CHAPTER IV.
Slow Progress of Culture. — Charles the Third and his Policy. — Isla. — His Friar Gerund. — His Cicero. — His Gil Blas. — Efforts to restore the Old School of Poetry. — Huerta. — Sedano. — Sanchez. — Sarmiento. — Efforts to introduce the French School. — Moratin the Elder and his Club. — Cadahalso, Yriarte, Samaniego, Arroyal, Montengon, Salas, Meras, Noroña.
The reign of Ferdinand the Sixth, which had been marked with little political energy during its continuance, was saddened, at its close, by the death of the monarch from grief at the loss of his queen. But it had not been without beneficial influences on the country. A wise economy had been introduced, for the first time since the discovery of America, into the administration of the state; the abused powers of the Church had been diminished by a concordat with the Pope; the progress of knowledge had been furthered; and Father Feyjoó, vigorous, though old, was still permitted, if not encouraged, to go on with his great task, and create a school that should rest on the broad principles of philosophy recognized in England and in France.
We must not, however, be misled by such general statements. Spain, notwithstanding half a century of advancement, was still deplorably behind the other countries of Western Europe in that intellectual cultivation, without which no nation in modern times can be prosperous, strong, or honored. “There is not,” says the Marquis of Enseñada, in a report made to the king, as minister of state,—“there is not a professorship of public law, of experimental science, of anatomy, or of botany, in the kingdom. We have no exact geographical maps of the country or its provinces, nor any body who can make them; so that we depend on the very imperfect maps we receive from France and Holland, and are shamefully ignorant of the true relations and distances of our own towns.”[320]
Under these circumstances, the accession of a prince like Charles the Third was eminently fortunate for the country. He was a man of energy and discernment, a Spaniard by birth and character, but one whom political connections had placed early on the throne of Naples, where, during a reign of twenty-four years, he had done much to restore the dignity of a decayed monarchy, and had learned much of the condition of Europe outside of the Pyrenees. When, therefore, the death of his half-brother called him to the throne of Spain, he came with a kind and degree of experience in affairs which fitted him well for his duties in the more important and more unfortunate kingdom, whose destinies he was to control for above a quarter of a century. Happily, he seems to have comprehended his position from the first, and to have understood that he was called to a great work of reform and regeneration, where his chief contest was to be with ecclesiastical abuses.
In some respects he was successful. His ministers, Roda, Florida-Blanca, Aranda, and Campomanes, were men of ability. By their suggestions and assistance, he abridged the Papal power so far, that no rescript or edict from Rome could have force in Spain without the expressed assent of the throne; he restrained the Inquisition from exercising any authority whatever, except in cases of obstinate heresy or apostasy; he forbade the condemnation of any book, till its author, or those interested in it, had had an opportunity to be heard in its defence; and, finally, deeming the Jesuits the most active opponents of the reforms he endeavoured to introduce, he, in one day, expelled their whole body from his dominions all over the world, breaking up their schools and confiscating their great revenues.[321] At the same time, he caused improved plans of study to be suggested; he made arrangements for popular education, such as were before unknown in Spain; and he raised the tone of instruction and the modes of teaching in the few higher institutions over which he could lawfully extend his control.
But many abuses were beyond his reach. When he appealed to the Universities, urging them to change their ancient habits, and teach the truths of the physical and exact sciences, Salamanca answered, in 1771, “Newton teaches nothing that would make a good logician or metaphysician, and Gassendi and Descartes do not agree so well with revealed truth as Aristotle does.” And the other Universities showed little more of the spirit of advancement.
With the Inquisition his success was far from being complete. His authority was resisted, as far as resistance was possible; but the progress of intelligence made all bigotry every year less active and formidable; and, whether it be an honor to his reign, or whether it be a disgrace, it is to be recorded, that the last person who perished at the stake in Spain, by ecclesiastical authority, was an unfortunate woman, who was burnt at Seville for witchcraft in 1781.[322]
Under the influence of a spirit like that of Charles the Third, during a reign protracted to twenty-nine years, there was a new and considerable advancement in whatever tends to make life desirable, of which the country on all sides gave token. The population, which had fled or died away, seemed to spring up afresh in places that oppression had made desert, and having regained something under the first of the Bourbons, it now, under the third, recovered rapidly the numbers it had lost in the days of the House of Austria, by wars all over the world, by emigration, by the persecution of the Jews and the expulsion of the Moriscos, by bad legislation, and by the cruel spirit of religious intolerance. The revenues in the same period were increased threefold, without adding to the burdens of the people; and the country seemed to be brought from a state of absolute bankruptcy to one of comparative ease and prosperity. It was certain, therefore, that Spain was not falling to ruin, as it had been in the time of Charles the Second.[323]
But all intellectual cultivation is slow of growth, and all intellectual reform still slower. The life and health infused into the country were, no doubt, felt in every part of its physical system, reviving and renewing the powers that had been so long wasted away, and that at one period had seemed near to speedy dissolution. But it was obvious, that much time must still elapse before such healthful circulations could reach the national culture generally, and a still longer time before they could revive that elegant literature, which is the bright, consummate flower of all true civilization. Yet life was beginning to be seen. It was a dawn, if it was nothing more.
The first striking effect produced by this movement in the reigns of Ferdinand the Sixth and Charles the Third was one quite in sympathy with the spirit of the nation, then resisting the ecclesiastical abuses that had so long oppressed it. It was an attack on the style of popular preaching, which, originally corrupted by Paravicino, the distinguished follower of Góngora, had been constantly falling lower and lower, until, at last, it seemed to have reached the lowest point of degradation and vulgarity. The assailant was Father Isla, who was born in 1703 and died in 1781, at Bologna, where, being a Jesuit, he had retired, on the general expulsion of his Order from Spain.[324] His earliest published work is his “Triumph of Youth,” printed in 1727, to give the nation an account of a festival, celebrated that year during eleven days at Salamanca, in honor of two very youthful saints who had been Jesuits, and who had just been canonized by Benedict the Thirteenth; a gay tract, full of poems, farces, and accounts of the maskings and bull-fights to which the occasion had given rise, and coming as near as possible to open satire of the whole matter, but yet with great adroitness avoiding it.
In a work somewhat similar, he afterwards went further. It was a description of the proclamation made in 1746, at Pamplona, on the accession of Ferdinand the Sixth, which was attended with such extravagant and idle ceremonies, that, being required to give some account of them to the public, he could not refrain from indulging in his love of ridicule. But he did it with a satire so delicate and so crafty, that those who were its subjects failed at first to apprehend his real purpose. On the contrary, the Council of the proud capital of Navarre thanked him for the honor he had done them; the Bishop and Archbishop complimented him for it; several persons whom he had particularly noticed sent him presents; and, when the irony began to be suspected, it became a subject of public controversy, as in the case of De Foe’s “Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” whether the praise bestowed were in jest or in earnest;—Isla all the time defending himself with admirable ingenuity and wit, as if he were personally aggrieved at the unfavorable construction put upon his compliments. The discussion ended with his retreat or exile from Pamplona.[325]
He was, however, at this period of his life occupied with more serious duties, and soon found among them a higher mark for his wit. From the age of twenty-four he had been a successful preacher, and continued such until he was cruelly expelled from his own country. But he perceived how little worthy of its great subjects was the prevalent style of Spanish pulpit oratory,—how much it was degraded by bad taste, by tricks of composition, by conceits and puns, and even by a low buffoonery, in which the vulgar monks, sent to preach in the churches or in the public streets and squares, indulged themselves merely to win applause from equally vulgar audiences, and increase the contributions they solicited by arts so discreditable. It is said that at first Father Isla was swept away by the current of his times, which ran with extraordinary force, and that he wrote, in some degree, as others did. But he soon recognized his mistake, and his numerous published sermons, written between 1729 and 1754, are marked with a purity and directness of style which had long been unknown, and which, though wanting the richness and fervor of the exhortations of Luis de Leon and Luis de Granada, would not have dishonored the Spanish pulpit even in their days.[326]
Isla, however, was not satisfied with merely setting a good example. He determined to make a direct attack on the abuse itself. For this purpose, he wrote what he called “The History of the Famous Preacher, Friar Gerund”; a satirical romance, in which he describes the life of one of these popular orators, from his birth in an obscure village, through his education in a fashionable convent, and his adventures as a missionary about the country; the fiction ending abruptly with his preparation to deliver a course of sermons in a city that seems intended to represent Madrid. It is written throughout with great spirit; and not only are the national manners and character everywhere present, but, in the episodes and in the occasional sketches Isla has given of conventual and religious life in his time, there is an air of reality which leaves no doubt that the author drew freely on the resources of his personal experience. Its plan resembles slightly that of “Don Quixote,” but its execution reminds us oftener of Rabelais and his discursive and redundant reflections, though of Rabelais without his coarseness. It is serious, as becomes the Spanish character, and conceals under its gravity a spirit of sarcasm, which, in other countries, seems inconsistent with the idea of dignity, but which, in Spain, has been more than once happily united with it, and made more effective by the union.
The sketches of character and specimens of fashionable pulpit oratory given in the “Friar Gerund” are the best parts of it, and are agreeable illustrations for the literary history of the eighteenth century. Of the preacher whom the Friar took for his model we have the following carefully drawn portrait:—
“He was in the full perfection of his strength, just about three-and-thirty years old; tall, robust, and stout; his limbs well set and well proportioned; manly in gait, inclining to corpulence, with an erect carriage of his head, and the circle of hair round his tonsure studiously and exactly combed and shaven. His clerical dress was always neat, and fell round his person in ample and regular folds. His shoes fitted him with the greatest nicety, and, above all, his silken cap was adorned with much curious embroidery and a fanciful tassel,—the work of certain female devotees who were dying with admiration of their favorite preacher. In short, he had a very youthful, gallant look; and, adding to this a clear, rich voice, a slight fashionable lisp, a peculiar grace in telling a story, a talent at mimicry, an easy action, a taking manner, a high-sounding style, and not a little effrontery,—never forgetting to sprinkle jests, proverbs, and homely phrases along his discourses with a most agreeable aptness,—he won golden opinions in his public discourses, and carried every thing before him in the drawing-rooms he frequented.”[327]
The style of eloquence of this vulgar ecclesiastical fop, a specimen of which follows, is no less faithfully and characteristically given; and was taken, as Father Isla intimates was his custom, from a discourse that had really been preached.[328]
“It was well known, that he always began his sermons with some proverb, some jest, some pot-house witticism, or some strange fragment, which, taken from its proper connections and relations, would seem, at first blush, to be an inconsequence, a blasphemy, or an impiety; until, at last, having kept his audience waiting a moment in wonder, he finished the clause, or came out with an explanation which reduced the whole to a sort of miserable trifling. Thus, preaching one day on the mystery of the Trinity, he began his sermon by saying, ‘I deny that God exists a Unity in essence and a Trinity in person,’ and then stopped short for an instant. The hearers, of course, looked round on one another, scandalized, or, at least, wondering what would be the end of this heretical blasphemy. At length, when the preacher thought he had fairly caught them, he went on,—‘Thus says the Ebionite, the Marcionite, the Arian, the Manichean, the Socinian; but I prove it against them all from the Scriptures, the Councils, and the Fathers.’
“In another sermon, which was on the Incarnation, he began by crying out, ‘Your health, cavaliers!’ and, as the audience burst into a broad laugh at the free manner in which he had said it, he went on:—‘This is no joking matter, however; for it was for your health and for mine, and for that of all men, that Christ descended from heaven and became incarnate in the Virgin Mary. It is an article of faith, and I prove it thus: “Propter nos, homines, et nostram salutem descendit de cœlo et incarnatus est,”’—whereat they all remained in delighted astonishment, and such a murmur of applause ran round the church, that it wanted little of breaking out into open acclamation.”[329]
The first volume of the “Friar Gerund” was printed in 1758, without the knowledge of the author, and in twenty-four hours eight hundred copies of it were sold.[330] Such an extraordinary popularity, however, proved any thing but a benefit. The priests, and especially the preaching friars, assailed it from all quarters, as the most formidable attack yet made in Spain on their peculiar craft. The consequence was, that, though the king and the court expressed their delight in its satire, the license to publish it further was withdrawn, its author was summoned before the Inquisition, and his book was condemned in 1760. But Isla was too strong in public favor and in the respect of the Jesuits to be personally punished, and the Friar Gerund was too true and too widely scattered to be more than nominally suppressed.[331]
The second volume did not fare so well. After the censure passed on the first, it could not, of course, be licensed, and so remained for a long time in manuscript, a forbidden book. In fact, it first appeared in England, and in the English language, in 1772, through the agency of Baretti, to whom the original had been sent after its author had gone to Italy. But an edition of the whole work in Spanish soon appeared at Bayonne, followed by other editions in other places; and, though it was never licensed at home till 1813,—and then only to be forbidden anew the next year, on the return of Ferdinand the Seventh,—still few books have been better known, all over Spain, to the more intelligent classes of the Spanish people, than Friar Gerund, from the day of its first publication to the present time. What is of more consequence, it was, from the first, successful in its main purpose. The sobriquet of Friar Gerund was given at once to those who indulged in the vulgar style of preaching it was intended to discountenance, and any one who was admitted to deserve the appellation could no longer collect an audience, except such as was gathered from the populace of the public squares.[332]
In consequence of the alarm and anxieties that accompanied his sudden and violent expulsion from Spain, in 1767, Father Isla suffered on the road an attack of paralysis, which made his health uncertain for the remaining fourteen years of his life. Still, after his death, it was found that in these sad years he had not been idle. Among his papers was a poem in sixteen cantos, containing above twelve thousand lines in octave stanzas. It is called “Cicero,” and claims to be a life of the great Roman orator. But it is no such thing. It is a satire on the vices and follies of the author’s own time, begun in Spain, but chiefly written during his exile in Italy; and, though it contains occasional sketches of an imaginary life of Cicero’s mother, they are very inconsiderable, and, as for Cicero himself, the poem leaves him in his cradle, only eighteen months old.
One of the subjects of its satire is the whole class of Spanish narrative poems, of which, and especially of those devoted to the lives of the saints, it may be regarded as a sort of parody; but its main purpose is to ridicule the lives of modern fine ladies, and the modes of early education then prevalent. The whole, however, is mingled with inappropriate discussions about Italy, poetry, and a country life, and hardly less inappropriate satire of professed musicians, theatres, and poets who praise one another; in short, with whatever occurred to Father Isla’s wayward humor as he was writing. From internal evidence, it seems to have been read, from time to time as it was written, to a society of friends,—probably some of the numerous exiles who, like himself, had resorted to Bologna, and subsisted there on the miserable pittance the Spanish government promised them, but often failed to pay. For such a purpose it was not ill adapted by its clear, flowing style, and occasionally by its pungent satire; but its cumbrous length and endless digressions, often trifling both in matter and manner, render it quite unfit for publication. It was, however, offered to the public censor, and permission to print it was refused, though for reasons so frivolous, that it seems certain the real objection was not to the poem, but to the author.[333]
Others of Father Isla’s works were more fortunate. Six volumes of his sermons were collected and published, and six volumes of his letters, chiefly addressed to his sister and her husband, and written in a very affectionate and gay spirit. To these, at different times, were added a few minor works of a trifling character, and one or two that are religious.[334]
But what most surprised the world was his translation of “Gil Blas,” printed in 1787, claiming the work, on which the fame of Le Sage must always principally rest, as “stolen from the Spanish, and now,” in the words of Father Isla’s title-page, “restored to its country and native language by a Spaniard, who does not choose to have his nation trifled with.”[335] The external grounds for this extraordinary charge are slight. The first suggestion occurs in 1752, and is made by Voltaire, who, in his “Age of Louis the Fourteenth,” declares the Gil Blas “to be entirely taken from Espinel’s ‘Marcos de Obregon.’” This charge, as we have seen, is not true, and we have reason to believe that it was the result of personal ill-will on the part of Voltaire, who had himself been attacked in the Gil Blas, and who had, in some way or other, heard that Le Sage was indebted to Espinel. Afterwards, similar declarations are made in two or three books of no authority, and especially in a Biographical Dictionary printed at Amsterdam in 1771. But this is all.
Roused by such suggestions, however, Father Isla amused himself with making a translation of Gil Blas, adding to it a long and not successful continuation,[336] and declaring, without ceremony or proof, that it was the work of an Andalusian advocate, who gave his manuscript to Le Sage, when Le Sage was in Spain, either as a secretary of the French embassy, or as a friend of the French ambassador. But all this seems to be without any foundation, for the manuscript has never been produced; the advocate has never been named; and Le Sage was never in Spain. Still, the Spanish claim has not been abandoned. On the contrary, Llorente, in two ingenious and learned works on the subject, one in French and the other in Spanish, but both printed in 1822, reasserts it, with great earnestness, resting his proofs on internal evidence, and insisting that Gil Blas is certainly of Spanish origin, and that it is probably the work, not indeed of Father Isla’s Andalusian advocate, but of Solís, the historian;—a suggestion, for which Llorente produces no better reason, than that nobody else of the period to which he assigns the Gil Blas was able, in his judgment, to write such a romance.[337]
But there is a ready answer to all such merely conjectural criticism. Le Sage proceeded, as an author in romantic fiction, just as he had done when he wrote for the public theatre; and the results at which he arrived in both cases are remarkably similar. In the drama, he began with translations and imitations from the Spanish, such as his “Point of Honor,” which is taken from Roxas, and his “Don Cesar Ursino,” which is from Calderon; but afterwards, when he better understood his own talent and had acquired confidence from success, he came out with his “Turcaret,” a wholly original comedy, which, far surpassed all he had before attempted, and showed how much he had been wasting his strength as an imitator. Just so he did in romance-writing. He began with translating the “Don Quixote” of Avellaneda, and remodelling and enlarging the “Diablo Cojuelo” of Guevara. But the “Gil Blas,” the greatest of all his works of prose fiction, is the result of his confirmed strength; and, in its characteristic merits, is as much his own as the “Turcaret.”
On this point, the internal evidence is as decisive as the external. The frequent errors of this remarkable romance in Spanish geography and history show, that it could hardly have been the work of a Spaniard, and certainly not of a Spaniard so well informed as Solís; its private anecdotes of society in the time of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth prove it to have been almost necessarily written by a Frenchman; while, at the same time, the freedom with which, as we go on, we find that every thing Spanish is plundered,—now a tale taken from “Marcos de Obregon,” now an intrigue or a story from a play of Mendoza, of Roxas, or of Figueroa,—points directly to Le Sage’s old habits, and to his practised skill in turning to account every thing that he deemed fitted to his purpose. The result is, that he has, by the force of his genius, produced a work of great brilliancy; in which, from his entire familiarity with Spanish literature and his unscrupulous use of it, he has preserved the national character with such fidelity, that a Spaniard is almost always unwilling to believe that the Gil Blas, especially now that he has it in the excellent version of Father Isla, could have been written by any body but one of his own countrymen.[338]
The chief talent of Father Isla was in satire, and the great service he performed for his country was that of driving from its respectable churches the low and vulgar style of preaching with which they had long been infested;—a work which the “Friar Gerund” achieved almost as completely as the “Don Quixote” did that of destroying the insane passion for books of chivalry which prevailed in the seventeenth century.
But, meanwhile, other attempts were making in other directions to revive the literature of the country; some by restoring a taste for the old national poetry, some by attempting to accommodate every thing to the French doctrines of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, and some by an ill-defined and often, perhaps, unconscious struggle to unite the two opinions, and to form a school whose character should be unlike that of either and yet in advance of both.
In the direction of the earlier national poetry little was done by original efforts, but something was attempted in other ways. Huerta, a fierce, but inconsistent, adversary of the French innovations, printed, in 1778, a volume of poems almost entirely in the old manner; but it was too much marked with the bad taste of the preceding century to enjoy even a temporary success, and its author, therefore, could boast of no follower of any note in a path which was constantly less and less trodden.[339]
On the other hand, more was done with effect to recall the memory of the old masters themselves. Lopez de Sedano, between 1768 and 1778, published his “Spanish Parnassus,” in nine volumes; a work which, though ill digested and not always showing good taste in its selections and criticisms, is still a rich mine of the poetry of the country in its best days, and contains important materials for the history of Spanish literature from the period of Boscan and Garcilasso.[340] Sanchez went further back, and in 1779 offered, to his countrymen, for the first time, the greater legendary treasures of their heroic ages, beginning with the noble old poem of the Cid, but unhappily leaving incomplete a task for which he had proved himself so well fitted by his learning and zeal, if not by his acuteness.[341] And finally, Sarmiento, a friend of Feyjoó, and one of his ablest public defenders, undertook an elaborate history of Spanish poetry, which contains important discussions relating to the period embraced by the inquiries of Sanchez, but which was broken off by the death of its venerable author in 1770, and remained unpublished till five years later.[342] These three works, though they excited too little attention at first, were still works of importance, and have served as the foundation for a better state of things since.
The doctrines of the French school, somewhat modified, perhaps, by the reproduction of the elder Spanish literature, but still substantially unchanged, found followers more numerous and active. During the reign of Charles the Third, Moratin the elder, a gentleman of an old Biscayan family, who was born in 1737, and died in 1780, succeeded, in a great degree, to the inheritance of Luzan’s opinions, and devoted himself to the reform of the taste of his countrymen. He was the friend of Montiano, who had himself endeavoured to introduce classical tragedy upon the Spanish stage, and who had, probably, some share in forming the literary character of the young poet. But the court, as usual, was an element in the movement. Moratin was received with flattering regard by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the head of the great house of the Guzmans; by the Duke of Ossuna, long ambassador in France; by Aranda, the wise minister of state, who rarely forgot the cause of intellectual culture; and by the Infante Don Gabriel de Bourbon, the accomplished translator of Sallust; and each of these persons was thus able, through Moratin, to exercise an influence on the state of letters in Spain.
His first public effort of any consequence, except a drama that will be noticed hereafter, was his “Poeta,” which appeared in 1764. It consists entirely of his own shorter poems, and is among the many proofs how small was the interest then felt in literature, since, though the whole collection fills only a hundred and sixty pages, it was found expedient to publish it in ten successive numbers, in order to give it a fair opportunity to be circulated and read. This was followed, the next year, by the “Diana,” a short didactic poem, in six books, on the Chase, and in 1765 by a narrative poem on the Destruction of his Ships by Cortés, to which if we add a volume published by the piety of his son in 1821, and containing, with a modest and beautiful life of their author, a collection of poems, most of which had not before been published, we shall have all of the elder Moratin that can now interest us.
Its value is not great; and yet portions of it are not likely to be soon forgotten. The “Epic Canto,” as he calls it, on the bold adventure of Cortés in burning his ships, is the noblest poem of its class produced in Spain during the eighteenth century, and gives more pleasure than almost any of the historical epics that preceded it in such large numbers. Some of his shorter pieces, like his ballads on Moorish subjects, and an ode to a champion in the bull-fights,—which Moratin constantly frequented, and of which he printed a pleasant historical sketch,—are full of spirit. All he wrote, indeed, is marked by purity and exactness of language and harmony of versification; showing that, though he possessed to an extraordinary degree the power of an improvisator, he composed carefully and finished with patience. But his chief success was as a public teacher; laboring faithfully in the chair of the Imperial College, where he took the place of his friend Ayala, and rebuking the bad taste of his times by the strength of his own modest example.[343]
Moratin was an amiable man, and gathered the men of letters of the Spanish capital in a friendly circle about him. They met in one of the better class of taverns,—the Fonda de San Sebastian,—where they maintained a club-room that was always open and ready to receive them. Ayala, the tragic writer; Cerdá, the literary antiquarian; Rios, who wrote the analysis of “Don Quixote” prefixed to the magnificent edition of the Academy; Ortega, the botanist and scholar; Pizzi, the Professor of Arabic Literature; Cadahalso, the poet and essayist; Muñoz, the historian of the New World; Yriarte, the fabulist; Conti, the Italian translator of a collection of Spanish poetry; Signorelli, the author of the general history of theatres; and others,—were members of this pleasant association, and resorted continually to its cheerful saloon.
How truly Spanish was the tone of their intercourse may be gathered from the fact, that they had but one law to govern all their proceedings, and that was, never to speak on any subject except the Theatre, Bull-fights, Love, and Poetry. But in every thing they undertook they were much in earnest. They read their works to each other for mutual, friendly criticism, and discussed freely whatever was written at the time, and whatever they thought would tend to revive the decayed spirit of their country. They read, too, and examined the literature of other nations; and, if their tendencies were more towards the school of Boileau and the great masters of Italy, than might have been anticipated from the spirit of their association, it should be borne in mind, that two of their most active members were Italian men of letters, that the court had recently come from Naples, and that the spirit of the times much favored all that was French, and especially the French theatre.[344]
Among the most interesting members of this agreeable society was José de Cadahalso, a gentleman descended from one of the old mountain families of the North of Spain, but born at Cadiz in 1741. His education was conducted from early youth in Paris, but before he was twenty years old he had visited Italy, Germany, England, and Portugal, and obtained a knowledge of the language and literature of each, and especially of England, sufficient to emancipate him from many national prejudices, and make him more useful to the cause of letters at home than he would otherwise have been.
On his return to Spain he took the military dress of Santiago, and entered the army. There he rose rapidly, till he reached the rank of colonel; but, in all the different places to which his own choice or the service of his regiment carried him,—Saragossa, Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, and Salamanca,—he sought occasion to continue his earlier pursuits, and succeeded in connecting himself with the leading spirits of the time, such as Moratin, Iglesias, Yriarte, the wise Jovellanos, and the young and promising Melendez Valdes. But his career, though successful, was short. He perished at the siege of Gibraltar, struck by a bomb, on the 27th of February, 1782, and the governor of the besieged fortress joined in the general sorrow over the grave of an honorable enemy who had been distinguished alike in letters and in arms.[345]
In 1772 Cadahalso published his “Eruditos á la Violeta,” or Fashionable Learning, to which, from its considerable success, he added a supplement the same year. The original work is a pleasant satire on the superficial scholarship of his times, and is thrown into the form of directions how to teach the whole circle of human knowledge in a course of lectures, that shall just fill the seven days of the week; the supplement giving a few further illustrations of the same subject, and some of the results of such teachings on the unhappy scholars who had been its victims. This, with a volume of poems printed the next year, and containing several careful translations from the ancients, a few satirical trifles after the manner of Quevedo, and a good many Anacreontic songs and tales in the manner of Villegas, are all of his works that were published during his lifetime.
But after his death there was found among his papers a collection of letters, supposed to have been written by a person connected with an embassy to Spain from Morocco, and addressed to his friends at home. They belong to the large family of works of fiction, begun by Marana’s “Turkish Spy,” and are commonly set down as imitations of Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters,” but, in fact, show a nearer relationship with Goldsmith’s “Citizen of the World.” The whole work, however, is more occupied with literary discussions and temporary satire, than either of those just referred to; and therefore, though it is written in a pure and pleasant style, with wit and good sense, it has been far from obtaining a place, like theirs, in the general regard of the world. Still, like the rest of his posthumous works, which comprise a few more compositions in prose satire and a few more poems, the best of which are in the old short verses always so popular in Spain, “The Moorish Letters” of Cadahalso have been often reprinted, and probably are not destined to be forgotten.[346]
Another member of the society founded by Moratin, and one of the most prominent of them, was Thomas de Yriarte, a gentleman who was born on the island of Teneriffe in 1750, but received that part of his education which decided the course of his life at Madrid, under the auspices of his uncle, Don Juan de Yriarte, the learned head of the King’s Library. The young man was known as a dramatic writer, and as a translator of French plays for the royal theatres, from the age of eighteen; and from the age of twenty-one, when he printed some good Latin verses on the birth of the Infante, afterwards Charles the Fourth, he was distinguished at court for his accomplishments both in ancient and modern literature. Soon after this period he received a place under the government; and, though his employments, both in the Office of Foreign Affairs and in that of the Department of War, were of an intellectual nature, still his time was much occupied by them, and his opportunities for the indulgence of a poetical taste were much diminished. Besides this, he had rivalries and troubles with Sedano, Melendez, Forner, and some others of his contemporaries, and was summoned before the Inquisition in 1786, as one tainted with the new French philosophy. The result of all these trials and interruptions was, that when, after his death, which occurred in 1791, his works were collected and published, more than half of the eight small volumes through which they were spread was found to consist of translations and personal controversies; the translations made with skill, and the quarrels managed with spirit and wit, but neither of them important enough to be now remembered.
His original poetry is better. It is marked by purity of style, regularity, and elegance, but not by power or elevation. The best of what is merely miscellaneous is to be found in eleven Epistles, with one of which, addressed to his friend Cadahalso, he dedicates to him a translation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry.” But in two departments, where his natural taste led him to labor with a decided preference, he apparently made more effort than in any other, and had greater success.
The first of these was didactic poetry. His poem “On Music,”—a subject which he chose from his considerable proficiency in that art,—appeared in 1780, and was soon favorably known, not only at home, but in Italy and France. It consists of five books, in which he discusses with philosophical precision the elements of music; musical expression of different kinds, but especially martial and sacred; the music of the theatre; that of society; and that of man in solitude. The poem is written in the free, national silva, irregular, but flowing, and no want of skill is shown in its management. But, as a whole, it has too little richness and vigor to give life to the cold forms of instruction, in which it is throughout rigorously cast.[347]
The other department, in which Yriarte was more successful, was that of fables. Here he, in some degree, struck out a new path; for he not only invented all his fictions, which no other fabulist in modern times had done, but restricted them all, in their moral purpose, to the correction of the faults and follies of men of learning,—an application which had not before been thought of. Their whole number, including a few that are posthumous, is nearly eighty, above sixty of which appeared in 1782. They are written with great care, in no less than forty different measures, and show an extraordinary degree of ingenuity in adapting the attributes and instincts of animals to the instruction, not of mankind at large, as had always been done before, but to that of a separate and small class, between whom and the inferior creation the resemblance is rarely obvious. The task was certainly a difficult one. Perhaps, on this account, they are too narrative in their structure, and fail somewhat in the genial spirit which distinguishes Æsop and La Fontaine, the greatest masters of Apologue and Fable. But their influence was so much needed in the age of bad writing when they appeared, and they are besides so graceful in their versification, that they were not only received with great favor at first, but have never lost it since. Their author’s reputation, in fact, now rests on them almost exclusively.[348]
Yriarte, however, had a rival, who shared these honors with him, and in some respects obtained them even earlier. This was Samaniego, a Biscayan gentleman of rank and fortune, who was born in 1745, and died in 1801; having devoted his life, in the most disinterested manner, to the welfare of his native province. He was one of the earliest and most active members of the first of those societies sometimes called “Friends of the Country,” and sometimes “Societies for Public Improvement,” which began in the reign of Charles the Third, and soon spread through Spain, exercising an important influence on the education and public economy of the kingdom, and laboring to raise the arts of life from the degraded condition into which they had fallen during the latter period of the dominion of the House of Austria.
The Biscayan Society, founded in 1765, devoted itself much to the education of the people; and, to favor this great cause, Samaniego undertook to write fables suited to the capacity of the children taught in the Society’s seminary. How early he began to prepare them is not known; but in the first portion, published in 1781, and therefore one year before those of Yriarte appeared, he speaks of Yriarte as his model, and leaves no doubt that the fables of that poet had been seen by him. The second part of Samaniego’s collection was published in 1784, when that of his rival had been admired by the public long enough to change the relations of the two authors, and bring up a quarrel of pamphlets between them, little creditable to either. Both parts, taken together, contain a hundred and fifty-seven fables, the last nineteen of which and a few others are original, while the rest are taken, partly from Æsop, Phædrus, and the Oriental fabulists, but chiefly from La Fontaine and Gay. They succeeded at once. The children learned them by heart, and the teachers of the children found in them subjects for pleasant reading and reflection. They were, no doubt, less carefully written than the fables of Yriarte, less original and less exactly adapted to their purpose; but they were more free-hearted, more natural, and adapted to a larger class of readers; in short, there is a more easy poetical genius about them, and therefore, even if they cannot claim a higher merit than those of Yriarte, they have taken a stronger hold on the national regard.[349]
The best of them are the shortest and simplest, like the following, entitled “The Scrupulous Cats,” which was well suited to the time when it appeared, and can hardly be amiss at any other.
Two cats, old Tortoise-back and Kate,
Once from its spit a capon ate.
It was a giddy thing, be sure,
And one they could not hide or cure.
They licked themselves, however, clean,
And then sat down behind a screen,
And talked it over. Quite precise,
They took each other’s best advice,
Whether to eat the spit or no?
“And did they eat it?” “Sir, I trow,
They did not! They were honest things,
Who had a conscience, and knew how it stings.”[350]
Samaniego was not the only person who, without belonging to the society of Moratin and his friends, coöperated with them in their efforts to encourage a better tone in the literature of their country. Among those who, from a similar impulse, but with less success, took the same direction, were Arroyal, who, in 1784, published a collection of poems, which he calls Odes, but which are oftener epigrams; and Montengon, a Jesuit, who, after the expulsion of his Order from Spain, began, in 1786, with his “Eusebio,” a work on education, partly in imitation of the “Télémaque,” and then went on rapidly with a prose epic called “Rodrigo,” a volume of Odes, and several other works, written with little talent, and showing by their inaccuracies of style that their author had been an exile in Italy till his mother tongue had become strange to him. To these should be added Gregorio de Salas, a quiet ecclesiastic, who wrote odes, fables, and other trifles, that were several times printed after 1790; Ignacio de Meras, a courtier of the worst days of Charles the Fourth, whose worthless dramas and miscellaneous poetry appeared in 1792; and the Count de Noroña, a soldier and diplomatist, who, besides a dull epic on the separation of the Arabian empire in Spain from that of the East, printed, in 1799-1800, two volumes of verse so light, that they procured for him sometimes the title of the Spanish Dorat. But all these writers only showed a constantly increasing disposition to fall more and more into the feebler French school of the eighteenth century; and while none of them had the talent of the few active spirits collected at the Fonda de San Sebastian in Madrid, none certainly exercised the sort of influence they did on the poetry of their time.[351]