But it was not possible that such a state of things should become permanent and normal. Even while Ferdinand the Seventh was living, a movement was begun, the first traces of which are to be found among the emigrated Spaniards, who cheered with letters their exile in England and France, and whose subsequent progress, from the time when the death of that unfaithful monarch permitted them to return home, is distinctly perceptible in their own country.[393] What precise direction this movement may hereafter take, or where it may end, it is not given us to foresee. Perhaps too much of foreign influence, and too great a tendency to infuse the spirit of the North into a poetry whose nature is peculiarly Southern, may, for a time, divert it from its true course. Or perhaps the national genius, springing forward through all that opposes its instincts, and shaking off whatever encumbers it with ill-considered help, may press directly onward, and complete the canon of a literature whose forms, often only sketched by the great masters of its age of glory, remain yet to be filled out and finished in the grandeur and grace of their proper proportions.
But, whether a great advancement may soon be hoped for or not, one thing is certain. The law of progress is on Spain for good or for evil, as it is on the other nations of the earth, and her destiny, like theirs, is in the hand of God, and will be fulfilled. The material resources of her soil and position are as great as those of any people that now occupies its meted portion of the globe. The mass of her inhabitants, and especially of her peasantry, has been less changed, and in many respects less corrupted, by the revolutions of the last century, than any of the nations who have pressed her borders, or contended with her power. They are the same race of men, who twice drove back the crescent from the shores of Europe, and twice saved from shipwreck the great cause of Christian civilization. They have shown the same spirit at Saragossa, that they showed two thousand years before at Saguntum. They are not a ruined people. And, while they preserve the sense of honor, the sincerity, and the contempt for what is sordid and base, that have so long distinguished their national character, they cannot be ruined.
Nor, I trust, will such a people—still proud and faithful in its less favored masses, if not in those portions whose names dimly shadow forth the glory they have inherited—fail to create a literature appropriate to a character in its nature so poetical. The old ballads will not indeed return; for the feelings that produced them are with by-gone things. The old drama will not be revived;—society, even in Spain, would not now endure its excesses. The old chroniclers themselves, if they should come back, would find no miracles of valor or superstition to record, and no credulity fond enough to believe them. Their poets will not again be monks and soldiers, as they were in the days when the influences of the old religious wars and hatreds gave both their brightest and darkest colors to the elements of social life; for the civilization that struck its roots into that soil has died out for want of nourishment. But the Spanish people—that old Castilian race, that came from the mountains and filled the whole land with their spirit—have, I trust, a future before them not unworthy of their ancient fortunes and fame; a future full of materials for a generous history, and a poetry still more generous;—happy if they have been taught, by the experience of the past, that, while reverence for whatever is noble and worthy is of the essence of poetical inspiration, and, while religious faith and feeling constitute its true and sure foundations, there is yet a loyalty to mere rank and place, which degrades alike its possessor and him it would honor, and a blind submission to priestly authority, which narrows and debases the nobler faculties of the soul more than any other, because it sends its poison deeper. But, if they have failed to learn this solemn lesson, inscribed everywhere, as by the hand of Heaven, on the crumbling walls of their ancient institutions, then is their honorable history, both in civilization and letters, closed for ever.
APPENDIX.
APPENDIX, A.
ON THE ORIGIN OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE.
(See Vol. I. pp. 11 and 47.)