Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo

      BOOK ONE 1915–1919

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

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