Your grace will cheer me like the sun;
But I can live content in shades.
Take me: you'll find when all is done,
Plain truth, and fewer serenades."
Even in translation the humorous amenity is not altogether lost, though no version can reproduce the technical perfection of the original. For refined wit and brilliant effect Góngora has seldom been exceeded; yet his fighter pieces failed to bring him the renown and the high promotion which he expected. He feigned to despise popularity, declaring that he "desired to do something that would not be for the general"; but none was keener than he in courting applause on any terms. He would dazzle and surprise, if he could not enchant, his public, and forthwith he set to founding the school which bears the name of culteranismo. We do not know precisely when he first practised in this vein; but it seems certain that he was anticipated by a young soldier, Luis de Carrillo y Sotomayor (1583-1610), whose posthumous verses were published by his brother at Madrid in 1611. Carrillo had served in Italy, where he came under the spell of Giovanni Battista Marino, then at the height of his influence; and the Obras of Carrillo contain the first intimations of the new manner. Many of Carrillo's poems are admirable for their verbal melody, his eclogues being distinguished for simple sincerity of sentiment and expression. But these passed almost unnoticed, for Carrillo was only doing well what Lope de Vega was doing better; and in fact it seems likely that the merits of the dead soldier-poet were unjustly overlooked by a generation which was content with two editions of his works.
He found, however, a passionate admirer in Góngora, who perceived in such work as Carrillo's Sonnet to the Patience of his Jealous Hope the possibilities of a revolution. When Carrillo writes of "the proud sea bathing the blind forehead of the deaf sky," he is merely setting down a tasteless conceit, which gains nothing by a forced inversion of phrase; but, as it happened, conceit of this sort was a novelty in Spain, and Góngora, who had already shown a tendency to preciosity in Espinosa's collection, resolved to develop Carrillo's innovation. Few questions are more debated and less understood than this of Gongorism. So good a critic as Karl Hillebrand gives forth this strange utterance:—"Not only Italian and German Marinists were imitators of Spanish Gongorists: even your English Euphuism of Shakespeare's time had its origin in the culteranismo of Spain." One hardly likes to accuse Hillebrand of writing nonsense, but he certainly comes near, perilously near it in this case. Lyly's Euphues was published in 1579, while Góngora was still a student at Salamanca, and Shakespeare died nearly twelve years before a line of Góngora's later poems was in print. Spanish scholars, indeed, disclaim responsibility for Euphuism in any shape. They refuse to admit that Lord Berners' or North's translations of Guevara could have produced the effects ascribed to them; and they argue with much reason that Gongorism is but the local form of a disease which attacked all Europe. However that may be, there can exist no possible connection between English Euphuism and Spanish Gongorism, save such as comes from a common Italian origin. Gongorism derives directly from the Marinism propagated in Spain by Carrillo, though it must be confessed that Marino's extravagances pale beside those of Góngora.
This, in fact, is no more than we should expect, for Marino's conceits were, so to say, almost natural to him, while Góngora's are a pure effect of affectation. He wilfully got rid of his natural directness, and gave himself to cultivating artificial antithesis, violent inversions of words and phrases, exaggerated metaphors piled upon sense tropes devoid of meaning. Other poets appealed to the vulgar: he would charm the cultivated—los cultos. Hence the name culteranismo.[26] At the same time it is fair to say that he has been blamed for more crimes than he ever committed. Ticknor, more than most critics, loses his head whenever he mentions Góngora's name, and holds the Spaniard up to ridicule by printing a literal translation of his more daring flights. Thus he chooses a passage from the first of the Soledades, and asserts that Góngora sings the praise of "a maiden so beautiful, that she might parch up Norway with her two suns, and bleach Ethiopia with her two hands." Perhaps no poet that ever lived would survive the test of such bald, literal rendering as this, and a much more exact notion of the Spanish is afforded by Churton:—
"Her twin-born sun-bright eyes
Might turn to summer Norway's wintry skies;
And the white wonder of her snowy hand