Can comprehend my words, though still endued
With power to raise my heavy Spanish dough.
And Father Isla makes himself merry with the idea of a man who fancies he has married an Andalusian or Castilian wife, and finds out that she proves little better than a Frenchwoman after all.[295]
Translations from the French followed this state of things; and, at last, an attempt was made to introduce formally into Spain a poetical system founded on the critical doctrines prevalent in France. Its author, Ignacio de Luzan, a gentleman of Aragon, was born in 1702; and, while still a child, went to Italy and received a learned education in the schools of Milan, Palermo, and Naples; remaining abroad eighteen years, and enjoying the society of several of the most distinguished Italian poets of the time, among whom were Maffei and Metastasio. At last, in 1733, he returned to Spain, a well-bred scholar, according to the ideas of scholarship then prevalent in Italy, and with a singular facility in writing and speaking French and Italian.
His personal affairs and his native modesty kept him for some time in retirement on the estates of his family in Aragon. But, in the condition to which Spanish literature was then reduced, a man of so many accomplishments could hardly fail, in any position, to make his influence felt. That of Luzan soon became perceptible, because he loved to write, and wrote a great deal. In Italy and Sicily he had published, not only Italian poetry of his own, but French. In his native language and at home, he naturally went further. He translated from Anacreon, Sappho, and Musæus; he fitted dramas of Maffei, La Chaussée, and Metastasio to the Spanish stage; and he wrote a considerable number of short poems, and one original drama, “Virtue Honored,” which was privately represented in Saragossa.
Whatever he did was well received, but little of it was published at the time, and not much has appeared since. His “Odes on the Conquest of Oran” were particularly admired by his friends, and, though somewhat cold, may still be read with pleasure. These and other compositions made him known to the government at Madrid, and procured for him, in 1747, the appointment of Secretary to the Spanish embassy at Paris. There he remained three years, and, from the absence of the ambassador, acted, for a large part of the time, as the only representative of his country at the French court. On his return home, he continued to enjoy the confidence of the king; and when he died suddenly, in 1754, he was in great favor, and about to receive a place of more consequence than any he had yet held.[296]
The circumstances of the country, and those of his own education, position, and tastes, opened to Luzan, as a critic, a career of almost assured success. Every thing was so enfeebled and degraded, that it could offer no effectual resistance to what he might teach. The political importance of his country among the nations of Europe had been crushed. Its moral dignity was impaired. Its school of poetry had disappeared. The old system of things in Spain, as far as poetical culture was concerned, had passed away, no less than the Austrian dynasty, with which it had come in; and no attempt deserving the name had yet been made to determine what should be the intellectual character of the system that should follow it. A small effort, under such circumstances, would go far towards imparting a decisive movement; and, in literary taste and criticism, Luzan was certainly well fitted to give the guiding impulse. He had been educated with great thoroughness in the principles of the classical French school, and he possessed all the learning necessary to make known and support its peculiar doctrines. In 1728, he had offered to the Academy at Palermo, of which he was a member, six critical discussions on poetry, written in Italian; so that, when he returned to Spain, he had only to take these papers and work them into a formal treatise, suited to what he deemed the pressing wants of the country. He did so;—and the result was his “Art of Poetry,” the first edition of which appeared in 1737.
The attempt was by no means a new one. The rules and doctrines of the ancients, in matters of taste and rhetoric, had frequently before been announced and defended in Spain. Even Enzina, the oldest of those who regarded Castilian poetry as an art, was not ignorant of Quintilian and Cicero, though, in his short treatise, which shows more good sense and good taste than can be claimed from the age, he takes substantially the same view of his subject that the Marquis of Villena and the Provençals had taken before him,—considering all poetry chiefly with reference to its mechanical forms.[297] Rengifo, a teacher of grammar and rhetoric, whose “Spanish Art of Poetry” dates from 1592, confines himself almost entirely to the structure of the verse and the technical forms known both to the elder Castilian style of composition and to the Italian introduced by Boscan;—a curious discussion, in which the authority of the ancients is by no means forgotten, but one whose chief value consists in what it contains relating to the national school and its peculiar measures.[298]
Alonso Lopez, commonly called El Pinciano,—the same person who wrote the dull epic on Pelayo,—went further, and in 1596 published his “Ancient Poetical Philosophy,” in which, under the disguise of a friendly correspondence, he gives, with much learning and some acuteness, his own views of the opinions of the ancient masters on all the modes of poetical composition.[299] Cascales followed him, in 1616, with a series of dialogues, somewhat more familiar than the grave letters of Lopez, and resting more on the doctrines of Horace, whose epistle to the Pisos he afterwards published, with a well-written Latin commentary.[300] Salas, on the contrary, in his “New Idea of Ancient Tragedy,” which appeared in 1633, followed Aristotle rather than any other authority, and illustrated his discussion—which is the ablest in Spanish literature on the side it sustains—by a translation of the “Trojanæ” of Seneca, and an address of the theatre of all ages to its various audiences.[301]
All these works, however, and three or four others of less consequence, assumed, so far as they attempted to lay their foundations in philosophy, to be built on the rules laid down by Aristotle or the Roman rhetoricians.[302] In this they committed a serious error. Ancient rhetoric can be applied, in all its strictness, to no modern poetry, and least of all to the poetry of Spain. The school of Lope de Vega, therefore, passed over them like an irresistible flood, leaving behind it hardly a trace of the structures that had been raised to oppose its progress. But Luzan took a different ground. His more immediate predecessors had been Gracian, who defended the Gongorism of the preceding period, and Artiga, who, in a long treatise “On Spanish Eloquence,” written in the ballad measures, had seemed willing to encourage all the bad taste that prevailed in the beginning of the eighteenth century.[303]