JUAN MELENDEZ VALDES.
But a poet of the graces, who has had but few equals even in the golden ages of Spanish poetry, and who excels in his particular sphere, remains to be noticed. This ornament of modern Spanish literature, is Juan Melendez Valdes, a doctor of law, and, perhaps, still professor of polite literature in Salamanca. A delicate fancy, ever lively, yet ever true to nature; an uncommon intensity of feeling; graceful turns of thought; a classic precision and elegance of language, and the most pleasing flow of versification, exist in so eminent a degree, and are so happily combined in this author’s works, that the critic is compelled to become a panegyrist, if he be not totally insensible to the charm which such a phenomenon presents in modern poetry.[624] At an early period of life, Melendez began to retrace the footsteps of Horace, Tibullus, Anacreon, and Villegas; but, as he must have felt that the luxuriant graces of his Spanish model were not to be excelled, his imagination appears to have spontaneously applied itself to a more exquisite painting of amatory ideas and images, and to the dignifying of that kind of poetry by a certain moral delicacy to the observance of which Villegas attached too little importance. The joys, sorrows, and sports of rustic love, rural festivals and amusements, are the materials which confer a peculiar character on the anacreontic effusions of Melendez. Were it not that the picturesque descriptions sufficiently indicate the Spaniard,[625] his verses might sometimes be mistaken for translations from an English or German poet. Nothing can surpass some of his descriptions in the graceful colouring of tender sentiment.[626] It is only necessary to bestow a slight glance on the compositions of Melendez to feel the injustice of the reproach cast on Spanish poetry, by a French traveller, who observes “that the Spaniard is so completely a citizen, that not even in his poetry does he manifest a taste for rural life.” This reproach, which is probably only directed against the poetic writers of the present day, would be unworthy of notice were it intended to apply to the Spanish poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whose numerous pastoral compositions abound in descriptions of rural scenery, which evince an intuitive perception of the poetic beauties of unsophisticated nature. Be this as it may, the Spanish academy thought proper, in the year 1780, to award a prize for the best poem in praise of rural life; and on this occasion Melendez gloriously competed with Yriarte.
Besides the anacreontic poems of Melendez, his lyric romances, his popular songs, in which the old national style is combined with modern elegance, his romantic odes, his elegies and his sonnets, must be numbered among the best productions in Spanish literature.[627] How admirably he succeeded in the composition of poetic epistles is proved by the classical dedication of his poems to his friend Jovellanos.[628] He has rendered service to the Spanish theatre by dramatizing the novel of the rich Camacho from Don Quixote. He is also the author of several treatises on moral and philosophical subjects.