Letters, arts, and even rational politics, practically died in Spain during the reign of Carlos II. Good work was done in serious branches of study: in history by Gaspar Ibáñez de Segovia Peralta y Mendoza, Marqués de Mondéjar; in bibliography by Nicolás Antonio; in law by Francisco Ramos del Manzano; in mathematics by Hugo de Omerique, whose analytic gifts won the applause of Newton. But all the rest was neglected while the King was exorcised, and was forced to swallow a quart of holy oil as a counter-charm against the dead men's brains given him (as it was alleged) by his mother in a cup of chocolate. Nor did the nightmare lift with his death on November 1, 1700: the War of the Succession lasted till the signing of the Utrecht Treaty in 1713. The new sovereign, Felipe V., grandson of Louis XIV., interested himself in the progress of his people; and being a Frenchman of his time, he believed in the centralisation of learning. His chief ally was that Marqués de Villena familiar to all readers of St. Simon as the major-domo who used his wand upon Cardinal Alberoni's skull:—"Il lève son petit bâton et le laisse tomber de toute sa force dru et menu sur les oreilles du cardinal, en l'appelant petit coquin, petit faquin, petit impudent qui ne méritoit que les étrivières." But even St. Simon admits Villena's rare qualities:—"Il savoit beaucoup, et il étoit de toute sa vie en commerce avec la plupart de tous les savants des divers pays de l'Europe.... C'était un homme bon, doux, honnête, sensé ... enfin l'honneur, la probité, la valeur, la vertu même." In 1711 the Biblioteca Nacional was founded; in 1714 the Spanish Academy of the Language was established, with Villena as "director," and soon set to earnest work. The only good lexicon published since Nebrija's was Sebastián de Covarrubias y Horozco's Tesoro de la Lengua castellana (1611): under Villena's guidance the Academy issued the six folios of its Dictionary, commonly called the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726-39). Accustomed to his Littré, his Grimm, to the scientific methods of MM. Arsène Darmesteter, Hatzfeld, and Thomas, and to that monumental work now publishing at the Clarendon Press, the modern student is too prone to dwell on the defects—manifest enough—of the Spanish Academy's Dictionary. Yet it was vastly better than any other then existing in Europe, is still of unique value to scholars, and was so much too good for its age that, in 1780, it was cut down to one poor volume. The foundation of the Academy of History, under Agustín de Montiano, in 1738, is another symptom of French authority.
Mr. Gosse and Dr. Garnett, in previous volumes of the present series, have justly emphasised the predominance of French methods both in English and Italian literature during the eighteenth century. In Germany the French sympathies of Frederick the Great and of Wieland were to be no less obvious. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that Spain should undergo the French influence; yet, though the French nationality of the King is a factor to be taken into account, his share in the literary revolution is too often exaggerated. Long before Felipe V. was born Spaniards had begun to interest themselves in French literature. Thus Quevedo, who translated the Introduction à la Vie Dévote of St. François de Sales, showed himself familiar with the writings of a certain Miguel de Montaña, more recognisable as Michel de Montaigne. Juan Bautista Diamante, apparently ignorant of Guillén de Castro's play, translated Corneille's Cid under the title of El Honrador de su padre (1658); and in March 1680 an anonymous arrangement of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme was given at the Buen Retiro under the title of El Labrador Gentilhombre. Still more significant is an incident recalled by Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo: the staging of Corneille's Rodogune and Molière's Les Femmes Savantes at Lima, about the year 1710, in Castilian versions, made by Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo. Compared with this, the Madrid translations of Corneille's Cinna and of Racine's Iphigénie, by Francisco de Pizarro y Piccolomini, Marqués de San Juan (1713), and by José de Cañizares (1716), are of small moment. The latter performances may very well have been due in great part to the personal influence of the celebrated Madame des Ursins, an active French agent at the Spanish court.
Readers curious as to the Spanish poets of the eighteenth century may turn with confidence to the masterly and exhaustive Historia Crítica of the Marqués de Valmar. Their number may be inferred from this detail: that more than one hundred and fifty competed at a poetic joust held in honour of St. Aloysius Gonzaga and St. Stanislaus Kostka in 1727. But none of all the tribe is of real importance. It is enough to mention the names of Juan José de Salazar y Hontiveros, a priestly copromaniac, like his contemporary, Swift; of José León y Mansilla, who wrote a third Soledad in continuation of Góngora; and of Sor María del Cielo, a mild practitioner in lyrical mysticism. A little later there follow Gabriel Álvarez de Toledo, a representative conceptista; Eugenio Gerardo Lobo, a romantic soldier with a craze for versifying; Diego de Torres y Villarroel, an encyclopædic professor at Salamanca, who, half-knowing everything from the cedar by Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth on the wall, showed critical insight by the contempt in which he held his own rhymes. The Carmelite, Fray Juan de la Concepción, a Gongorist of the straitest sect, was the idol of his generation, and proved his quality, when he was elected to the Academy in 1744, by returning thanks in a rhymed speech: an innovation which scandalised his brethren, and has never been repeated.
A head and shoulders over these rises the figure of Ignacio de Luzán Claramunt de Suelves y Gurrea (1702-54), who, spending his youth in Italy, was—so it is believed—a pupil of Giovanni Battista Vico at Naples, where he remained during eighteen years. For his century, Luzán's equipment was considerable. His Greek and Latin were of the best; Italian was almost his native tongue; he read Descartes and epitomised the Port-Royal treatise on logic; he was versed in German, and, meeting with Paradise Lost—probably during his residence as Secretary to the Embassy in Paris (1747-50)—he first revealed Milton to Spain by translating select passages into prose. His verses, original and translated, are insignificant, though, as an instance of his French taste, his version of Lachaussée's Préjugé à la Mode is worthy of notice: not so the four books of his Poética (1737). So early as 1728, Luzán prepared six Ragionamenti sopra la poesia for the Palermo Academy, and on his return to Spain in 1733 he re-arranged his treatise in Castilian. The Poética avowedly aims at "subjecting Spanish verse to the rules which obtain among cultured nations"; and though its basis is Lodovico Muratori's Della perfetta poesia, with suggestions borrowed from Vincenzo Gravina and Giovanni Crescimbeni, the general drift of Luzán's teaching coincides with that of French doctrinaires like Rapin, Boileau, and Le Bossu. It seems probable that his views became more and more French with time, for the posthumous reprint of the Poética (1789) shows an increase of anti-national spirit; but on this point it is hard to judge, inasmuch as his pupil and editor, Eugenio de Llaguno y Amírola (a strong French partisan, who translated Racine's Athalie in 1754), is suspected of tampering with this text, as he adulterated that of Díaz Gámez' Crónica del Conde de Buelna.
Luzán's destructive criticisms are always acute, and are generally just. Lope is for him a genius of amazing force and variety, while Calderón is a singer of exquisite music. With this ingratiating prelude, he has no difficulty in exposing their most obvious defects, and his attack on Gongorism is delivered with great spirit. It is in construction that he fails: as when he avers that the ends of poetry and moral philosophy are identical, that Homer was a didactic poet expounding political and transcendental truths to the vulgar, that epics exist for the instruction of monarchs and military chiefs, that the period of a play's action should correspond precisely with the time that the play takes in acting. Luzán's rigorous logic ends by reducing to absurdity the didactic theories of the eighteenth century; yet, for all his logic, he had a genuine love of poetry, which induced him to neglect his abstract rules. It is true that he scarcely utters a proposition which is not contradicted by implication in other parts of his treatise. Nevertheless, his book has both a literary and an historic value. Written in excellent style and temper, with innumerable parallels from many literatures, the Poética served as a manifesto which summoned Spain to fall into line with academic Europe; and Spain, among the least academic because among the most original of countries, ended by obeying. Her old inspiration had passed away with her wide dominion, and Luzán deserves credit for lending her a new opportune impulse.
He was not to win without a battle. The official licensers, Manuel Gallinero and Miguel Navarro, took public objection to the retrospective application of his doctrines, and a louder note of opposition was sounded in a famous quarterly, the Diario de los Literatos de España, founded in 1737 by Juan Martínez Salafranca and Leopoldo Gerónimo Puig. Though the Diario was patronised by Felipe V., though its judgments are now universally accepted, it came before its time: the bad authors whom it victimised combined against it, and, as the public remained indifferent, the review was soon suspended. Even among the contributors to the Diario, Luzán found an ally in the person of the clerical lawyer, José Gerardo de Hervás y Cobo de la Torre (d. 1742), author of the popular Sátira contra los malos Escritores de su Tiempo. Hervás, who took the pseudonym of Jorge Pitillas, wrote with boldness, with critical sense, with an ease and point and grace which engraved his verse upon the general memory; so that to this day many of his lines are as familiar to Spaniards as are Pope's to Englishmen. They err who hold with Ticknor that Hervás imitated Persius and Juvenal: in style and doctrine his immediate model was Boileau, whom he adapts with rare skill, and without any acknowledgment. He carries a step further the French doctrines, insinuated rather than proclaimed in the Poética, and, though he was not an avowed propagandist, his sarcastic epigrams perhaps did more than any formal treatise to popularise the new doctrines.
A reformer on the same lines was the Benedictine, Benito Gerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro (1675-1764), whose Teatro crítico and Cartas eruditas y curiosas were as successful in Spain as were the Tatler and Spectator in England. Feijóo's style is laced with Gallicisms, and his vain, insolent airs of infallibility are antipathetic; yet though his admirers have made him ridiculous by calling him "the Spanish Voltaire," his intellectual curiosity, his cautious scepticism, his lucid intelligence, his fine scent for a superstitious fallacy, place him among the best writers of his age. A happy instance of his skill in exposing a paradox is his indictment of Rousseau's Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts. His rancorous tongue raised up crowds of enemies, who scrupled not to circulate vague rumours as to his heretical tendencies: in fact, his orthodoxy was as unimpeachable as were the services which he rendered to his country's enlightenment. His cause, and the cause of learning generally, were championed by the Galician, Pedro José García y Balboa, best known as Martín Sarmiento (1695-1772), the name which he bore in the Benedictine order. Sarmiento's erudition is at least equal to Feijóo's, and his industry is matched by the variety of his interests. As a botanist he won the admiration and friendship of Linné; Feijóo's Teatro crítico owes much to his unselfish supervision; yet, while his name was esteemed throughout Europe, he shrank from domestic criticism, and withheld his miscellaneous works from the press. He owes his place in literature to his posthumous Memorias para la historia de la Poesía y Poetas españoles, which, despite its excessive local patriotism, is not only remarkable for its shrewd insight, but forms the point of departure for all later studies. Not less useful was the life's work of Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar (1699-1781), who was the first to print Juan de Valdés' Diálogo de la Lengua, who was the first biographer of Cervantes, and who edited Luis Vives, Luis de León, Mondéjar, and others. Though much of Mayáns' writing has grown obsolete in its methods, he is honourably remembered as a pioneer, and his Orígenes de la Lengua castellana is full of wise suggestion and acute divination.
Prominent among Luzán's followers in the self-constituted Academia del Buen Gusto is Blas Antonio Nasarre y Férriz (1689-1751), an industrious, learned polygraph who carried party spirit so far as to reproduce Avellaneda's spurious Don Quixote (1732), on the specific ground that it was in every way superior to the genuine sequel. Cervantes, indeed, was an object of pitying contempt to Nasarre, who, when he reprinted Cervantes' plays in 1749, contended that they not only were the worst ever written, but that they were a heap of follies deliberately invented to burlesque Lope de Vega's theatre. Of the same school is Lope's merciless foe, Agustín Montiano y Luyando (1697-1765), author of two poor tragedies, the Virginia and the Ataulfo, models of dull academic correctness. Yet he found an illustrious admirer in the person of Lessing, who, by his panegyric on Montiano in the Theatralische Bibliotek, remains as a standing example of the fallibility of the greatest critics when they pronounce judgment on foreign literatures. Even more exaggerated than Montiano was the Marqués de Valdeflores, Luis José Velázquez De Velasco (1722-72), whom we have already seen ascribing Torre's poems to Quevedo, an error almost sufficient to ruin any reputation. Velázquez expressed his general literary views in his Orígenes de la Poesía castellana (1749), which found an enthusiastic translator in Johann Andreas Dieze, of Göttingen. Velázquez develops and emphasises the teaching of his predecessors, denounces the dramatic follies of Lope and Calderón, and even goes so far as to regret that Nasarre should waste his powder on two common, discredited fellows like Lope and Cervantes. It is impossible for us here to record the polemics in which Luzán's teaching was supported or combated; defective as it was, it had at least the merit of rousing Spain from her intellectual torpor.
Some effect of the new criticism is seen in the works of the Jesuit, José Francisco de Isla (1703-81), whose finer humour is displayed in his Triunfo del Amor y de la Lealtad (1746), which professes to describe the proclamation at Pamplona of Ferdinand VI.'s accession. The author was officially thanked by Council and Chapter, and some expressed by gifts their gratitude for his handsome treatment. As Basques joke with difficulty, it was not until two months later that the Triunfo (which bears the alternative title of A Great Day for Navarre) was suspected to be a burlesque of the proceedings and all concerned in them. Isla kept his countenance while he assured his victims of his entire good faith; the latter, however, expressed their slow-witted indignation in print, and brought such pressure to bear that the lively Jesuit—who kept up the farce of denial till the last day of his life—was removed from Pamplona by his superiors. The incorrigible wag departed to become a fashionable preacher; but his sense of humour accompanied him to church, and was displayed at the cost of his brethren. Paravicino, as we have already observed, introduced Gongorism into the pulpit, and his lead was followed by men of lesser faculty, who reproduced "the contortions of the Sibyl without her inspiration." By degrees preaching almost grew to be a synonym for buffoonery, and by the middle of the eighteenth century it was as often as not an occasion for the vulgar profanity which pleases devout illiterates. It is impossible to cite here the worst excesses; it is enough to note that a "cultured" congregation applauded a preacher who dared to speak of "the divine Adonis, Christ, enamoured of that singular Psyche, Mary!" Bishops in their pastorals, monks like Feijóo in his Cartas eruditas, and laymen like Mayáns in his Orador Cristiano (1733), strove ineffectually to reform the abuse: where exhortation failed, satire succeeded. Isla had witnessed these pulpit extravagances at first hand, and his six quarto volumes of sermons—none of them inspiring to read, however impressive when delivered—show that he himself had begun by yielding to a mode from which his good sense soon freed him.
His Historia del famoso Predicador Fray Gerundio de Campazas, alias Zotes (1758), published by Isla under the name of his friend, Francisco Lobón de Salazar, parish priest of Aguilar and Villagarcía del Campo, is an attempt to do for pulpit profanity what Don Quixote had done for chivalresque extravagances. It purports to be the story of a peasant-boy, Gerundio, with a natural faculty for clap-trap, which leads him to take orders, and gains for him no small consideration. A passage from the sermon which decided Gerundio's childish vocation may be quoted as typical:—"Fire, fire, fire! the house is a-flame! Domus mea, domus orationis vocabitur. Now, sacristan, peal those resounding bells: in cymbalis bene sonantibus. That's the style: as the judicious Picinelus observed, a death-knell and a fire-tocsin are just the same. Lazarus amicus noster dormit. Water, sirs, water! the earth is consumed—quis dabit capiti meo aquam.... Stay! what do I behold? Christians, alas! the souls of the faithful are a-fire!—fidelium animæ. Molten pitch feeds the hungry flames like tinder: requiescat in pace, id est, in pice, as Vetablus puts it. How God's fire devours! ignis a Deo illatus. Tidings of great joy! the Virgin of Mount Carmel descends to save those who wore her holy scapular: scapulis suis. Christ says: 'Help in the King's name!' The Virgin pronounceth: 'Grace be with me!' Ave Maria." And so forth at much length.