II
SPANISH LYRIC POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
Early in the nineteenth century the armies of Napoleon invaded Spain. There ensued a fierce struggle for the mastery of the Peninsula, in which the latent strength and energy of the Spaniards became once more evident. The French devastated parts of the country, but they brought with them many new ideas which, together with the sharpness of the conflict, served to awaken the Spanish people from their torpor and to give them a new realization of national consciousness. During this period of stress and strife two poets, Quintana and Gallego, urged on and encouraged their fellow countrymen with patriotic songs.
Manuel José QUINTANA (1772-1857) had preëminently the "gift of martial music," and great was the influence of his odes Al armamento de las provincias contra los franceses and Á España después de la revolución de marzo. He also strengthened the patriotism of his people by his prose Vidas de españoles célebres (begun in 1806): the Cid, the Great Captain (Gonzalo de Córdoba), Pizarro and others of their kind. In part a follower of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, Quintana sang also of humanity and progress, as in his ode on the invention of printing. In politics Quintana was a liberal; in religious beliefs, a materialist. Campoamor has said of Quintana that he sang not of faith or pleasures, but of duties. His enemies have accused him of stirring the colonies to revolt by his bitter sarcasm directed at past and contemporaneous Spanish rulers, but this is doubtless an exaggeration. It may be said that except in his best patriotic poems his verses lack lyric merit and his ideas are wanting in insight and depth; but his sincerity of purpose was in the main beyond question and he occasionally gave expression to striking boldness of thought and exaltation of feeling. In technique Quintana was a follower of the Salamancan school.
The cleric Juan Nicasio GALLEGO (1777-1853) rivaled Quintana as a writer of patriotic verses. A liberal in politics like Quintana, Gallego also took the side of his people against the French invaders and against the servile Spanish rulers. He is best known by the ode El dos de mayo, in which he exults over the rising of the Spanish against the French on the second of May, 1808; the ode Á la defensa de Buenos Aires against the English; and the elegy Á la muerte de la duquesa de Frías in which he shows that he is capable of deep feeling. Gallego was a close friend of Quintana, whose salon in Madrid he frequented. Gallego wrote little, but his works are more correct in language and style than those of Quintana. It is interesting that although the writings of these two poets evince a profound dislike and distrust of the French, yet both were in their art largely dominated by the influence of French neo-classicism. This is but another illustration of the relative conservatism of belles-lettres.
In the year 1793 there had been formed in Seville by a group of young writers an Academia de Letras Humanas to foster the cultivation of letters. The members of this academy were admirers of Herrera, the Spanish Petrarchist and patriotic poet of the sixteenth century, and they strove for a continuation of the tradition of the earlier Sevillan group. The more important writers of the later Sevillan school were Arjona, Blanco, Lista and Reinoso. Manuel María de ARJONA (1771-1820), a priest well read in the Greek and Latin classics, was an imitator of Horace. José María BLANCO (1775-1841), known in the history of English literature as Blanco White, spent much time in England and wrote in English as well as in Castilian. Ordained a Catholic priest he later became an Unitarian. The best-known and most influential writer of the group was Alberto LISTA (1775-1848), an educator and later canon of Seville. Lista was a skilful artist and like Arjona an admirer and imitator of Horace; but his ideas lacked depth. His best-known poem is probably a religious one, Á la muerte de Jesús, which abounds in true poetic feeling. Lista exerted great influence as a teacher and his Lecciones de literatura española did much to stimulate the study of Spanish letters. Félix José REINOSO (1772-1814), also a priest, imitated Milton in octava rima. As a whole the influence of the Sevillan school was healthful. By insisting upon purity of diction and regularity in versification, the members of the school helped somewhat to restrain the license and improve the bad taste prevailing in the Spanish literature of the time. The Catalonian Manuel de CABANYES (1808-1833) remained unaffected by the warring literary schools and followed with passionate enthusiasm the precepts of the ancients and particularly of Horace.
In the third decade of the nineteenth century romanticism, with its revolt against the restrictions of classicism, with its free play of imagination and emotion, and with lyricism as its predominant note, flowed freely into Spain from England and France. Spain had remained preëminently the home of romanticism when France and England had turned to classicism, and only in the second half of the eighteenth century had Spanish writers given to classicism a reception that was at the best lukewarm. Now romanticism was welcomed back with open arms, and Spanish writers turned eagerly for inspiration not only to Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Byron, but also to Lope de Vega and Calderón. Spain has always worshiped the past, for Spain was once great, and the appeal of romanticism was therefore the greater as it drew its material largely from national sources.
In 1830 a club known as the Parnasillo was formed in Madrid to spread the new literary theories, much as the Cénacle had done in Paris. The members of the Parnasillo met in a wretched little café to avoid public attention. Here were to be found Bretón de los Herreros, Estébanez Calderón, Mesonero Romanos, Gil y Zárate, Ventura de la Vega, Espronceda and Larra. The influence of Spanish epic and dramatic poetry had been important in stimulating the growth of romanticism in England, Germany and France. In England, Robert Southey translated into English the poem and the chronicle of the Cid and Sir Walter Scott published his Vision of Don Roderick; in Germany, Herder's translation of some of the Cid romances and the Schlegel brothers' metrical version of Calderón's dramas had called attention to the merit of the earlier Spanish literature; and in France, Abel Hugo translated into French the Romancero and his brother Victor made Spanish subjects popular with Hernani and Ruy Blas and the Légendes des siècles. But Spain, under the despotism of Ferdinand VII, the "Tyrant of Literature," remained apparently indifferent or even hostile to its own wonderful creations, and clung outwardly to French neo-classicism.[2] Böhl von Faber,[3] the German consul at Cadiz, who was influenced by the Schlegel brothers, had early called attention to the merit of the Spanish literature of the Golden Age and had even had some of Calderón's plays performed at Cadiz. And in 1832 Durán published his epoch-making Romancero. In 1833 Ferdinand VII died and the romantic movement was hastened by the home-coming of a number of men who had fled the despotism of the monarch and had spent some time in England and France, where they had come into contact with the romanticists of those countries. Prominent amongst these were Martínez de la Rosa, Antonio Alcalá Galiano, the Duke of Rivas and Espronceda.
Footnote 2:[ (return) ] Cf. l'Épopée castillane, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Paris, 1910, pp. 249-252.