Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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,