History of Spanish Literature, vol. 3 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

But he returned there a saddened and disappointed man; little inclined to poetical studies, and with little of the tranquillity of spirit necessary to pursue them successfully. At the end of six weary years came the revolution of Aranjuez, and he was again free. He hastened at once to Madrid. But he was too late. The king was already at Bayonne, and the French power was in the ascendant in the capital. Unfortunately, he attached himself to the new government of Joseph, and shared first its disasters and then its fate. Once he was absolutely led out to be shot by the excited population of Oviedo, where he had been sent as a commissioner. On another occasion, his house at Salamanca was sacked, and his precious library destroyed, by the very French party whose interests he served. At last, when all was lost, he fled. But, before he crossed the frontier, he knelt down and kissed the last spot of earth that he could call Spain; and then, as the Bidassoa received his tears, cried out in anguish that “he should never again tread the soil of his country.” His prophecy was fulfilled as sadly as it was made. Four miserable years he lived as an exile in the South of France, and then died at Montpellier, on the 24th of May, 1817, in poverty and suffering.[354]

To solace the heavy hours of his exile, he occupied himself with preparing the materials for a final publication of all he had written, embracing many new poems and many changes in those already published;—all which appeared in 1820, and have constituted the basis of the different editions of his works that have been given to the world since. Like the previous collections, it shows, not, indeed, a poetical genius of the first order, nor one with very flexible or very various attributes, but certainly a genius of great sweetness; always winning and graceful whenever the subject implies tenderness, and sometimes vigorous and imposing when it demands power. What Melendez wrote with success was a great advance upon the poetry of Montiano, and even upon that of the elder Moratin. It was more Castilian, and more full of feeling, than theirs. In style, too, it was more free, and it has done much to settle the poetical manner that has since prevailed. Gallicisms occasionally occur that might have been avoided, though many of them have now become a part of the recognized resources of Spanish poetry; but more often Melendez has revived old and neglected words and phrases, which have thus been restored to their place in the language, and have increased its wealth. As a general remark, his verse is not only flowing, but well suited to his subjects; and whether we consider what he has done himself, or what influence he has exercised over others,—especially when we read the little volume he published in the freshness of his youth, while he was still unknown at court and still careless of the convulsions that were at last to overwhelm him,—there can be no doubt that he was better fitted to form a new school and give a guiding impulse to the national poetry than any writer that had appeared in Spain for above a century.[355]

Older than Melendez, but somewhat influenced by him and by Cadahalso, who had an effect on the taste of both, was the excellent Father Diego Gonzalez, a modest Augustinian monk, a part of whose life was spent in active religious duties at Salamanca, where he became intimate with the poets of the new school; a part of it at Seville, where he was the friend of Jovellanos; and a part of it at Madrid, where he died in 1794, about sixty years old, sincerely lamented by some of the noblest spirits of his time. As a poet, Gonzalez adhered more to the old Castilian school than Melendez did. But his model was the best. He imitated Luis de Leon; and did it with such happy success, that, in some of his odes and in some of his versions of the Psalms, we might almost think we were listening to the solemn tones of his great master. His most popular poems, however, were light and gay; such as his verses “To a Perfidious Bat,” which have been very often printed; his verses “To a Lady who had burned her Finger”; and similar trifles, in which he showed that all the secret idiomatic graces of the old Castilian were at his command. A didactic poem on “The Four Ages of Man,” which he began, and in the first book of which there is a fine dedication of the whole to Jovellanos, was never finished. Indeed, his poetry, though much known and circulated during his lifetime, was an object of little interest or care to himself, and was collected with difficulty after his death, and published by his faithful friend, Juan Fernandez.[356]

Other poets, among whom were Forner, Iglesias, and Cienfuegos, were more under the influence of the Salamanca school than Gonzalez was. Forner, like Melendez, was born in Estremadura, and the two young friends were educated together at Salamanca. In his critical opinions,—partly shown in a satire “On the Faults introduced into Castilian Poetry,” which gained an academic prize in 1782, and partly in his controversies with Huerta on the subject of the Spanish theatre,—he inclines much to the stricter French school. But his poetry is more free than such opinions would imply; and in his latter years, when he lived as a magistrate at Seville, and studied Herrera, Rioja, and the other old masters who were natives of its soil, he attached himself yet more decidedly to the national manner, and approached nearer to the serene severity of Gonzalez. Unhappily, his life, besides being much crowded with business, was short. He died in 1797, only forty-one years old; and, except his prose works, the best of which is a well-written defence of the literary reputation of his country against the injurious imputations of foreigners, he left little to give the world proof of the merits he possessed, or the influence he really exercised.[357]

Iglesias, though his life was even shorter, was, in some respects, more fortunate. He was born in Salamanca, and educated there under the most favorable auspices. Offended at the low state of morals in his native city, he indulged himself at first in the free forms of Castilian satire;—ballads, apologues, epigrams, and especially the half-simple, half-malicious letrillas, in which he was eminently successful. But, when he became a parish priest, he thought such lightness unbecoming the example he wished to set before his flock. He devoted himself, therefore, to serious composition; wrote serious ballads, eclogues, and silvas in the manner of Melendez; and published a didactic poem on theology;—all a result of a most worthy purpose, and all written in the pure style which is one of his prominent merits; but none of it giving token of the instinctive promptings of his genius, and none of it fitted to increase his final reputation. After his death, which occurred in 1791, when he was thirty-eight years old, this became at once apparent. His works were collected and published in two volumes; the first being filled with the graver class of his poems, and the second with the satirical. The decision of the public was instant. His lighter poems were too free, but they were better imitations of Quevedo than had yet been seen, and became favorites at once; the serious poems were dull, and soon ceased to be read.[358]

Cienfuegos, who was ten years younger than Melendez, was more strictly his follower than either of the two poets last mentioned. But he had fallen on evil times, and his career, which promised to be brilliant, was cut short by the troubles they brought upon him. In 1798 he published his poetical works; the miscellaneous portion consisting of Anacreontics, odes, ballads, epistles, and elegies, which, while they give proof of much real talent and passion, show sometimes an excess of sentimental feeling, and sometimes a desire to imitate the metaphysical and philosophical manner supposed to be demanded by the spirit of the age. Both were defects, to which he had been partly led by the example of his friend and master, Melendez, at whose feet he long sat in the cloisters of Salamanca; and both were affectations, from which a character so manly and decided as that of Cienfuegos might in time have emancipated itself.

But the favor with which this publication was received procured for him the place of editor of the government gazette, at Madrid; and, when the French occupied that capital, in 1808, he was found firm at his post, determined to do his duty to his country. Murat, who had the command of the invading forces, endeavoured, at first, to seduce or drive him into submission, but, failing in this, condemned him to death; a sentence which would infallibly have been carried into execution,—since Cienfuegos refused to make the smallest concession to the French authority,—if his friends had not interfered and procured a commutation of it into transportation to France. The change, however, was hardly a mercy. The sufferings of the journey, in which he travelled as a prisoner; the grief he felt at leaving his friends in hands which had hardly spared his own life; and the anticipation of a long exile in the midst of his own and his country’s enemies, were too much for his patriotic and generous spirit; and he died in July, 1809, at the age of forty-five, only a few days after he had reached the spot assigned for his punishment.[359]

One other person, already referred to with honor, must now be particularly noticed, who, if his life belonged to the state, still wrote poetry with success, and exercised over the school formed at Salamanca an influence which belongs to the history of letters. This person was Jovellanos, the wise magistrate and minister of Charles the Fourth, and the victim of his master’s unworthy weakness and of the still more unworthy vengeance of the reigning favorite. He was born in Gijon, in Asturias, in 1744, and from his earliest youth seems to have shown that love of intellectual cultivation, and that moral elevation of character, which distinguished the whole of the more mature portions of his life.

The position of his family was such, that all the means for a careful education to be found in Spain were open to him; and, as he was originally destined to the higher dignities of the Church, he was sent to study philosophy and the canon and civil law at Oviedo, Avila, Alcalá de Henares, and Madrid. But, just as he was about to take the irrevocable step that would have bound him to an ecclesiastical life, some of his friends, and especially the distinguished statesman, Juan Arias de Saavedra, who was like a second father to him, interfered, and changed his destination. The consequence of this intervention was, that, in 1767, he was sent as a judicial magistrate to Seville, where, by his humane spirit, and his disinterested and earnest devotion to the duties of a difficult and disagreeable place, he made himself generally loved and respected; while, at the same time, by his study of political economy and the foundations of all just legislation, he prepared the way for his own future eminence in the affairs of his country.

But the spirit of Jovellanos was of kindred with whatever was noble and elevated. At Seville, he early discovered the merit of Diego Gonzalez, and through him was led into a correspondence with Melendez. One result of this is still to be found in the poetical Epistle of Jovellanos to his friends in Salamanca, exhorting them to rise to the highest strains of poetry. Another was the establishment of a connection between himself and Melendez, which, while it was important to the young school at Salamanca, led Jovellanos to give more of his leisure to the elegant literature he had always loved, but from which the serious business of life had, for some time, much separated him.