CHAPTER XL.
Concluding Remarks on the Second Period. — Decay of the National Character. — Diminished Number of Writers and Diminished Interest of the Public in Letters. — Ruin of the State begun in the Time of Philip the Second, and Continued in the Reigns of Philip the Third, Philip the Fourth, and Charles the Second. — Effects of this Condition of Things on Literary Culture. — False Influences of Religion. — False Influences of Loyalty.
It is impossible to study with care the Spanish literature of the seventeenth century, and not feel that we are in the presence of a general decay of the national character. At every step, as we advance, the number of writers that surround us is diminished. In what crowds they were gathered together during the reigns of Philip the Second and Philip the Third, we may see in the long lists of poets given by Cervantes in his “Galatea” and his “Journey to Parnassus,” and by Lope de Vega in his “Laurel of Apollo.” But in the reign of Philip the Fourth, though the theatre, from accidental circumstances, flourished more than ever, the other departments showed symptoms of decline; and in the reign of Charles the Second, wherever we turn, the number of authors sinks away, till it is obvious that some great change must take place, or elegant literature in Spain will speedily become extinct.
The public interest, too, in the few writers that remained, was gone. At least, that general, national interest, which alone can sustain the life it alone can give to the literature of any country, was no longer there; and all the favor, that Spanish poets and men of letters enjoyed at the end of the century, came from the court and the superficial fashion of the time, which patronized the affected style of those followers of Góngora, whose bad taste seemed to go on increasing in extravagance, as talent among them grew more rare.
Every thing, meanwhile, announced, that the great foundations of the national character were giving way on all sides; and that the failing literature of the country was only one of the phases and signs of the coming overthrow of its institutions. The decay which was so visible on the surface of things had, however, long mined unseen beneath what had been thought a period of extraordinary security and glory. Charles the Fifth, while, on the one side, by the war of the Comuneros, he had crushed nearly all of political liberty that Cardinal Ximenes had left in the old constitutions of Castile, had given, on the other, by his magnificent foreign conquests, a false direction to the character of his people at home;—both tending alike to waste away that vigor and independence which the Moorish wars had nourished in the hearts of the nation, and which had so long constituted its real strength. Philip the Second had been less successful than his father in his great labors to advance the permanent prosperity of the monarchy. He had, indeed, added Portugal and the Philippine Islands to his empire, which now comprehended above a hundred millions of human beings, and seemed to threaten the interests of all the rest of Europe. But such doubtful benefits were heavily overbalanced by the religious rebellion of the Netherlands, the fatal source of unnumbered mischiefs; by the exhausting wars with Elizabeth of England and Henry the Fourth of France; by the contempt for labor, that followed the extraordinary prevalence of a spirit of military adventure, and broke down the industry of the country; by the vast increase of the ecclesiastical institutions, which created a ruinous amount of pensioned idleness; and by the wasteful luxury brought in with the gold of America, which seemed to corrupt whatever it touched; so that, when that wary prince died, he left an impoverished people, whose energies he had overstrained and impaired by his despotism, and whose character he had warped and misdirected by his unrelenting and unscrupulous bigotry.[262]
His successor, feeble-minded and superstitious, was neither able to repair the results of such mischiefs, nor to contend with the difficulties they entailed upon his country. The power of the clergy, grown enormous by the favor of Philip the Second and the consolidated influence of the Jesuits, continued to gain strength, as it were of itself; and, under the direct persuasions of this mighty hierarchy, nearly six hundred thousand descendants of Moors—who, though preserving, as their fathers had done for a century, the external appearances of Christianity, were yet suspected of being Mohammedans at heart—were now, by a great crime of state, expelled from the land of their birth; a crime followed by injuries to the agriculture and wealth of the South of Spain, and indeed of the whole country, from which they have never recovered.[263]
The easy, gay selfishness of Philip the Fourth, and the open profligacy of his ministers, gave increased activity to the causes that were hastening on the threatened ruin. Catalonia broke out into rebellion; Jamaica was seized by the English; Roussillon was ceded to France; Portugal, which had never been heartily incorporated into the monarchy, resumed her ancient place among the independent nations of the earth;—every thing, in short, showed how the external relations of the state were disturbed and endangered. Its internal condition, meanwhile, was no less shaken. The coin, notwithstanding the wise warnings of Mariana, had been adulterated anew; the taxes had been shamelessly increased, while the interest on the ever-growing public debt was dishonestly diminished. Men, everywhere, began to be alarmed at the signs of the times. The timid took shelter in celibacy and the institutions of the Church. The bolder emigrated. At last, the universal pressure began to be visible in the state of the population. Whole towns and villages were deserted. Seville, the ancient capital of the monarchy, lost three quarters of its inhabitants; Toledo one third; Segovia, Medina del Campo, and others of the large cities, fell off still more, not only in their numbers and opulence, but in whatever goes to make up the great aggregate of civilization. The whole land, in fact, was impoverished, and was falling into a premature decay.
The necessary results of such a deplorable state of things are yet more apparent in the next reign,—the unhappy reign of Charles the Second,—which began with the troubles incident to a long minority, and ended with a failure in the regular line of succession, and a contest for the throne. It was a dreary period, with marks of dilapidation and ruin on all sides. Beginning at the southern borders of France, and following the coast by Barcelona and Gibraltar round to Cadiz, not one of the great fortresses, which were the keys of the kingdom, was in a state to defend itself against the most moderate force by which it might be assailed. On the Atlantic, the old arsenals, from which the Armada had gone forth, were empty; and the art of ship-building had been so long neglected, that it was almost, or quite lost.[264] And, in the capital and at court, the revenues of the country, which had long been exhausted and anticipated, were at last unable to provide for the common wants of the government, and sometimes even failed to furnish forth the royal table with its accustomed propriety; so that the envoy of Austria expressed his regret at having accepted the place of ambassador at a court where he was compelled to witness a misery so discreditable.[265]
It was a new lesson to the world in the vicissitudes of empire. No country in Christendom had, from such a height of power as that which Spain occupied in the time of Charles the Fifth, fallen into such an abyss of degradation as that in which every proud Spaniard felt Spain to be sunk, when the last of the great House of Austria approached the grave, believing himself to be under the influence of sorcery, and seeking relief by exorcisms which would have disgraced the credulity of the Middle Ages;—all, too, at the time when France was jubilant with the victories of Condé, and England preparing for the age of Marlborough.[266]
In any country, such a decay in the national character and power would be accompanied by a corresponding, if not an equal, decay in its literature; but in Spain, where both had always been so intimately connected, and where both had rested, in such a remarkable degree, on the same foundations, the wise who looked on from a distance could not fail to anticipate a rapid and disastrous decline of all that was intellectual and elegant. And so, in fact, it proved. The old religion of the country,—the most prominent of all the national characteristics,—the mighty impulse which, in the days of the Moors, had done every thing but work miracles,—was now so perverted from its true character by the enormous growth of the intolerance which sprang up originally almost as a virtue, that it had become a means of oppression such as Europe had never before witnessed. Through the whole period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which we have just gone over,—from the fall of Granada to the extinction of the Austrian dynasty,—the Inquisition, as the grand exponent of the power of religion in Spain, had maintained, not only an uninterrupted authority, but, by constantly increasing its relations to the state, and lending itself more and more freely to the punishment of whatever was obnoxious to the government, had effectually broken down all that remained, from earlier days, of intellectual independence and manly freedom. But this was not done, and could not be done, without the assent of the great body of the people, or without such an active coöperation on the part of the government and the higher classes as brought degradation and ruin to all who shared in its spirit.
Unhappily, this spirit, mistaken for the religion that had sustained them through their long-protracted contest with their infidel invaders, was all but universal in Spain during this whole period. The first and the last of the House of Austria,—Charles the Fifth and the feeblest of his descendants,—if alike in nothing else, were alike in the zeal with which they sustained the Holy Office while they lived, and with which, by their testaments, they commended it to the support and veneration of their respective successors.[267] Nor did the intervening kings show less deference to its authority. The first royal act of Philip the Second, when he came from the Low Countries to assume the crown of Spain, was to celebrate an auto da fé at Valladolid.[268] When the young and gay daughter of Henry the Second of France arrived at Toledo, in 1560, that city offered an auto da fé as part of the rejoicings deemed appropriate to her wedding; and the same thing was done by Madrid, in 1632, for another French princess, when she gave birth to an heir to the crown;[269]—odious proofs of the degree to which bigotry had stifled both the dictates of an enlightened reason and the common feelings of humanity.
But in all this the people and their leaders rejoiced. When a nobleman, about to die for adherence to the Protestant faith, passed the balcony where Philip the Second sat in state, and appealed to him not to see his innocent subjects thus cruelly put to death, the monarch replied, that, if it were his own son, he would gladly carry the fagots for his execution; and the answer was received at the time, and recorded afterwards, as one worthy of the head of the mightiest empire in the world.[270] And again, in 1680, when Charles the Second was induced to signify his desire to enjoy, with his young bride, the spectacle of an auto da fé, the artisans of Madrid volunteered in a body to erect the needful amphitheatre, and labored with such enthusiasm, that they completed the vast structure in an incredibly short space of time; cheering one another at their work with devout exhortations, and declaring that, if the materials furnished them should fail, they would pull down their own houses in order to obtain what might be wanting to complete the holy task.[271]
Nor had the principle of loyalty, always so prominent in the Spanish character, become less perverted and mischievous than the religious principle. It offered its sincere homage alike to the cold severity of Philip the Second, to the weak bigotry of Philip the Third, to the luxurious selfishness of Philip the Fourth, and to the miserable imbecility of Charles the Second. The waste and profligacy of such royal favorites as the Duke of Lerma and the Count Duke Olivares, which ended in national bankruptcy and disgrace, failed seriously to affect the sentiments of the people towards the person of the monarch, or to change their persuasions that their earthly sovereign was to be addressed in words and with feelings similar to those with which they approached the Majesty of Heaven.[272] The king—merely because he was the king—was looked upon substantially as he had been in the days of Saint Ferdinand and the “Partidas,” when he was accounted the direct vicegerent of Heaven, and the personal proprietor of all those portions of the globe which he had inherited with his crown.[273] The Duc de Vendôme, therefore, showed his thorough knowledge of the Spanish character, when, in the War of the Succession,—Madrid being in possession of the enemy, and every thing seeming to be lost,—he still declared, that, if the persons of the king, the queen, and the prince were but safe, he would himself answer for final success.[274] In fact, the old principle of loyalty, sunk into a submission—voluntary, it is true, and not without grace, but still an unhesitating submission—to the mere authority of the king, seemed to have become the only efficient bond of connection between the crown and its subjects, and the main resource of the state for the preservation of social order. The nation ceased to claim its most important rights, if they came in conflict with the rights claimed by the royal prerogative; so that the resistance of Aragon in the case of Perez, and that of Catalonia against the oppressive administration of the Count Duke Olivares, were easily put down by the zeal of the very descendants of the Comuneros of Castile.
It is this degradation of the loyalty and religion of the country, infecting as it did every part of the national character, which we have felt to be undermining the general culture of Spain during the seventeenth century; its workings being sometimes visible on the surface, and sometimes hidden by the vast and showy apparatus of despotism and superstition under which it was often concealed even from its victims. But it is a most melancholy fact in the case, that whatever of Spanish literature survived at the end of this period found its nourishment in such feelings of religion and loyalty as still sustained the forms of the monarchy,—an imperfect and unhealthy life, wasting away in an atmosphere of death. At last, as we approach the conclusion of the century, the Inquisition and the despotism seem to be everywhere present, and to have cast their blight over every thing. All the writers of the time yield to their influences, but none in a manner more painful to witness, than Calderon and Solís; the two whose names close up the period, and leave so little to hope for the future. For the “Autos” of Calderon and the “History” of Solís were undoubtedly regarded, both by their authors and by the public, as works eminently religious in their nature; and the respect, and even reverence, with which each of these great men treated the wretched and imbecile Charles the Second, were as undoubtedly accounted to them by their contemporaries for religious loyalty and patriotism. At the present day, we cannot doubt that a literature which rests in any considerable degree on such foundations must be near to its fall.[275]
HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.