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FROM Romanticism in Castilian Poetry

INTRODUCTION

More than a century ago, German thought laid the groundwork for critical science in art. The Schlegel brothers,¹ who indisputably represent this epiphany, share the glory of having founded the best instrument thus far for scientifically registering the diverse manifestations of fine arts in our times. Since then, art criticism has stopped limiting itself to a superficial analysis of form and a more or less incomplete consideration of a specific technique to become the profound, wide-reaching judgment that stems from a scientific vision seen through a prism, the multiple facets of which direct many lights toward a central, high, and vigorous conclusion in harmonious theory. That is to say, the critic of today is the master who corrects, the chisel that files down the works of other activities, but who corrects and files in accordance with the models that he has come to obtain as ideals by dint of an eager drive toward perfection. And it will not be hyperbole to attribute this elevated, integrating mission of improvement to contemporary criticism, if at the outset we disinherit the belief of certain didactic publicists that art criticism has no transformative bearing on the work of art that it considers.

Every science like every man, every thought like every device, can stand a bit more sunlight or some possibility of progressive force so that life may advance down the road of civilization toward ever brighter horizons. On the contrary, it is also possible that they may constitute a negative element of progress, which in the final analysis is a reactionary tendency at the heart of their apparently ecstatic temerity. And under the laws of existence, it is necessary to evaluate in fair terms exactly what in every work concerns the interests of the common endeavor in one way or another. Thus values in the spirit exist as the need to place human labor in plain sight, with the objective of specifying the degree to which and the sense in which it impacts on the great universal work—and herein lies the essential role of the critic.

There was therefore a need for the charitable action of truly scientific criticism, since the analytic spirit in the century of Luis XIV was, as Le Bon states in The Psychology of Revolution,² nothing more than a storm that razed and destroyed, whose fertilizing action would bear fruit only at a much later date, when humanity, revitalized under the archway of peace in the wake of the neoplatonic epic, began to live again, and science, philosophy, and art took to truer courses; when the spirit started to think about the fate of the people and all that has been done over centuries past in favor of their well-being and progress. Romantic autonomy in art was thus thrust forward, elevating, as a logical consequence, the critic to his corresponding place in literature.

[JM]

CRITIQUE OF ROMANTICISM³

This brings us to José de Espronceda, “the typical man of romanticism.” The poetry of this brother of Byron is the loyal image, the eminently precise spirit of Spanish romanticism. Since his verse sinks into the reader’s soul like fantastic tears of darkness and acrimony, bores through the tranquil sky of faith like the crackling embers of an entire people—perhaps of an entire epoch—and shakes in the torturous flames of a pessimistic philosophy on the brink of skepticism, we see the romantic doctrine fulfilled in a broad and definitive way. To begin with the orientation of Espronceda’s influences, the personal reference is the essential motif in all his cantos, and this positive element of artistic subjectivism, the life and color to his cantos, as the Englishman Fitzmaurice-Kelly says, undoubtedly makes him the most distinguished Spanish poet of his century.

Espronceda presents himself with complete sincerity in his poetry, that is, exactly as he is in himself, and no longer assumes a personality to engage his surroundings, as in the French romanticism of Victor Hugo, which came later to give origin to objective thinking and naturalism, whereupon the romantic school reached its end. Espronceda, on the other hand, was none of that; the firm gaze with which the poet pierces himself engendered the instability that was throbbing through all spheres of activity in his century, thereby giving origin to doubt and skepticism. And thus, José Martí, has said,

Poets of today can be neither epic nor lyric with naturalness and serenity; there is no room for more lyric poetry except the kind that one pulls out of oneself, as if out of one’s own being whose existence cannot be doubted, or as if the problem of human life had been undertaken so courageously and investigated so fervently, that there could be no better motive more stimulating or more prone to profundity and greatness than the study of oneself. Today, no one is certain of his faith. True believers have fallen into self-deceit. All have been kissed by the same sorceress. Men may tear their innermost selves to shreds, but in the calmest recesses there remains famished furious Unrest, some Vague Hope, and the Secret Vision. An immense pale man, with a gaunt face, weepy eyes and a dry mouth, dressed in black, traverses the earth with serious strides without stopping to sleep; and he has sat down in every home and placed his trembling hand on all the bedsteads—Oh, what blows to the brain! What a shock to the breast! To demand what never comes! To know not what one desires! To feel delight and nausea equally in the spirit, nausea of the day that dies and delight in the dawn!⁴

Espronceda is this man who lives and will live for centuries to come, breathing life into the poetry of El diablo mundo. This poet’s philosophy also belongs to Byron, and the kinship is so evident that there is no shortage of people who believe that they see in his poetry imitations of the author of Cain. But there can be no greater foolishness than this kind of imposture. If Espronceda were not who he is, an original personality, an unmistakably distinct genius, with a trademark all his own, perhaps that claim could hold some weight. In the Spanish poet the soul of his race is latent; it is the genuine expression of the Iberian Latinity of the century, which was debated in fights of all kinds—social, political, philosophical—and this more than anything else distinguishes his arduous impassioned sentimentalism, that subjugator of the brain, and the creative power of his dreaming mind, the docile instrument of his Castilian heart. In his most sublime intonations, the genius of Espronceda bears no likeness to Byron, and it is precisely at those moments that the originally Latin tendency is highlighted by the strong emotive exaltation, the thrilling ferocity of blistering heat and the rogue flight of the impossible ideal giving in to vague fractures that open up to the night of nothingness and disillusion. With waveringly unreligious abstraction—an attitude like someone who retires from the symposium of the world headed toward the occult with his eyes fixed on what he abandons—he furrows a contemptuous brow of protest and rises into the air to make contact with the shadows before vanishing among them. Instead, an influence from Goethe may be perceptible, but only because of what he touched on in his plan for and execution of El diablo mundo and because of the spiritualism of his metaphysics. The rest is proper to nineteenth-century Spanish psychology, as seen in these lines by Espronceda:

¡Dicha es soñar, y el riguroso seño

no ver jamás de la verdad impía!

His principle poem, El diablo mundo, is the battle of vanity and ephemerality in the world against the eternal ideal of immortality, the childish reality of life—“a la que tanto nuestro afán se adhiere”—against the eternal destinies, which may have created the spirit of man by dint of his intellectualizing the instinctive feeling of perpetuity. Thus, this is the battle of the spirit of the century and of Spain: the poet did not try to paint the objective aspect of his work deliberately, with the preconceived notion that his lyre was to be the diapason on which he would shudder a sublime tumultuous breath of human life, in order to catch, in some formidable clash, the echo that would return to the shores of history as the complaint of a century fleetingly passing through the mute bosom of Nature.

Espronceda did not think of this, just as the Cripple of Lepanto did not think that the core of Don Quixote was going to reflect two opposite modes of perceiving life for all of eternity. His psyche was the poem, and the poetry of Espronceda, let us add, existed from the moment that the poet began to live.

In El diablo mundo, on one hand the world throbs with its objects that reach their end, that are born and die like fatuous fires, and on the other hand there is a distant, magical, diffuse, and mysterious chimera that comes from beyond the grave. Might this otherworldly vision be grounded in reality? And if it is, could this be the paradise that the Nazarene spoke of at Golgotha?

This epopoeia that lived in the soul of Espronceda is his own. It is his idiosyncrasy, his artistic personality, his philosophical brilliance, and this is what legitimizes it and why the particular concrete physiognomy of one sole man characterizes the metaphysical concern of an epoch of humanity—a consistent concern for knowing where to locate the eternal, absolute core of all revolutions of thought, expressions of society, and evolutionary progress of Nature. This romantic in heart and soul, obsessed with the not-too-distant memory and devastating analysis of the previous century and with contemplating the uncertainty and revolt swaying the society of his time, in the absence of a strong, firm metaphysics, José de Espronceda wondered, if everything (including the work of reason and human freedom) is torn to shreds and pulverized, dies and is replaced by another formula, then where is invariable eternal certainty? And this thought of the poet is made tangible in the energetic painting of the “man overwhelmed by his age, embittered by painful useless experience, who hopelessly closes a book he was reading sadly convinced of the sterility of science.”⁵

Espronceda’s other poems respond to the same spirit of El diablo mundo, although to varying degrees. For a new thought, a new eternal universal question, he was to demand a new elocution, a new mode of expression. The artistic manifestation of the social spirit that speaks in these terms to all men, who in turn grow enthused by it and love it, as a father loves his babe in whom the soul of the life giver is sweetly transformed, is the ideal of art—and this is what Espronceda achieved.

Under the law of evolution, the Castilian language transformed by the power of the romantic poets’ innovative spirit, like the French language, evolved in its richness and flexibility at the price of breaking off with the dictatorial, inclement, and erroneous grammar of its neoclassical past. Without altering the individuality of the Castilian lexicon, many gaps were filled that had stymied the manifestation of ideas which could not pass through the diction as long as the voices that uttered them were previously consecrated by the intransigent despotic academy; in a word, the language was enriched. So, Espronceda did just this and broke the laws governing poetic language, fatally, irresistibly, with the blind force of his psyche—that tough precept of poetry, as one feels in his breast this man’s robust poetic temperament, exploded in a gasp of asphyxia, thirsty for light and space. Ros de Olano said that “while our poet was aspiring to condense humanity into a book, the first thing he did was break all the established precepts, except for the logical unity.”⁶

Suffice a reading of El diablo mundo to recognize the metrical variety, the marvelous sensationalist rhythmic play, no less impressive than the well-understood freedom with which he has handled the rhyme in such an intensely profound musical way. But again, we repeat, he did not create this poetic voluntarily, reflectively, and, if he did, it would not have resulted in poetry of emotion, feeling, and enthusiastic rhythmical vitality: Espronceda is not the Parnassian who sacrifices the tones of life to the ingenuous games of color and harmony, which is what Hugo’s successors resorted to in the end; nor is he the Greek or Hellenistic pasticheur of cold pulchritude and symmetry from some previous pseudoclassic of his in a Spanish Parnassus. His poetry is none of this, but rather the frank, uncovered, tumultuously melodious canto whipped out, the image of emotion, the intense palpitation of great beautiful thoughts, like a burning touch of sunlight inside the transparent crystal of the word, which trembles and glimmers; a canto that is heard reverberating in the innermost core of the heart, like the orchestra of universal life in which every note of the human heart’s scale rings from silent tears all the way to the garrulous laughter of joy. For such a sublime lyric the music could not have been otherwise.

The stanzas deemed of lesser art—being frivolous, light, and childish—offered themselves to him and, for reasons of fidelity, he accepted and used them to orchestrate ideas that were ordinary because of their lack of importance or to play with errant breezes in which he would exteriorize the vanities of the world. With variable euphony, due to the proper nature of their prosodic organisms, these forms of meter had no need for improvement beneath the chisel of Espronceda, after all that had been achieved by the instructive poets of the eighteenth century. The image of beings, who wander the world in pursuit of frivolous pleasures, without experiencing the disconcerting lofty idea of the reason of things, we see in this short stanza:

Allá va la nave,

bogad sin temor,

ya el aura la arrulle,

ya silve Aquilón.

Yet that severe, olympic, inflexible, and majestic hendecasyllable of the Argensolas took on an infinite variety of attitudes and intensities, along with a determined number of tonic accents in a slow duration or swift parade, as when he says,

Los siglos a los siglos se atropellan,

los hombres a los hombres se suceden …

In explosions such lines let out a piercing scream of anguish, pain, or anger, which nails a profound sustained accent into the word that has been expressed, even though the total cadence of the verse gets dislocated and its prosodic sound gets altered. The hendecasyllable is the verse par excellence, preferred not only by Espronceda but by all Spanish romantic poets. It seems that the Alexandrine of Berceo and the dodecasyllable of Juan de Mena, which are also meters favored by the Castilian muse, were not to Espronceda’s liking or in accordance with his poetic sense of organization, since he hardly worked in these.

The laws of poetry, no doubt, like the laws of language in general, are based on the psychophysiological laws of man. Each people has its poetry, just as each individual has his own voice, a special timber in his words: each form of meter and rhythm could be considered the special timber of the poetry of a people, just as rhyme is the note of distinction of phrasing in music. For that reason, just as French romanticism’s favorite expression was the eighteenth-century Alexandrine modified by Hugo, the Spanish romantic period crystalized its exteriorization in the romance and the hendecasyllable, by making these malleable and adorning them with rich, opulent rhyme. This is why we can say that it’s logical and rational, without fear of being mistaken, that a single metrical form corresponding to a determined sociability is susceptible to transformation and even abandon over the course of time and with the evolution of said sociability. And this is the legitimacy of the revolution that Espronceda put in effect, since he was the voice of his people and the moment.

From our perspective, José de Espronceda is the head of romanticism in Castilian poetry, not because he is the leader of an intellectual or physical movement who for the first time raises the revolutionary flag and unleashes the nacent vision of a new activity but rather because he is the one who, though serving after other predecessors in the already-formed ranks, grabs ahold of the standard of the rebellion and, raising himself up with it to a height he had not reached before, waves it next to the sun, like a victorious eagle, and leaves it nailed on high while he flies off to Glory.

* * *

Behind Espronceda, who completed his mission in the progress of humanity by the age of thirty-three, the eminent José Zorrilla appears, in whose literary figure, according to the critics, romanticism displays its most outstanding mark. Yet here we are wont to resolve a question of great importance for the principles of the school in question and its history. The author of Don Juan Tenorio does not represent the apogee of romanticism for well-founded reasons.

Far above the legends into which Zorrilla has injected the genuinely Spanish note, whose poetry is driven by the rancid perfume of the traditions of the race tacked together beneath the burning meridianal sun, far above the legends is the polyphonic canto of El diablo mundo, that grandiose poem, engendered by humanity’s innermost core, which rises out of the century that came before it and thus spontaneously surpasses Goethe’s Faust in its motivation and Christian sentiment. If these legends indeed draw from their source of inspiration, insofar as this is the history of the Spanish people—with all its war-riddled episodes and fanaticism, with all its effervescence and fragile ideals—in a word, if these poems “are written in the dust and ruins of the ancient monuments and castles” and are the voice of their race, then they might respond to one of the characters of romantic poetry, but their intrinsic importance does not fulfill the ideal of romanticism in relation to society and human evolution. “Zorrilla is not outstanding for his familiarity with the modern philosophical systems that form the superior feature in the stories of Goethe,” Camacho Roldán explains. “Before all else he is a poet, a poet of nature, a poet of the music of language, a poet whose amenable expression imitates the roaring thrust of the harsh wind.”⁷ Zorrilla, a contemporary of Espronceda, had a longer life to bring his artistic ideals to reality, and so he did.

In the literary oeuvre of Zorrilla there are two perfectly distinct genres: drama and legend. Corresponding to the first are the so very popular Don Juan Tenorio and El puñal del godo, among other dramas; and to the second, Más vale llegar a tiempo que rondar un año and Ganar perdiendo among his comedies. The grand tribunal of posterity has already handed down its ruling on these works, and the critics have said so much about them that there is no need for us here to engage them again, except insofar as these poems respond in one way or another to the school we are studying.

From our perspective, Don Juan Tenorio is clearly the most popular drama of all theatrical works to have been written in Castilian, and this deep sincere prestige that it enjoys among its readers can be explained by two main reasons: the water sources of inspiration Zorrilla drank from to elaborate the broad thought of this work and the form he used to embody his ideas. Don Juan Tenorio is not a figure created by Zorrilla, dispensing with a vision of society, as an a priori consequence of his astonishing fantasy, which, along with much else, was well within Zorrilla’s capabilities. Rather, Don Juan is a character who corresponds to the tradition of the Spanish people and to the spirit of its sociability. Moreover, the protagonist of this drama is a genuine model of human idiosyncrasy. To be precise, he is the passionately erotic, unreligious, and courageous personification of romantic man, and as the image of these ideas and feelings of the spirit, he has risen from society to the stage, like a natural flower, obeying one of Guyau’s laws which says that, just as in the towering mountains there exists some corner where nature’s polyrhythm goes to echo and all the voices of the region convene, so too from human activity does a man emerge who encapsulates the tumultuous palpitations of the heart in his superior psychic vitality. Hence, Don Juan Tenorio. He undoubtedly corresponds to the simple basic essence of this figure of art, the real existence of a man, whom the people knew and tradition embellished with fantastic features and painted with the stunning lines of a rare psychological composition. Tirso took him to stage and, in this sense, Tirso was romantic.⁸ But Zorrilla modified him, because aside from presenting us with this figure onstage, with this universal character to whom we have alluded, he infused him with a vigorous spirit of Spanish Latinity; it is in this way that Don Juan Tenorio is the pure and loyal image of Spanish man, and this is why the work’s widespread reception has been so favorable. With regard to the formal art of the dramatic development, this is another powerful strength that has made the author’s thought ineradicable in the astonished imagination of all who speak Castilian. Everywhere someone is heard delightfully reciting portions of the verses from Don Juan Tenorio, due to the sublime simplicity of style, the familiar phraseological elocutions, and the trademark usage of the romance and hendecasyllable meters, which the Spanish hold so dear, as if those bits of harmony are themselves the beating of the Castilian breast.

And what can we say about El puñal del godo that we haven’t said already? The organizing dramatic idea of this poem does not have a different origin than that of Don Juan; it too is a flower of Spanish blood and sentiment; it too is the faithful representation of the social spirit of the epoch in which it was written, and this is why its genuine inspiration is the people, informed as it is by the legendary memories of medieval times.

In the second genre, Zorrilla maintains the romantic temperament of the motifs from his dramatic works. One could say that, with the miracle of his portentous genius in the legends, he has brought us the living breath of ancient platonic love from the grave, melancholic burial ground of medieval Spain, from the remote gothic monasteries, and from the burning, mystical, patriotic enthusiasm of the Cids and Pelayos. Never before did Spanish lyricism know how to gain momentum so energetically from the heated breath of the Iberian soul; never in its creations did it unfurl so completely the net of its distant glorious memories, nor did it endow such lucid beauty of local color and architectonic forms. Other poets might have created something better with regard to highbrow ideas, lineal perfection, and beauty in the visual tonalities, but no one has managed to copy with such fidelity the mysterious majestic mansions from the Middle Ages, full of unnerving penumbras and monastic abstractions, the dark stormy nights that plunge the rugged sierras of Spain into mourning, where the wind howls and a religious tone of spiritual sadness reigns. Finally, no one has managed to show us so clearly the ephemeral nuances of the race—the wild impetuses of falconry, the mildest winged swooning of tenderness, blind Christian fanaticism, vulgarity, violence, irreligiousness, criminal blood, and the martyr’s purple heart. Admire here a brushstroke of quintessential beauty in the execution of such idealization, when he paints the vision of Margarita la Tornera in the convent:

Pero con fulgor tan puro,

tan fosfórico y tan tenue,

que el templo seguía oscuro

y en silencio y soledad.

Solo de la monja en torno

se notaba vaporosa

teñida de azul y rosa

una extraña claridad.

Although some critics suggest that his traditions lack research with regard to philosophical speculations, this defect is completely nonexistent in the author’s lyric, no matter what portion of text one cites from his immense oeuvre. This contra is mistaken and unjust. Let he who says otherwise say so when Zorrilla pontificates and sings that

… la hermosa

es prenda que con envidia

el cielo dio, y con perfidia

por castigo a la mujer.

Y que quien cifra sobre ella

el bien del amor ajeno,

no acierto más que veneno

en su delicia verter.

It is easy to see in the literary endeavor of Zorrilla a common character identifiable in all his poetry—the dramatic form—no matter how imperceptible the perpetual dialogue may be, a circumstance that can be explained by the intense zest for life that the author wished to communicate and did communicate in all his works, the reason for which concurs so strongly with the dramatization of thought to the benefit of the clarity and vigor of his ideas.

No aspiro a más laurel ni a más hazaña,

que a una sonrisa a mi dulce España.

This is what the poet sang in his prelude, when he was inviting the reader to a tasting of his poetry:

las sabrosas historias de otros días.

In effect, whereas Espronceda lost himself in the national meaning of his inspirational themes, throwing himself into the world to harvest from the activity of the human spirit the eternal concerns, the perpetual agitation that makes him thirst for a solution to the metaphysical problems; while this colossus of spiritualist thought, confronting the odyssey of the century on his way toward the conquest of his ideals, was singing all the disillusions and all the doubts in a free, robust, burning, and booming intonation, like the thrust of life itself; Zorrilla, nostalgic for the infancy of his race, dreaming of legendary times of his people’s past, more Spanish than human, more patriotic than universal, put on the chords of his lyre the old fibers of the Castilian heart. That is why in his poetry, as we have already said, there prevails the ardent fantasy of the low latitudes, gold-plated melancholy of the meridian, fierce heroic impetuosity, consoling theology, and the instinctive sadness of the soul of Spain. In this sense, the oeuvre of the author of Don Juan marks the resurgence of Spanish classicism, insofar as all the arguments of his works are so genuinely portrayed from social reality that they resemble, as we have already said, projections of actuality, repetitions of events, ideas and feelings that have transpired on the stage of life.

Just look at the vital breath with which he is penetrating a thought that, exposed in another way, would have become figurative:

¿No es verdad que cuando a solas

hablo con vos, Don Rodrigo,

va vuestra alma en lo que os digo

como nave entre las olas,

esperando de un momento

a otro, verse sumergida

por la mar embravecida

de mi airado pensamiento?

And the energetic image of an attitude:

¿No es verdad que cuando clavo

mis ojos en vuestro rostro,

os hielo el alma y os postro

a mis pies como un esclavo?

And as for his technique? When we were speaking about Espronceda, we said that the preferred verse of romanticism in Spain has been the hendecasyllable, and Zorrilla shows us just this. For the most part his dramatic poems are developed in this metrical form, and in the secular assonant romance, which, as Piñeiro puts quite well, only on the Zorrillesque plectrum does the natural charm and untamed music thrive as it does in the Spanish cantares of heroic feats.

With regard to what of Zorrilla’s is relegated to the traditionalist genre, including the poems Granada and Al Hamar, there prevails almost exclusively the same combination of primitive measure, sometimes adorned with consonant rhyme that may diminish its value of spontaneity and finesse like the popular heroic meter, but it also enables it to gain auditory and melodic force, as well as a visual effect.

Therefore, without denying the guiding influence of Lamartine and Musset,⁹ given the preponderance that French romanticism exercises on all European literatures, one can say that José Zorrilla was a genius whose works are the exclusive fruit of his own artistic organization and philosophical temperament. This is confirmed by the fact that no poet of his rank has become the representative voice of his race and epoch to the point of reaching his level or rising above him, which is clearly manifest not only in the content but also in the formal technique of his works, and this has incited Alberto Lista—a classicist through and through—to read the grandiose creations of this author and then exclaim in a scathing critique of the liberty of Zorrilla’s executive manner,

[W]hen on the wings of the idea our fantasy wants to fly to the empire, an incorrect expression, an improper word, an impossible Gallicism or neologism warns us that we are stuck in the mud of the earth … We cannot attribute this defect to the school of contemporary romanticism, first because its leaders in France have never managed to remove the yolk of their grammar, which is one thousand times more burdensome in French than in Spanish, and second because there are many poets among us who belong to the same school and who despite the liberty that they take during their raptures of imagination, still do not dare trespass the limits that preformulated poetic language has imposed on the license of genius.¹⁰

As for his technique, there is no doubt that Zorrilla left many of his contemporaries in the dust, with his autonomous exaltation and profound knowledge of the science of the belles lettres, which is why to the chagrin of the Aristarchuses of the world¹¹ and the rulings of prescribed science, rather than being transgressions, as the professor of the University of Madrid suggests, those breaks with the academic rules of language have become the greatest merits of his work. With regard to morphology, the true legislator and motor for the transformation or disappearance of words is not the fanciful will of writers but of society, which thus fulfills one of the various projections of the evolution of the human spirit. That is why, when Zorrilla had penetrated this truth, placing in his poetry all the feeling, desire, and action of his people, he knew better than anyone where it was going, following the impulses of his own original artistic orientation. Today in his diction society sees words and phrases heard every day in different situations of life among the Spanish people. For this reason, one author says,

[I]n Zorrilla one does not find reminiscences of Homer’s grandiosity or Virgil’s delicate tenderness or Horace’s cultured philosophical expression: in his poetry one does not sense the exotic yet enjoyable flavor that reading the works of foreign writers transmits, but of him one can say what Michelet said of Alexander Dumas: he was a force of Nature.¹²

[JM]