'Twixt the mute load and ever-sounding tide.
His steps now move secur'd; a glimmering light
(The Pharos of some cottage) takes his sight."
And so on in passages where the darkness grows denser at every line. "C'est l'obscurité qui en fait tout le mérite," as Fabrice observes when Gil Blas fails to understand his friend's sonnet.
Valencia's protest was followed by another from the Sevillan, Juan de Jáuregui, whose preface to his Rimas (1618) is a literary manifesto against those poems "which only contain an embellishment of words, being phantoms without soul or body." Jáuregui returned to the attack in his Discurso poético (1623), a more formal and elaborate indictment of the whole Gongoristic movement. This treatise, of which only one copy is known to exist, has been reprinted with some curtailments by Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo in his Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España. It deserves study no less for its sound doctrine than for the admirable style of the writer, whose courtesy of tone makes him an exception among the polemists of his time. As Jáuregui represents the opposition of the Seville group, so Manuel Faria y Sousa, the editor of the Lusiadas, speaks in the name of Portugal. Faria y Sousa's theory of poetics is the simplest possible: there is but one great poet in the world, and his name is Camões. Faria y Sousa transforms the Lusiadas into a dull allegory, where Mars typifies St. Peter; he writes down Tasso as "common, trivial, not worth mentioning, poor in knowledge and invention"; and, in accordance with these principles, he accuses Góngora of being no allegorist, and protests that to rank him with Camões is to compare "Marsyas to Apollo, a fly to an eagle."
A more formidable opponent for the Gongorists was Lope de Vega, who was himself accused of obscurity and affectation. Bouhours, in his Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit (1687), tells that the Bishop of Belley, Jean-Pierre Camus, meeting Lope in Madrid, cross-examined him as to the meaning of one of his sonnets. With his usual good-nature, the poet listened, and "ayant leû et releû plusieurs fois son sonnet, avoua sincèrement qu'il ne l'entendoit pas luy mesme." It must have irked his inclination to take the field against Góngora, for whom he had a strong personal liking:—"He is a man whom I must esteem and love, accepting from him with humility what I can understand, and admiring with veneration what I cannot understand." Yet he loved truth (as he understood it) more than he loved Socrates. "You can make a culto poet in twenty-four hours: a few inversions, four formulas, six Latin words, or emphatic phrases—and the trick is done," he writes in his Respuesta; and he follows up this plain speaking with a burlesque sonnet.
Of Faria y Sousa and his like, Góngora made small account: he fastened upon Lope as his victim, pursuing him with unsleeping vindictiveness. There is something pathetic in the Dictator's endeavours to soften his persecutor's heart. He courts Góngora with polite flatteries in print; he dedicates to Góngora the play, Amor secreto; he writes Góngora a private letter to remove a wrong impression given by one Mendoza; he repeats Góngora's witty sayings to his intimates; he makes personal overtures to Góngora at literary gatherings; and, if Góngora be not positively rude, Lope reports the fact to the Duque de Sessa as a personal triumph:—"Está más humano conmigo, que le debo de haber pareçido más ombre de bien de lo que él me ymaginava" ("He is gentler with me, and I must seem to him a better fellow than he thought"). Despite all his ingratiating arts, Lope failed to conciliate his foe, who rightly regarded him as the chief obstacle in culteranismo's road. The relentless riddlemonger lost no opportunity of ridiculing Lope and his court in such a sonnet as the following, which Churton Englishes with undisguised gusto:—
"Dear Geese, whose haunt is where weak waters flow,
From rude Castilian well-head, cheap supply,
That keeps your flowery Vega never dry,