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Título del texto editado:
Letter XII
Autor del texto editado:
Dillon, John Talbot
Título de la obra:
Letters from an English travaller in Spain, in 1778, on the origin and progress of poetry in that kingdom
Autor de la obra:
Dillon, John Talbot
Edición:
London: R. Baldwin, 1781


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LETTER XII

Fourth period and decline of Spanish Poetry in the seventeenth century.


St. Ildefonso, 26th July, 1778.

Like another Don Quixote, I sallied forth from Madrid, on one of the hottest days in July, and having traversed a bleak country and climbed steep and almost perpendicular mountains, I at last reached, with a good deal of labour, the royal seat of St. Ildefonso, in a wild and barren situation, where, for the sake of the cool air that constantly reigns here, Philip the 5th thought fit to display his magnificence, by converting one of the most barren spots in nature into a royal villa, where the lavish expense of Versailles was to be renewed, and the French taste of gardening exhibited, with the formal lines of stiff design and antiquated symmetry. Nature, it is true, assisted them with the most clear and limpid water, which they have made use of to advantage; shade being here an object of principal luxury, the gardens have the appearance of a perfect paradise, on leaving the sultry air of Madrid. But notwithstanding this contrast, it is here so piercing at night, and its transitions so sudden as to be of ten productive of dangerous effects on the constitution; for while you pass the day agreeably, dressed in silk, a Ruffian fur is acceptable at night.

Though every effort is made in these gardens, in the midst of snowy mountains, to support vegetation, and force a smile on nature, yet everything looks languid; and instead of the blooming aspect of summer, it rather puts me in mind of the subject I proposed continuing in my last letter, when having traced the Spanish muse in the bright days of splendour, I come now to descant upon her withered bays, like the puny products of St. Ildefonso, that have the colour and resemblance of youth, but nothing of its juvenile vigour and strength. —Thus it happened to the Spanish muse in the seventeenth century, to which the false taste that had already crept in amongst the Italians contributed not a little, and served to hasten their decline; even the Tuscan muse, after soaring to the highest pinnacle of glory, insensibly began to lose her pristine comeliness under the tuition of Marini and his pupils, who by a strain of false similes and extravagant conceits, stripped the muses of their natural graces. The Spaniards soon catched the contagion in the feeble condition they were in, and Lorenzo Gracian, some of whose works have been translated into English, further established this false taste, which he attempted to methodize in a formal essay, entitled de Agudeza y arte de Ingenio; by which means the pleasing elegance of nature was disfigured by a combination of pedants, who losing sight of every beautiful idea, contemning at the same time the rules of art, made way for their insipid vagaries. —These unmerciful despoilers may be classed under three heads in Spain; the first violated all the laws of the drama, and introduced innumerable defects on the stage, which have never been eradicated: of these, Christoval de Virues, Lope de Vega, and Montalban, were the principal leaders, and were followed by Calderon, Salazar, Candamo, Zamora, and others, who to the most glaring improprieties, superadded a ridiculous bombast and affectation of language, which became superlatively intolerable and absurd. —The second class consisted of those who in imitation of the Italians and their unnatural Concetti, introduced such an extravagant profusion of false sentiment, equivocal expression, and swollen periods, as recalled to mind those ancient times, when such men had been so severely handled by Horace; and not content with doing so much in jury to the drama, they further extended it to lyric compositions. —The third class was distinguished by the pedantic appellation of Cultos, “or refined”, which comprehended a set of puritans, who out of false zeal for the chastity of the muses, endeavoured to introduce a greater purity of diction, but by their awkward and ignorant presumption, substituted obscure and unknown expressions to a new and turgid dialect. At the head of these was the poet Luis de Gongora, the count de Villamediana, with others of less note, who contributed to diffuse an universal bad taste, and discredit the muses, sapping the very foundations of their temple, and pointing their shafts against the few remnants of beauty and eloquence in every branch of literature: to such, a low state was true genius reduced by these vandals, that the greatest applauses were given, to vile punsters and minstrels, and every retailer of false wit, under the denomination of Discreciones, who in a former age would have been hissed off the stage with the most sovereign contempt.

While an universal languor thus pervaded every mind, the royal stem partook of a similar decline of nature. The progeny of the great emperor Charles now drew near to its last gasp! whatever may have been the cause, the muses gradually drooped with the empire of these monarchs, and in conjunction with the dismembered dominions of the Philips, expired under the feeble Charles the second, who leaving no issue, a prince of the house of Bourbon ascended the throne of Spain. —The national dress of the Spaniard, as well as his character, were altered; his fable garment was changed for the gay and effeminate modes of Versailles; Spanish gravity was put out of countenance, and he was deprived of his darling whiskers, as the savage Ruffians much about the same time had been despoiled of their beards 1 —Perhaps you are unacquainted with the importance of whiskers at that time in Spain and Portugal: It is told of Don Joam de Castro, a Portuguese viceroy in India, that being in great want of money, and desirous to borrow a large sum in that country, he pawned one of his whiskers, as the most sacred pledge he could think of; which he afterwards honourably redeemed: in which he acted with more punctilio than that famous Spanish hero the Cid, who obtaining a sum of money of a Jew on his plate, instead of sending it to his house, ordered only a chest of sand; —though he afterwards made restitution in his will.

Adieu. —My next will be from the Escurial, where I am going to spend a few days, and then prepare matters for my departure for England.





1. When the emperor Charles's German soldiers quarrelled with their Spanish comrades, they used to swear in German By Got, laying hold of their whiskers; from whence the Spaniards mistaking the meaning of the Word, have called whiskers ever since by the name of Bigotes, though the original word is Mostacho, from the Greek word μυςαξ, the upper lip. —Whiskers and beards were points of great consequence in Spain in those days and any insult offered to them was not to be borne with, even after death by the Cid, as the grave Cobarruvias tells us, It was said, that a Jew having pulled him by the beard on his tomb, out of contempt, God permitted that the figure of this champion should extend its marble hand to its sword, and draw it one third out of the scabbard; on which the affrighted Jew screamed out, which brought people together, who related the story, and some said it caused the Jew to become a Christian.

GRUPO PASO (HUM-241)

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