Professors of the literature of the past in the United States work among and by means of the books that preserve writing in an architectural environment that houses the memories which books contain and provides the spaces for them to be read, analysed, discussed, and perpetuated. At the same time, nearly all buildings on an academic campus are named (as they likewise are everywhere else), and one finds such names, those of donors, savants, artists, and even professors, incised onto the façades, pediments, lintels, and doors of the edifices that recall the achievements of the rich, the famous, and the relatively obscure. A campus is thus the repository of the unforgotten, whose memory lives on both in immaterial words and in quite palpable stuff such as stone.
A major feature of civilization is its striving not to fall into oblivion. To ward off their erasure, cultures have devised two main agencies, one a material monument and the other the non-material structure provided by words as they form a fabric of discourse in poetry, poetry rather than prose because poetry is primordial, and stubbornly endures by virtue of its being mnemonic. Indeed, memory is for the Spanish Golden Age the supreme faculty of mind. In Cervantes’ El licenciado Vidriera, the novela begins with its protagonist’s awakening to a quest for fame through learning, a pursuit for which Tomás Rodaja is prodigiously well-qualified as in Salamanca he wins renown for his excellence in law and secular literature, letras humanas: “Su principal estudio fue de leyes; pero en lo que más se mostraba era en letras humanas; y tenía tan felice memoria, que era cosa de espanto; e ilustrábala tanto con su buen entrendimiento que no era menos famoso por él que por ella” [His major was law but literature (i.e., classics) was where he really shone and he had such gifts of memory, which he richly illuminated with his fine intelligence, that he was no less renowned for the one than the other] (Cervantes 1981, 44).1
Likewise, memory and remembrance provide a major motif in the classicizing verse of Francisco de Quevedo, whose superb command of the Latin and Greek languages and literatures engages him in a dialogue with antiquity of an intensity more characteristic of the Renaissance pursuit of the past than of the baroque, in which recovery of lost greatness gives rise to a conflicted and complex meditation on the meaning of Graeco-Latin culture in the context of a modern Christian world. Thus, Quevedo combines an earlier devotion to the farther past with a proud and knowing comprehension of actuality. Rodrigo Cacho Casal brilliantly expounds these “creative tensions” in “The Memory of Ruins: Quevedo’s Silva to ‘Roma antigua y moderna.’” Here, in briefer and much more modest compass, I follow a different path from that of Cacho Casal’s admirable essay. My analysis discovers a theme, one might almost call it a topos, although it is not to be found in Curtius, one that recurs in the course of literary expression from very ancient times. This is the rivalry between architecture and poetry as to which of them is the better preserver of memory. A late expression of this tension occurs in John Ruskin’s pronouncement in prose in The Seven Lamps of Architecture as to the superiority of architecture to poetry as the agent of recall. Historically, this faculty moves from Egypt to Greece and to Rome. Poets in Greece were paid professionals but their Roman counterparts often had to have recourse to potentates for support and fame. This need drew them into the ancient political economy of patronage, a system of veiled interaction by means of largesse rather than the modern method of overt exchange. Accordingly, the recipients of largesse joined, nolens volens, the structure that sustained political hegemony, a situation most marked in the case of the great poets of the late Republic and the early Empire. Their condition offers a model for Quevedo, whose prose sought to influence policy and whose poetry is inherently political as it would supersede, in commemoration of the mighty, perishable material monuments with deathless words, whose fame constitutes rich remuneration. Further, Quevedo expands the classical notion of the poet, disengaged and at lyrical ease in pastoral or agricultural otium, to project him into the world of negotium, war and politics, where repose is not only an alternative to the pursuit of power but also the experience of withdrawal into meditation in the very midst of strife, this otium a truce rather than a lasting peace. Naturally, those who war mainly with words judge them to be more effective memorials than stone monuments. But we have a nineteenth-century redress of the balance between memory that functions in words as against memory that expresses itself in matter with John Ruskin’s somewhat perfervid weighing of the merits of each in “The Lamp of Memory” segment of The Seven Lamps of Architecture:
There are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life. (Ruskin 1980, 203)2
Ruskin’s binary is not altogether unsubtle; “the latter in some sort includes the former.” His is as well a most ancient opposition found, surprisingly perhaps, in a poem on papyrus celebrating the greater claim to perpetuity that scribes have over the privileged people who resort to sumptuous tombs for their burial:
Man decays, his corpse is dust,
All his kin have perished,
But a book makes him remembered
Through the mouth of its reciter.
Better is a book than a well-built house
Than Tomb-chapels in the west;
Better than a solid mansion,
Than a stela in the temple.
(Lichtheim 1976, 177)
After this Egyptian expression of the rivalry between poetry and architecture, their opposition comes to be symbolic in the Greek practice of the epitaph, as of course it also was in Egyptian funerary culture, with much writing on buildings and tombs. In Greece, however, the epitaph becomes a genre when it takes the poetic form of the epigram which, according to Moses Hadas, is “a verse inscription on hard material, gravestones or offerings, usually composed for pay by a professional poet. The conciseness and finish of the lapidary style then came to be used for expressions of similar sentiment where there was no thought of an actual inscription” (Hadas 1950, 217). Thus the epigram became detachable from the hard surface on which it originally had been designed to be inscribed, while yet retaining the memory of the tomb, so that one might with reason reverse Ruskin’s dictum and declare that poetry “in some sort includes” architecture.
The great collection of sepulchral inscriptions, actual and imagined, in Greek is The Greek Anthology, published most comprehensively in five volumes of the Loeb Classical Library edition by W.R. Paton. The thousands of brief poems it contains extend from 700 BCE to 900 CE and are immensely various even as epigram and the lapidary style conjoin them. A proem of Agathicis Scholasticus to a collection of new epigrams composed in imperial Byzantium iterates, pace John Ruskin, the idea of the greater staying power of the written record:
Columns and pictures and inscribed tablets are a source of great delight to those who possess them, but only during their life; for the empty glory of man does not much benefit the spirits of the dead. But virtue and the grace of wisdom both accompany us there and survive here [,] attracting memory. So neither Plato nor Homer takes pride in pictures or monuments, but in wisdom alone. Blessed are they whose memory is enshrined in wise volumes and not in empty images. (Ruskin 1980, 4.4)
In a cluster of poems celebrating Sappho, Tellius Laureas composes an invented epitaph for her tomb, probably one from a group of competing eulogies of the poet:
When thou passest, O Stranger, by the Aeolian tomb, say not that I, the Lesbian poetess, am dead. This tomb was built by the hands of men and such works of mortals are lost in swift oblivion. But if thou enquirest about me for the sake of the Muses, from each of whom I took a flower to lay beside my nine flowers of song, thou shalt find that I escaped the darkness of death, and that no sun shall dawn and set without memory of lyric Sappho. (1980, 6.17)
Among the imagined inscriptions, Evenus of Ascalon rather fancifully personifies the city of Troy, speaking from its ruin:
Strangers, the ash of ages has devoured me, holy Ilion, the famous city once renowned for my towered walls, but in Homer I still exist, defended by brazen gates. The spears of the destroying Achaeans shall not again dig me up, but I shall be on the lips of all Greece. (1980, 9.62)
Quite naturally, the poets are wont to proclaim the superior staying power of their verse over all the materials that commemorate. These are necessarily included in it, or implied, in the role, as above, of a ruined rival. But I am aware of the incorporation of the rival into the fabric of the poem as first occurring only in a great, celebrated, and vainglorious Latin ode of Horace, the thirtieth in the Third Book of Odes. This is, as editors Shorey and Laing observe, Horace’s “Epilogue to the three books of the Odes…”(411) and as such a quite immodest but not inaccurate summary of his achievement in them as a poet:
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius,
Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere aut innumerabilis
Annorum series et fuga temporum.
Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei
Vitabit Libitinam: usque ego postera
Crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
Scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex.
Dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus
Et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium
Regnavit populorum, ex humili potens
Princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
Deduxisse modos. Sume superbiam
Quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica
Lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.
I have completed a monument more durable than bronze and loftier than the pyramids’ regal mass, one that neither the onslaughts of wind and rain nor the endless flight of time down through the years can bring down. I shall not altogether die, for a significant portion of myself will thwart the rites of burial. As I, constantly renewed by the praise of posterity, shall grow in stature for as long as the high priest ascends with a voiceless Vestal the Capitolium, I, a potentate though humbly born where the rushing river Aufidus resounds and where trickling Daunus [river as well as king] once ruled over his rude subjects, I shall be proclaimed the first to have brought Aeolian strains to Italic measures. Gladly accept, Melpomene, high distinction achieved through merit and gird my brow [hair] with Delphic laurel. (1960, 3.30)
For this ode to be fully Napoleonic, it wants only the act of Horace crowning himself instead of Melpomene graciously acceding to the poet’s command (sume). And it constructs Horace’s rise to artistic immortality on the architectonics of monumentum, the very matter of remembrance in the shape of the pyramids and the form of the Capitolium.
Indeed, the pyramidical is the encompassing concept of the poem. It bases its movement to that structure by a first reference to the matter of durability, with “aere,” verse will outlast aes, money as coin, and aes also as the bronze on which laws are published and promulgated and aes as the bronze from which statues are cast. The form of the pyramid also has biographical resonance, for in having risen “ex humili” to supreme mastery of his art, Horace’s career rests upon an extremely broad base among the semi-savage folk of his native Apulia from which this son of an ex-slave has mounted by degrees, each one less gross, to a poetic pinnacle where, free of matter, Melpomene, the muse of lyric, crowns him in the inaugural act of a reign (he is after all “princeps”) that will outlast the structures that the political potentates have commissioned to perpetuate their pharaonic and Augustan images. Melpomene reminds one of Maecenas, the minister and favourite of Octavian who so discerningly extended his grace and favour to a poet who had no social standing. In consequence, Horace’s artistic origins in Greek lyric take on an Italic, a very Roman, style, as he makes his way up to Parnassus on the hundred steps of the Capitolium. It was the essential edifice of the city and its empire (urbs et orbis). Lemprière asserts that the earliest form of it was “finished by Tarquinius Superbus, and consecrated by the consul Horatius after the expulsion of theTarquins from Rome” (1984, 139). The negative epithet applied to Rome’s last king, superbus = proud, haughty, chimes curiously with Horace’s term for the high honour of his achievement, superbia, but the name of the consecrator of the temple puts the poet on home ground.
A citadel as well as a shrine, the Capitolium was triadic, for it had three cellae, or chapels, housing respectively the images of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the main Roman deities. The verb that Horace uses to characterize his ascent, “scandet,” suggests that he climbs up to eminence not only by rising physically, but also metrically, poetically, through the force of his “numbers.” The noun form of scandere, to climb, ascend, is scansio, the act of ascending, but also it signifies the quantitative metre of both Greek and Latin verse, scansion. The two senses don’t seem at all related except perhaps by association of the human with the metrical foot. As for the actual temple, it was disturbingly vulnerable. First destroyed in the civil wars of the Republic, it was rebuilt by Sulla, then destroyed again under Vitellius, partly restored then ruined under Vespasian, and then rebuilt for the last time under Domitian. Almost nothing of it remains. It would seem strange for the poet to equate the durability of his verse with the survival of a building so subject to ruin, even in Horace’s own lifetime, but it is the persistence of the Capitolium that would justify the analogy, even though the poem has far outlived the temple, which continues in word alone, and not in stone, to the putative dismay of John Ruskin. In any case, Horace’s prodigious ode 3.30 contains two additional constructs in its enveloping pyramidicality, those of both the Capitolium, a mount, a citadel, a temple, and a Greek Parnassus. Accordingly, one could rightly say of it that its poetry embodies architecture, lastingly.
Only potentates can erect structures such as those which enable Horace to rise. The “exegi monumentum” ode draws great strength from its maker’s intimacy, one might almost say cohabitation, with political and military power. He himself had a brief engagement with advancement through arms when “early in 43 [B.C.E.] … he joined M. Brutus’ republican army, receiving the rank of Military Tribune which was usually held by young men of family and position. Brutus’ defeat and death at Philippi in the following year at the hands of Mark Antony and Caesar Octavian ended Horace’s military career” (Bailey 1982, 9). Returning to Italy, he earned through his verse an invitation to join the circle of Gaius Maecenas, Augustus’s powerful valido. Maecenas became and remained Horace’s patron for almost all of the rest of their respective lives. Augustus himself once invited Horace to become his private secretary but the poet, wisely one would think, demurred.
Artists do well to keep their distance from the mighty who engage them. Surely Velázquez would have painted more if Philip IV had not named him his aposentador mayor. But the patronage system causes the dependent to draw closer to the source of his sustenance, often with remarkable results, as when much of the power of Las meninas derives from the domesticity of the painter in the household of the king, an association that permits the equation of the mastery of the artist with that of the monarch. In the first twenty-five years of his voluminous Mémoires the duc de Saint-Simon grapples constantly with the sovereign might of Louis XIV as it gradually levels the aristocracy down to an equality common to all the subjects of despotism and autocracy, lamenting the déclassement of the grands seigneurs while vainly aspiring to a favour with the king that would make him powerful and influential, a status he achieves dubiously only during the regency of the duc d’Orléans. Power repels and attracts, is both feared and loved. This paradox, with its conflicting centrifugal and centripetal tendencies, confronts the greatest poets, Virgil and Horace, of the late republican and early imperial age, in the persons of Maecenas and Caesar Octavian Augustus. Their considerable largesse to each man further complicates the matter, for the talented artist finds a personal autonomy in her creative ability of which the material cognate is the possession of land. For the poet, the original expression of the myth of artistic independence occurs in pastoral, bucolic verse. Shepherds would seem freer than farmers, tied to chores and to the seasons. But the same family farm still persists today as a related myth of relative immunity from oppression. In the lives of Horace and Virgil, farmland plays a major role, for both men, of quite humble stock, saw their paternal acres expropriated so that these could be bestowed upon military veterans of the protracted civil wars that began in full with the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE and which ended with the victories of Philippi, and of Actium (31 BCE), by Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavian. Yet both men recovered their modest patrimony as gifts, as benefactions proffered by Maecenas or Augustus himself, in addition to the sporadic gifts of actual money that the emperor may have made (Bowditch 2001, 57).
In the first,3 but not chronologically so, of his ten eclogues Virgil places himself at the greatest Theocritan remove from the seat of power, with a conversation between the two shepherds Tityrus and Melioboeus. One would expect these elegantly styled countrymen to treat mostly of love, unrequited or requited. And indeed Tityrus is enamoured of one Amaryllis, but she is not the subject of their song. It is rather the military and political realities of Rome in strife reaching to the confines of the known world which have occasioned Meliboeus to be dispossessed of his land when in bitter contrast Tityrus retains his peaceful abode, and so commits himself to reverence for the “deus nobis haec otia fecit,” the divus, perhaps first Antony and then the triumphant Octavian becoming Augustus who “won for us this peace.” Otia, here peace, is wonderfully polysemous. It is the antonym of negotium < nec otium, or non-repose in the form of the concerns of government, warfare, business, freedom from which permits the literary pursuit of higher culture, especially in the form of poetry, above all pastoral, which may be said to live and thrive in that privileged parenthesis provided by otium.4 However, the surcease that Tityrus enjoys is not an evocation of an uncontaminated atmosphere such as that which Theocritus conjures, a separate, autonomous world.5 It is rather a gift from the almighty mighty, and as such places the recipient in a posture of gratitude and dependence.6 Virgil’s First Eclogue owes much to a princeps, in bello et in pace. War despoils Meliboeus, while peace protects Tityrus. Moses Hadas observes that “the Eclogues are so closely copied from Theocritus that it is possible to charge Virgil with misunderstanding his original in one or two passages” (Hadas 1952, 143). Yet, the First Eclogue notably occludes the Theocritan idyll by introducing into it a Meliboeus forced into exile and a Tityrus beholden to an urban majesty that he had not even been capable of imagining before he visited Rome. Traditionally the pastoral poem occupies the daylight hours from dawn to dusk. But the First Eclogue omits sunrise and midday so as to place its colloquy at the end of the diurnal span, towards dusk and the onset of night. Virgil’s vision here is thus in a darkening perspective.
Similarly, Horace evokes an Edenic rural landscape made poetically possible by otium, as well as made physically possible by Maecenas’s gift to him of the Sabine farm, and so replacing but not identical to his own lost “Paterna rura,” in the celebrated “Beatus ille” Epode 2.7 This dream of agricultural plenty and independence would place the poet at the farthest remove from his patron intent in Rome on all manner of business. The farmer is blessed to be “procul negotiis,” and so making Maecenas the antonymic figure to the happy possessor of otium. Debt is the genus of servitude that the countryman avoids by being entirely free of it: “Solutus omni faenore” (Putnam 1982, 4). At the same time he renounces the careers of fearsome ambition: the life of the soldier on land, of the merchant at sea, of the politician currying favour with the powerful. In their stead, he proposes a series of delicious images of self-sufficiency, so compelling that the reader is shocked to discover that these are the fantasy of Alfius the usurer, whose withdrawal from commerce to rural retirement is notably short-lived, since only a few weeks after he liquidated his holdings, he is back in the market.
But the poem’s abrupt return to debt and credit is more than a sardonic twist. It is structural, anticipated in the “solutus omni faenore,” for Horace’s “rura” are unhappily not “paterna”; they constitute the largesse of a magnate to a deprived poet who, though not precisely the client required to pay his respects every morning, in person, to his benefactor, as salutatio, is nonetheless obligated to express his gratitude and thanks, not once but continually. The benefaction is a principal sum that cannot be repaid and that charges interest in the form of verse. In this manner the poet is indentured to his patron, indefinitely. What mitigates the pattern is the “gifted” artist’s pursuit of parity with the benefactors through a mastery of his art that is tantamount to their supremacy. Here, Horace anticipates Titian in his relationship with his exalted patron the emperor Charles V who “treated him as an equal in spirit, if not in rank … their correspondence occasionally reads like that between two great and equal powers” (Panofsky 1969, 8). This progress to parity begins when the bond between artist and patron loses some of its imbalance to a feeling of what might be called friendship, amicitia, in which the two participants, joined together like spouses in a long, solid, successful marriage, take on some of the traits of their opposite number, so that poet in some measure impersonates patron and patron poet. This assumption of a degree of the coloration of the other infuses Velázquez’s great pictorial claim to parity with Philip IV in Las meninas, as the painter quietly dominates the scene with the magisterial brush that will fill the huge foregrounded canvas, whereas the monarch and his consort, though central, look rather dimly on, from the background. They are peripheral. The painter is in command.8
In Horace’s Ode 30.3, it is likewise the poet who takes command, polysemously, for from the earth, “ex humili,” humble, yes, but also conveying the sense of the soil, the closeness to it, that nurtures the sermo humilis of pastoral song, from which springs the “potens” Princeps. His rise “ex humili” is an ascent to mastery; “potens,” the technique of that mastery, is his induction of Greek forms into Italic matter, a method in which he may not be first, primus, but of which he is a leader, a master, princeps. Horace himself also applies the noun to the great-nephew of Julius Caesar in the middle phase of his ascent to supremacy. Caesar Octavian Augustus is the poet’s ultimate patron. Horace identifies his art with his ruler’s power (he, as poet, is “potens”) and on the strength of it claims parity with his sovereign, like him anointed, crowned, exalted, and deified. The distance from Virgil’s recumbent Tityrus (he is “recubans,” lying flat on his back, thus a most true humilis) to the Augustan pinnacle on the Capitoline is immense, socially as well as artistically. Yet both he and Horace negotiate it, not without the help of Alfius, as well as, of course, that of Maecenas, himself a “faenerator” in the poetry market.
Many of the fundamental factors conditioning the development of Graeco-Latin poetry as in the works of Horace and Virgil created under the management of their patrons, the duces Maecenas and Caesar Octavian Augustus, re-assert themselves in a great and representative sonnet of Francisco de Quevedo:
Con mas vergüenza viven Euro y Noto,
Licas, que en nuestra edad los usureros;
sosiéganse tal vez los vientos fieros
y, ocioso, el mar no gime su alboroto.
No siempre el Ponto en sus orillas roto
ejercita los roncos marineros:
ocio tienen los golfos más severos;
ocio goza el bajel, ocio el piloto.
Cesa de la borrasca la milicia:
nunca cesa el despojo ni la usura
ni sabe estar ociosa su codicia.
[Eurus and Notus practise more restraint, Lichas, than do our present-day usurers. Even brutal winds do, on occasion, die down and, coming to rest, the sea no longer groans in its upheaval. Great waves of the Pontus crashing on the beach do not always agitate screaming sailors. Even the most daunting deep knows surcease, as does the vessel, as the helmsman does. Storms have a cessation of their hostilities. Profiteering, however, is incessant, its greediness incapable of repose. It is oblivious of peace and insatiable, dares to call its evils equity, its robberies legal, its sickness a remedy.] (1969, 66)
This seascape of a sonnet addresses the dangers of maritime navigation in pursuit of gain through the classical polarities of negotium versus otium. It resembles Fray Luis’s “Vida retirada,” vv. 61–9, by directly confronting the turbulent seas of desire. But Fray Luis figures shipwreck so as to generate from it a landlubberly antonym and antidote. Quevedo, on the other hand, extracts otium from the eye of the storm, which is a Graeco-Roman turbulence churned up by the antagonism of the wind from the East, Eurus (Euro) and the wind from the South, Notus (Noto) on the surface of the Black Sea, Pontus. The activities that bring the voyager into peril are the ancient quest for profit over the waters of the Mediterranean, as well as militaristic expansion (“de la borrasca la milicia”) with a view to wealth and empire. Those negotia, which the poem embraces and so is anything but “procul” from them, require no naming. But they acquire a contemporaneous pertinacity with the phrase “en nuestra edad los usureros.” Blecua assigns this sonnet no date in his edition, but it could well have been written at the time of Quevedo’s tract Execración contra los judíos, which attacks Olivares’s attempt to replace the Crown’s Genoese bankers with Jewish converso financiers from Portugal. Carlos Gutiérrez gives 20 July 1633 as the date of publication of the Execración, an odious work that puts Quevedo in the company of Ezra Pound, whose antisemitism and peculiar economics dim but cannot obliterate the lustre of his artistic achievement which, like Quevedo’s own, emerges from a profound engagement with the classics, and in particular with Latin authors like Propertius.
Gutiérrez calls into question the “originality” of Quevedo’s love poetry (2005, 185). To my mind, however, there can be no doubt as to the originality of the “Con más vergüenza” [with more shame] sonnet. Of course, Quevedo does not start afresh. He works with traditional materials, but as a whole the poem is an aggiornamento of these. Its rhetoric in the form of its anaphora of otium – “ocioso,” “ocio,” “ocio,” “ocioso” frames a profound truth about economic activity in a new post-classical key. All the old negotia knew surcease, had their season. “The sailing season, marked by the festive launching of the bark of Isis (the navigium Isidis) on March 5, opened on March 10, and lasted until November 11” (Balsdon 2004, 226). Even armies went into winter quarters. Much of the poignance of “haec otia” in Virgil and Horace derives from the protracted waging of civil war throughout the Roman world between 44 and 31 BCE. However, Octavian finally brought this time of troubles to a close. Thus, all things have their intermittencies, their rhythm – except usury. It alone is incessant, owing to which the early modern (and the modern) world has lost its diastole and systole, the natural alternance between activity and repose. Continuity without pause characterizes especially the markets of the twenty-first century. Financial exchanges operate uninterruptedly thanks to the internet, and grocery stores remain open day and night. Quevedo is the early poet of this arrythmia “en nuestra edad” [in our time]. He also anticipated the semantic accommodation of greed to the lust for gain in the guise of economics, the basic rule of which is that desire, once heeded, is met not by satisfaction but by a new desire ad infinitum: “no sabe hallar hartura” [not to find the limits]. The “maldad” of usury becomes legitimate and can call its thievery lawful, its sickness a remedy, “growth” a cure for poverty. These sententiae are to some extent unjust but they are far from being inaccurate in this age, “nuestra edad,” of rampant greed and excess.
The sonnet suggests that the poet abstains from depredation. But such is far from being the case with Quevedo who, among many involvements, became the valido of the Duke of Osuna. As Tellez Girón’s gumshoe and point man, he found himself commissioned in 1615 to return from Sicily to Madrid with much money for bribes to influential persons for their help in securing the Viceroyalty of Naples for the duke. He succeeded. His mission has been seen as a paradigm of the corruption that flourished under Philip III, and so it is; but this is exactly how the very young Charles I obtained the imperial crown, through bribery of its electors, who pretty much auctioned off their votes. Corruption is native to the pursuit and exercise of power. The poetic answer to the seductions of might is a retreat into subsistence in a place in the country far from the madding crowd, and innocent of the ironic subversion of an Alfius. That richly traditional bipolarity certainly is a significant modality of Quevedo’s, but in the “Con más vergüenza” sonnet there emerges a figure not distant but proximate, in the thick of things, a poet whose creative otium is an intermission in the action, in the negotia of self-enrichment, wars, government, religion.
A vigorously testimonial sonnet places the poet in the pleasure grounds of the palace that Lerma built after the court returned to Madrid from Valladolid, his monumento (Quevedo 1969, 225). The poem’s rubric is instructive: “A la huerta del Duque de Lerma, favorecida y ocupada muchas veces del Señor Rey Don Felipe Tercero, y olvidada hoy de igual concurso” [To the grounds [and house] of the Duke of Lerma, often honoured by the presence of his Majesty King Philip III and today bereft of any such frequentation]. In letter 150 of his Epistolario, one addressed to his neighbour and friend, the Duke of Medinaceli, Quevedo describes this same sonnet, which he encloses, in terms very like those of the rubric. He adds that he wrote the poem a few days ago, “on más celo que ingenio, como quien le amaba y temía” [with more devotion than wit, as one who both loved and feared him] (1964, 942a). And indeed these verses manifest more emotion than cleverness as Quevedo mourns the extinction of the house of Lerma in the death of the grandson of Philip III’s once powerful minister. But even the emotion is ritualized in the letter as the love and the fear that by convention bind the ruled to the ruler. Their combination flatteringly, if not sycophantically, suggests that the dead duke was born to almost regal command. His demise conjures the downfall of his grandfather, Lerma:
Yo vi la grande y alta jerarquía
del magno, invicto y santo Rey Tercero
En esta casa, y conocí lucero
al que en sagradas púrpuras ardía.
Hoy desierta de tanta monarquía,
y del nieto, magnánimo heredero,
yare; pero arde en glorias de su acero,
como in la pompa que ostentar solía.
Menos invidia teme aventurado
que venturoso; el mérito procura;
los premios aborrece escarmentado.
¡Oh, amable si desierta arquitectura,
más hoy al que te ve desengañado
que cuando frecuentada en tu ventura!
[I myself have seen, in this house that great and lofty eminence, the third Philip, grand, triumphant, and deeply devout, and I have known the starry brilliance of him who once blazed in cardinal’s robes (i.e., Lerma, first duke). Today that house lies bereft of monarchy and of its grandson, its great-souled scion, but it is alight with the glory of his sword, as it is with the splendour it once displayed. He fears envy less who courts danger than he who curries favour. [Such a one] pursues merit and, disabused, recoils from largesse. Today this palace is even more inviting, in its abandonment, to one who beholds it with unclouded eyes, than it was in its populous prosperity.] (1964, 942)
“A la huerta del Duque de Lerma” is less brilliant for its semantics (though the interplay in it among the senses of “aventurado,” “venturoso,” and the final “ventura” is masterful) than for the compression with which it reviews the career of the first duke, his son the Duke of Úceda, and the dead grandson, who according to letter 157 “salío de Madrid con el marques de Spínola” [left Madrid [for Flanders] with the Marquess of Spínola] and died quickly (letter 154) of a urinary disorder (“mal de orina”), not quite the “glorias de su acero” of the sonnet. However, since this last duke apparently died without male issue (Quevedo does mention a daughter) his decease means the fall of the house of Lerma, an event of great significance for Quevedo, and one rousing real emotion in him (“celo”) since as a youth he had attached himself to Lerma and his confederates, above all his particular patron, the Duke of Osuna. Accordingly, “A la huerta” begins with the emphatic “yo,” one of only two to do so in volume 1 of Quevedo’s Obra poética. As subject of the verb “vi” it makes the poem into one of personal witness, and most appropriately so, inasmuch as by March of 1636 Quevedo had experienced profound personal and political vicissitudes in two great transitions, from the reign of Philip II to that of Philip III and from the rule of the “Rey Tercero” to that of the last Habsburg Philip. By the end of Philip III’s occupancy of the throne, both the first Duke of Lerma and Quevedo’s patron Osuna had fallen from favour. But it was at the height of his career that Lerma had created the establishment celebrated and lamented in the poem. In 1636, however, Quevedo had long since managed to survive the ruin of his sponsors by adhering to the party and the person of Lerma’s successor, the privado of Philip IV, the Duke of Olivares. Quevedo’s propagandizing for Olivares was opportunistic. Yet I think John Elliott entirely plausible in seeing a good measure of personal conviction in his support of the new dispensation. Nonetheless, as over the years Olivares failed to effect the reform he had first envisioned, Quevedo gradually fell away from the great minister: “I think we can detect in 1634–35 the first signs of an alienation from the Olivares regime which will soon convert Quevedo into an implacable opponent of the Count-Duke and his works” (Elliott 1989, 202). The sonnet on the death of Lerma’s grandson fully supports this contention.
A change in attitude towards Philip III is key to Quevedo’s shift in allegiance. In 1621 the Olivares faction tended to judge Philip as a misguided monarch. Quevedo contributed to such a view in his Carta del Rey Don Fernando el Católico, “which may be read both as an implied criticism of the late king as measured against the ideals of kingship exemplified by Ferdinand the Catholic, and an expression of hope that the young Philip IV would take Ferdinand as his model” (Elliott 1989, 190). Evidence of Quevedo’s disaffection from Lerma and Philip around 1621 can justify Cacho Casal’s assertion in his note 30 (1174): “It is well known that Quevedo considered Philip III an unworthy king who had let Spain fall into decadence.” But the 1636 sonnet characterizes the king as great, “magno,” in the sense of Carlomagno, “invicto” or undefeated, always victorious, and “santo” or very religious. The first two of these adjectives are almost impossible to defend though the third may pass. The verdict of the historians with respect to Philip is, despite Paul C. Allen’s judicious showing in Philip III and the Pax Hispanica, 1598–1621, that this monarch was far less fainéant than has been supposed remains negative. But it is less negative, thanks to Allen and to Antonio Feros’s Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621. Still, it is difficult to imagine Quevedo himself subscribing to the image of Philip as a great warrior king, associated as he is by Allen with the putative Pax Hispanica, a truce which occupied exactly half his reign, from 1609 to 1621.
A fair portion of the poem’s hyperbole derives from one of its several modes, that of the “Ubi sunt” which nostalgically evokes the vanished grandeur of yesteryear and in this case the poet’s youth. Corollary to this theme is the fall of greatness into oblivion, the disgrace of Lerma and the extinction of his ducal line, in view of which moral reflection on the vanity of human ambition is almost unavoidable and indeed does explicitly occur in the first tercet, the grammatical subject of whose three verbs, “teme,” “procura,” and “aborrece” is not easy to ascertain but which I take to be “nieto,” dead but configured in the present tense, a feature that turns the scene back to the living and their surviving witness, the poet Quevedo. In meditation on the death of an aspiring military hero who has chosen the battlefield over the palace intrigue that doomed his grandfather and father, the poet now adopts his model’s vision. Like the young duke he is “escarmentado,” chastened, so that he comes to see the scheme of the palace and its gardens, its “arquitectura,” not as a theatre of jealousy and envy but as a peaceful place, in its neglect, for edifying rumination on mortal delusion, the huerta of Fray Luis’s Vida retirada. Thus the scheme, not now one of pride and ambition, is “amable,” morally endearing because the poet, himself “escarmentado” and “desengañado,” can discern its purpose and plan and meaning.
But the poem cannot remove from its architecture the character of the palace as a theatre of ambition. Fray Luis, whose first editor Quevedo had been in 1631, far more conclusively rejects all rivalry in the nine wonderful lines of ‘Al salir de la cárcel’:
Aquí la envidia y mentira
me tuvieron encerrado.
Dichoso el humilde estado
del sabio que se retira
de aqueste mundo malvado
y con pobre mesa y casa
en el campo deleitoso
con solo Dios su vida pasa
ni envidiado ni envidioso.
[Here envy and perjury kept me imprisoned. Blessed is the condition of the sage who withdraws from this evil world and in the delightful countryside, poorly housed and fed, communes with God alone, neither envied nor envious.] (Sarmiento 48)
Envy is the great negative force of this utterance, and Fray Luis completely disarms it by spiritual retreat to that locus where he is “ni envidiado ni envidioso.” Quevedo’s transformation of Lerma’s “huerta” diminishes but does not banish the whole of striving and ambition: “Menos envidia teme.” It is indeed the powerful psychic motivation for his art and career, one replete with conflict and rivalry, and one in which praise can be a potent weapon.
Unamuno in his brilliant Abel Sánchez portrays a lifelong rivalry between the painter of its title and his antagonist, Joaqúin Monegro. The consummate mala lengua of the novel is Federico Cuadro, who in the casino deconstructs praise as a manner of detraction. Whenever Federico heard one person praise another he would ask: “¿Contra quién va ese elogio?” [Whom is that praise directed against?], then explaining that “cuando se elogia mucho a uno se tiene presente a otro al que se trata de rebajar con ese elogio, a un rival del elogiado” [When one person greatly praises another, the person praising has in mind a third party whom he is trying to bring down with that praise, a rival of the person being praised] (1963, 94). This is a technique with which Quevedo is entirely familiar. He used Don Fernando el Católico to discredit Philip III in his Carta del Rey. Now, Victor Hugo of the seventeenth century, he implausibly lauds a notably undistinguished monarch, and by extension Philip’s valido Lerma, so as to create an unfavourable evocation of Lerma’s successor under Philip IV, the Count-Duke of Olivares, the tacit target of those three fulsome adjectives.
The location of the sonnet in Lerma’s deserted grounds and house itself conjures a less implicit competition than does the eulogy of the monarch ministered to by the first duke, whose palace in what were then the exurbs of Madrid, the Carrera de San Jerónimo, stood out in a concentration of estates belonging to the títulos, or high Spanish nobility. When the Count-Duke resolved to have a grandiose pleasure palace built for Philip IV and sited it “along the Prado de San Jerónimo … one house in particular would have been seen as a challenge to Olivares’s power as a builder. Right across the road from San Jerónimo was the large estate consisting of house and gardens created by the Duke of Lerma after the return of the court from Valladolid [1606]. Lerma had been a builder on the grand scale, but Olivares was determined to outbuild him. The Retiro, once expanded, would cut down Lerma and his palace by size” (Brown and Elliott 1980, 62). Similarly, the sonnet of 1636 is in part meant to cut Olivares down to size, a task not accomplished in Quevedo’s lifetime.
By brandishing his mastery of the adversarial art of polemical praise, Quevedo constructs his poem with the integument of external rivalries. Matching it is an inner competition, that between the material and the moral. If in no other way, Lerma did distinguish himself by his architectonics, his palaces. They, and the edifice in the Carrera de San Jerónimo, would then constitute his memorial, a notion strengthened by the poet’s reading of the estate as an epigram. In that epigram, we experience a retreat from the vita activa of negotia to a landscape of otium that fosters meditation and litterae. In Lerma’s garden, itself a semi-retreat from business in Madrid, ambition confronts extinction. Ambition faints and fades but does not altogether vanish. “Non omnis moriar.” The estate is a vacancy of rivalrous striving, a mausoleum for dead hopes that express their ghostly being in the recognition of their vanity and so invite the caminante in the garden to sepulchral ponderation in a “campo deleitoso,” thus effecting a transformation of the material into the spiritual without annihilating the material, a very rich and exceedingly dangerous sublimation.
A cognate sublimation occurs in the silva on the death of the Duke of Osuna, Pedro Téllez Girón, in 1624. His bond with Quevedo may have begun as early as 1599 (Gutiérrez 2005, 222) but became intense in the period of the duke’s major exercise of power first as viceroy of Sicily and then of Naples. A letter of April 1617 describes Quevedo upon his arrival in Rome to confer with the pope as a “caballero de muchas partes, muy entendido, y muy privado del virrey de Nápoles [Osuna]” [a gentleman of many attainments, savvy, and very much the favourite of the viceroy] (Gutiérrez 2005, 221). In this silva and the sonnets about Osuna and his death, the quality that the poet celebrates most is his patron’s military and naval prowess. The silva’s orthography is that of the autograph manuscript as reproduced in Blecua. Line 4 has in “imitas” an error of Quevedo’s. Grammar and sense call for imita:
No con estatuas duras
en que el mármor ocioso
i el arte perezoso,
difunto, imita fixas las figures,
detendré tu semblante
que el mundo teme i llora;
ni emulo de Lisipo i Policleto,
¡o grande, ia inmortal Duque de Osuna!,
para contradezir a tu fortuna
procuraré con tus facione reales
animar los metales:
que los dorados bultos
más doctos i más cultos
lisonxa muerta son sin movimiento.
Valdréme del açento
de la lira i del canto
que, disfrazando mi sonoro llanto,
tu nombre llevará de xente en xente
i a la tumba del sol desde el Oriente.
Razonarále el Noto por las gavias
i el mar, que tanto honor deve a tu quillas,
hará que le pronuncien sus orillas;
i sus golfos, que fueron
teatro a tus hazañas,
aplaudiendo sus sañas
las pirámides tres de tus Xirones,
que hizieron callar en tus pendones
las bárbaras de Exipto,
hoy, lastimados de tu ausencia [eterna],
de lágrimas seran borrasca ticrna.
[I will not arrest your likeness (with which time at that ultimate moment which all fear and mourn stole away) in hard statues where indolent marble and malingering deathly craft imitate form as a fixity. Nor will I, following Lysippus and Polyclitus, undertake, O grand and now immortal duke, to reverse your fate by quickening bronze with your regal features, for even the most skilled and refined gilt castings are but a lifeless and immobile form of flattery. I will avail myself of the strains of the lyre and of song which, overcoming my sounding dirge, will transport your name from nation to nation and from the sun’s cradle to its grave. Notus will proclaim it in the rigging, and the sea, which owes so great a debt of honour to your ships [keels], will cause its shores to articulate it. And the high seas (which were the theatre of your exploits, applauding the wrath of the three pyramids of the arms of the Téllez Girón which, flown in your pennants, outdid [silenced] their piratical Egyptian models) today, aggrieved at your everlasting absence, will be a tender tempest of tears.] (Quevedo 1969, 289)
In Abel Sánchez, Federico Cuadro goes so far as to assert, “Nadie elogia con buena intención” [Nobody praises disinterestedly] (Unamuno 1963, 94) and in fact nearly all of Quevedo’s encomia serve a dual purpose, to shore up the subject of his admiration and to subvert that subject’s rivals. So he published a poet whom it is extremely difficult not to admire, Fray Luis, on his merits but also with a view to diminishing the culterano school, so close to his own poetic as to make them unbearable. However, it is not easy to discern a second and polemical object in the “No con estatuas duras” eulogy and elegy. In 1624 the poet was still in the first flush of his enthusiasm for Olivares’s reform movement, which had brought about the duke’s fall and prosecution. Quevedo was, as Osuna’s right-hand man, naturally implicated in any allegation of viceregal misconduct. So the poem may be an effort by Quevedo to clear himself through a resounding vindication of his former patron, although to do so could have put him in an awkward position with his then-current sponsor. That problem may explain the non-publication of the poem which, to judge by Blecua’s comments on the manuscript, was at best in semi-final form. It is, nonetheless, a notable composition, especially for its personal tenor, as in the “yo vi” sonnet. Indeed, the first-person anaphora structures the silva: “detendré,” “procuraré,” and “Valdréme.”
Quevedo had many occupations, several of them unsavoury, but he had one profession, that of poet. In the elegy on Osuna he is a poet very much and very visibly in command. His power with words enabled him in the sonnet on Lerma’s trophy estate to transform an empty theatre of insolent display into a Thebaid, a hermitage,9 not severe but one beckoning to rumination on the point of it all. Here, there is even more wonderful alchemy as, Orpheus with Aeolian harp, he transmutes the hard base matter – metal and stone – of memory and fame into wind and storm driving ships over the Mediterranean Sea, and so making the waters and the gale and the masts and the rigging one huge instrument of wild lamentation over Osuna, a storm of grief but an intimate personal one, “borrasca tierna.” Moreover, in this elegy the decried incessancy of the profit motive in the “Con mas Vergüenza” sonnet is exploited so as to modulate Mediterranean gales into a never-ending planctus for the dead duke, negotia raised to infinity, where there is no otium.
1 All translations are my own unless otherwise cited.
2 The passage I quote appears in Ruskin’s volume The Seven Lamps of Architecture, chapter 6, “The Lamp of Memory.” The editor of this collection, Joan Evans, calls her volume of excerpts from the various writings of Ruskin The Lamp of Beauty. All references to this work here come from this edited text.
3 The text is that of Paul Alpers in his invaluable, The Singer of the Eclogues (1979, 10–14).
4 “Otium is a keyword in the discussion of the pastoral” (Rosenmeyer 1973, 67).
5 In a discussion of Quintilian’s sense of genus David Halperin cites that author’s opinion of Theocritus, an assessment that brings out the notable contrast between the Idylls and the Eclogues: “Theocritus is much to be admired … but his rustic and pastoral poetry shuns not only the marketplace and politics, but even the very City [i.e., the financial district, Wall Street] itself” (1983, 11).
6 Bowditch compellingly places Horace’s dealings with Maecenas and Augustus in the context of a gift economy whose largesse conceals the fundamental exchange of land for verse. The gift economy also can provide, I think, a better account of Quevedo’s transactions with the magnates of his country than does Gutiérrez’s sense of “field,” which is better suited to the year 1800 in Europe than to 1600 in Spain.
7 I cite Epode II from Shorey and Laing’s edition of Horace.
8 This account of the painting owes a great deal to Jonathan Brown’s understanding of it as expressed in his Images & Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting, as well as in his Velázquez.
9 The grounds of the Retiro had six hermitages. They “were the most distinctive feature of the park and appear to have been purely Spanish in origin. Hermitages had been incorporated into the park on the estate at Lerma, built by the Duke of Lerma in the 1600s” (Brown and Elliott 1980, 77).
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