Their blossoms a host of bees, alarmed,
Watched over on jealous wing;
Hoarse trumpeters seemed they all, and armed
Each bee with a diamond sting:
I tore them away, but each flower I tore
Has cost me a wound which smarteth sore.
Now as I these jessamine flowers entwine,
A gift for thy vagrant hair,
I must have, from those honey-sweet lips of thine,
A kiss for each sting I bear:
It is just that the blooms I bring thee home,
Be repaid by sweets from the golden comb."
If from Italian measures we pass to Letrillas and the Castilian Romance, Góngora will be found king of that class, which has received from no one so much grace, so many splendours, and so much poetry. His merit indeed, in this department, is so great, and specimens of his success in it are so common, that there remains no other difficulty to prove it than that of choice. This fragment will suffice for our purpose.
"Now, all pomp, the Moorish hero,
Whilst his robes sweet perfumes throw,
Lays aside his crooked sabre,
Hangs on high his moony bow.
His hoarse tambours, hoarse no longer,
Seem like amorous turtle-doves;
And his pendants streaming favours,
Favours given by her he loves.
She goes forth with bosom naked,
Loosely flow her golden locks;
If she stays them, 'tis with jasmines,
Chains them, 'tis with pinks and stocks.
All things serve their gentle passion,
Every thing fresh joy assumes;
Flattering, if not babbling breezes,
Stir their robes and toss their plumes.
Green fields yield them mossy carpets,
Trees pavilions, flowers the vales,
Peaceful fountains golden slumber,
Music love-lorn nightingales.
Trunks their bark, whose tablets better
Keep their names than plates of brass;
Better far than ivory pages,
Than the marble's sculptured mass.
Not a beech but bears some cipher,
Tender word, or amorous text;
If one vale sounds Angelina,
Angelina sounds the next."
How could a writer possessing this strength and richness afterwards abandon himself to the pitiable frenzies in which he lost himself, without preserving even a shadow of their excellences! Thinking that the poetic period was enervated, and looking upon nature as poverty, purity as subjection, and ease as looseness, he aspired to extend the limits of the language and poetry, by the invention of a new dialect which should re-elevate the art from the plain, dull track into which, according to him, it was reduced. This dialect was distinguished by the novelty of the words, or by their application; by the singularity and dislocation of the phrase, or by the boldness and profusion of its figures; and in it he not only composed his Soledades and Polifemo, but distorted, after the same manner, almost all his sonnets and songs, sprinkling as well with a sufficient number of false ornaments his romances and letrillas.
If Góngora, to the excellent qualities he possessed, had joined the judgment and good taste he wanted; if he had made the same profound study of the language as Herrera, both meditating on the resources which the idiom presented, and attending to its character, richness, and harmony, then would have followed the result he desired, and he would, perhaps, have gained the glory of being the restorer, and not the opprobrium of having been the corrupter of the art. But the same circumstance befel him which befals all who seek to erect a building without foundations; he gave into a world of freaks and extravagances, into an abominable gibberish, as opposite to truth as to beauty, and which, whilst it was followed by a multitude of the ignorant, was censured by as many as yet preserved a spark of sense and judgment.
"He sought," says Lope de Vega, "to enrich the art, and even the language, with such figures and ornaments, as were never, till his time, imagined or beheld. In my opinion, he fully succeeded in what he aimed at, if this was his aim; the difficulty is in receiving it. According to many, he has raised the novelty into a peculiar class of poetry, and they are not at all mistaken; for, in ancient times, men were made poets by the study of a whole life; in the modern, they become poets in a day; as, with a few transpositions, four precepts, and six Latin words or emphatic phrases, you will see them elevated where they neither know nor understand themselves. Lipsius wrote that new Latin which good judges in these matters say Cicero and Quintilian laughed at in the other world. The whole foundation of the structure is transposition; and what makes it the more harsh is the so far separating the substantive from the adjective, where the parenthesis is impossible: it is a composition full of tropes and figures; a face coloured in the manner of angels with the trumpet of judgment, or of the winds in maps. Sonorous words and figures enamel an oration; but if the enamel covers all the gold, it is no longer a grace to the jewelling, but a notable deformity." And in another part he says, "..., without going in search of so many metaphors on metaphors, wasting in rouge what is needed in features, and enfeebling the spirit with the weight of such an excessive body. This it is that has destroyed a great number of talented men in Spain, with such deplorable effect, that an illustrious poet, who, writing with his native powers and in his proper language, was read with general applause, since he has abandoned himself to purism, has lost it all."
Not satisfied with these demonstrations of severity, this placid man, who scarcely knew what malignity was, thought it his duty to persecute the pest as with fire and sword, and in his comedies, in the burlesque poetry of Burguillos, in the Laurel de Apollo, and in a thousand other places, ridiculed and cursed this kind of poetry, which he characterized as "an odious invention to make the language barbarous." He was aided in this warfare by Jauregui, Quevedo, and some others; but their efforts were unavailing, and they themselves were at length forced to yield to the contagion. For though they cannot be called Purists in all the rigour of the term, they adopted some of the elements which composed the dialect, such as violent transpositions, extravagant hyperboles, and incoherent figures. Góngora, meanwhile, as he had never known restraint or subjection, fulminated against his adversaries the grossest taunts; and, fierce and proud from the applauses of the ignorant, internally exulted with all the glory of a triumph. This was increased by the support given to his party by the celebrated preacher, Fray Hortensio Paravicino, from the great influence which he had with the theologians and sacred orators, and by the unfortunate Count de Villamediana, in the secret and powerful favour which he was supposed to have at court. Both imitated Góngora, and drew after them other writers of less note, propagating thus this barbarous language till the middle of the century in which Luzán and other admirable critics entirely succeeded in weaning the nation from it.
At the same time with the Purists appeared the Concettisti, punsters, and utterers of grave saws in frigid and sententious language: D. Francisco de Quevedo surpassed all, as well by his merit as influence, in the progress of these different sects. Quevedo, according to some, is the father of laughter, the treasury of jests, the fountain of wit, the inventor of a number of happy words and phrases, in a word, the Comus of Spain. According to others, he is, on the contrary, a writer inauspicious to the beauty and decorum of wit: his humour, say they, instead of being festive, is low buffoonery; he has impoverished the language, depriving it of an infinite number of modes of speech, once noble and becoming, now, thanks to him, low and indecorous; and if he at any time amuses, it is by the original extravagance of his follies. These two judgments, so contradictory, are yet both true; and if we consider attentively the character of this writer, we shall see what foundation both the one and the other have for their censures and applauses. Quevedo was every thing in excess: no one, in the same manner, displays in the serious a gravity so rigid and morals so austere; no one, in the jocose, shows a humour so gay, so free, and so abandoned to the spirit of the thing. In the choice of his subjects, we are alike sensible of this contrariety. Alguazils, scriveners, procuresses, compliant husbands, ruffians, and women of easy access, generally form the subject matter of his buffooneries; and we must, in justice, acknowledge that he very often lashes them in a masterly manner. At another time a theologian and stoic, he translates Epictetus, comments on Seneca, interprets Scripture, and entangles himself in the useless labyrinths of metaphysics; lost labours, which, for the most part, are no longer read, and which have scarcely any other merit than their astonishing erudition.
From this contradiction springs so often the effort and difficulty with which he writes in both kinds of composition. His style, in prose as in verse, in serious as in jocose, is always struck forth without connexion or graduation, sacrificing almost always truth and nature to exaggeration and hyperbole. His imagination was most vivid and brilliant, but superficial and negligent; and the poetic genius that animates him, sparkles but does not glow, surprises but does not agitate, bounds with impetuosity and force, but neither flies nor ever supports itself at the same elevation. The rage of expressing things with novelty made him call the brink of the sea the law of the sand; love, the civil war of the born; trunks of trees on which lovers' names are engraved, a rural book written in enamel. In burlesque verse, he heaps together forced allusions, ambiguities, and paragraphs of nonsense. A ruffian, to denote how keenly he has felt his disgrace, will say, that he has wept rope for rope, and not, at every lash; he will say, that he has had more grasshoppers than the summer, more tenants than the tomb, more bookstrings than the missal. I am well aware that Quevedo often diverts with what he writes, and raves because it is his pleasure: I know that puns have their proper place in such compositions, and that no one has used them more happily than he. But every thing has its bounds; and, heaped together with a prodigality like his, instead of pleasing, they create only weariness.