FOOTNOTES:
[1] Memoirs and Papers of Sir Andrew Mitchell, K.B., Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Court of Great Britain to the Court of Prussia, from 1756 to 1771. By Andrew Bisset, of Lincoln's Inn, Barrister-at-Law. 2 Vols. Chapman & Hall, London.
HOURS IN SPAIN.
The neglect of Spanish literature is perhaps, after the decay of Spanish power, the most striking instance of the precarious tenure of greatness that modern history can supply. Various causes have contributed to this result; none more powerfully perhaps than that ecclesiastical domination which included all that could embellish and exalt our nature in the sphere of its malignant activity, and after poisoning the sources of material prosperity—after making the river, the forest, and the mine useless to their possessors—after turning the land of corn, and wine, and oil into a wilderness—extended its destructive conquest to the informing soul of its inhabitants, and to the ruin of commerce added the extermination of thought itself.
There were many causes which contributed to the triumph of this influence in Spain. The long war against the Moors, carried on with such unequalled pertinacity, and terminated by such complete success, could hardly fail to prolong and exasperate the feelings of religious antipathy, and to make the bigotry, which so many generations had identified with patriotic feeling, precious and venerable to their descendants. And as in France it must for many centuries have been the great object of every true patriot to fortify and to consolidate, at the sacrifice even of constitutional principle, the central power which alone could protect her from invasion, and prevent her from being reduced to the state of wretched insignificance to which a minute subdivision of power into petty principalities had degraded Germany,—so in Spain, national pride mingled itself with religious principle; the hostility of race combined with the hatred of sect; and if the latter made the former furious, the former made the last implacable. The Saxon submitted to the Norman. But the Spaniard, under circumstances far less favourable to resistance, never for one moment abandoned his hostility to the Moor. Again, when Louis the Fourteenth had been compelled by adverse fortune to surrender the cause of his own grandson, the Spanish peasant, without resources, without commerce, without fleets, without armies, adhered with inflexible fidelity to the cause he had once embraced, and in spite of Blenheim and Ramilies and Oudenarde—in spite of Marlborough, Eugene, and Peterborough—kept the sovereign of his affections on the throne;-and finally, when the rest of Continental Europe quailed before the first of conquerors, the spirit which had triumphed at Almanza and Granada showed itself once more to be invincible, and taught mankind the memorable lesson that "all was not lost" where hatred was immortal, and the determination of resistance not to be overcome. Such a nation must leave an imperishable mark in history. As, however, these elements of pride and bigotry acquired an ascendency in the Spanish character, it gradually sank into a sullen apathy of unsocial indolence, which its declining influence and repeated mortifications tended materially to confirm. Shut up behind the barrier of the Pyrenees—living only in the past, consoling itself by the recollections of former grandeur for the consciousness of actual insignificance and decay; the slave of priests, the victim of kings—it clung to habits unknown in the rest of Europe, and to feelings with which all sympathy had long since passed away. The language, which in the sixteenth century had been spoken in every court of Europe, was unknown—the writers, whom the giant intellects that surrounded the throne of our Elizabeth had studied with so much care, were forgotten. In spite of her noble colonies, in spite of her glorious dialect, in spite of writers more nearly approaching the great models of antiquity in the exquisite perfection of style than those of any modern country, in spite of a drama the wealth of which was inexhaustible Spain ceased to have any influence on the progress of human thought and action. Her vast empire was a corpse from which life had fled. So complete was the ignorance of Spanish literature, that Montesquieu said of the Spaniards, without incurring the charge of having sacrificed truth to epigram, "Le seul de leurs livres qui soit bon est celui qui a fait voir le ridicule de tous les autres:" a singular proof of literary ingratitude in the countryman of Molière, Corneille, and Le Sage—and a still more remarkable proof of the fluctuation of national studies in a country where, scarce a century before, ignorance of Spanish would have been looked upon as a proof of the most barbarous rusticity.
In France, says Cervantes, there is no one man or woman who does not learn Spanish. "En Francia, ni varon ni muger dexa de aprender la lengua Castellana."
To the effect of this very circumstance the growing indifference to Spanish literature may, in some measure, be ascribed. During the palmy state of Spanish greatness, the Spaniard, finding his language, as the French is now, the received organ of social intercourse throughout Europe, seldom vouchsafed to study modern languages. Nor, indeed, were such studies congenial to the taste and temper of that fastidious and haughty nation. In earlier days, poetical traditions and popular ballads had wandered across the Pyrenees. The songs of the Troubadours, and the effusions in the tongue of Oc, had, by means of the kindred dialect of Catalonia, exercised great influence over Castilian poetry. But, towards the end of the fifteenth century, the connection between French and Spanish literature was altogether interrupted: as the language of Catalonia sank to the level of a mere provincial dialect, the channel of communication was blocked up. The family relations between the different members of the houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon could not fill up the chasm which nature had placed between the inhabitants of different sides of the Pyrenees, and which centuries of almost incessant warfare had contributed to widen; and as the provinces of Berne and Languedoc became scandalous as the seats of heresy, everything that came from France was looked upon with aversion and distrust. Still stronger and more insurmountable were the barriers against English literature. He who will read the Dragontea of Lope de Vega, the most amiable of authors, and the ode of Gongora, Al armamento de Felipe segundo contra Inglaterra, may form some idea of the scorn and hatred with which the Spaniard, proud of his race, proud of his victories, proud of his language, and, above all, tenacious to madness of the unsullied purity of his faith, looked upon the piratical English, twice apostates from the Holy See, who spoke a barbarous dialect, unknown to the nations of the South, clogged with consonants and monosyllables, incapable of sonorous cadences, and in every respect the opposite of his own. Even at the present day, it is remarkable that Southey—with all his faults, the best writer of English prose that our age has produced—was deeply versed in Spanish literature; and in spite of our acquisitions in physical science, a native of the South, to whom his own beautiful dialect is familiar, might be forgiven when he reads the clumsy prose and prosaic verse of the present day, if he reflect with delight on the Ciceronian eloquence of Cervantes, and the finished periods of Saavedra Faxardo. A Spanish artisan would be ashamed to write like our learned men, or to speak like many members of the House of Commons—so true and so universal is the doctrine of compensation. In the year 1754, Velasquez assures us that there was in Spain no single translation of an English author. But the aversion was not reciprocal. In the days of our great Elizabeth, when the English intellect was at a height from which it has ever since been travelling downwards, Spanish novels and romances were diligently studied, and perpetually translated. There is strong evidence to show that the great dramatists of that day were not ignorant of the Spanish stage.
A translation, or rather an abridgment, of the Celestina, was printed in London in 1530, and in 1580 the story was acted in a London theatre.
But as all our readers may not have heard—and many of them probably have not read a line of the Celestina—we will, before we proceed farther, explain the nature of this most remarkable—and if the age when it was written be considered—this quite unequalled production.