The poet Luis de Gongora was born in the city in 1561. His first studies were at the University of Salamanca, whither he was sent at the age of fifteen, to learn law. While at the College he became exceedingly worn in health, but his disease was not mortal, and his recovery was accounted miraculous. While still a youth Gongora wrote poetry. He showed but little aptitude for the profession of lawyer, and upon his return to Cordova he cultivated his bent for poetry.
In person Luis de Gongora was tall and powerfully built. He was a caustic writer, and in his first period his style was simple and delightful. But he became more mannered and affected as he grew older, and his later work was marred by pomposity, extravagance, and often by sheer absurdity. His mannerisms were, however, regarded as the fruit of rare genius by his host of disciples and imitators. Gongorism became the fashion among poetasters in Spain, and the followers of this master of eccentricity were slavish flatterers and fanatical worshippers.
At forty-five Gongora left Cordova and entered the Church. He afterwards lived in Madrid. In the capital he was under the patronage of influential hidalgos and nobles, and Philip III. made him his honorary chaplain. Gongora eventually returned to his native place, where he died at the age of sixty-six, in the year 1627.
In spite of his stilted style and metrical defects, Gongora was endowed with true poetic talent. Writing of him, Lope de Vega said: ‘I have known this gentleman for eight-and-twenty years, and I hold him to be possessed of the rarest and most excellent talent of any in Cordova, so that he need not yield even to Seneca or Lucan, who were natives of the same town.’
APPENDIX I
THE GREAT MOSQUE OF CORDOVA
It is not a little singular that the present Cathedral of Cordova is better known to the inhabitants of the city as La Mezquita, or Mosque, than by its Christian designation; which circumstance may be taken as a proof of the great influence exerted over Spanish thought and feeling by the Moorish occupation of the Peninsula.
The truth is that Spanish and Moorish interests had much in common, and both nations had equal pride in the celebration of notable deeds performed by Mussulman or Christian. The mingling of the two peoples after the conquest of Granada gave, at least to the commonalty of both nations, a spirit of charity which it had been better to foster than to extinguish.
This gentle sentiment is well expressed in a lament by Amados de los Rios, a great Spanish antiquary and Orientalist, who sings a mournful requiem over the departed glories of the Mosque, once the model of Arab architecture, and the pride of Islam:—
‘Neither the sumptuous Christian fabric that to-day rises in the midst of those countless columns, nor all the treasures of art lavished upon it by the celebrated artists of the sixteenth century who erected it, nor that interminable series of chapels of every epoch which, resting against the walls of the Mosque, disfigure it; nor the clumsy angels that seem to suspend their flight to shed glory over the divine service, nor the words of the Evangelist sounding from the seat of the Holy Spirit, can dispel or banish in the slightest degree the majesty of those wandering shades, that in vain seek in the sanctuary the sacred volume whose leaves, according to tradition, were enamelled with the blood of the Khalif Othman, martyr to the faith. A world of souvenirs here enthralls the mind of the traveller as he gazes with a feeling of sorrow upon these profanations,—works dictated by the intolerant yet sincere faith of our ancestors, impelled by the desire of banishing for ever from that spot consecrated to the law of Jesus, the spirit of Mohammed and the ghosts of his slaves that haunt it, and will for ever haunt it while it exists. For, in spite of the mutilations it has endured, and of the changes it has undergone, there is impressed upon it, by a superior ineradicable law, the seal of the art that inspired it, and the character of the people by whom it was planned and erected.’
Don Amados is not alone in his eloquent, if unavailing protest. When Charles V., in 1526, visited Cordova, and observed St. Peter’s (the Coro) rising out of the very centre of the Mosque, he rebuked the Bishop, Alonso Manriquez, who had erected the incongruous edifice, in no measured terms. When the king saw the extent of the mischief, he said: ‘You have built here what you or any one might have built elsewhere; but you have spoilt what was unique in the world.’ Alas! the monarch had forgotten, or did not choose to remember, that the declaration came with a very bad grace from one who, for his never-completed palace at Granada, had torn down whole Courts and Halls of the Alhambra.