Footnote:
[29] For two singularly acute critical studies by M. E. Mérimée on Jove-Llanos and Meléndez Valdés, see the Revue hispanique (Paris, 1894). vol. i. pp. 34-68, and pp. 217-235.
CHAPTER XII
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Intellectual interaction between Spain and France is an inevitable outcome of geographical position. To the one or to the other must belong the headship of the Latin races; for Portugal is, so to say, but a prolongation of Galicia, while the unity of Italy dates from yesterday. This hegemony was long contested. During a century and a half, fortune declared for Spain: the balance is now redressed in France's favour. The War of the Succession, the invasion of 1808, the expedition of 1823, the contrivance of the Spanish marriages show that Louis XIV., Napoleon I., Charles X., and Louis-Philippe dared risk their kingdoms rather than loosen their grip on Spain. More recent examples are not lacking. The primary occasion of the Franco-German War in 1870-71 was the proposal to place a Hohenzollern on the Spanish throne, and the Parisian outburst against "Alfonso the Uhlan" was an expression of resentment against a Spanish King who chafed under French tutelage. Since there is no ground for believing that France will renounce a traditional diplomacy maintained, under all forms of government, for over two centuries, it is not rash to assume that in the future, as in the past, intellectual development will tend to coincide with political influence. French literary fashions affect all Europe more or less: they affect Spain more.
It is a striking fact that the great national poet of the War of Independence should be indisputably French in all but patriotic sentiment. Manuel José Quintana (1772-1857) was an offshoot of the Salamancan school, a friend of Jove-Llanos and of Meléndez Valdés, a follower of Raynal and Turgot and Condorcet, a "philosopher" of the eighteenth-century model. Too much stress has, perhaps, been laid on his French constructions, his acceptance of neologisms: a more radical fault is his incapacity for ideas. Had he died at forty his fame would be even greater than it is; for in his last years he did nothing but repeat the echoes of his youth. At eighty he was still perorating on the rights of man, as though the world were a huge Jacobin Convention, as though he had learned and forgotten nothing during half a century He died, as he had lived, convinced that a few changes of political machinery would ensure a perpetual Golden Age. It is not for his Duque de Viseo, a tragedy based on M. G. Lewis's Castle Spectre, nor by his Ode to Juan de Padilla, that Quintana is remembered. The partisan of French ideas lives by his Call to Arms against the French, by his patriotic campaign against the invaders, by his prose biographies of the Cid, the Great Captain, Pizarro, and other Spaniards of the ancient time. We might suspect, if we did not know, Quintana's habit of writing his first rough drafts in prose, and of translating these into verse. Though he proclaimed himself a pupil of Meléndez, nature and love are not his true themes, and his versification is curiously unequal. Patriotism, politics, philanthropy are his inspirations, and these find utterance in the lofty rhetoric of such pieces as his Ode to Guzmán the Good and the Ode on the Invention of Printing. Unequal, unrestrained, never exquisite, never completely admirable for more than a few lines at a time, Quintana's passionate pride of patriotism, his virile temperament, his individual gift of martial music have enabled him to express with unsurpassed fidelity one very conspicuous aspect of his people's genius.
Another patriotic singer is the priest, Juan Nicasio Gallego (1777-1853), who, like many political liberals, was so staunchly conservative in literature that he condemned Notre Dame de Paris in the very spirit of an alarmed Academician. Slight as is the bulk of his writings, Gallego's high place is ensured by his combination of extreme finish with extreme sincerity. His elegy On the Death of the Duquesa de Frias is tremulous with the accent of profound emotion; but he is even better known by El Dos de Mayo, which celebrates the historic rising of the second of May, when the artillerymen, Jacinto Ruiz, Luis Daoiz, and Pedro Velarte, by their refusal to surrender their three guns and ten cartridges to the French army, gave the signal for the general rising of the Spanish nation. His ode Á la defensa de Buenos Aires, against the English, is no less distinguished for its heroic spirit. There is a touch of irony in the fact that Gallego should be best represented by his denunciation of the French, whom he adored, and by his denunciation of the British, who were to assist in freeing his country.