This last name introduces us to another controversy, which, though connected in the most intimate way with our subject, is a sort of appendix to it, and one of those appendices which, in some cases, one must ruthlessly cut short. Gongorism, Culteranism, &c. The quarrels over Lope (whom, by the way, Góngora himself savagely attacked) were succeeded by the battle of culteranismo, again distinguished by that curious see-sawing which, as we have seen, marks the Spaniards on almost all critical points. Quevedo, for instance, and the above-mentioned Gonzales de Salas, behave like those capricious knights of Spenser’s, who were always changing sides in the battle, and running tilt at the very champions by whose side they had lately charged. Quevedo. Quevedo in particular has a most extraordinary record in this matter. I do not think that, in my limited reading of Spanish, I have ever laughed more over anything than over his Cuento de Cuentos,[[460]] and his Catechism to help to translate the jargonizing ladies, where he addresses himself Al caro, diáfano, transparente e mediano Lector, gives instructions in the best manner of precious speech, and advises that a wife should call her husband mi quotidio, and he her su sempiterna, while neither will dream of speaking of a “gota de agua,” but will, of course, denominate it a podagra. Yet Quevedo at other times did more than condescend to cultism, or culteranism, as it seems to be indifferently called.
Gracián.
The great prose apostle of the cult, as Góngora was its poet, was Balthasar Gracián, who has not a little for us in his famous Agudeza y arte de ingenio,[[461]] the Bible of preciosity, with its motto, En Nada Vulgar, and its doctrine (II. 49), that La semejança es origen de una immensidad conceptuosa tirar principio de agudeza sin limite. His name gives an opportunity of illustrating the difficulty of treating cosas de España. The limitations of Spanish criticism. I am not aware of any living English authorities on Spanish literature who can be placed above Mr David Hannay and Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly. Of these, the first says[[462]] that it was Gracián’s “chosen function to be the critic, prophet, and populariser of Gongorism”; the second,[[463]] that “No man ever wrote ... with more scorn of Gongorism and all its work.” Who shall decide when doctors of this degree disagree to this extent? I am, so far as my very poor and imperfect knowledge of the texts goes, with Mr Hannay: but that is not to the point.
What, I think, is to the point, and what I may say with some general knowledge of criticism, if with little particular knowledge of Spanish, is that the very nature of the subject invites, excuses, necessitates such differences. The Spaniards, if I may be pardoned a rough and ugly metaphor, never “digested themselves,” never either kept creation and criticism separate, or waited for the one till the other had ceased. Naturaleza and Agudeza jostle each other constantly in them, with a result of truceless war. One may even wonder whether cultismo, culteranismo, conceptismo,[[464]] coming as they did after the great period of natural freedom, in Lope, and Tirso, and Cervantes at his best, did not do far more than the harm that the much-abused “Metaphysicals” did in English. The practice of Góngora and Gracián, even of Calderon, not seldom belied the arguments of Tirso and of the shadowy Turia and Sanchez. When a Luzán comes in such cases it is too fatally easy for him to say, “Well! whatever the ancients did, they did not do this! There is at any rate no jerigonza in Aristotle or in Horace!” And the Spaniards had no Milton, no Shakespeare to carry them through, as ours carried us through the worst times. Their Cervantes in his great work was of an “off” kind, as yet not fully recognised; their Lope was too fluent, facile, voluminous, unconvincing; their Calderon, with all his marvellous poetical and specially lyrical power, too unequal and perhaps too rhetorical.
Above all, they had the misfortune to have no critic of real authority. The Arte Nuevo is partly clever enough “technical education,” partly bookwork, partly ignoble or inartistic compromise: and if we compare Tasso and Lope, at no such great distance of time, we can only be struck by the enormous advantage of the Italian in serious critical weight. The others, the Pincianos, the Gonzales de Salas, and the rest, were persons, if not exactly of no mark or likelihood, at any rate of no commanding and authoritative importance, like Ben Jonson and Dryden in England, like Boileau in France. Even such comparatively slight examination of the actual texts as I have been able to give has shown me that many most interesting and independently striking aperçus, passages, phrases may be taken from the Spanish critics. But I cannot say that, even after duly perusing and perpending the admirably competent and loving examination of Señor Menéndez, I have been able to form any high opinion of Spanish seventeenth-century criticism as a whole.
[409]. Padua, 1607.
[410]. Padua, 1612.
[411]. 2 vols. fol., Cologne, 1607.