A History of Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

Will doom you else to duck and dive for ever."

The warfare was carried on with singular ferocity, the careless Lope offering openings at every turn. "Remove those nineteen castles from your shield," sang Góngora, deriding Lope's foible in blazoning his descent. The amour with Marta Nevares Santoyo was the subject of obscene lampoons innumerable. A passage in the Filomena volume arabesques the story of Perseus and Andromeda with a complimentary allusion to an anonymous poet whose name Lope withheld: "so as not to cause annoyance." Góngora's copy of the Filomena exists with this holograph annotation on the margin:—"If you mean yourself, Lopillo, then you are an idiot without art or judgment." Yet, despite a hundred brutal personalities, Lope went his way unheeding, and on Góngora's death he penned a most brilliant sonnet in praise of that "swan of Betis," for whom his affection had never changed.

Góngora lived long enough to know that he had triumphed. Tirso de Molina and Calderón, with most of the younger dramatists, show the culto influence in many plays; Jáuregui forgot his own principles, and accepted the new mode; even Lope himself, in passages of his later writings, yielded to preciosity. Quevedo began by quoting Epictetus's aphorism:—Scholasticum esse animal quod ab omnibus irridetur. And he renders the Latin in his own free style:—"The culto brute is a general laughing-stock." But the "culto brute" smiled to see Quevedo given over to conceptismo, an affectation not less disastrous in effect than Góngora's own. Meanwhile enthusiastic champions declared for the Córdoban master. Martín de Ángulo y Pulgar published his Epístolas satisfactorias (1635) in answer to the censures of the learned Francisco de Cascales; Pellicer preached the Gongoristic gospel in his Lecciones solemnes (1630); the Defence of the Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe fills a quarto by Cristóbal de Salazar Mardones (1636); García de Salcedo Coronel's huge commentaries (1636-46) are perhaps, more obscure than anything in his author's text; and, so far away as Peru, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Rector of Cuzco, published an Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora, Príncipe de los Poetas Lyricos de España (1694). There came a day when, as Salazar y Torres informs us, the Polifemo and the Soledades were recited on Speech-Day by the boys in Jesuit schools.

It took Spain a hundred years to rid her veins of the Gongoristic poison, and Gongorism has now become, in Spain itself, a synonym for all that is bad in literature. Undoubtedly Góngora did an infinite deal of mischief: his tricks of transposition were too easily learned by those hordes of imitators who see nothing but the obvious, and his verbal audacities were reproduced by men without a tithe of his taste and execution. And yet, though it be an unpopular thing to confess, one has a secret sympathy with him in his campaign. Lope de Vega and Cervantes are as unlike as two men may be; but they are twins in their slapdash methods, in their indifference to exquisiteness of form. Their fatal facility is common to their brethren: threadbare phrase, accepted without thought and repeated without heed, is, as often as not, the curse of the best Spanish work. It was, perhaps, not altogether love of notoriety which seduced Góngora into Carrillo's ways. He had, as his earliest work proves, a sounder method than his fellows and a purer artistic conscience. No trace of carelessness is visible in his juvenile poems, written in an obscurity which knew no encouragement. It is just to believe that his late ambition was not all self-seeking, and that he aspired to renew, or rather to enlarge, the poetic diction of his country.

The aim was excellent, and, if Góngora finally failed, he failed partly because his disciples burlesqued his theories, and partly because he strove to make words serve instead of ideas. That his endeavour was praiseworthy in itself is as certain as that he came at last to regard his principles as almost sacred. He doubtless found some pleasure in astounding and annoying the burgess; but he aimed at something beyond making readers marvel. And though he failed to impose his doctrines permanently, it is by no means certain that he laboured in vain. If any later Spaniard has worked in the conscious spirit of the artist, seeking to avoid the commonplace, to express high thoughts in terms of beauty—though he knows it not, he owes a debt to Góngora, whose hatred of the commonplace made Castilian richer. The Soledades and the Polifemo have passed away, but many of the words and phrases for which Góngora was censured are now in constant use; and, culteranismo apart, Góngora ranks among the best lyrists of his land. Cascales, who was at once his friend and his opponent, said that there were two Góngoras—one an angel of light, the other an angel of darkness; and the saying was true in so far as it implied that in all circumstances his air of distinction never quits him. Still the earlier Góngora is the better, and before we leave him we should quote, as an example of that first happy manner, inimitable in its grace and humour, Churton's not too unsuccessful version of The Country Bachelor's Complaint:—

"Time was, ere Love play'd tricks with me,

I lived at ease, a simple squire,

And sang my praise-song, fancy free,

At matins in the village quire....