CHAPTER V.
School of Salamanca. — Melendez Valdes. — Gonzalez. — Forner. — Iglesias. — Cienfuegos. — Jovellanos. — Muñoz. — Escoiquiz. — Moratin the Younger. — Quintana.
Both the parties, into which Spanish literature was divided about the middle of the eighteenth century, erred by running into those extremes of opinion which are rarely right in any thing and never in matters of taste. Moratin was wrong in speaking with contempt of such poetry as the fine old ballad of “Calaynos,” and Huerta was equally wrong when he said, that the “Athalie” of Racine might be fit to be represented by boarding-school misses, but was fit for nothing else. It was natural, therefore, that another party, or school, should be formed, which should endeavour to avoid the excesses of both its predecessors, and unite their merits; one that should not be insensible to the power and richness of the old writers of the time of the Philips, and yet, escaping from their extravagances and bad taste, should mould itself in some degree according to the severe state of literary opinion then prevailing on the Continent. Such a school in fact appeared at Salamanca in the latter part of the reign of Charles the Third and the beginning of that of Charles the Fourth.
Its proper founder was Melendez Valdes, who was born in Estremadura, in 1754, and at the age of eighteen was sent to study at Salamanca, where, if he did not pass the larger remaining portion of his life, he passed at least its happiest and best years.[352] As a versifier, he began early, and in a bad school; writing at first in the manner of Lobo, who was still read and admired. But he soon fell indirectly under the influence of Moratin and his friends at Madrid, who were in every way opposed to the bad taste of their time. By a fortunate accident Cadahalso was carried fresh from the meetings of the club of the Fonda de San Sebastian to Salamanca. His discerning kindness detected at once the talent its possessor had not yet discovered. He took Melendez into his house; showed him the merit of the elder literature of his country, as well as that of the other cultivated nations of Europe; and devoted himself so earnestly and so affectionately to the development of his young friend’s genius, that it was afterwards said, with some truth, that, among all the works of Cadahalso, the best was Melendez. At the same period, too, Melendez became acquainted with Iglesias and Gonzalez; and through the latter was placed in relations of friendship with the commanding mind of Jovellanos, who exercised from the first moment of their intercourse an obvious and salutary influence over him.
His earliest public success was in 1780, when he obtained a prize offered by the Spanish Academy for the best eclogue. Yriarte, who was some years older, and had already become favorably known at court and in the capital, was his most formidable rival. But the poem Yriarte offered, which is on the pleasures of a country life, as set forth by one disgusted with that of the city, is somewhat in the formal, declamatory style of the less fortunate portions of the older Spanish pastorals; while that of Melendez is fresh from the fields, and as one of the judges said, in the discussion that followed its reading, seems absolutely to smell of their wild flowers. It was, indeed, in sweetness and gentleness, if not in originality and strength, such a return to the tones of Garcilasso, as had not been heard in Spain for above a century. Yriarte received the second honors of the contest, but was not satisfied with such a decision, and made known his feelings by an ill-judged attack upon the successful eclogue of his rival. The popular favor, however, fully sustained the Academy, and its vote on that occasion has never been reversed.
The next year Melendez came to Madrid. He was received with great kindness by Jovellanos and his friends; and obtained new honors at the Academy of San Fernando, by an ode “On the Glory of the Arts,” which that Academy had been founded to foster. But his preference was still for his old poetical haunts on the banks of the Tórmes, and, having obtained the chair of Professor of the Humanities or Philology, at Salamanca, he gladly returned thither, and devoted himself to its unostentatious duties.
In 1784, at the suggestion of Jovellanos, he became a competitor for the prize offered by the city of Madrid for a comedy, and wrote “The Marriage of Camacho.” But his talent was not dramatic; and therefore, though he obtained the votes of the judges, he did not, to the great disappointment of his patron, obtain those of the public when his drama was brought to the test of a free representation.
This failure, however, he retrieved a year afterwards, by publishing 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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]