Luzan took no notice of either of them. He followed the poetical system of Boileau and Lebossu, not, indeed, forgetting the masters of antiquity, but everywhere accommodating his doctrines to the demands of modern poetry, as Muratori had done just before him, and enforcing them by the example of the French school, then more admired than any other in Europe.[304] His object, as he afterwards explained it, was “to bring Spanish poetry under the control of those precepts which are observed among polished nations”; and his work is arranged with judgment to effect his purpose. The first book treats of the origin and nature of poetry, and the second, of the pleasure and advantage poetry brings with it. These two books constitute one half of the work, and having gone through in them what he thinks it necessary to say of the less important divisions of the art,—such as lyric poetry, satire, and pastorals,—he devotes the two remaining books entirely to a discussion of the drama and of epic poetry,—the forms in which Spanish genius had long been more ambitious of excellence than in any other. A strict method reigns through the whole; and the style, if less rich than is found in the older prose-writers, and less so than the genius of the language demands, is clear, simple, and effective. In explaining and defending his system of opinions, he shows judgment, and a temperate philosophy; and his abundant illustrations, drawn not only from the Castilian, the French, the Greek, and the Latin, but from the Italian and the Portuguese, are selected with excellent taste, and applied skilfully to strengthen his general argument and design. For its purpose, a better treatise could hardly have been produced.
The effect was immediate and great. It seemed to offer a remedy for the bad taste which had accompanied, and in no small degree hastened, the decline of the national literature from the time of Góngora. It was seized on, therefore, with eagerness, as the book that was wanted; and when to this we add that the literature of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, which it held up as the model literature of Christendom, was then regarded throughout Europe with almost unmingled admiration, we shall not be surprised that the “Poética” of Luzan exercised, from its first appearance, a controlling authority over opinion at the court of Spain, and over the few writers of reputation then to be found in the country.[305]
Something more, however, than a reformation in taste was wanted in Spain before a sufficient foundation could be laid for advancement in elegant literature. The commonest forms of truth had been so long excluded from the country, that the human mind there seemed to have pined away, and to have become dwarfed, for want of its appropriate nourishment. All the great sciences, both moral and physical, that had been for a hundred years advancing with an accelerated speed everywhere else throughout Europe, had been unable to force their way through the jealous guard which ecclesiastical and political despotism had joined to keep for ever watching the passes of the Pyrenees. From the days of the Comuneros and the Reformation of Luther, when religious sects began to discuss the authority of princes and the rights of the people, and when the punishment of opinion became the settled policy of the Spanish state, every thing in the shape of instruction that was not approved by the Church was treated as dangerous. At the universities, which from their foundation had been entirely ecclesiastical corporations, and were used constantly to build up ecclesiastical influences, no elegant learning was fostered, and very little tolerated, except such as furnished means to form scholastic Churchmen and faithful Catholics; the physical and exact sciences were carefully excluded and forbidden, except so far as they could be taught on the authority of Aristotle; and, as Jovellanos said boldly in a memorial on the subject to Charles the Fourth, “even medicine and jurisprudence would have been neglected, if the instincts of men had permitted them to forget the means by which life and property are protected.”[306]
The Spanish universities, in fact, still taught from the same books they had used in the time of Cardinal Ximenes, and by the same methods. The scholastic philosophy was still regarded as the highest form of merely intellectual culture. Diego de Torres, afterwards distinguished for his knowledge in the physical sciences,—a man born and educated at Salamanca in the first half of the century,—says, that, after he had been five years in one of the schools of the University there, it was by accident he learned the existence of the mathematical sciences.[307] And, fifty years later, Blanco White declares, that, like most of his countrymen, he should have completed his studies in theology at the University of Seville without so much as hearing of elegant literature, if he had not chanced to make the acquaintance of a person who introduced him to a partial knowledge of Spanish poetry.[308]
Thus far, therefore, the old system of things was triumphant, and the common forms of advancing knowledge were, to an extraordinary and almost incredible degree, kept out of the country. On the other hand, errors, follies, and absurdities sprang up and abounded, just as surely as darkness follows the exclusion of light. Few persons in Spain in the beginning of the eighteenth century were so well informed as not to believe in astrology, and fewer still doubted the disastrous influence of comets and eclipses. The system of Copernicus was not only discouraged, but forbidden to be taught, on the ground that it was contrary to Scripture. The philosophy of Bacon, with all the consequences that had followed it, was unknown. It was not, perhaps, true, that the healing waters of knowledge had been rolled backward to their fountain, but no spirit of power had descended to trouble them, and they had now been kept stagnant till life was no longer in them and life could no longer be supported by them. It seemed as if the faculties of thinking and reasoning, in the better sense of these words, were either about to be entirely lost in Spain, or to be partly preserved only in a few scattered individuals, who, by the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny that oppressed them, would be prevented from diffusing even the imperfect light which they themselves enjoyed.
But it could not be so. The human mind cannot be permanently imprisoned; and it is an obvious proof of this consoling fact, that the intellectual emancipation of Spain was begun by a man of no extraordinary gifts, and one whose position gave him no extraordinary advantages for the undertaking to which he devoted his life,—the quiet monk, Benito Feyjoó. He was born in 1676, the eldest son of respectable parents in the northwestern part of Spain, who, contrary to the opinions of their time, did not think the law of primogeniture required them to devote their first-born wholly to the duty of sustaining the honors of his family and enjoying the income of the estates he was to inherit. At the age of fourteen, his destination to the Church was determined upon; but he loved study of all kinds, and applied himself, not only to theology, but to the physical sciences and to medicine, so far as means were allowed him in the low state to which all intellectual culture was then sunk. As early as 1717, he established himself in a Benedictine convent at Oviedo, and lived there forty-seven years in as strict a retirement as his duties permitted, occupied only with his studies, and relying almost entirely on the press as the means of enlightening his countrymen.
His personal character and resources, in some respects, fitted him well for the great task he had undertaken. He was a sincere Catholic, and therefore felt no disposition to interfere even with abuses that were protected by the authority of his Church; a circumstance without which he would have been stopped at the very threshold of his enterprise. His mind was strong and patient of labor; and if, on the one hand, his researches were restrained by the embarrassments of his ecclesiastical position, he had, on the other, obtained, what few Spaniards then enjoyed, the means of knowing much of what had been done in Italy, in France, and even in England, for the advancement of science during the century preceding that in which he was educated. Above all, he was honest, and seriously devoted to his work. But, as he advanced, he was shocked to find how wide a gulf separated his own country from the rest of Europe. Truth, he saw, had, on many important subjects, been so completely excluded from Spain, that its very existence was hardly suspected; and that, while Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Calderon and Quevedo, had been rioting unrestrained in the world of imagination, the solemn world of reality,—the world of moral and physical truth,—had been as much closed against inquiry as if his country had been no part of civilized Europe.
At times he seems to have been anxious concerning the result of his labors; but, on the whole, his courage did not fail him. He was not, indeed, a man of genius. He was not a man to invent new systems of metaphysics or philosophy. But he was a learned man, with a cautious judgment, somewhat obscured, but not really impaired, by religious prejudices, from which he could not be expected to emancipate himself; he was a man who understood the real importance of the labors of Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, of Leibnitz, Pascal, and Gassendi; and, what was of vastly more consequence, he was determined that his own countrymen should no longer remain ignorant of the advancement already made by the rest of Christendom under the influence of master-spirits like these.
So far as the War of the Succession had served to rouse the national character from its lethargy, and to direct the thoughts of Spaniards to what had been done beyond the Pyrenees, it was favorable to his purpose. But in other respects, as we have seen, it had effected nothing for the national culture. Still, when, in 1726, Feyjoó printed a volume of essays connected with his main purpose, he was able to command public attention, and was encouraged to go on. He called it “The Critical Theatre”; and in its different dissertations,—as separate as the papers in “The Spectator,” but longer and on graver subjects,—he boldly attacked the dialectics and metaphysics then taught everywhere in Spain; maintained Bacon’s system of induction in the physical sciences; ridiculed the general opinion in relation to comets, eclipses, and the arts of magic and divination; laid down rules for historical faith, which would exclude most of the early traditions of the country; showed a greater deference for woman, and claimed for her a higher place in society, than the influence of the Spanish Church willingly permitted her to occupy; and, in all respects, came forth to his countrymen as one urging earnestly the pursuit of truth and the improvement of social life. Eight volumes of this stirring work were published before 1739, and then it stopped, without any apparent reason. But in 1742 Feyjoó began a similar series of discussions, under the name of “Learned and Inquiring Letters,” which he finished in 1760, with the fifth volume, thus closing up the long series of his truly philanthropical, as well as philosophical, labors.
Of course he was assailed. A work, called the “Antiteatro Crítico,” appeared early, and was soon followed by another, with nearly the same title, and by not a few scattered tracts and volumes, directed against different portions of what he had published. But he was quite able to defend himself. He wrote with clearness and good taste in an age when the prevailing style was obscure and affected; and, if he fell occasionally into Gallicisms, from relying much on French writers for his materials, his mistakes of this sort were rare; and, in general, he presented himself in a Castilian costume, that was respectable and attractive. Nor was he without wit, which his prudence taught him to use sparingly, and he had always the energy which belongs to good sense and practical wisdom; a union of qualities not often found anywhere, and certainly of most rare occurrence in cloisters like those in which Feyjoó passed his long life.