
government.[403] A little later, colonies of all kinds were greatly
multiplied; and it is impossible to read Cæsar and Livy without feeling
that the Roman policy was more generous to Spain, than it was to any
other of the countries that successively came within its control.
Tarragona, where the Scipios first landed, Carthagena, founded by
Asdrubal, and Córdova, always so important, early took the forms and
character of the larger municipalities in Italy; and, in the time of
Strabo, Cadiz, for numbers, wealth, and activity, was second only to
Rome itself.[404] Long, therefore, before Agrippa had broken the power
of the mountaineers at the North, the whole South, with its rich and
luxuriant valleys, had become like another Italy; a fact, of which the
descriptions in the third book of Pliny’s Natural History can leave
no reasonable doubt. To this, however, we should add the remarkable
circumstance, that the Emperor Vespasian, soon after the pacification
of the North, found it for his interest to extend to the whole of Spain
the privileges of the municipalities in Latium.[405]
[403] Livius, Hist. Rom., Lib. XLIII. c. 3.
[404] Strabo, Lib. III., especially pp. 168, 169, ed. Casaubon,
fol., 1620; and Plin., Hist. Nat., Lib. III. §§ 2-4, but
particularly Vol. I., ed. Franzii, 1778, p. 547. A striking proof
of the importance of Spain, in antiquity generally, may be found
in the fact incidentally stated by W. von Humboldt, (Prüfung,
etc., § 2, p. 3,) that “ancient writers have left us a great
number of Spanish names of places;--in proportion, a greater
number than of any other country except Greece and Italy.”
[405] Plin., Hist. Nat., Lib. VII. c. 44, where the distinction
is spoken of as something surprising, since Pliny adds, that
it was “an honor which our ancestors refused even to those of
Latium.”
Spaniards, too, earlier than any other strangers, obtained those
distinctions of which the Romans themselves were so ambitious, and
which they so reluctantly granted to any but native citizens. The first
foreigner that ever rose to the consulship was Balbus, from Cadiz,
and he, too, was the first foreigner that ever gained the honors of
a public triumph. The first foreigner that ever sat on the throne of
the world was Trajan, a native of Italica, near Seville;[406] and
indeed, if we examine the history of Rome from the time of Hannibal
to the fall of the Western Empire, we shall probably find that no
part of the world, beyond the limits of Italy, contributed so much to
the resources, wealth, and power of the capital, as Spain, and that
no province received, in return, so large a share of the honors and
dignities of the Roman government.
[406] Plin., Hist. Nat., Lib. V. c. 5, with the note of Hardouin,
and with Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana Vetus, fol., 1787, Lib. I.
c. ii.
On all accounts, therefore, the connection between Rome and Spain was
intimate, and the civilization and refinement of the province took
their character early from those of the capital. Sertorius found it a
wise policy to cause the children of the principal native families to
be taught Latin and Greek, and to become accomplished in the literature
and elegant knowledge to be found in those admirable languages;[407]
and when, ten years later, Metellus, in his turn, had crushed the
power of Sertorius, and came home triumphant to Rome, he brought with
him a number of native Cordovan poets, against whose Latinity the
fastidious ear of Cicero was able to object only that their accent had
_pingue quiddam ... atque peregrinum_,--something thick, or rude, and
foreign.[408]
[407] Plutarchus in Sertorium, c. 14.
[408] Pro Archiâ, § 10. It should be noted especially, that
Cicero makes them _natives_ of Córdova,--“Cordubæ _natis_ poetis.”
From this period Latin writers began to be constantly produced in
Spain.[409] Portius Latro, a native of Córdova, but a public advocate
of the highest reputation at Rome, opened in the metropolis the
earliest of those schools for Roman rhetoric, that afterwards became so
numerous and so famous, and, among other distinguished men, numbered
as his disciples Octavius Cæsar, Mæcenas, Marcus Agrippa, and Ovid.
The two Senecas were Spaniards, and so was Lucan; names celebrated
enough, certainly, to have conferred lasting glory on any city within
the limits of the Empire. Martial came from Bilbilis, and, in his old
age, retired there again to die in peace, amidst the scenes which,
during his whole life, seem to have been dear to him. Columella, too,
the best of the Roman writers on agriculture, was a Spaniard; and so,
it is probable, were Quinctilian and Silius Italicus. Many others might
be added, whose rights and reputation were fully acknowledged in the
capital of the world, during the last days of the Republic, or the best
days of the Empire, as orators, poets, and historians; but their works,
though famous in their own time, have perished in the general wreck of
the larger part of ancient literature. The great lights, however, of
Roman letters in Spain are familiar to all, and are at once recognized
as constituting an important portion of the body of the Latin classics,
and an essential part of the glory of Roman civilization.[410]
[409] Some excellent and closely condensed remarks on this
subject may be found in the Introduction to Amédée Thierry’s
“Histoire de la Gaule sous l’Administration Romaine,” 8vo, 1840,
Tom. I. pp. 211-218; a work which leaves little to be desired, as
far as it goes.
[410] Of Roman writers in Spain, the accounts are abundant.
The first book, however, of Antonio’s “Bibliotheca Vetus” is
sufficient. But, after all that has been written, it has always
seemed singular to me that Horace should have used exactly the
word _peritus_, when intending specifically to characterize the
Spaniards of his time, (II. Od. xx. 19,) unless _peritus_ is used
with reference to its relations with _experior_, rather than in
its usual sense of _learned_. Sir James Mackintosh, speaking of
the Latin writers produced by Spain, says they were “the most
famous of their age.” Hist. Eng., Vol. I. p. 21, London, 1830.
After this period, no considerable change, that needs to be noticed,
took place in the Spanish Peninsula, until the final overthrow of the
Roman power.[411] Undoubtedly, at the Northwest, and especially among
the mountains and valleys of what is now called Biscay, the language
and institutions of Rome were never established;[412] but, in all
the remainder of the country, whatever there was of public policy or
intellectual refinement rested on the basis of the Roman character
and of Roman civilization. But the Roman character and civilization
decayed there, as they did everywhere, and though, during the last four
centuries in which the Imperial authority was acknowledged in Spain,
the country enjoyed more of tranquillity than was enjoyed in any other
province within the limits of the Empire, still, like the others, it
was much disturbed during the whole of this fatal period, and was
gradually yielding to the common destiny.
[411] The story told by Aulus Gellius, (NN. AA., Lib. XIX. c.
9,) about Antoninus Julianus, a Spaniard, who exercised the
profession of a rhetorician at Rome, shows pleasantly that there
was no Spanish language at that time (circa A. D. 200) except
the Latin; for when the “Greci plusculi” at table reproached
Antoninus with the poverty of Latin literature, they reproached
him as one who was a party concerned, and he defended himself
just as a Roman would have done, by quotations from the Latin
poets. His patriotism was evidently Roman, and the _patria
lingua_ which he vindicated was the Latin.
[412] In the beautiful fragment of a History of England by Sir
J. Mackintosh, he says, _ut supra_, with that spirit of acute
and philosophical generalization for which he was so remarkable:
“The ordinary policy of Rome was to confine the barbarians within
their mountains.” The striking poem in Basque, given by W. von
Humboldt, (Mithridates, Band IV. p. 354,) shows the same fact in
relation to Biscay.
It was during this troubled interval, that another great cause of
change was introduced into Spain, and began to produce its wide effects
on whatever of intellectual culture existed in the country. This great
cause was Christianity. The precise point of time, or the precise
mode, of its first appearance in Spain cannot now be determined. But
it was certainly taught there in the second century, and seems to
have come in, through the southern coast, from Africa.[413] At first,
as elsewhere, it was persecuted, and therefore professed in secret;
but, as early as the year 300, churches had been publicly established,
and from the time of Constantine and Osius of Córdova, it was the
acknowledged and prevalent religion of large parts of the country. What
is of consequence to us is, that the language of Christianity in Spain
was the Latin. Its instructions were obviously given in Latin, and
its early literature, so far as it appeared in Spain, is found wholly
in that language.[414] This is very important, not only because it
proves the great diffusion of the Latin language there from the third
century to the eighth, but because it shows that no other language was
left strong enough to contend with it, at least through the middle and
southern portions of the country.
[413] Depping, Tom. II. pp. 118, etc. But those who wish to see
how absurdly even grave historians can write on the gravest
subjects may find all sorts of inconsistencies, on the early
history of Christianity in Spain, in the fourth book of Mariana,
as well as in most of the other national writers who have
occasion to touch upon it.
[414] On the subject of early Christianity in Spain, the third
chapter of the fourth book of Depping contains enough for all
but those who wish to make the subject a separate and especial
study. Such persons will naturally look to Florez and Risco,
“España Sagrada,” and their authorities, which, however, must
be consulted with great caution, as they are full of the
inconsistencies alluded to in the last note.
The Christian clergy, however, it must be recollected, did little
or nothing to preserve the purity of the Latin language in Spain,
or to maintain whatever of an intellectual tone they found in the
institutions established by the Romans.[415] How early these
institutions, and especially the ancient schools, decayed there, we do
not know; but it was earlier than in some other parts of the Empire.
In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries even the ecclesiastics were
sunk into the grossest ignorance, so that, when Gregory the Great, who
was Pope from 590 to 604, warned Licinian, Bishop of Carthagena, not
to give consecration to persons without education, Licinian replied,
that, unless it were permitted to consecrate those who knew only that
Christ had been crucified, none could be found to fill the priestly
office.[416] In fact, Isidore of Seville, the famous Archbishop and
saint, who died in 636, is the last of the Spanish ecclesiastics that
attempted to write Latin with purity; and even he thought so ill of
classical antiquity, that he prohibited the monks under his control
from reading books written by heathen of the olden time;[417] thus
taking away the only means of preserving from its threatened corruption
the language they wrote and spoke.[418] Of course this corruption
advanced, in times of confusion and national trouble, at a rapid pace,
until the spoken language of the country became, to those out of it,
an almost unintelligible jargon; and the offices of the Church, as they
were read at mass and on feast days, could no longer be understood by
the body of the worshippers. This was the result, partly of the decay
of all the Roman institutions, and, indeed, of all the principles on
which those institutions had rested, and partly of the invasion and
conquest of the country by the Northern barbarians, whose irruption,
with the violences that followed it, left for a long time neither the
quietness nor the sense of security necessary even to the humblest
intellectual culture.[419]
[415] One reason why the clergy did little to preserve the purity
of the Latin, and much to corrupt it, in the South of Europe,
was, that they were obliged to hold their intercourse with the
common people in the _degraded_ Latin. And this intercourse,
which consisted chiefly of instructions given to the common
people, was a large part of all the clergy did in the early ages
of the Church. For the Christian clergy in Spain, as elsewhere,
addressed themselves, for a long period, to the lower and more
ignorant classes of society, because the refined and the powerful
refused to listen to them. But the Latin spoken by those classes
in Spain, whether it were what was called the “lingua rustica”
or not, was undoubtedly different from the purer Latin spoken
by the more cultivated and favored classes, just as it was in
Italy, and even much more than it was there. In addressing the
common people, their Christian teachers in Spain, therefore,
very early found it expedient, and probably necessary, to use
the _degraded_ Latin, which the common people spoke. At last, as
we learn, no other was intelligible to them; for the grammatical
Latin, even of the office of the Mass, ceased to be so. In this
way, Christianity must have contributed directly and materially
to the degradation of the Latin, and to the formation of the new
dialects, just as it contributed to form the modern character,
as distinguished from the ancient. Indeed, without entering
into the much vexed questions concerning the _lingua rustica_
or _quotidiana_, its origin, character and prevalence, I cannot
help saying, that I am persuaded the modern languages and their
dialects in the South of Europe were, so far as the Latin was
concerned, formed out of the popular and vulgar Latin found in
the mouths of the common people; and that Christianity, more than
any other single cause, was the medium and means by which this
change from one to the other was brought about. For the _lingua
rustica_, see Morhof, De Patavinitate Livianâ, capp. vi., vii.,
and ix.; and Du Cange, De Causis Corruptæ Latinitatis, §§ 13-25,
prefixed to his Glossarium.
[416] The passage from Licinian is given in a note to Eichhorn’s
“Allgemeine Geschichte der Cultur,” 1799, 8vo, Band II. p. 467.
See, also, Castro, Biblioteca Española, 1786, folio, Tom. II. p.
275.
[417] Isidore, as cited at length in Eichhorn’s “Cultur,” Band
II. p. 470, note (I).
[418] For Isidorus Hispalensis, see Antonio, Bib. Vet., Lib. V.
capp. iii., iv.; and Castro, Bib. Esp., Tom. II. pp. 293-344. I
judge Isidore’s Latinity chiefly from his “Etymologiarum Libri
XX.,” and his “De Summo Bono, Libri III.,” fol., 1483, lit.
Goth. No doubt, there are many words in Isidore of Seville, that
are not of classical authority, some of which he marks as such,
and others not; but, on the whole, his Latinity is respectable.
Among the corrupt words he uses are a few that are curious,
because they have descended into the modern Castilian; such as,
“_astrosus_, ab astro dictus, quasi malo sidere natus,” (Etymol.,
1483, fol. 50. a,) which appears in the present _astroso_, the
familiar term for _unhappy_, _disastrous_, and permitted by the
Spanish Academy;--_cortina_, of which Isidore says, “Cortinæ
sunt aulæa, id est, vela de pellibus, qualia in Exodo leguntur,”
(Etym., f. 97. b,) which appears in the modern Spanish _cortina_,
for curtain;--”_camisias_ vocamus, quod in his dormimus in
camis,” (Etym., f. 96. b,) which last word, _cama_, is explained
afterwards to be “lectus brevis et circa terram,” (Etym., f. 101.
a,) and both of which are now Spanish, _camisa_ being the proper
word for shirt, and _cama_ for bed;--”_mantum_ Hispani vocant
quod manus tegat tantum, est enim brevis amictus,” (Etym., f. 97.
a,) which is the Spanish _manto_;--and so on with a few others.
They are, however, only curious as corrupted Latin words, which
_happened_ to continue in use, till the modern Spanish arose
several centuries later.
[419] See Eichhorn’s Cultur, Band II. pp. 472, etc.;--or, for
more ample accounts, Antonio, Bib. Vet., Lib. V. and VI.; and
Castro, Bib. Esp., Tom. II.
This great irruption of the Northern barbarians effected another and
most important revolution in the language of the Peninsula. It in fact
gave to it a new character. For the race of men by whom it was made was
entirely different, both in its origin, its language, and, indeed, in
all that goes to make up national character, from the four races that
had previously occupied the country. The new invaders belonged to those
vast multitudes beyond the Rhine, who had been much known to the Romans
from the time of Julius Cæsar, and who, at the period of which we
speak, had been, for above a century, leaning with a portentous weight
upon the failing barriers, which, on the banks of that glorious stream,
had long marked the limits of Roman power. Urged forward, not only
by the natural disposition of Northern nations to come into a milder
climate, and of barbarous nations to obtain the spoils of civilization,
but by uneasy movements among the Tartars of Upper Asia, which were
communicated through the Sclavonic tribes to those of Germany, their
accumulated masses burst, in the beginning of the fifth century, with
an irresistible impulse, on the wide and ill-defended borders of the
Empire. Without noticing the tumultuous attempts that preceded this
final and fatal invasion and were either defeated or turned aside,
it is enough to say, that the first hordes of the irruption which
succeeded in overthrowing the empire of the world began to pass the
Rhine at the end of the year 406, and in the beginning of 407. These
hordes, however, were pressed forward, it may be said almost without
a figure, by the merely physical weight of the large bodies that
followed them. Tribe succeeded tribe, with all the facility and haste
of a nomadic life, which knows neither local attachments nor local
interests, and with all the eagerness and violence of barbarians
seeking the grosser luxuries of civilization; so that when, at the
end of that century, the last of the greater warlike emigrations had
forced for itself a place within the limits of the Roman empire, it
may be truly said, that, from the Rhine and the British Channel on the
one side, to Calabria and Gibraltar on the other, there was hardly a
spot of that empire over which they had not passed, and few where they
were not then to be found possessors of the soil, and masters of the
political and military power.[420]
[420] Gibbon, Chap. XXX.
In the particular character of the multitudes that finally established
themselves within its territory, Spain was certainly less unfortunate
than were most of the countries of Europe, that were in a similar
manner invaded. The first tribes that rushed over the Pyrenees--the
Franks, who came before the general invasion, and the Vandali, the
Alani, and the Suevi, who, as far as Spain was concerned, formed its
vanguard--committed, no doubt, atrocious excesses, and produced a state
of cruel suffering, which is eloquently and indignantly described in a
well-known passage of Mariana;[421] but, after a comparatively short
period, these tribes or nations passed over into Africa and never
returned. The Goths, who succeeded them as invaders, were, it is true,
barbarians, like their predecessors, but they were barbarians of a
milder and more generous type. They had already been in Italy, where
they had become somewhat acquainted with the Roman laws, manners, and
language; and when, in 411, they traversed the South of France and
entered the Peninsula, they were received rather as friends than as
conquerors.[422] Indeed, at first, their authority was exercised in the
name and on behalf of the Empire; but, before the century was ended,
the last Emperor of the West had ceased to reign; and, by a sort of
inevitable necessity, the Visigoth dynasty was established throughout
nearly the whole of Spain, and acknowledged by Odoacer, the earliest of
the barbarian kings of Italy.
[421] Lib. V. c. 1.
[422] Mariana, Lib. V. c. 2.
Previously, however, to the entrance of the Visigoths into Spain, they
had been converted to Christianity by the venerable Ulfilas; and, as
early as 466-484, in a period of great confusion, they had formed for
themselves a criminal code of laws, to which, in 506, they added a
civil code,--the two being subsequently made to constitute the basis of
that important body of laws which, above a century later, was compiled
by the fourth Council of Toledo.[423] But, though the Visigoths had
thus adopted some of the most important means of civilization, their
language, like that of the rest of the Northern invaders, remained
essentially barbarous. It was never, at any time, in Spain, a written
language. It was of the Teutonic stock, and had nothing, or almost
nothing, in common with the Latin. Still, the people who spoke it were
so intimately mingled with the conquered people, and each, from its
position, had become so dependent on the other, that it was no longer a
question whether they should find some medium of communication suited
to the daily and hourly intercourse of common life. They were, in
fact, compelled to do so. The same consequences, therefore, followed,
that followed in the other Roman or Romanized countries which were
invaded in the same way. A union of the two languages took place; but
not a union on equal terms. This was impossible. For on the side of
the Latin were not only the existing, though decayed, institutions of
the country, but whatever of civilization and refinement was still to
be found in the world, as well as the vast and growing power of the
Christian religion, with its organized priesthood, which refused to
be heard in any other language. So that, if the Goths, on their part,
had the political and military authority, and even a more fresh and
vigorous intellectual character, they were obliged, on the whole, to
submit to such prevalent influences, and to adopt, in a great degree,
the language through which alone they could obtain the benefits of a
more advanced state of society. The Latin, therefore, corrupted and
degraded as it was, remained in Spain, as it did in the other countries
where similar races of men came together, by far the most prominent
element in the language that grew out of their union, and was thus made
to constitute the grand basis of the modern Spanish.
[423] Gibbon, Chap. XXXVII.; an article in the Edinburgh Review,
Vol. XXXI., on the Gothic Laws of Spain; and Depping, Tom. II.
pp. 217, etc.
The most considerable change effected by the invaders in the language
they found established in Spain was a change in its grammatical
structure. The Goths, like any uncivilized people, could learn the
individual words of the more cultivated language they every day heard,
easier than they could comprehend the philosophical spirit of its
grammar. While, therefore, they freely adopted the large and convenient
vocabulary of the Latin, they compelled its complicated forms and
constructions to yield to the simpler constructions and habits of their
own native dialects. This may be illustrated by the striking changes
they wrought in the established inflections of the Latin nouns and
verbs. The Romans, it is well known, had strict declensions to mark
the relations of their nouns, and strict conjugations by which they
distinguished the times of their verbs. The Goths had neither, but used
articles united with prepositions to mark the cases of their nouns, and
auxiliaries of different kinds to mark the changes in the meanings of
their verbs.[424]
[424] In the earliest Gothic that remains to us, (the Gospels
of Ulfilas, circa A. D. 370,) there is no indefinite article;
and the definite does not always occur where it is used in the
original Greek, from which, it is worthy of notice, the venerable
Bishop made his version, and not from the Latin. But there is no
reason, I think, to suppose that the articles of both sorts were
not used by the Goths, as well as by the other Northern tribes,
in the fifth century, as they have been ever since. See Ulfilas,
Gothische Bibelübersetzung, ed. Zahn, 1805, 4to, and, especially,
Einleitung, pp. 28-37.
When, therefore, in Spain, they received the Latin, where no article
existed, they compelled _ille_, as the nearest word they could find, to
serve for their definite article, and _unus_ for their indefinite,--so
that, in their oldest deeds and other documents, we find such phrases
as _ille_ homo, _the_ man; _unus_ homo, _a_ man; _illa_ mulier, _the_
woman; and so on,--from which the modern Spanish derives its articles
_el_ and _la_, _uno_, _una_, etc., just as the French, by a similar
process, obtained the articles _le_ and _la_, _un_ and _une_, and
the Italians _il_ and _la_, _uno_ and _una_.[425] The same sort of
compromise took place in relation to the verbs. Instead of _vici_, I
have conquered, they said _habeo victus_; instead of saying _amor_, I
am loved, they said _sum amatus_; and from such a use of _habere_ and
_esse_, they introduced into the modern Spanish the auxiliaries _haber_
and _ser_, as the Italians introduced _avere_ and _essere_, and the
French _avoir_ and _être_.[426] This example of the effect produced
by the Goths on the nouns and verbs of the Latin is but a specimen
of the changes they brought about in the general structure of that
language, by which they contributed their full share towards still
further corrupting it, as well as towards modelling it into the present
Spanish;--a great revolution, which it required above seven centuries
fairly to accomplish, and two or three centuries more entirely to carry
out into all its final results.[427]
[425] Raynouard, Troubadours, Tom. I. pp. 39, 43, 48, etc., and
Diez, Grammatik der Romanischen Sprachen, 1838, 8vo, Band II. pp.
13, 14, 98-100, 144, 145.
[426] Raynouard, Troubadours, Tom. I. pp. 76-85.
[427] See, on the whole of this subject,--the formation of the
modern dialects of the South of Europe,--the excellent “Grammatik
der Romanischen Sprachen von Fried. Diez,” Bonn, 1836-38, 2 vols.
8vo. For examples of corruptions of the Spanish language, such as
are above referred to, take the following:--_Frates, orate pro
nos_, instead of _Fratres, orate pro nobis_;--_Sedeat segregatus
a corpus et sanguis Domini_, instead of _corpore et sanguine_.
(Marina, Ensayo, p. 22, note, in Memorias de la Academia de la
Hist., Tom. IV.) The changes in spelling are innumerable, but
are less to be trusted as proofs of change in the language,
because they may have arisen from the carelessness or ignorance
of individual copyists. Specimens of every sort of them may be
found in the “Coleccion de Cédulas,” etc., referred to in Vol. I.
p. 47, note, and in the “Coleccion de Fueros Municipales,” by Don
Tomas Muñoz y Romero, Madrid, 1847, fol., Tom. I.
But, in the mean time, another tremendous invasion had burst upon
Spain; violent, unforeseen, and for a time threatening to sweep away
all the civilization and refinement, that had been preserved from the
old institutions of the country, or were springing up under the new.
This was the remarkable invasion of the Arabs, which compels us now to
seek some of the materials of the Spanish character, language, and
literature in the heart of Asia, as we have already been obliged to
seek for some of them in the extreme North of Europe.
The Arabs, who, at every period of their history, have been a
picturesque and extraordinary people, received, from the passionate
religion given to them by the genius and fanaticism of Mohammed, an
impulse that, in most respects, is unparalleled. As late as the year
of Christ 623, the fortunes and the fate of the Prophet were still
uncertain, even within the narrow limits of his own wild and wandering
tribe; yet, in less than a century from that time, not only Persia,
Syria, and nearly the whole of Western Asia, but Egypt and all the
North of Africa had yielded to the power of his military faith. A
success so wide and so rapid, founded on religious enthusiasm, and so
speedily followed by the refinements of civilization, is unlike any
thing else in the history of the world.[428]
[428] See some striking remarks on the adventures of Mohammed, in
Prof. Smyth’s genial Lectures on Modern History, Vol. I. pp. 66,
67, 8vo, London, 1840.
When the Arabs had obtained a tolerably quiet possession of the
cities and coasts of Africa, it was natural they should turn next
to Spain, from which they were separated only by the straits of the
Mediterranean. Their descent was made, in great force, near Gibraltar,
in 711; the battle of the Guadalete, as it is called by the Moorish
writers, and of Xerez, as it is called by the Christians, followed
immediately; and, in the course of three years, they had, with their
accustomed celerity, conquered the whole of Spain, except the fated
region of the Northwest, behind whose mountains a large body of
Christians, under Pelayo, retreated, leaving the rest of their country
in the hands of the conquerors.
But while the Christians, who had escaped from the wreck of the
Gothic power, were thus either shut up in the mountains of Biscay
and Asturias, or engaged in that desperate struggle of nearly eight
centuries, which ended in the final expulsion of their invaders, the
Moors[429] throughout the centre and especially throughout the South
of Spain were enjoying an empire as splendid and intellectual as the
elements of their religion and civilization would permit.
[429] They were so called from their African abode, Mauritania,
where they naturally inherited the name of the ancient _Mauri_.
Much has been said concerning the glory of this empire, and the effect
it has produced on the literature and manners of modern times. Long
ago, a disposition was shown by Huet and Massieu to trace to them
the origin both of rhyme and of romantic fiction; but both are now
generally admitted to have been, as it were, spontaneous productions
of the human mind, which different nations at different periods have
invented separately for themselves.[430] Somewhat later, Father Andres,
a learned Spaniard, who wrote in Italy and in Italian, anxious to
give to his own country the honor of imparting to the rest of Europe
the first impulse to refinement after the fall of the Roman empire,
conceived the theory, at once broader and more definite than that of
Huet, that the poetry and cultivation of the Troubadours of Provence,
which are generally admitted to be the oldest of Southern Europe in
modern times, were derived entirely and immediately from the Arabs
of Spain; a theory which has been adopted by Ginguené, by Sismondi,
and by the authors of the “Literary History of France.”[431] But they
all go upon the presumption that rhyme and metrical composition,
as well as a poetic spirit, were awakened later in Provence than
subsequent inquiries show them to have been. For Father Andres and his
followers date the communication of the Arabian influences of Spain
upon the South of France from the capture of Toledo in 1085, when,
no doubt, there was a great increase of intercourse between the two
countries.[432] But Raynouard[433] has since published the fragment of
a poem, the manuscript of which can hardly be dated so late as the year
1000, and has thus shown that the Provençal literature is to be carried
back above a century earlier, and traced to the period of the gradual
corruption of the Latin, and the gradual formation of the modern
language. The elder Schlegel, too, has entered into the discussion of
the theory itself, and left little reason to doubt that Raynouard’s
positions on the subject are well founded.[434]
[430] See Huet, “Origine des Romans,” (ed. 1693, p. 24,) but
especially Warton, in his first Dissertation, for the Oriental
and Arabic origin of romantic fiction. The notes to the octavo
edition, by Price, add much to the value of the discussions
on these questions. Warton’s Eng. Poetry, 1824, 8vo, Vol. I.;
Massieu (Hist. de la Poésie Françoise, 1739, p. 82) and Quadrio
(Storia d’ Ogni Poesia, 1749, Tom. IV. pp. 299, 300) follow Huet,
but do it with little skill.
[431] The opinion of Father Andres is boldly stated by him in
the following words: “Quest’ uso degli Spagnuoli di verseggiare
nella lingua, nella misura, e nella rima degli Arabi, può dirsi
con fondamento la prima origine della moderna poesia.” (Storia
d’ Ogni Lett., Lib. I. c. 11, § 161; also pp. 163-272, ed. 1808,
4to.) The same theory will be found yet more strongly expressed
by Ginguené (Hist. Litt. d’Italie, 1811, Tom. I. pp. 187-285);
by Sismondi (Litt. du Midi, 1813, Tom. I. pp. 38-116; and Hist.
des Français, 8vo, Tom. IV., 1824, pp. 482-494); and in the Hist.
Litt. de la France (4to, 1814, Tom. XIII. pp. 42, 43). But these
last authors have added little to the authority of Andres’s
opinion, the very last being, I think, Ginguené.
[432] Andres, Storia, Tom. I. p. 273. Ginguené, Tom. I. pp.
248-250, who says: “C’est à cette époque (1085) que remontent
peut-être les premiers essais poétiques de l’Espagne, _et que
remontent sûrement les premiers chants de nos Troubadours_.”
[433] Fragment d’un Poème en Vers Romans sur Boèce, publié par
M. Raynouard, etc., Paris, 8vo, 1817. Also in his Poésies des
Troubadours, Tom. II. Consult, further, Grammaire de la Langue
Romane, in the same work, Tom. I.
[434] I refer to “Observations sur la Langue et la Littérature
Provençales, par A. W. Schlegel,” Paris, 1818, 8vo, not
published. See, especially, pp. 73, etc., in which he shows how
completely anti-Arabic are the whole tone and spirit of the early
Provençal, and still more those of the early Spanish poetry. And
see, also, Diez, Poesie der Troubadours, 8vo, 1826, pp. 19, etc.;
an excellent book.
But, though we cannot, with Father Andres and his followers, trace
the poetry and refinement of all the South of Europe in modern times
primarily or mainly to the Arabs of Spain, we must still, so far as the
Spanish language and literature are concerned, trace something to them.
For their progress in refinement was hardly less brilliant and rapid
than their progress in empire. The reigns of the two Abderrahmans, and
the period of the glory of Córdova, which began about 750 and continued
almost to the time of its conquest by the Christians in 1236, were more
intellectual than could then be found elsewhere; and if the kingdom of
Granada, which ended in 1492, was less refined, it was, perhaps, even
more splendid and luxurious.[435] The public schools and libraries
of the Spanish Arabs were resorted to, not only by those of their
own faith at home and in the East, but by Christians from different
parts of Europe; and Pope Sylvester the Second, one of the most
remarkable men of his age, is believed to have owed his elevation to
the pontificate to the culture he received in Seville and Córdova.[436]
[435] Conde, Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en España,
Madrid, 1820-21, 4to, Tom. I. and II., but especially Tom. I. pp.
158-226, 425-489, 524-547.
[436] Sylvester II. (Gerbert) was Pope from 999 to 1003, and was
the first head France gave to the Church. I am aware that the
Benedictines (Hist. Litt. de la France, Tom. VI. p. 560) intimate
that he did not pass, in Spain, beyond Córdova, and I am aware,
too, that Andres (Tom. I. pp. 175-178) is unwilling to allow him
to have studied at any schools in Seville and Córdova except
Christian schools. But there is no pretence that the Christians
had important schools in Andalusia at that time, though the Arabs
certainly had; and the authorities on which Andres relies assume
that Gerbert studied with the Moors, and prove more, therefore,
than he wishes to be proved. Like many other men skilled in
the sciences during the Middle Ages, Gerbert was considered a
necromancer. A good account of his works is in the Hist. Litt. de
la France, Tom. VI. pp. 559-614.
In the midst of this flourishing empire lived large masses of native
Christians, who had not retreated with their hardy brethren under
Pelayo to the mountains of the Northwest, but dwelt among their
conquerors, protected by the wide toleration which the Mohammedan
religion originally prescribed and practised. Indeed, except that, as a
vanquished people, they paid double the tribute paid by Moors, and that
they were taxed for their Church property, these Christians were little
burdened or restrained, and were even permitted to have their bishops,
churches, and monasteries, and to be judged by their own laws and their
own tribunals, whenever the question at issue was one that related
only to themselves, unless it involved a capital punishment.[437]
But, though they were thus to a certain degree preserved as a
separate people, and though, considering their peculiar position,
they maintained, more than would be readily believed, their religious
loyalty, still the influence of a powerful and splendid empire, and
of a population every way more prosperous and refined than themselves,
was constantly pressing upon them. The inevitable result was, that, in
the course of ages, they gradually yielded something of their national
character. They came, at last, to wear the Moorish dress; they adopted
Moorish manners; and they served in the Moorish armies and in the
places of honor at the courts of Córdova and Granada. In all respects,
indeed, they deserved the name given to them, that of Mozárabes or
Muçárabes, persons who seemed to become Arabs in manners and language;
for they were so mingled with their conquerors and masters, that, in
process of time, they could be distinguished from the Arabs amidst whom
they lived by little except their faith.[438]