Their blossoms, a host of bees, alarmed
Watched over on jealous wing,
Hoarse trumpeters seemed they all, and armed
Each bee with a diamond sting:
I tore them away, but each flower I tore
Has cost me a wound which smarteth sore.
Now as I these jessamine flowers entwine,
A gift for thy fragrant hair,
I must have, from those honey-sweet lips of thine,
A kiss for each sting I bear:
It is just that the blooms I bring thee home
Be repaid by sweets from the golden comb.[107]"
His poems in Spanish metres, his letrillas and romances, have the same brilliancy of expression, warmth of emotion, and vivid colouring. The "Ballad of Angelica and Medora" is particularly airy and fresh, but rich and strong as a deep clear inland river that reflects the gorgeous tints of the sky. Gongora surpasses every other Spanish lyrist, in the brilliant colouring of his poetry, and the vivacity of his expression.
But all this he voluntarily set at nought. Instead of writing as a poet, he adopted the crabbed critic's art, and, extreme in all things, gave no quarter even to the beauties of his own compositions. He might reprove the diluted interminable poems of Lope, and the unpoetic style of Cervantes; he might have been displeased with the poverty of ideas and enervated conceptions of many of his contemporaries; but he might have been satisfied with his own ease, purity, and strength: he, however, rejected even these, and instituted a system: a new dialect was invented, a new construction adopted,—new words, a dislocated construction, a profusion and exaggeration of figures were introduced. "He rose," one of his disciples writes, "to the sublime height of refinement (cultura), which ignorance holds in distaste, and accomplished the greatness off 'Polyphemus,' the 'Soledades,' and other shorter, but not less, poems." He grew almost frantic in the dissemination of his system; and in his vehemence against its opponents, he became lost to poetry, and lives, even to this day, more remembered as a fantastic and ill-judging innovator, than as one of the most natural, brilliant, and imaginative poets that Spain ever produced.
Lope de Vega has written a letter, or rather essay, upon Gongora and his system, and gives the following account of both:
"I have known this gentleman for eight-and-twenty years, and I hold him to be possessed of the rarest and most excellent talent of any in Cordova, so that he need not yield even to Seneca or Lucan, who were natives of the same town. Pedro Linan de Riaza, his contemporary at Salamanca, told me much of his proficiency in study, so that I cultivated his acquaintance, and improved it by the intercourse we had when I visited Andalusia; and it always appeared as if he liked and esteemed me more than my poor merits deserve. Many other distinguished men of letters at that time competed with him:—Herrera, Vicente Espinel, the two Argensolas, and others, among whom this gentleman held such place, that Fame said the same of him as the Delphic oracle did of Socrates.
"He wrote in all styles with elegance, and in gay and festive compositions his wit was not less celebrated than Martial's, while it was far more decent. We have several of his works composed in a pure style, which he continued for the greater part of his life. But, not content with having reached the highest step of fame in sweetness and softness, he sought (I have always believed with good and sincere intentions, and not with presumption, as his enemies have asserted), to enrich the art, and even language, with such ornaments and figures as were never before imagined nor seen. In my opinion he fulfilled his aim, if this was his intent; the difficulty rests in receiving his system: and so many obstacles have arisen, that I doubt they will never cease, except with their cause; for I think the obscurity and ambiguity of his expressions must be disagreeable to many. By some he is said to have raised this new style into a peculiar class of poetry; and they are not mistaken: for, as in the old manner of writing, it took a life to become a poet, in this new one it requires but a day: for, with these transpositions, four rules, and six Latin words or emphatic phrases, they rise so high that they do not know—far less understand themselves. Lipsius wrote a new Latin, which those who are learned in such things say Cicero and Quintilian laugh at in the other world; and those who have imitated him are so wise that they lose themselves. And I know others who have invented a language and style so different from Lipsius that they require a new dictionary. And thus those who imitate this gentleman produce monstrous births—and fancy that, by imitating his style, they inherit his genius. Would to God they imitated him in that part which is worthy of adoption; for every one must be aware that there is much that is deserving of admiration, while the rest is wrapt in the darkness of such ambiguity as I have found the cleverest men at fault when they tried to understand it. The foundation of this edifice is transposition, rendered the more harsh by the disjoining of substantives from adjectives, where no parenthesis is possible, so that even to pronounce it is difficult: tropes and figures are the ornaments, so little to the purpose, that it is as if a woman, when painting herself, instead of putting the rouge on her cheeks, should apply it to her nose, forehead and ears. Transpositions may be allowed, and there are common examples, but they must be appropriate. Boscan, Garcilaso, and Herrera use them. Look at the elegance, softness, and beauty of the divine Herrera, worthy of imitation and admiration! for, it is not to enrich a language, to reject its natural idiom, and adopt instead phrases borrowed from a foreign tongue; but, now, they write in the style of the curate who asked his servant for the "anserine reed," telling her that "the Ethiopian licour was wanting in the cornelian vase." These people do not attend to clearness or dignity of style, but to the novelty of these exquisite modes of expression, in which there is neither truth nor propriety, nor enlargement of the powers of language; but an odious invention that renders it barbarous, imitated from one who might have been an object of just admiration to us all."[108]
In addition to these grave and reasonable arguments, Lope attacked the culto style with ridicule, better suited to explode the would-be invention of the unintelligible. In several plays he alludes to it with good humoured raillery. In one of them, a cavalier desirous of making use of the talents of a poet to write for him, asks—
Cav.A plain or polished bard?[109]
Poet.Refined my style.