CHAPTER II.
Marquis of San Phelipe. — Influence of France on Spanish Literature. — Luzan. — His Predecessors and his Doctrines. — Low State of all Intellectual Culture in Spain. — Feyjoó.
One historical work of some consequence belongs entirely to the reign of Philip the Fifth,—the commentaries on the War of the Succession, and the history of the country from 1701 to 1725, by the Marquis of San Phelipe. Its author, a gentleman of Spanish descent, was born in Sardinia, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and early filled several offices of consequence under the government of Spain; but, when his native island was conquered by the Austrian party, he remained faithful to the French family, under whom he had thus far served, and made his escape to Madrid. There Philip the Fifth received him with great favor. He was created Marquis of San Phelipe,—a title chosen by himself in compliment to the king,—and, besides being much employed during the war in military affairs, he was sent afterwards as ambassador, first to Genoa, and then to the Hague, where he died, on the 1st of July, 1726.
In his youth the Marquis of San Phelipe had been educated with care, and therefore, during the active portions of his life, found an agreeable resource in intellectual occupations. He wrote a poem in octave stanzas on the story in the “Book of Tobit,” which was printed in 1709, and a history of “The Hebrew Monarchy,” taken from the Bible and Josephus, which did not appear till 1727, the year after his death. But his chief work was on the War of the Succession. The great interest he took in the Bourbon cause induced him to write it, and the position he had occupied in the affairs of his time gave him ample materials, quite beyond the reach of others less favored. He called it “Commentaries on the War of Spain, and History of its King, Philip the Fifth, the Courageous, from the Beginning of his Reign to the Year 1725”; but, although the compliment to his sovereign implied on the title-page is faithfully carried through the whole narrative, the book was not published without difficulty. The first volume, in folio, after being printed at Madrid, was suppressed by order of the king, out of regard to the honor of certain Spanish families that show to little advantage in the troublesome times it records; so that the earliest complete edition appeared at Genoa without date, but probably in 1729.
It is a spirited book, earnest in the cause of Castile against Catalonia; but still, notwithstanding its partisan character, it is, the most valuable of the contemporary accounts of the events to which it relates; and, notwithstanding it has a good deal of the lively air of the French memoirs, then so much in fashion, it is strongly marked with the old Spanish feelings of religion and loyalty,—feelings which this very book proves to have partly survived the general decay of the national character during the seventeenth century, and the convulsions that had shaken it at the opening of the eighteenth. In style it is not perfectly pure. Perhaps tokens of its author’s Sardinian education are seen in his choice of words; and certainly his pointed epigrammatic phrases and sentences often show, that he leaned to the rhetorical doctrines of Gracian, of whom, in his narrative poem, we see that he had once been a thorough disciple. But the Commentaries are, after all, a pleasant book, and abound in details, given with much modesty where their author is personally concerned, and with a picturesqueness which belongs only to the narrative of one who has been an actor in the scenes he describes.[294]
But, when we speak of Spanish literature in the reign of Philip the Fifth, we must never forget that the influence of France was gradually becoming felt in all the culture of the country. The mass of the people, it is true, either took no cognizance of the coming change, or resisted it; and the new government willingly avoided whatever might seem to offend or undervalue the old Castilian spirit. But Paris was then, as it had long been, the most refined capital in Europe; and the courts of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth, necessarily in intimate relations with that of Philip the Fifth, could not fail to carry to Madrid a tone which was already spreading of itself into Germany and the extreme North.
French, in fact, soon began to be spoken in the elegant society of the capital and the court;—a thing before unknown in Spain, though French princesses had more than once sat on the Spanish throne. But now it was a compliment to the reigning monarch himself, and courtiers strove to indulge in it. Pitillas, under pretence of laughing at himself for following the fashion, ridicules the awkwardness of those who did so, when he says,
And French I talk; at least enough to know
That neither I nor other men more shrewd
Can comprehend my words, though still endued
With power to raise my heavy Spanish dough.
And Father Isla makes himself merry with the idea of a man who fancies he has married an Andalusian or Castilian wife, and finds out that she proves little better than a Frenchwoman after all.[295]
Translations from the French followed this state of things; and, at last, an attempt was made to introduce formally into Spain a poetical system founded on the critical doctrines prevalent in France. Its author, Ignacio de Luzan, a gentleman of Aragon, was born in 1702; and, while still a child, went to Italy and received a learned education in the schools of Milan, Palermo, and Naples; remaining abroad eighteen years, and enjoying the society of several of the most distinguished Italian poets of the time, among whom were Maffei and Metastasio. At last, in 1733, he returned to Spain, a well-bred scholar, according to the ideas of scholarship then prevalent in Italy, and with a singular facility in writing and speaking French and Italian.
His personal affairs and his native modesty kept him for some time in retirement on the estates of his family in Aragon. But, in the condition to which Spanish literature was then reduced, a man of so many accomplishments could hardly fail, in any position, to make his influence felt. That of Luzan soon became perceptible, because he loved to write, and wrote a great deal. In Italy and Sicily he had published, not only Italian poetry of his own, but French. In his native language and at home, he naturally went further. He translated from Anacreon, Sappho, and Musæus; he fitted dramas of Maffei, La Chaussée, and Metastasio to the Spanish stage; and he wrote a considerable number of short poems, and one original drama, “Virtue Honored,” which was privately represented in Saragossa.
Whatever he did was well received, but little of it was published at the time, and not much has appeared since. His “Odes on the Conquest of Oran” were particularly admired by his friends, and, though somewhat cold, may still be read with pleasure. These and other compositions made him known to the government at Madrid, and procured for him, in 1747, the appointment of Secretary to the Spanish embassy at Paris. There he remained three years, and, from the absence of the ambassador, acted, for a large part of the time, as the only representative of his country at the French court. On his return home, he continued to enjoy the confidence of the king; and when he died suddenly, in 1754, he was in great favor, and about to receive a place of more consequence than any he had yet held.[296]
The circumstances of the country, and those of his own education, position, and tastes, opened to Luzan, as a critic, a career of almost assured success. Every thing was so enfeebled and degraded, that it could offer no effectual resistance to what he might teach. The political importance of his country among the nations of Europe had been crushed. Its moral dignity was impaired. Its school of poetry had disappeared. The old system of things in Spain, as far as poetical culture was concerned, had passed away, no less than the Austrian dynasty, with which it had come in; and no attempt deserving the name had yet been made to determine what should be the intellectual character of the system that should follow it. A small effort, under such circumstances, would go far towards imparting a decisive movement; and, in literary taste and criticism, Luzan was certainly well fitted to give the guiding impulse. He had been educated with great thoroughness in the principles of the classical French school, and he possessed all the learning necessary to make known and support its peculiar doctrines. In 1728, he had offered to the Academy at Palermo, of which he was a member, six critical discussions on poetry, written in Italian; so that, when he returned to Spain, he had only to take these papers and work them into a formal treatise, suited to what he deemed the pressing wants of the country. He did so;—and the result was his “Art of Poetry,” the first edition of which appeared in 1737.
The attempt was by no means a new one. The rules and doctrines of the ancients, in matters of taste and rhetoric, had frequently before been announced and defended in Spain. Even Enzina, the oldest of those who regarded Castilian poetry as an art, was not ignorant of Quintilian and Cicero, though, in his short treatise, which shows more good sense and good taste than can be claimed from the age, he takes substantially the same view of his subject that the Marquis of Villena and the Provençals had taken before him,—considering all poetry chiefly with reference to its mechanical forms.[297] Rengifo, a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, whose “Spanish Art of Poetry” dates from 1592, confines himself almost entirely to the structure of the verse and the technical forms known both to the elder Castilian style of composition and to the Italian introduced by Boscan;—a curious discussion, in which the authority of the ancients is by no means forgotten, but one whose chief value consists in what it contains relating to the national school and its peculiar measures.[298]
Alonso Lopez, commonly called El Pinciano,—the same person who wrote the dull epic on Pelayo,—went further, and in 1596 published his “Ancient Poetical Philosophy,” in which, under the disguise of a friendly correspondence, he gives, with much learning and some acuteness, his own views of the opinions of the ancient masters on all the modes of poetical composition.[299] Cascales followed him, in 1616, with a series of dialogues, somewhat more familiar than the grave letters of Lopez, and resting more on the doctrines of Horace, whose epistle to the Pisos he afterwards published, with a well-written Latin commentary.[300] Salas, on the contrary, in his “New Idea of Ancient Tragedy,” which appeared in 1633, followed Aristotle rather than any other authority, and illustrated his discussion—which is the ablest in Spanish literature on the side it sustains—by a translation of the “Trojanæ” of Seneca, and an address of the theatre of all ages to its various audiences.[301]
All these works, however, and three or four others of less consequence, assumed, so far as they attempted to lay their foundations in philosophy, to be built on the rules laid down by Aristotle or the Roman rhetoricians.[302] In this they committed a serious error. Ancient rhetoric can be applied, in all its strictness, to no modern poetry, and least of all to the poetry of Spain. The school of Lope de Vega, therefore, passed over them like an irresistible flood, leaving behind it hardly a trace of the structures that had been raised to oppose its progress. But Luzan took a different ground. His more immediate predecessors had been Gracian, who defended the Gongorism of the preceding period, and Artiga, who, in a long treatise “On Spanish Eloquence,” written in the ballad measures, had seemed willing to encourage all the bad taste that prevailed in the beginning of the eighteenth century.[303]
Luzan took no notice of either of them. He followed the poetical system of Boileau and Lebossu, not, indeed, forgetting the masters of antiquity, but everywhere accommodating his doctrines to the demands of modern poetry, as Muratori had done just before him, and enforcing them by the example of the French school, then more admired than any other in Europe.[304] His object, as he afterwards explained it, was “to bring Spanish poetry under the control of those precepts which are observed among polished nations”; and his work is arranged with judgment to effect his purpose. The first book treats of the origin and nature of poetry, and the second, of the pleasure and advantage poetry brings with it. These two books constitute one half of the work, and having gone through in them what he thinks it necessary to say of the less important divisions of the art,—such as lyric poetry, satire, and pastorals,—he devotes the two remaining books entirely to a discussion of the drama and of epic poetry,—the forms in which Spanish genius had long been more ambitious of excellence than in any other. A strict method reigns through the whole; and the style, if less rich than is found in the older prose-writers, and less so than the genius of the language demands, is clear, simple, and effective. In explaining and defending his system of opinions, he shows judgment, and a temperate philosophy; and his abundant illustrations, drawn not only from the Castilian, the French, the Greek, and the Latin, but from the Italian and the Portuguese, are selected with excellent taste, and applied skilfully to strengthen his general argument and design. For its purpose, a better treatise could hardly have been produced.
The effect was immediate and great. It seemed to offer a remedy for the bad taste which had accompanied, and in no small degree hastened, the decline of the national literature from the time of Góngora. It was seized on, therefore, with eagerness, as the book that was wanted; and when to this we add that the literature of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, which it held up as the model literature of Christendom, was then regarded throughout Europe with almost unmingled admiration, we shall not be surprised that the “Poética” of Luzan exercised, from its first appearance, a controlling authority over opinion at the court of Spain, and over the few writers of reputation then to be found in the country.[305]
Something more, however, than a reformation in taste was wanted in Spain before a sufficient foundation could be laid for advancement in elegant literature. The commonest forms of truth had been so long excluded from the country, that the human mind there seemed to have pined away, and to have become dwarfed, for want of its appropriate nourishment. All the great sciences, both moral and physical, that had been for a hundred years advancing with an accelerated speed everywhere else throughout Europe, had been unable to force their way through the jealous guard which ecclesiastical and political despotism had joined to keep for ever watching the passes of the Pyrenees. From the days of the Comuneros and the Reformation of Luther, when religious sects began to discuss the authority of princes and the rights of the people, and when the punishment of opinion became the settled policy of the Spanish state, every thing in the shape of instruction that was not approved by the Church was treated as dangerous. At the universities, which from their foundation had been entirely ecclesiastical corporations, and were used constantly to build up ecclesiastical influences, no elegant learning was fostered, and very little tolerated, except such as furnished means to form scholastic Churchmen and faithful Catholics; the physical and exact sciences were carefully excluded and forbidden, except so far as they could be taught on the authority of Aristotle; and, as Jovellanos said boldly in a memorial on the subject to Charles the Fourth, “even medicine and jurisprudence would have been neglected, if the instincts of men had permitted them to forget the means by which life and property are protected.”[306]
The Spanish universities, in fact, still taught from the same books they had used in the time of Cardinal Ximenes, and by the same methods. The scholastic philosophy was still regarded as the highest form of merely intellectual culture. Diego de Torres, afterwards distinguished for his knowledge in the physical sciences,—a man born and educated at Salamanca in the first half of the century,—says, that, after he had been five years in one of the schools of the University there, it was by accident he learned the existence of the mathematical sciences.[307] And, fifty years later, Blanco White declares, that, like most of his countrymen, he should have completed his studies in theology at the University of Seville without so much as hearing of elegant literature, if he had not chanced to make the acquaintance of a person who introduced him to a partial knowledge of Spanish poetry.[308]
Thus far, therefore, the old system of things was triumphant, and the common forms of advancing knowledge were, to an extraordinary and almost incredible degree, kept out of the country. On the other hand, errors, follies, and absurdities sprang up and abounded, just as surely as darkness follows the exclusion of light. Few persons in Spain in the beginning of the eighteenth century were so well informed as not to believe in astrology, and fewer still doubted the disastrous influence of comets and eclipses. The system of Copernicus was not only discouraged, but forbidden to be taught, on the ground that it was contrary to Scripture. The philosophy of Bacon, with all the consequences that had followed it, was unknown. It was not, perhaps, true, that the healing waters of knowledge had been rolled backward to their fountain, but no spirit of power had descended to trouble them, and they had now been kept stagnant till life was no longer in them and life could no longer be supported by them. It seemed as if the faculties of thinking and reasoning, in the better sense of these words, were either about to be entirely lost in Spain, or to be partly preserved only in a few scattered individuals, who, by the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny that oppressed them, would be prevented from diffusing even the imperfect light which they themselves enjoyed.
But it could not be so. The human mind cannot be permanently imprisoned; and it is an obvious proof of this consoling fact, that the intellectual emancipation of Spain was begun by a man of no extraordinary gifts, and one whose position gave him no extraordinary advantages for the undertaking to which he devoted his life,—the quiet monk, Benito Feyjoó. He was born in 1676, the eldest son of respectable parents in the northwestern part of Spain, who, contrary to the opinions of their time, did not think the law of primogeniture required them to devote their first-born wholly to the duty of sustaining the honors of his family and enjoying the income of the estates he was to inherit. At the age of fourteen, his destination to the Church was determined upon; but he loved study of all kinds, and applied himself, not only to theology, but to the physical sciences and to medicine, so far as means were allowed him in the low state to which all intellectual culture was then sunk. As early as 1717, he established himself in a Benedictine convent at Oviedo, and lived there forty-seven years in as strict a retirement as his duties permitted, occupied only with his studies, and relying almost entirely on the press as the means of enlightening his countrymen.
His personal character and resources, in some respects, fitted him well for the great task he had undertaken. He was a sincere Catholic, and therefore felt no disposition to interfere even with abuses that were protected by the authority of his Church; a circumstance without which he would have been stopped at the very threshold of his enterprise. His mind was strong and patient of labor; and if, on the one hand, his researches were restrained by the embarrassments of his ecclesiastical position, he had, on the other, obtained, what few Spaniards then enjoyed, the means of knowing much of what had been done in Italy, in France, and even in England, for the advancement of science during the century preceding that in which he was educated. Above all, he was honest, and seriously devoted to his work. But, as he advanced, he was shocked to find how wide a gulf separated his own country from the rest of Europe. Truth, he saw, had, on many important subjects, been so completely excluded from Spain, that its very existence was hardly suspected; and that, while Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Calderon and Quevedo, had been rioting unrestrained in the world of imagination, the solemn world of reality,—the world of moral and physical truth,—had been as much closed against inquiry as if his country had been no part of civilized Europe.
At times he seems to have been anxious concerning the result of his labors; but, on the whole, his courage did not fail him. He was not, indeed, a man of genius. He was not a man to invent new systems of metaphysics or philosophy. But he was a learned man, with a cautious judgment, somewhat obscured, but not really impaired, by religious prejudices, from which he could not be expected to emancipate himself; he was a man who understood the real importance of the labors of Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, of Leibnitz, Pascal, and Gassendi; and, what was of vastly more consequence, he was determined that his own countrymen should no longer remain ignorant of the advancement already made by the rest of Christendom under the influence of master-spirits like these.
So far as the War of the Succession had served to rouse the national character from its lethargy, and to direct the thoughts of Spaniards to what had been done beyond the Pyrenees, it was favorable to his purpose. But in other respects, as we have seen, it had effected nothing for the national culture. Still, when, in 1726, Feyjoó printed a volume of essays connected with his main purpose, he was able to command public attention, and was encouraged to go on. He called it “The Critical Theatre”; and in its different dissertations,—as separate as the papers in “The Spectator,” but longer and on graver subjects,—he boldly attacked the dialectics and metaphysics then taught everywhere in Spain; maintained Bacon’s system of induction in the physical sciences; ridiculed the general opinion in relation to comets, eclipses, and the arts of magic and divination; laid down rules for historical faith, which would exclude most of the early traditions of the country; showed a greater deference for woman, and claimed for her a higher place in society, than the influence of the Spanish Church willingly permitted her to occupy; and, in all respects, came forth to his countrymen as one urging earnestly the pursuit of truth and the improvement of social life. Eight volumes of this stirring work were published before 1739, and then it stopped, without any apparent reason. But in 1742 Feyjoó began a similar series of discussions, under the name of “Learned and Inquiring Letters,” which he finished in 1760, with the fifth volume, thus closing up the long series of his truly philanthropical, as well as philosophical, labors.
Of course he was assailed. A work, called the “Antiteatro Crítico,” appeared early, and was soon followed by another, with nearly the same title, and by not a few scattered tracts and volumes, directed against different portions of what he had published. But he was quite able to defend himself. He wrote with clearness and good taste in an age when the prevailing style was obscure and affected; and, if he fell occasionally into Gallicisms, from relying much on French writers for his materials, his mistakes of this sort were rare; and, in general, he presented himself in a Castilian costume, that was respectable and attractive. Nor was he without wit, which his prudence taught him to use sparingly, and he had always the energy which belongs to good sense and practical wisdom; a union of qualities not often found anywhere, and certainly of most rare occurrence in cloisters like those in which Feyjoó passed his long life.
The attacks made on him, therefore, served chiefly to draw to his works the attention he solicited, and in the end advanced his cause, instead of retarding it. Even the Inquisition, to which he was more than once denounced, summoned him in vain before its tribunals.[309] His faith could not be questioned, and his cause was stronger than they were. Fifteen editions of his principal work, large as it was, were printed in half a century. The excitement it produced went on increasing as long as he lived; and when he died, in 1764, he could look back and see that he had imparted a movement to the human mind in Spain, which, though it was far from raising Spanish philosophy to a level with that of France and England, had yet given it a right direction, and done more for the intellectual life of his country than had been done for a century.[310]