Time has misused the work of Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1788-1862) who at one time was held by Europe as the literary representative of Spain. No small part of his fame was due to his prominent position in Spanish politics; but the disdainful neglect which has overtaken him is altogether unmerited. Not being an original genius, his lyrics are but variations of earlier melodies: thus the Ausencia de la patria is a metrical exercise in Jorge Manrique's manner; the song which commemorates the defence of Zaragoza is inspired by Quintana; the elegy On the Death of the Duquesa de Frias, far short of Gallego's in pathos and dignity, is redolent of Meléndez. His novel, Doña Isabel de Solís, is an artless imitation of Sir Walter Scott; nor are his declamatory tragedies, La Viuda de Padilla and Moraima, of perdurable value any more than his Moratinian plays, such as Los Celos Infundados. Martínez de la Rosa's exile passed in Paris led him to write the two pieces by which he is remembered: his Conjuración de Venecia (1834), and his Aben-Humeya (the latter first written in French, and first played at the Porte Saint-Martin in 1830) denote the earliest entry into Spain of French romanticism, and are therefore of real historic importance. Fate was rarely more freakish than in placing this modest, timorous man at the head of a new literary movement. Still stranger it is that his two late romantic experiments should be the best of his manifold work.
But he was not fitted to maintain the leadership which circumstances had allotted to him, and romanticism found a more popular exponent in Ángel de Saavedra, Duque de Rivas (1791-1865), the very type of the radical noble. His exile in France and in England converted him from a follower of Meléndez and Quintana to a sectary of Chateaubriand and Byron. His first essays in the new vein were an admirable lyric, Al faro de Malta, and El Moro expósito, a narrative poem undertaken by the advice of John Hookham Frere. Brilliant passages of poetic diction, the semi-epical presentation of picturesque national legends, are Rivas' contribution to the new school. He went still further in his famous play, Don Álvaro (1835), an event in the history of the modern Spanish drama corresponding to the production of Hernani at the Théâtre Français. The characters of Álvaro, of Leonor, and of her brother Alfonso Vargas are, if not inhuman, all but titanic, and the speeches are of such magniloquence as man never spoke. But for the Spaniards of the third decade, Rivas was the standard-bearer of revolt, and Don Álvaro, by its contempt for the unities, by its alternation of prose with lyrism, by its amalgam of the grandiose, the comic, the sublime, and the horrible, enchanted a generation of Spanish playgoers surfeited with the academic drama.
To English readers of Mr. Gladstone's essay, the Canon of Seville, José María Blanco (1775-1841), is familiar by the alias of Blanco White. It were irrelevant to record here the lamentable story of Blanco's private life, or to follow his religious transformations from Catholicism to Unitarianism. A sufficient idea of his poetic gifts is afforded by an English quatorzain which has found favour with many critics:—
"Mysterious night! When our first parent knew
Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus, with the host of heaven, came,