Modern Spanish Lyrics | Page 9

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 page xxxiii 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 page xxxiv 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
page xxxv 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