Returning to Madrid, Espronceda was soon concerned in more conspiracies, and escaped to Gibraltar, whence he passed to Lisbon. A suggestion of the Byronic pose is found in the story (of his own telling) that, before landing, he threw away his last two pesetas, "not wishing to enter so great a town with so little money." In Lisbon he met with that Teresa who figures so prominently in his life; but the Government was once more on his track, and he fled to London, where Byron's poems came upon him with the force of a revelation. In England he found Teresa, now married, and eloped with her to Paris, where, on the three "glorious days" of July 1830, he fought behind the barricades. The overthrow of Charles X. put such heart into the Spanish emigrados that, under the leadership of the once famous Chapalangarra—Joaquín de Pablo—they determined to raise all Spain against the monarchy. The attempt failed, Chapalangarra was killed in Navarre, and Espronceda did not return to Spain till the amnesty of 1833. He obtained a commission in the royal bodyguard, and seemed on the road to fortune, when he was cashiered because of certain verses read by him at a political banquet. He turned to journalism, incited the people to insurrection by articles and speeches, held the streets against the regular army in 1835-36, shared in the liberal triumph of 1840, and, on the morrow of the successful revolution which he had organised, pronounced in favour of a republic. He was appointed Secretary to the Embassy at the Hague in 1841, returning to Spain shortly afterwards on his election as deputy for Almería. He died after four days of illness on May 23, 1842, in his thirty-third year, exhausted by his stormy life. A most formidable journalist, a demagogue of consummate address, a man-at-arms who had rather fight than not, Espronceda might have cut out for himself a new career in politics—or might have died upon the scaffold or at the barricades. But, so far as concerns poetry, his work was done: an aged Espronceda is as inconceivable as an elderly Byron, a venerable Shelley.
Byron was the paramount influence of Espronceda's life and works. The Conde de Toreno, a caustic politician and man of letters, who was once asked if he had read Espronceda, replied: "Not much; but then I have read all Byron." The taunt earned Toreno—"insolent fool with heart of slime"—a terrific invective in the first canto of El Diablo Mundo:—
"Al necio audaz de corazón de cieno,
Á quien llaman el Conde de Toreno."
The gibe was ill-natured, but Espronceda's resentment goes to show that he felt its plausibility. If Toreno meant that Espronceda, like Heine, Musset, Leopardi, and Pushkin, took Byron for a model, he spoke the humble truth. Like Byron, Espronceda became the centre of a legend, and—so to say—he made up for the part. He advertised his criminal repute with manifest gusto, and gave the world his own portrait in the shape of pale, gloomy, splendid heroes. Don Félix de Montemar, in El Estudiante de Salamanca, is Don Juan Tenorio in a new environment—"fierce, insolent, irreligious, gallant, haughty, quarrelsome, insult in his glance, irony on his lips, fearing naught, trusting solely to his sword and courage." Again, in the famous declamatory address To Jarifa, there is the same disillusioned view of life, the same lust for impossible pleasures, the same picturesque mingling of misanthropy and aspiration. Once more, the Fabio of the fragmentary Diablo Mundo is replenished with the Byronic spirit of defiant pessimism, the Byronic intention of epical mockery. And so throughout all his pieces the protagonist is always, and in all essentials, José de Espronceda.
Whether any writer—or, at all events, any but the very greatest—has ever succeeded completely in shedding his own personality is doubtful. Espronceda, at least, never attempted it, and consequently his dramatic pieces—Doña Blanca de Borbón, for example—were foredoomed to fail. But this very force of temperament, this very element of artistic egotism, lends life and colour to his songs. The Diablo Mundo, the Estudiante de Salamanca, ostensibly formed upon the models of Goethe, and Byron, and Tirso de Molina, are utterances of individual impressions, detached lyrics held together by the merest thread. Scarcely a typical Spaniard in life or in art, Espronceda is, beyond all question, the most distinguished Spanish lyrical poet of the century. His abandonment, his attitude of revolt, his love of love and licence—one might even say his turn for debauchery and anarchy—are the notes of an epoch rather than the characteristics of a country; and, in so much, he is cosmopolitan rather than national. But the merciless observation of El Verdugo (The Executioner), the idealised conception of Elvira in El Estudiante de Salamanca, are strictly representative of Quevedo's and of Calderón's tradition; while his artificial but sympathetic rhetoric, his resonant music, his brilliant imagery, his uncalculating vehemence, bear upon them the stamp of all his race's faults and virtues. In this sense he speaks for Spain, and Spain repays him by ranking him as the most inspired, if the most unequal, of her modern singers.
His contemporary, the Catalan, Manuel de Cabanyes (1808-1833), died too young to reveal the full measure of his powers, and his Preludios de mi lira (1833), though warmly praised by Torres Amat, Joaquín Roca y Cornet, and other critics of insight, can scarcely be said to have won appreciation. Cabanyes is essentially a poet's poet, inspired mainly by Luis de León. His felicities are those of the accomplished student, the expert in technicalities, the almost impeccable artist whose hendecasyllabics, Á Cintio, rival those of Leopardi in their perfect form and intense pessimism; but as his life was too brief, so his production is too frugal and too exquisite for the general, and he is rated by his promise rather than by his actual achievement. Milá y Fontanals and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo have striven to spread Cabanyes' good report, and they have so far succeeded that his genius is now admitted on all hands; but his chill perfection makes no appeal to the mass of his countrymen.
Espronceda's direct successor was José Zorrilla (1817-1893), whose life's story may be read in his own Recuerdos del tiempo viejo (Old-time Memories). It was his misfortune to be concerned in politics, for which he was unfitted, and to be pinched by continuous poverty, which drove him in 1855 to seek his fortune in Mexico, whence he returned empty-handed in 1866. His closing years were somewhat happier, inasmuch as a pension of 30,000 reales, obtained at last by strenuous parliamentary effort, freed him from the pressure of actual want. It may be that it came too late, and that Zorrilla's work suffers from his straitened circumstances; but this is difficult to believe. He might have produced less, might have escaped the hopeless hack-work to which he was compelled; but a finished artist he could never have become, for, by instinct as by preference, he was an improvisatore. The tale that (like Arthur Pendennis) he wrote verses to fit engravings is possibly an invention; but the inventor at least knew his man, for nothing is more intrinsically probable.
His carelessness, his haste, his defective execution are superficial faults which must always injure Zorrilla in the esteem of foreign critics; yet it is certain that the charm which he has exercised over three generations of Spaniards, and which seems likely to endure, implies the possession of considerable powers. And Zorrilla had three essential qualities in no common degree: national spirit, dramatic insight, and lyrical spontaneity. He is an inferior Sir Walter, with an added knowledge of the theatre, to which Scott made no pretence. His Leyenda de Alhamar, his Granada, his Leyenda del Cid were popular for the same reason that Marmion and the Lady of the Lake were popular: for their revival of national legends in a form both simple and picturesque. The fate that overcame Sir Walter's poems seems to threaten Zorrilla's. Both are read for the sake of the subject, for the brilliant colouring of episodes, more than for the beauty of treatment, construction, and form; yet, as Sir Walter survives in his novels, Zorrilla will endure in such of his plays as Don Juan Tenorio, in El Zapatero y el Rey, and in Traidor, inconfeso, y mártir. His selection of native themes, his vigorous appeal to those primitive sentiments which are at least as strong in Spain as elsewhere—courage, patriotism, religion—have ensured him a vogue so wide and lasting that it almost approaches immortality. In the study Zorrilla's slapdash methods are often wearisome; on the stage his impetuousness, his geniality, his broad effects, and his natural lyrism make him a veritable force. Two of Zorrilla's rivals among contemporary dramatists may be mentioned: Antonio García Gutiérrez (1813-1884), the author of El Trovador, and Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch (1806-1880), whose Amantes de Teruel broke the hearts of sentimental ladies in the forties. Both the Trovador and the Amantes are still reproduced, still read, and still praised by critics who enjoy the pleasures of memory and association; but a detached foreigner, though he take his life in his hand when he ventures on the confession, is inclined to associate García Gutiérrez and Hartzenbusch with Sheridan Knowles and Lytton.