Others of Father Isla’s works were more fortunate. Six volumes of his sermons were collected and published, and six volumes of his letters, chiefly addressed to his sister and her husband, and written in a very affectionate and gay spirit. To these, at different times, were added a few minor works of a trifling character, and one or two that are religious.[334]
But what most surprised the world was his translation of “Gil Blas,” printed in 1787, claiming the work, on which the fame of Le Sage must always principally rest, as “stolen from the Spanish, and now,” in the words of Father Isla’s title-page, “restored to its country and native language by a Spaniard, who does not choose to have his nation trifled with.”[335] The external grounds for this extraordinary charge are slight. The first suggestion occurs in 1752, and is made by Voltaire, who, in his “Age of Louis the Fourteenth,” declares the Gil Blas “to be entirely taken from Espinel’s ‘Marcos de Obregon.’” This charge, as we have seen, is not true, and we have reason to believe that it was the result of personal ill-will on the part of Voltaire, who had himself been attacked in the Gil Blas, and who had, in some way or other, heard that Le Sage was indebted to Espinel. Afterwards, similar declarations are made in two or three books of no authority, and especially in a Biographical Dictionary printed at Amsterdam in 1771. But this is all.
Roused by such suggestions, however, Father Isla amused himself with making a translation of Gil Blas, adding to it a long and not successful continuation,[336] and declaring, without ceremony or proof, that it was the work of an Andalusian advocate, who gave his manuscript to Le Sage, when Le Sage was in Spain, either as a secretary of the French embassy, or as a friend of the French ambassador. But all this seems to be without any foundation, for the manuscript has never been produced; the advocate has never been named; and Le Sage was never in Spain. Still, the Spanish claim has not been abandoned. On the contrary, Llorente, in two ingenious and learned works on the subject, one in French and the other in Spanish, but both printed in 1822, reasserts it, with great earnestness, resting his proofs on internal evidence, and insisting that Gil Blas is certainly of Spanish origin, and that it is probably the work, not indeed of Father Isla’s Andalusian advocate, but of Solís, the historian;—a suggestion, for which Llorente produces no better reason, than that nobody else of the period to which he assigns the Gil Blas was able, in his judgment, to write such a romance.[337]
But there is a ready answer to all such merely conjectural criticism. Le Sage proceeded, as an author in romantic fiction, just as he had done when he wrote for the public theatre; and the results at which he arrived in both cases are remarkably similar. In the drama, he began with translations and imitations from the Spanish, such as his “Point of Honor,” which is taken from Roxas, and his “Don Cesar Ursino,” which is from Calderon; but afterwards, when he better understood his own talent and had acquired confidence from success, he came out with his “Turcaret,” a wholly original comedy, which, far surpassed all he had before attempted, and showed how much he had been wasting his strength as an imitator. Just so he did in romance-writing. He began with translating the “Don Quixote” of Avellaneda, and remodelling and enlarging the “Diablo Cojuelo” of Guevara. But the “Gil Blas,” the greatest of all his works of prose fiction, is the result of his confirmed strength; and, in its characteristic merits, is as much his own as the “Turcaret.”
On this point, the internal evidence is as decisive as the external. The frequent errors of this remarkable romance in Spanish geography and history show, that it could hardly have been the work of a Spaniard, and certainly not of a Spaniard so well informed as Solís; its private anecdotes of society in the time of Louis the Fourteenth and Louis the Fifteenth prove it to have been almost necessarily written by a Frenchman; while, at the same time, the freedom with which, as we go on, we find that every thing Spanish is plundered,—now a tale taken from “Marcos de Obregon,” now an intrigue or a story from a play of Mendoza, of Roxas, or of Figueroa,—points directly to Le Sage’s old habits, and to his practised skill in turning to account every thing that he deemed fitted to his purpose. The result is, that he has, by the force of his genius, produced a work of great brilliancy; in which, from his entire familiarity with Spanish literature and his unscrupulous use of it, he has preserved the national character with such fidelity, that a Spaniard is almost always unwilling to believe that the Gil Blas, especially now that he has it in the excellent version of Father Isla, could have been written by any body but one of his own countrymen.[338]
The chief talent of Father Isla was in satire, and the great service he performed for his country was that of driving from its respectable churches the low and vulgar style of preaching with which they had long been infested;—a work which the “Friar Gerund” achieved almost as completely as the “Don Quixote” did that of destroying the insane passion for books of chivalry which prevailed in the seventeenth century.
But, meanwhile, other attempts were making in other directions to revive the literature of the country; some by restoring a taste for the old national poetry, some by attempting to accommodate every thing to the French doctrines of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, and some by an ill-defined and often, perhaps, unconscious struggle to unite the two opinions, and to form a school whose character should be unlike that of either and yet in advance of both.
In the direction of the earlier national poetry little was done by original efforts, but something was attempted in other ways. Huerta, a fierce, but inconsistent, adversary of the French innovations, printed, in 1778, a volume of poems almost entirely in the old manner; but it was too much marked with the bad taste of the preceding century to enjoy even a temporary success, and its author, therefore, could boast of no follower of any note in a path which was constantly less and less trodden.[339]
On the other hand, more was done with effect to recall the memory of the old masters themselves. Lopez de Sedano, between 1768 and 1778, published his “Spanish Parnassus,” in nine volumes; a work which, though ill digested and not always showing good taste in its selections and criticisms, is still a rich mine of the poetry of the country in its best days, and contains important materials for the history of Spanish literature from the period of Boscan and Garcilasso.[340] Sanchez went further back, and in 1779 offered, to his countrymen, for the first time, the greater legendary treasures of their heroic ages, beginning with the noble old poem of the Cid, but unhappily leaving incomplete a task for which he had proved himself so well fitted by his learning and zeal, if not by his acuteness.[341] And finally, Sarmiento, a friend of Feyjoó, and one of his ablest public defenders, undertook an elaborate history of Spanish poetry, which contains important discussions relating to the period embraced by the inquiries of Sanchez, but which was broken off by the death of its venerable author in 1770, and remained unpublished till five years later.[342] These three works, though they excited too little attention at first, were still works of importance, and have served as the foundation for a better state of things since.
The doctrines of the French school, somewhat modified, perhaps, by the reproduction of the elder Spanish literature, but still substantially unchanged, found followers more numerous and active. During the reign of Charles the Third, Moratin the elder, a gentleman of an old Biscayan family, who was born in 1737, and died in 1780, succeeded, in a great degree, to the inheritance of Luzan’s opinions, and devoted himself to the reform of the taste of his countrymen. He was the friend of Montiano, who had himself endeavoured to introduce classical tragedy upon the Spanish stage, and who had, probably, some share in forming the literary character of the young poet. But the court, as usual, was an element in the movement. Moratin was received with flattering regard by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, the head of the great house of the Guzmans; by the Duke of Ossuna, long ambassador in France; by Aranda, the wise minister of state, who rarely forgot the cause of intellectual culture; and by the Infante Don Gabriel de Bourbon, the accomplished translator of Sallust; and each of these persons was thus able, through Moratin, to exercise an influence on the state of letters in Spain.